There are services that allow anonymous payments. I think Proton, Mailbox.org, and Posteo all accept cash payments.

Kagi has a “privacy pass” feature, which uses some fancy ephemeral authentication tokens that are not traceable to your specific account. You lose personalized settings, naturally (like site rankings) but you can do searches that aren’t directly tied to your account.

For email, there’s no one-size-fits-all risk model. I mean, my email address is my full name, @ a domain that I own and is itself traceable to me. I have no need for anonymity, but I DO need privacy and security.

I don’t think you’ll find another major repo with so many real-world incidents though. Whether this is because of a systemic problem or just because it’s targeted more frequently, I’m not sure.

Now stand in awe of my wild, wild rolling!

I’ve also had Macs online for years without issue.

I guess it only applies to “ephemeral” ports 49152–65535, though I’m not sure what range macOS actually uses. Wikipedia has numbers for Linux and various Windows versions but not macOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeral_port

So does that mean typical desktop usage, like email, web browsing, SSH, etc. would be unaffected? Anyone have any insight on this? I’m not a networking expert myself.

I can’t believe the claim that “everything else dies” when that goes directly against observed reality.

You can run Linux on Mac hardware if that’s what you mean.

But I was talking about the software side, in comparison to Windows.

MacOS is not a walled garden any more than Windows is. That’s just iOS/iPadOS.

You can run any software you want on macOS. It doesn’t need to be from the App Store, and it doesn’t need to be notarized by Apple or even signed.

How long that will remain true is an open question. I don’t think they can realistically enforce signing or notarization in the near future. Too much would break.