Maria Sophia wrote:
Q: What Windows newsreaders allow you to set the $EDITOR & all the headers?
A:
Agent allows some editing, but not on all headers. Xnews used to let one
tweak them all, but some, as you know, are often overwritten by servers,
either free or non-free.
besides that, i agree with your insight about privacy, but i nonetheless
let other people plonk me efficiently if they wish, by exposing a
(kinda) FQDN in my message-ids.
Thanks for helping to answer the question, where the only way to get
privacy is to build it into your system, yourself, as far as I can tell.
Privacy isn't something you get by accident. It's something you build.
The instant you set up any computer system, you start adding privacy to it.
Of the million things needed to know for privacy, most people only know 3.
For example, I post perhaps, oh, I don't know, a thousand photos a year to
various forums, where I wonder if most people know about sensor pattern
noise fingerprinting. They know about EXIF but not about PRNU tracking.
And then, as with writing a newsreader with full obfuscation power, they
then need to quickly mathematically reduce the PRNU, which is not simple.
I invest hours in any given article body & I help thousands of people
yearly, where the *value* of that gift isn't in the wrapping paper header.
I don't change who I am (same 2021 phone, same 2009 desktop, same Santa
Cruz Mountain location, same iPads, same attitudes, same everything.
With my nearly-perfect grammar, stellar spelling, line-wrap balance and
attitudes toward Google/Microsoft/Apple, I don't hide who I am. Ever.
I don't change my punctuation style, nor my attitudes about marketing.
If marketing supplied it to you, then you're the product in many cases.
One big step to garner privacy on the Internet, if it's even possible, is
to refuse to create an account for anything & never pay even 1 cent online.
Another is to understand how programs (web browsers in particular) are
fingerprinted so as to put lower-entropy randomizing procedures in place.
Yet another is to rotate VPNs and time zones randomly, and even to stack
VPNs on top of proxies (& vice versa), particularly using only free tools.
That's why my Windows 11 setup has no MSA for example, although it's almost
impossible to remain private from any operating system vendor, as a rule.
Newsgroups: alt.comp.os.windows-11,alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt,alt.comp.microsoft.windows
Subject: PSA: I can happily report that my first Win11 Home installed sans a MSA
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:24:16 -0500
Message-ID: <10k3l9g$2ug$1@nnrp.usenet.blueworldhosting.com>
Android is the easiest common consumer platform to remain private on,
whereas iOS is, by far, almost impossible (contrary to Marketing claims).
Back to newsreaders, most people simply give up on protecting privacy.
But privacy is like hygiene; it's a million little things done every day.
One of those little things is to not re-use the same Usenet wrapping paper.
People who don't practice privacy as simple as that, may never understand.
--
Just one person on Usenet paying it forward so all benefit daily.
Les messages affichés proviennent d'usenet.