Platform27

Sentimentality, images of long dead family members.

Monetarily, my Steam account.

Lying about collecting that data, because they do (and I block it). Not lying, but backtracking on everything else.

Other than the FairPhone, which you already mentioned, nothing really matches all criteria.

I’d give a nod to the Pixel line, though. Google already offers 5 years of software updates, and the next line is rumoured to get 7. Plus Google allows Custom ROM support, which makes it a fan favourite in the privacy community. Granted it’s not as repairable as the FairPhone, and it’s not as eco-friendly, but it’s decent enough.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

If anything, they’re worse.

1. Brave is an advertising company, that blocks everyone, but them. Forcing over people and companies into their system.
2. They’re heavily in the blockchain ecosystem, with their own worthless crypto.
3. They take from open source projects (uBlock, Chromium, etc), but threaten legal action when someone forks them.
4. They install bloat/spyware on your Windows system (later claimed it was a mistake).
5. Brave, and its CEO is right-wing, lobbying against things like same-sex marriage.

I could go on.

any technical solution short of DRM is provably impractical and unworkable.

Don’t give them ideas.

I was going to say a house by the sea… but it probably wouldn’t be my first purchase. Instead it would likely be:

1. Pizzas
2. A salad
3. Booze
4. A video game
5. Clear my own debts, while also setting aside money for friends and family’s debt.

Inside: Vomit + insects (cockroaches, I think). Software: The weebiest weeb setup (images, boot sounds, etc) to ever exist.

They’re Evil Arseholes, what’d you expect.

No. Here’s a pretty good explanation from the qBittorrent forums:

Your ratio is what percentage you have given back to others of what you have taken. For example, if you download something, and have a .5 ratio on that file, that means you've shared back half of what you've taken.

Ideally, you should strive to always seed to 1.0 meaning you have given back the same amount that was taken. In an ideal world, this would assure that no torrent ever has to die. Private trackers may have more specific rules about what ratio you must maintain, either overall (across all torrents you download) and/or on each individual torrent you grab. Check the specific trackers you participate on for their rules.

If you deal exclusively with public trackers, then 1.0 should be your minimum goal.

Personally, I’d put your ratio at 2.0, if you have the available data allowance, and bandwidth. Help others like you’ve been helped, even on public trackers.

For all those who’ve lost their jobs, I’m sorry, and hope you land on your feet. For Epic…

Honestly, I don’t even remember it being that funny. I haven’t gave it a second thought since its release. The power of social media marketing, I guess.

If you’ve never seen Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, I’d encourage you instead to take a look at Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz, both really good movies.

Yeah, YT is the last holdout for me. It’s literally the only Google service I willingly sign up for. I’ve tried Piped/Invidious, but they don’t match YTs quality.

Even finding Lemmy was not easy. Just doing a search brought up Lemmy from Motörhead. Talented guy, but not really what I wanted. It took me awhile before I even found an instance, and that was only because of a YT video. Most folks will just use the first page of their chosen search engine, and then give up.

Then signing up to… pretty much anything federated is a confusing experience for new users. Trying to wrap your head around instances, communities, and so on. “Why does there have to be an XYZ community at Example instance, when there already is one on ABC Instance? Can’t they just merge? What’s the point? What if I want to be a part of example instance, but want to subscribe to communities on the ABC instance?“

When signup is done, but you then enabled 2FA. You input the string on your app, click apply. Then when you try to log back in, you find you’re logged out, and don’t know why. It’s because Lemmy is one of the few services to use SHA256, and not SHA1. So it doesn’t work with something like Bitwarden. I had to find a GitHub post to find out why this was happening. Not a good first impression.

Then when you subscribe to communities they’re either lacking in content, or reposting, sometimes from another instance.

There seems to be issues with posting media, and the whole integration with other ActivityPub seems to need some work.

Overall I think all this is growing pains. I wouldn’t say the service is ready, but I don’t think it’ll be ready, until it onboards new users. However I don’t think many new users (non-technical users especially) will stay, due to the issues above.

IGG is a cracking group with a mixed reputation. Early on they distributed malware, which continues to give them a negative reputation. Though, I haven’t heard of anything bad about them, in some time… some repackers also use their cracks, with no issues. I think they were the first that cracked the latest Armoured Core, for example.

A TV will do, for a child. He doesn’t NEED anything fancy. Will it be a great experience? Absolutely not. Others here have already gone over the issues. That being said, if cash flow is an issue (relatable), it’ll be fine. Console gamers have been doing it for literal decades. I also used to do it, back when I was a kid, when we had an old 480i TV. Your kid should be grateful that he can play his games. People can spend too much time worrying about not getting the best experience (especially when giving advice to others), when it’s often not needed.

1. Quake
2. Thief
3. Metal Gear Solid
4. Half Life
5. System Shock 2

Honourable mention to Final Fantasy 7, and Zelda Ocarina of Time. They might have been great when released, but I don’t think they’ve aged well.

RIP Volition. From Decent, Red Faction, Summoner, and Saints Row, they made some really good stuff. Even if the modern Volition is nowhere near the team it might have been, it’s sad to see a studio being closed.

The only thing that comes to mind is PeerTube. I’ve never used it, but I’ve seen it suggested a few times in the privacy community.

Health is on-device, and is E2EE. To my knowledge, that's always been the case. They do allow optional data linking services, but those need to be setup by the end-user. Apple should have no knowledge of this data, by default. Notes can be E2EE (with ADP), and with Journal (a new iOS feature) being E2EE. Music is a paid for service, with no ads, and is one of the more privacy respecting options. Data is needed for Music to help serve the user, and suggest artists/songs... it's literally one of the platforms benefits, over self-hosting.

