You don’t need to pass a test or read the road law books to buy a bicycle. It’s not a motor vehicle. Therefore it is not bound by motor law.

In my journey to remove myself from as many unethical companies as possible I was hit with one of several hard lessons, that even if I remove my dependency on corps like Google, I may not want to sacrifice services who themselves depend on it. For example, I use Home Assistant. I value several (external) community made integrations and therefore use HACS. Well, HACS is a frontend for all these extras, which are exclusively hosted on Github. So I ‘can’t’ delete my Git account, rather keep it around for API access.

I have some other services like Shopify, who I don’t really trust but who are frequently the only adopted sale point for many merchants, who themselves are ethically sound or, subjectively, the ‘best’ source. Who better to host a throwaway email account for services I reluctantly connect with than Google, aha.

What I’m saying is, I’m finding total deGoogling a challenge, and I wish you the best of luck. At least there’s alternatives to the Play Store; Aurora, F-droid, and ApkMirror||ApkPure

I installed Termux for reasons I’ve forgotten, and was surprised to discover the base is a distro called Alpine. Learned more about this seldom talked-about fourth Linux distro. I tell you, if nothing else it’s nice to be able to install apks I’m familiar with on PC, and SSH into my server directly from the phone

You got any tips for brands? Felt cute, might self-medicate later~

They’d forget that their currency is $ if corporate capitalism wasn’t so heavily ingrained into their national identity

(Assuming the one who made a mistake is American - even though many countries use dollars the US are the only ones bold enough to forget the internet isn’t just for them)

Wait, Ecosia has an AI assistant? One - that sounds ridiculously counterproductive to their goal of being eco, Two - I need to check that out haha

Well, from what I can find it doesn’t seem that much of an attack vector –

– My phone does not have 2G compatibility, this probably only tracks location if you’ve switched on location services and I’d wager most people use IM calls and texts rather than cellular. If the phone is old enough to have 2G or 3G, perhaps there’s a threat. If you live in the US it’s ironically probably smart to leave it on – state forces are a bigger threat than malicious conglomerates atm

Even so, I can’t do this if I want to keep some services or games – I’m currently liberal with my app downloads and around a dozen refuse to work unless they’ve been installed or updated to the absolute latest release with the Play Store version - Aurora versions don’t work. There’s the argument that if it doesn’t work, it’s not valuable enough to keep, but I play games quite a bit.

They flagged Rustdesk a while back, which is a probably harmless open-source remote access software. Because of this I learned that Google not only has Play Protect in Google Play settings, but a second, separate setting in Security called Advanced Protection, that prompted me to remove Rustdesk, and a second time after it re-enabled itself. It reminds me of the days I ran Windows and the antivirus would kill vital programs or script files for some games.

Can’t they just say no and risk jail for treason or something? Better than killing innocent people for the state’s superficial show of power and attempt at dominance.

Well this is awful. My policy is if it can’t agree to my terms, it is rejected. If a company is kicking up a fuss because I want to ensure my primary address isn’t forever compromised by spam, and doesn’t work with aliases or duckduckgo privacy relays, then said company doesn’t get my attention or business. Whatever the service you’re trying to obtain from them, I can almost guarantee there’s a more amicable alternative.

The UK government mostly only use the term ‘terrorist’ if a threat to the government is perceived. They don’t care about the people in general in this sense.

In the end nobody was harmed, and though no doubt the Jewish locals were a little terrorised, croudfunding and/or legal reclamation from the suspects will ensure the organisation has much more money than they had before the attack to put toward much-needed improvements to their infrastructure.

I hope more information is released regarding this.

OOP was possibly referring to the movie Crash, or the origin novel

Ah the good old days, before the majority of America bought Apple tech and incentivised other manufacturers to follow the practice of walled gardens, intentional malware and monetised tech lifespans. Thanks to the EU regulators’ constant defense against corporations, it’s possible that charging for repairs within the first 10 years, either at a specialist centre or via manufacturer-specific tools, might just be put under ‘hidden fees’ or ‘false advertisement’. With the help of the EU we retain some semblance of owning the product we purchased

Yes! Jane Lynch. She’s playing Sue Sylvester in Glee in this meme

What hateful gamers are they listening to

deleted by creator

Please use body tape instead

Yes, and their doc pages and personal site of the same name. Here’s hoping they don’t resurface the same code under a new name

Do you prefer XMPP or Matrix

Yes* - I haven’t used Discord in a long time as its bloat simply doesn’t interest me, but for communicating with folk:

Matrix, at least for me, is great, but the most capable mobile client Element has many broken or missing features.
Classic, but not X, has:

• working calls via STUN/TURN,
• an emoji menu,
• correctly showing chat profile images (X duplicates the most recent one for all chats),
• and the ability to create unencrypted group chats (purely for public memes).

X, but not Classic, has:

• attachment captions,
• HD images,
• markdown support,
• a more modern UI,
• and (when it works) fully encrypted 1-1 and conference calls via Matrix Livekit.

I currently dual-wield the two because neither is enough yet, and most other clients lack call functionality entirely.

XMPP, at least for me, is nearly perfect. It just works and I find the fact that desktop clients still look like AOL Messenger quite charming. However it has:

• very manual encryption key management, meaning even I find trusting a new device daunting let alone any adopters,
• no backward decryption, meaning message history needs to be exported and transferred to a new device,
• plaintext serverside storage for several pieces of data. It’s my server so ownership isn’t a worry, but it’s a massive security risk in the albeit unlikely event of a hack or hijack.

I chose higher encryption and easier adoption between Matrix and XMPP but wish there was a more fulfilling option.