Thanks I hate it

Most obvious monopoly since Ma Bell. Even worse than Microsoft which was also obviously a monopoly. Break them all up. Microsoft, ATT (for the… 4th time? Maybe just abolish them at this point…), Comcast, Verizon, Google, Apple, the list goes on. All those food corps that end up being 3 parent companies owning everything else. Break it all up. Force unionization also while going through the legal processes.

Your first point is made irrelevant by the law existing. It doesn’t matter what Apple says now, they must comply or face fines for violation. Maybe they’ll bring that up at a future court hearing to which I say: I hope the EU imprisons Tim Cook if they try. Why? Fuck em that’s why

They’ll very likely try some fucky shit. Good news is 1) simply the existence of proper alternatives, even if required to be sideloaded, is a MASSIVE step forward and 2) I assume the EU will pursue them if only to suck money from their coffers. Blocking it to a EU citizen who is outside the EU absolutely violates the spirit of the law and the EU should come down on Apple with all their power if/when that happens

I personally use Fennec and Bromium whenever using Android (I’m a sick fuck who hot swaps between an iPhone and a Google Pixel phone). Fennec for a lot of stuff is fine, but much like the default Firefox, it’s still slow- although better. Bromium and other Chromium based browsers on Android, especially on older shittier hardware, are really hard to beat. I find myself using Bromium a lot just because it’s simply faster. Firefox/Fennec with native support for actual ublock origin though… nothing beats that browsing experience as far as replicating real desktop browsing. Bromium can’t keep up and Google doesn’t want Chrome to. Brave can offer a similar blocking experience but at what cost? I fucking H A T E crypto and even their features that you can turn off, just seeing references to them and such pisses me off. Honestly wish someone would spitefully fork Brave anonymously and remove any crypto references. Last time a team did it openly Brave got pissy and tried to get the project taken down… Even though it’s open source. So, fuck them.

Do you have ublock origin installed? It eliminates all those popups in my experience.

This is pretty much what happened, yes. I’d offer an important expansion on “innovative features” though. Chrome was objectively faster at everything. Loading pages, starting up, all that stuff. If all you care(d) about was a super fast, modern-feeling browsing experience then Chrome was all there was.

I was one of those “fuck Bill Gates!” dudes circa 2008 or 09 or whenever Chrome came along. I had been using Firefox for years because, I dunno, nerd shit. All my nerdy buddies used it and said I should use it, so I did.

And then Chrome came along and like you say Google was the cool kid on the block. They were building out Google Fiber (remember that? Feels bad), “taking it to the man ™️!” in the form of ISPs. Oh God, how I wish they had won that fight… Even the might of Google proved incapable of breaking the collusion of government and corporations that empower the ISPs in the US…

Anyway, Google was, if I’m being fair here, doing an amazing job with PR.

They were building up and out Android OS, providing an actual competitor to Apple’s (basically) first to market iOS.

Mozilla simply couldn’t keep up. It was already pretty niche pre-Chrome, but post-Chrome it was just IE/Edge and Chrome basically. Firefox was left far behind by the general public, forgotten and, if remembered, remembered only as “the browser for nerds.”

I’m back on Firefox now after Google’s billionth threat to end adblockers in Chrome. That plus Google’s clearly unethical practices. I don’t agree with everything Mozilla does/has done and some of the stuff that comes prepackaged in Firefox is unnecessary in my view, BUT there’s little point in denying their superiority over the competition in many ways.

Normie is incredibly common online in general. It’s not just relegated to weird right wing sites either.

I’m in my mid 30s and even I gotta say… you sound a bit like “old man yells at cloud” with this take. Just chill out a little bit. You’re making the rest of us approaching-middle-agers look bad.

And if you’re somehow younger than me then I gotta say… actually, keep it up. Your apparent lack of being terminally-online (oh no, I used a recently coined term…) is definitely healthier than whatever the fuck the rest of us are doing.

Revanced has sponsorblock though and has for a while

I was using Heimdall and it was having some weird corruption(?) issues. Switched to homarr when I saw it the other day and it’s great. It has small icons (for phones) medium (for like tablets) and large (for desktops/laptops) all can be changed independently so you can optimize for mobile and desktop usage. Très bien

Which is annoying tbh.

Would be nice if the smart whatever (see I forgot their app name already while typing) team would… team up somehow with the revanced team and they agree on one name, one app. Having two apps for what is essentially the same OS with a different skin is… silly. Like an app for Apple TV and a different app that does essentially the same thing for iOS.