PIA is owned by Kape Technologies., a dodgy company, founded by a member is Israel’s Intelligence Devision. They’re known to spread malware, steal users data, and redirect traffic to advertisers. That being said, PIA claims that despite being owned by Kape, they remain in control of their day-to-day operations. I haven’t heard of any major issues, since the acquisition. Kape also seems to like the profitability of their (several) VPNs.

Up to you if you trust them with your data. Personally, I do not.

Until today I haven’t seen an ad on YT, for years. Then I searched for a video, clicked, and got an ad. Clicked off the video, restarted the browser (also updated uBlock’s filters), and that fixed it.

Edit: I wrote this and got another ad. No video, just the audio.

There’s a couple of ways to block it.

1. Via an application Firewall, which will run on your PC. Safing’s Portmaster works on both Linux and Windows. Objective-See’s LuLu is a good Mac option. Both of these tools are free and open source.

2. If you know Unity’s IPs, you could block it in your firewall. I’m guessing you do not. Though, with a little work, it can be done.

3. If you can’t do either, you could at the very least block it at the DNS level. This will stop the software getting those IPs. It doesn’t really work if the IPs are already baked into the software, but that is incredibly unlikely in games. A great configurable DNS provider is NextDNS. If you have the know how to self-host a Pi-Hole or Adguard Home are great options.

There’s also ways to analyse that traffic, which I won’t go into here.

I’m in the UK, and prices keep rising. As of right now I can expect to pay around £120, for two people, over a week. This week was £143. For those in the US, that’s a little over $180. Pre pandemic, and actually leaving the EU, groceries was half that price.

The rewrite is done.

https://protonvpn.com/blog/vpn-linux-app/

1. Copyright is a HUGE pain in the arse, especially with books. Do you realise how hard some libraries have had to fight, just for trying to do, your business idea. On that note.
2. What’s your USP, especially compared to a library? They already have tons of physical and digital books, and other media. You can even request scientific papers, from some of them. Remember digital libraries are also a thing.
3. A lot of scientific papers are already available for free, online. They can be hard to find, but they are available.
4. How are you making money? What are the expected net/gross income? How are you going to convince them to pay?

Check out Heroic Game Launcher. It works with GoG, handles GoG Galaxy Cloud Save support, and works with Proton (similar to Steam). A very good client.

1. KDE Project
2. Wayland
3. Open source drivers (especially Nvidia)
4. Lemmy
5. Mastadon
6. Scribus
7. Nextcloud
8. Firefox
9. Tutanota suite
10. Wine

I can see the appeal. Of course it would be easier for the average user, for Steam integration (eg: with Steam Deck), but the real killer feature would be cloud save syncing. Add in the Community features, like forums (good resource), and the potential for guides, on getting settings optimized for a game.

Too much work, for so little gain. I’d expect it if they ever release a Tf3, though.

It applies to most business.

1. You give a positive face to the market you’re in (Game Pass, Phil Spencer, pro-dev vibe, etc).
2. You buy chunks of the market (Activ-Bliz-King is a massive chunk), while saying it’s good for the industry.
3. You squeeze the company of its IP, while bleeding the market dry of money. All of which kills, or at least hurts that market.

Right now, Micro$oft is in the Extend phase.

Having it open source, does not make it good. I think I'd prioritise making it fun, try to.make a profit, and then open sourcing it. I don't think having it open source will help you sell copies... you might sell less. Make your money first, have a feasible business strategy, so you don't go bust. Then try to keep the game alive vis open sourcing it.

Apple does not sell user data. By all means, look at their Privacy Policy (it's easy to read), and show me where this is mentioned. They do collect it, and use it for their own marketing platform, but they don't sell/trade it. In fact they DO anonymise the data they collect. Take a look: https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Differential_Privacy_Overview.pdf This is just one document, found after a quick search. They also disclose other details on their security, and other privacy (or lack thereof) aspects.

Now show me where other ad agencies, not just one or two, that goes to the same lengths, while also giving decent documentation. I'm not saying Apple is perfect (far from it).

China stealing foreign companies tech/code… /Noooo, say it’s not so /s

Depending on your server, and how you install you might have a bad experience. I’ve had issues where it wasn’t finding the film/series metadata, having plugin issues, and being incredibly slow (slow UI when anything is being done, slow scanning folders, slow loading saved metadata, etc). Jellyfin, like a lot of open source software, feels like jank. The devs know about a lot of issues, but they’re swamped with so much, with this big of a project.

People criticise Plex, rightfully so with some of their bad decisions, but it still works better. For me, Plex runs so much better, and without issues. I won’t be moving away to Jellyfin in the foreseeable future, but I’ll be glad when I am able to.

Could be the engineer didn't have permission to see file details. They could still be readable by higher-ups, but not to the general engineer. This is how it should work, if e2ee is not used. If Dropbox allowed everyone who worked on their server to read files... that's a huge invasion of privacy.

Most popular Linux distributions will work great for gaming, Nobara (based on Fedora) included. It’s a great option, and one I can recommend. A lot of the more tedious work, that should be done with Fedora, is done for you. What’s more debatable is whether you go for Gnome (more like Mac’s OSX) or KDE (more like Windows), but that’s personal preference, not relating to gaming. Make sure to try them both, before you move to something else (or back to Windows). They’re both great, but very different options.

That is generally really annoying, when on desktop. Consider looking for an Android/iOS app. The app will keep track of your account, and you won’t really have that issue anymore. I use Thunder, and find it a decent experience on both platforms.

Yeah, I was trying to think about my immediate reaction. After the shock, denial, and a bucket load of swearing, I’d want to celebrate.

Just gota get it up. Might be harder than it looks, though.