It’s not that we’re uninformed, it’s that we disagree.

route my traffic to a different country where I don’t live in and them viewing my activity is potentially less of a problem

Depending on where you live, and where your service resides, this could be tricky.

In the US, for instance, if you’ve chosen a provider in Australia, then a FVEY agreement could be in place to share that data. This gets around the technicality that intel gathering is not occurring on US soil and is not being done by the gov.

And again with the US, if you’ve chosen a country that’s not amiable to sharing user data, the US could very well be justifying that country as a target for pilfering data anyway.

So, that would leave choosing a service provider within the US, which should need to go through the FISA courts for any access to citizen data, but who knows after the Snowden revelations.

I guess that’s the state of privacy if you’ve got a nation state that’s targeted you for surveillance. Only way around it I can think of is data to be encrypted in transit and at rest, and only you control the keys. But that’s not something that’s going to happen with something like mainstream email anyway, too inconvenient for most folks (and you also don’t know if your recipients are security conscious either).

No I hate MS. I won’t ever forget the pain that was developing edge cases around Internet Explorer (fuck IE 6, that shit was the worst).

Fucking gyrenes, where’d all my crayons go?!

TempleOS has entered the chat.

EndeavourOS - For when you love running Arch, but can’t be assed to install it all from scratch again (and the Endeavour cinnamon install has been awesome).

The first two and the last three are the same

I read that as “all five are the same”. And I’m like damn, don’t want to work in a slaughterhouse if that’s true for you!

unless you have nvidia. Fuck nvidia.

flips off in Torvalds

For me it’s funeral potatoes, or half the desert dishes from various potlucks that would happen in the chapel gym.

Jokes on them though, all those recipes are posted online now! Don’t need a temple recommend for that shit lol.

I’ve been using mine for 10+ years, maybe changing batteries once.

I currently use it with a NUC loaded with linux mint, and have the UI HD scaled (it’s an out-of-the box option).

The only native functionality of the actual smart tv that I use, is the power button.

“Never trust a man with two first names.”

My wife flips her fucking lid.

I’d go with state actors first.

When a particular social media platform is centralized, you can buy yourself a say percentage of stock and have sway over it (cough tencent), or have a useful idiot ruin the platform (cough musk), or another useful idiot to run propaganda you like anyway (cough truth social, cough fox news, cough newsmax…), or yet another that will sell out it’s host country’s citizens for cold hard cash (cough facebook).

But when that social media platform is decentralized? Well, then you’d need to figure out how to poison the well early on to stave off adoption. The Saudi Arabias, UAEs, Chinas definitely don’t like the idea of lemmy, and it’ll be way harder for them to control if critical mass is hit.

and im sure youd complain about prices too

A universal claim only takes one case to disprove, and I’ll be that case: you’re wrong. I actually seek out the pay services and cut out the “free” ones.

My real complaint is when the huge companies offer a paid plan, but then still try to double dip and abuse my data and I. So I leave for the smaller guys who have an actual reputation to protect and so have garnered some trust. The hard part are things like google street view, or youtube, where competition is way behind due to the sheer inertia that incumbents have (e.g., creators using youtube due to the huge potential audience).

Other thing hard to ditch for me is android, as I really don’t like how tightly locked down apple’s walled garden is - not being able to run real firefox with my choice of extensions is a showstopper for any mobile platform.

Bible Pimp: “Have you even RTFM, son?”

Bubblez: “That depends; can you go fuck yourself?”

It can also happen if google can’t obtain/verify an id with their normal means (e.g. ip + browser type/settings + cookies + …).

I get challenged all the time and I’ve been on the same static consumer ip, but I go through some precautions to make it more difficult to id me (dump all browser state on restart, disable js except for trusted sources, ad blocker plugin, privacy conscious browser + settings, etc.). I still use a vpn in certain scenarios, but still get captchas either way.

In a similar vein is to look for government auctions in town. I’ve got a major public university in my city, and it maintains a permanent auction warehouse. Like once a month they sell all kinds of stuff, from mini fridges to laptops by the pallet.

If you want to get really fancy, could do some distributed session management with something like redis. Though the underlying application needs to be abstracted out already to allow for it.