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Transcript

Please excuse any grammatical errors. I used a tool to generate the transcript and haven’t had a chance to read through it yet.

I attended Defcon 33 a few months ago, in August of 2025, in Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s always an enlightening experience. So, if you ever have the chance to go, I highly recommend it. To those that saw me there and came up to me and thanked me for my content that I publish, thank you for that. Your words truly meant a lot to me.

But before we get into it, I want to mention that I offer paid consulting. I truly believe that anyone can figure out anything given enough time, but there are some people that prefer to save time by spending money. And if that’s you, I am happy to help. You can find out more at sidabritos.com by clicking the “Schedule Consultation” button.

This year, I saw a presentation by Yoav McGidd. I hope I pronounced that correctly. That gave me the same gross feeling I had when I made my initial video in August 2021 about switching to GrapheneOS. Here’s the TL;DDR of what that presentation talked about. It covered how Apple’s AI ecosystem is sending WhatsApp, iMessage, and other app data of Apple users when they are using the “Hey Siri” feature, and the user has no control over this.

Besides sending the message data that was being used to transcribe what the user had said, it was also sending what media the user was currently listening to in their browser. I guess they need that for context. It was also sending a list of apps installed on the user’s machine, including a list of apps from a virtual machine the user had on the host. The presentation has way more details on this, so I suggest you look at that. I also saw that Defcon published the talk yesterday on YouTube, so if you want to watch that, I will link it down below.

But after seeing this presentation, I was just grossed out, for lack of a better term. I don’t use Siri on my MacBook, but I know there’s other privacy invasive stuff running, even though I filter my network traffic with Little Snitch and have most of the Apple features and apps disabled. And before you start typing that comment, yes, I know I talk about GrapheneOS and that’s what I use, so using macOS makes me a hypocrite, a sellout, trying to think of the other names that I’ve been called, but it’s fine. I get it. No hard feelings. It’s what worked best for me at the time.

But times are changing. And add in that Tim Cook is selling out to Donald Trump, giving him a gold bar trophy, because that’s what I do with my friends. We have a bunch of Silicon Valley nerds brown-nosing the current administration and going to fancy dinners. We also have Apple doing whatever they can to appease the current people in power. And regardless of which side you fall on, tech companies being in bed with the government is not normal, at least in the U.S., at least not this blatantly.

So, what I’m going to be doing is trying to migrate to Qubes OS, which is a reasonably secure operating system. I mean, if this guy likes it, then it’s got to be kind of good. Where Qubes OS is different from a regular operating system is that they leverage Xen-based virtualization to allow for the creation and management of isolated compartments called cubes. Basically, what that means is that every app or compartment is a virtual machine which keeps it separate from others.

I’ve read and heard that the learning curve can be pretty steep for Qubes OS. And in the past, I’ve tried other desktop OSes like Fedora, Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, Debian, but none of them did it for me. This time, I have the motivation behind me, so I figured I would try and use the best available option that I knew of. So, I went out and purchased a 2018 T480 ThinkPad for $25 shipped off eBay. I wanted to use something that was listed as compatible with Qubes but not spend a ton of money. I’m not recommending you go out and buy this laptop. I just wanted to find the cheapest option available. If Qubes OS ends up working for me, then I’ll switch out to something else in the future.

There are a few things I want to mention about this laptop. First off, it was one of the first laptops I used at my first job that we would roll out to employees. And like I said, this is a 2018 laptop, but somehow it came with some amazing features like an integrated, I don’t know if you can see it, slide for the webcam to cover it. So that’s pretty awesome. I don’t know why that’s not a feature anymore.

The keyboard’s also pretty decent and has some nice tactile feedback. The touchpad is decent as well. It also has the little nub in the center that you can use for the mouse. The red nub is actually missing from this one, but I could replace it if I wanted to. In addition, it has a removable battery, so that’s pretty handy as well. And the ports on here also impressed me. So again, 2018 laptop, almost eight years old at this point, it has two USB-C ports along with a dock connection port. And on the other side, it has an Ethernet port, a full-size SD card slot, two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, and a headphone jack. So, it was pretty refreshing to see all those ports again on a laptop. I miss those days, along with an integrated webcam cover.

So, I’m going to be recording my experience from the start with this process. It’s not going to be like my current videos where I test everything out and make a polished guide demonstrating how to do things. I’m going to share my experience from the perspective of someone who has never used Qubes OS before and document that process. So, a little bit different format, but I think it’ll be interesting.

I know it’s not realistic to expect I’ll get everything migrated over to a five-year-old laptop. I’ll probably continue my video editing on macOS, but everything else is fair game. So, if you have any suggestions or feedback on getting started with Qubes OS, feel free to share that down below, and I’ll see you next time.