That’s how communism always ends up. When you hand over majority of the power to the state, it won’t be keen on giving it back.

That’s like saying the US is not capitalist because we don’t have a true free market and better products/services don’t always rise to the top.

These simply aren’t things that can practically happen, just like the workers owning the means of production.

Yes absolutely. Your hardware has built in DRM capabilities. Modern CPUs basically have a 2nd small CPU inside that runs proprietary code and manages the primary CPU, and it also handles DRM.

That isn’t something you can easily work around.

Except it’s practically impossible to exist in modern society without internet. Unless you’re rich and you can get other people to do internet-requiring tasks for you.

There are AOSP based roms that are de-googled. You can use third party app stores to download foss software, or other 3rd party stores that let you download from Google play (aurora). iPhone is basically the only other choice, but it’s not any better in this context.

Lots of alternative email providers. Protonmail is one.

For maps, openstreetmap exists. You can also use Google maps without an account inside a secure browser. That will minimize data collection.

You can use a downloader (yt-dlp or a gui that wraps it) for YouTube, or use a 3rd party app like NewPipe. Again, using YouTube without an account in a secure browser is an option.

Chrome can obviously be replaced with Firefox/LibreWolf. If you must have a chromium based browser, you can use ungoogled chromium. chrlauncher is a small app that can be used to make it easy on windows and keep it updated.

You cant really do anything about the apps that use chromium internally for rendering, besides finding replacements.

It will likely not work inside a VM. Haven’t looked into the implementation, but they will probably want to use the hardware DRM manufacturers have been sneaking into the CPUs and GPUs.

So you will be required to use “approved” CPU, “approved” OS and “approved” browser to access certain websites, as it is already the case with online streaming. You can kiss foss goodbye.

Mastodon is a piece of software. I don’t see anyone saying “phpBB” or “WordPress” has a massive child abuse material problem.

Has anyone in the history ever said “Not a good look for phpBB”? No. Why? Because it would make no sense whatsoever.

I feel kind of a loss for words because how obvious it should be. It’s like saying “paper is being used for illegal material. Not a good look for paper.”

What is the solution to someone hosting illegal material on an nginx server? You report it to the authorities. You want to automate it? Go ahead and crawl the web for illegal material and generate automated reports. Though you’ll probably be the first to end up in prison.

All the issues KOSA is aiming to address are also issues that affect the general population. I would say legal age teenagers and young adults are affected just as much.

If the issues are deemed harmful enough to require legislation, then it should be addressing the issue themselves rather than adding harm by passing insanely privacy violating bills.

And when it comes to children, parents should be responsible for what their children as exposed to on the internet. This debate is decades old and it’s pretty much been settled. Despite the society being strongly against exposing children to any sexual content, porn websites don’t have any age verification. Parents are responsible for what their child views on the internet.

It’s 4 Google engineers. They sure as shit didnt start this as a pet project.

Antitrust lawsuit? What’s that?

When is the last time any of the big tech companies got hit with antitrust? Microsoft is brazenly doing shit on windows they wouldn’t even dream of in early 2000s. Resetting user defaults to their products. Constantly advertising their products when user launches a competitors software.

They don’t give a fuck and neither do the governments.

Users often depend on websites trusting the client environment they run in. This trust may assume that the client environment is honest about certain aspects of itself, keeps user data and intellectual property secure, and is transparent about whether or not a human is using it. This trust is the backbone of the open internet, critical for the safety of user data and for the sustainability of the website’s business.

Jesus christ just the introduction paragraph is a load of horseshit. Actually bold faced lies. Users depend on websites trusting the client? In what fucking world are websites trusting the client??? Literally the only case is the media DRM that should have never been part of the web in the first place.

get your credit card stolen.

Let’s see… I don’t provide my credit card to anyone when pirating. The only way they are getting my credit card is breaking into my house. (no, mkv files can’t have viruses).

But I do need to provide my credit card info to HBO, which they store, on their likely poorly secured servers.

The number of credit cards stones from data leaks very likely exceeds the number of them stolen because someone got duped when trying to pirate.

Pretty sure HBO was willing go to for multiple more seasons (why would they not?), but Dumb and Dumber decided to rush the ending.

Just clarifying because it looks like by they you mean HBO.

Wow he got a death threat in an email, which also asked for his address lmao.

Poor guy. First day on the internet must be tough.

