Whitney Webb exhorts people to start 'prepping' for a major cyber-attack by getting off mainstream platforms - what advice could you share on that point in terms of 'open-source' options?

That's a good question. Part of the conundrum is we don't know to what extent they'll shut down open-source or decetralized platforms, which they'll be able to do (but maybe not entirely with decetralization.)

For example, since that Nazi pig guy took over Twitter, a lot of people have been navigating to a Mastodon instance. Mastodon is open source and decetralized, in a sense (not truly as each instance exists on a server), but the Man could still take it down an a whack-a-mole fashion by taking individual instances (servers) offline if they 'endanger' the, well, Man.

Duck-duck-go is a good open-source alternative to Google. Firefox is a good browser for privacy because it now uses the 'containers' approach which allows you to sandbox a site to a specific container, meaning that site won't be able to see what you've been doing outside that container.

But it all comes back to the ISP level control. The Man will be able to shut down or control whatever he wants. Individually, this will be done via your ISP, which is your doorway and ticket to the Internet -- that's how he will control you personally. Controlling sites and such will be done largely via DNS, which will basically take domain names down, but he could also attack the ISP of any offending server.

It will be interesting to see what happens to Bitcoin. It's international and doesn't rely on any one server or domain name, so it will be nearly impossible for the Man to take down entirely, but he can scare the shit out of people from using it with threat of jail time and use all sorts of other methods. The other thing that might happen is that banks may actually embrace Bitcoin as a gold replacement or at least something to have on their books for sake of diversification, in which case it could be left alone but will then become a tool for the Man rather than one against him.

One thing to keep in mind, and this is a biggy -- the Internet protocol is free, open-source, and implementable on any community level. As I think I've point out before, you can create your own internet in your community given the essential hardware (you already have it) and software (Linux, Apache server, etc., all free). It's not hard, and you can block the Man. You can decide who is on your internet. Then, if only one person on your internet can somehow connect to the next community over, boom, you've just connected your two community's internets (probably should be called intranets), and your network has grown. It's organic.

I'm curious about Linux as a way to store documents.

I highly recommend Linux, but it is a learning curve. If you're interested, my advice would be to take an old, unused computer if you have one and install it on that. Let me know if you're ready to take that leap and I'll post simplified instructions. All the info is online, but there's so much info that it's sometimes frustrating, particularly at first. We get used to whatever OS we use and using a new one is always frustrating. I get severely frustrated with Windows when I have to use it at work.

I have a bunch of backup protocols I use, combined with encryption. My routine involves muliple external drives that I've amassed over the years, a couple different cloud services, and tools like rclone and rsync, which come with Linux.

Regarding cloud services, we get back to our conundrum. If there is no cloud, well...

I encrypt everything important when putting in on the cloud, even when a service says it encrypts everything on the client side and can't see your shit. OK, well, maybe they can't.

One service that I use for big stuff like movies is Storj, but it's not user friendly, at all. It's super cheap, and it's entirely decentralized storage, so in theory it can't be taken down as easily as some others, but that's assuming you have Internet. Still, I find their approach interesting.

But really for cloud storage I don't think it matters too much, really, as long as everything is encrypted. Cryptomator seems to be a popular, open-source, user-friendly tool. I don't use it just because I've set everything up using different methods, but I think it seems like a good option.