I’m not young enough to be considered a “digital native.” I can recall playing with Apple II computers in a daycare center sometime around 1990. We had a lab full of Macintosh LCIII’s at Braun Station Elementary around 1993. For my 10th birthday, in 1995, I was gifted an Acer Aspire  minitower with a 120MHz Pentium processor, 16 megabytes of RAM, and a 1.2 gigabyte hard drive. I dialed-up to AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, Netcom, and the ImagiNation Network. San Antonio also had a fairly robust BBS scene.

In my teens, I generally viewed Apple Computers as underpowered & overpriced, unsuitable for gaming. In high school, I sat awkwardly with my love (the first time we were romantically separated) in a video editing bay equipped with a Quicksilver G4. Later, I briefly experimented with Macs in the 2nd term of my freshman year of college – an iLamp G4 in my dorm room and a 12” PowerBook for class. I was uncomfortable (for many reasons) and I reverted to Windows soon after.

So, for 20 years, I’ve owned personal computers running Windows du jour: 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP (SPs 1, 2, & 3), Vista, 7, 10, and most recently, 11. I’m familiar with it. I know the keyboard shortcuts and PowerShell commands. I know how to troubleshoot, and I know when something is amiss. Last week, for example, I (yet again) noticed a rogue process communicating with a “private” IP address over the PUBLIC Internet. The address was pingable, too! In case you are just tuning in – these “anomalies” have been happening since at least May 2023, starting with my desktop computers.

My “smartphone revolution” didn’t begin with Apple. I had a T-Mobile Sidekick and then, a Palm Treo 700w, long before the iPhone existed. Released in 2007, it was an AT&T exclusive for years. Since I was a Sprint WiMax subscriber back then, I really had no choice but Android, specifically, an HTC Evo 4G.  For 16 years, I was a satisfied user of flagship phones running Google’s mobile OS.

11 months ago, about a year into all this deep state torment, it was apparent that my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra was compromised. This was a few months before [redacted] started threatening to frame me for kiddie porn, but around the time my mom (texting from an anonymous number) told me she molested me as a child. Once my Android phone started behaving erratically, I decided that I needed a nice, American company to sue whenever my tormentors were inevitably exposed. Google is a data broker, and Samsung is Korean. Even if I could prove their consent/involvement (and yes, their certificate keys would have been used to authorize THAT level of intrusion) …I had probably EULA’d away my rights and/or international law doesn’t recognize American civil liberties. The hardware manufacturer and the software developer would both do one of these 👈 👉.

So, last May, I fled the egregious privacy invasion called Android, switched to iPhone, and never looked back, similar to the way ThE VoIcEs sent me straight into G-d’s loving arms. Is my iPhone 15 compromised? At the network level, probably. Can’t really control that. However, once upon a time last fall, when [redacted] was being a fascist meanie, she mentioned that things were planted in the “encrypted folder” on my phone. I’m pretty sure she’s an Android user. Samsung does have a tool called, “Secure Folder,” (presumably to hide your adult feet pics) but there is no analogous feature in native iOS. And I’ve never downloaded an app to add this functionality, because I have nothing to hide.

Anywho, these shadow jerks clearly have infiltrated my desktop and laptop PCs, which run updated versions of Windows 11. Besides the latest “private IP” fiasco on my main desktop, I had to completely reinstall Windows on my laptop last week, because various processes were opening automatically, overloading the 11th-Gen i7 CPU and rendering it unusable. Last fall, I erased my entire network attached storage array (featuring my life’s digital design work) because [redacted] said they laced it with kiddie porn. I’ve had enough. I rode a bus to Philly yesterday and got a great deal on a used MacBook M4 Pro w/ 24GB of RAM. I am now a Mac user from here on out.

If you think your Windows PC might be compromised by the Deep State but cannot convert right now, I recommend downloading TinyWall firewall and SysInternals’ Process Explorer. These bad people (who are also bad at their jobs) would prefer to operate in secrecy. Those two programs will identify the jerkware consuming your processor cycles and reveal the flow of data in/out over the Internet.