If you receive a death threat that you think is real, you contact the police and the FBI. But considering that the man who was threatening him didn’t even know his address, I struggle to think how he thought it was an actionable threat.

which is truly still Open Source

How so? Chromium is fully open source and functional. There is the ungoogled chromium fork that removes all features tied to google from it. It’s fully open source by all definitions.

They arent being altruistic. Having their browser engine implementation being dominant gives them an incredible amount of pull in the space of web standards and their adoption.

Some good has come out of this and the web has been advancing rapidly, but they have abused it plenty of times as well.

Or you could just enable that filter in ublock origin. Will be faster and more robust as well.

Don’t we already have pretty robust laws when it comes to person’s likeness?

I presume most contracts cover this aspect mainly for the purposes of marketing and future references. Of course the actors probably didn’t expect the extent the current technology could allow their likeness to be exploited.

It would probably make sense to require more specific contracts for this purpose, and have previously signed general contracts become insufficient for using actors’ likeness for this purpose.

That could indicate a lot of things. It would be very difficult to distinguish a torrent from something like cloud folder sync. And that would still be a statistical guess. No ISP is going to go after customers because their VPN traffic is potentially torrent traffic.

Besides, even if they could detect that torrenting is taking place, they will not know what data is being transferred from and to where. It’s a meme, but torrents are actually sometimes used for non-copyright infringing data.

I can’t really think of a reason those specific drinks would give you a headache.

I compared the ingredients of coke cherry zero with regular coke zero, and the ingredient lists are almost literally identical. The only difference would be in the flavoring they use, both of which are just listed as “Natural Flavors”.

The only other difference is coke cherry zero has marginally more Acesulfate Potasium or less Potassium Citrate. We can tell because their position on the ingredient list is swapped. It’s not well known, but ingredient lists are sorted from highest to lowest content.

Potasium Citrate is found in many foods, in particular in lemons, grapefruit and pomegranates. It’s added for preservation and flavor.

Acesulfate Potasium is another artificial sweetener, with sweetness on par with Aspartame. Like aspartame, it’s a very well studied food additive and is deemed completely safe by regulators.

But again, both drinks contain them, so even if we disregard that they are safe, the small difference in content is very very unlikely to cause any effect.

And you don’t have to be an idiot to be susceptible to confirmation bias. Our brains are built to look for patterns, but sometimes they see them where they don’t exist.

As for #2, really any amount of sugary drinks is bad for you. This includes fruit juices (including “no sugar added” and freshly pressed). The problem comes from how fast your body absorbs the sugar. Sugar dissolved in water is very quickly absorbed and causes a rapid spike in blood glucose. These spikes put you at risk of developing a range of nasty conditions - in particular Type 2 Diabetes and Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease. Of course drinking one can won’t immidiately give you those conditions, not unlike how smoking one cigarette won’t immidiately give you lung cancer. But like there is no “healthy” number of cigarettes you can smoke, there is no healthy amount of sugary drinks you can consume.

It’s best to avoid, but of course nobody is expected to live perfectly healthy lives, so drinking a can now and then will probably not harm you.

If you want to have a sugary drink, make sure you do not drink it on an empty stomach. Drinking it with a meal will slow down how quickly sugar is absorbed. For the same reason, eating sweet fruits like apples is perfectly healthy despite relatively high sugar content. The sugar is locked inside the solids of the fruit and is absorbed slowly.

Artificial sweeteners are usually 200-1000 times sweeter than sugar, so their content is tiny compared to sugar. A can of coke zero contains 87mg of aspartame. Aspartame has no effect on blood glucose or insulin levels. Even if it did, such a tiny amount could not cause a spike.

This is why I get agitated with headlines like these. WHO announces some study that they haven’t even published that says aspartame “might be carcinogenic” which flies in the face of decades of research and widespread usage. And thousands of fear mongering articles will push the already misinformed public to drinking sugary drinks that in contrast are practically poison.

The 2nd point in the blog post you present as a source is factually incorrect:

2. Artificial sweeteners contribute to chronically high insulin.

The link (bolded by me) in the following text

One of the most commonly used artificial sweeteners in diet sodas, aspartame is particularly damaging to the brain.

Goes to a page titled “Can Sugar Affect Your Cognitive Ability?”. They didn’t even link to the thing their text is claiming.

How can you take this trash seriously?

And personal anecdotes are absolutely worthless in discussions like this. Artificial sweeteners are consumed by a massive portion of the population. Any person who falls ill is likely to have consumed artifical sweeteners, so they will have incredible correlation with every disease on the planet.