I see updates from as recent as last week on github?

On that note, if anyone sees this comment or another and wants to try YouTube revanced (or extended) DO NOT JUST BLINDLY GOOGLE AND CLICK THE WEBSITE THAT COMES UP FIRST

I have no idea if that site is owned by a legit dev or not. What I do know is the legit devs directly say on github, where the source code can be reviewed, to NOT download from any other place than github.

Sorry for the PSA but I just don’t want people downloading possibly malicious code from random sites. It’s easy to fall into the blindly search, blindly install hole.

I think it’s just the ease of GUI for people. This isn’t to shit on anyone, btw. A lot of people don’t like dealing with the keys and IPs involved, few as there may be, with setting up wireguard.

If someone else has a compelling difference or reason to use tailscale then I’d be happy to hear it. I tried it once and it worked fine enough. But wireguard works just as fine and takes the same time to setup if you already know what to do. Like wireguard seriously takes 2 minutes.

Use Firefox on desktop

Use Firefox (or Mull or Fennec- both are forks) on Android. I have Bromite too for times Firefox is being fucky.

On iOS unfortunately due to Apple’s (soon to be lifted) browser restrictions, the default Safari browser is basically as good as any other since Apple forces other browsers to basically just be reskins of Safari (forces webkit usage). I do recommend Firefox Focus if you want stronger, Brave-like adblocking without using Brave obviously. Focus seems to block close to the same level as ublock origin + Firefox on a desktop. It’s barebones by design though, so not ideal for everyone. I know Google/Mozilla are working on non-webkit Apple App Store approved browsers for next year when that law goes into effect (might not be available officially for NA users, not sure how that is gonna play out yet. Hopefully EU sues Apple for $100B for doing that if they do.) Hopefully that means official actual gecko based Firefox is coming fucking finally. Firefox with ublock is all I ever asked for. I’d even take Safari with actual ublock but unfortunately Apple is Apple, the annoying little fuckers.

What extensions does chrome have which are useful that Firefox doesn’t?

My only recurring issue with Firefox, which may have been fixed I dunno, is it for some reason it “isn’t officially supported” or whatever exact wording to use hardware security keys (like yubikey, which I use on every account that allows it). It’s only certain websites that don’t want to work though. Like google, Microsoft and many others were fine but I think paypal didn’t want to work properly but it does work on Edge, Chrome, probably Brave. Overall annoying as fuck at times but I deal with it to be out of Google’s-world

See my problem with stories like this is everyone walks away thinking “the good thing happened.” But this isn’t a resolution. It’s halfway there. In a sane society if you make an obviously insane request like this for a bullshit and insane reason you should face consequences for even trying. And I know that makes people uncomfortable and “but the legal system!” comes up a lot. I don’t care. Change it. The CEO and every lawyer that ok’d this request from the court towards reddit should bare minimum be fired and probably fined/face their own criminal charges for even trying this shit.

To me this is effectively the same as finding a diary on the ground that says “I smoked crack and sold a gram to my sister in 10th grade” and some overzealous insane person tries to have a court force somebody who saw them drop the diary to reveal the identity so they can be prosecuted for a “crime” far in the past which very well may never have happened. I mean, if we’re going to have a dogshit legal system, and we do, the least we can ask from the multibillion dollar thieves (the capitalist corporations) is they do their own goddamn detective work. No, don’t find hypothetical posts. I can post that I shot JFK. I time traveled over 2 decades before I was born and I did it. Is the problem with trying to use anonymous “confessions” not surface level obvious? There is no evidence beyond the confession! And I’m no lawyer, but generally speaking a confession alone won’t convict anyone. Actual evidence is required. Assuming this shit was actually done, piracy occured, the ISP won’t keep any sort of logs that long and the odds of their harddrives containing that specific media years later? Doubtful. Maybe the judge breaks the law and allows a more broad warrant not just limited to specific movies. I think a skilled attorney gets that evidence tossed anyway since it was gathered illegitimately. Basically it SHOULD BE goddamn nearly impossible for them to ever prove anyone ever did anything like this without the person walking down to the local FBI office with their harddrives in hand, ISP logs and a written confession of all the shit they pirated since middle school. Maybe mention the time they stole gummy bears from their cousin in 3rd grade too.

I dunno, this shit just pisses me off because it’s so brazen and also just so fucking lazy. Like, put some fucking effort into being assholes for fuck’s sake. Trolling through decade-old reddit posts where some dude vaguely referred to his ISP letting him pirate is the best a billion dollar studio can do? It’s just sad really. The CEO and lawyers should voluntarily resign, go home into a dark room, and commit seppuku. We should really bring that tradition of failed higher-ups having at least the dignity to fall on their own sword (literally) back.

I don’t live in VA, let’s say nearby, but my ISP sometimes incorrectly shows VA. A couple sites started popping up saying I had to make an account to which I obviously immediately said suck my dick and started VPNing, which I should be using anyway probably.

Fuck these Christian fascist weirdos. Everyone knows their intent here is to lightly ban porn because no one trusts or even wants to upload their personal identifying information to sketchy companies.

And I know we all know you can use a vpn. For now. While there’s no criminal liability for you. What happens when these weirdos get Jesus’ wiener deep in their brains and decide these laws aren’t good enough… they want to make porn outright illegal. Who has faith the Supreme Court will stop them? Not fucking me. They should already be stopping these laws, but there’s zero indication that’s gonna happen. Crazy to me people still defend any of this.

I recommend replacing the default launcher. Google has packed so many fucking ads into their paid-for devices that it blows the mind to see. A good replacement launcher removes all that junk and the device runs faster too as a result. I did it on my nvidia shield pro (runs Android TV) and a google tv/chromecast I have too. Made the shield basically flawless and the best entertainment experience and the google tv it made much more useable.

The launcher I’ve been using is called “projectivy launcher” for the google tv. There’s a giant post over on XDA with specifics if interested. It’s made my google tv much better and I’d recommend the small asspain to try it. (I’m not affiliated with the launcher team or anything I just like it a lot)

“Your honor, my defense rests on one simple principle: you can’t defame the dead. Elon Musk killed Twitter last week. That is all.”

But on a serious note, Elon is a fucking baby however these cases typically get tossed out basically instantly for being baseless. His intent is likely to make future researchers or just non-anonymous people everywhere never speak the MEAN truth about his stupidity or suffer bullshit law suits. He has the infinite money, it’s not like he cares if a court orders he pay all the fees for wasting time. Normal people can’t accept that risk though or the time off work to deal with it. Basically, he should face imprisonment for a long fucking time to deter HIM from this bullshit. Or, I dunno, seize all his ill gotten capital, I dunno.

Bro just came in and made a bunch of shit up. Jesus.

I choose to read this as what it actually is: some sort of dark comedy attempt.

The Tibet thing is the only slim shred of truth in there EXCEPT all the weird shit about raping (are you ok bro?). China “liberated” take that how you will Tibet from a H O R R I F I C fascist-like regime basically built around systematic rape of children. And no they didn’t fucking rape or randomly murder. You probably listened to some weirdo 2nd generation ultra right wing fascist “refugee” from the Tibetan region who believed all of his dad/grandpa’s bullshit and then YOU believed. Guess what: right wingers and their kids who “flee” China/USSR/Cuba, etc. all have massive incentives to lie their fucking asses off about what happened in any of those countries. There’s a reason only the most fascist disgusting worms “flee” and end up teaching their kids these lies which they parrot for you to believe. Stop listening to these liars. Look into their claims. They are basically ALWAYS fucking lies. That Tibetan anecdote is a perfect encapsulation of the amazing bullshit liberals will gobble up.

The African thing is fucking hilarious. I’ve not heard that right wing talking point yet, but I’ll look it up later and see what’s going on. And to be clear it’s hilarious that liberals just randomly make this type of shit up and attribute meaning to it without a single shred of proof. And it bears extreme repeating- anything you ever want to throw out on China or rather Chinese citizens abroad doing crimes I will happily say (if it’s true, which obviously SOME people do bad shit, no shit) “yes that’s bad. Here’s a list of 10 worse American crimes” for every one you can list. It’s not a dick measuring contest, but nothing happens within a bubble and if you choose to lie or sometimes point out truth in China you goddamn better be ready to spend 10hours shitting on America for every 2 minutes you spent on China because the difference in scale is, yes, that fucking huge. You are pointing at the ant when you live with the bear and acting like the ant is as scary or deadly. You live in the fourth fucking reich. The only stone are you allowed to cast is at yourself or your establishments. I don’t give a shit. No. Not a single fucking word against any other country until you are actively pursuing the destruction of the US military and all of its intelligence agencies. THEN you can shit on China or whoever. Until then you are squishing the ant and the bear is mauling the village and you think you’re in the right. Jesus Christ. Also stop fucking lying about China. Please. Fuck. It’s embarrassing as fuck.