I daily drive Fedora because RHEL is what my industry uses and it’s good to stay on top of the technology.

I use all three. I have Windows on one of my machines that I use occasionally for gaming. I use Macs for work since that’s what all my corporate machines comes with and I daily drive Linux and use it for all my home servers.

Keep in mine not everyone uses TOR to evade the three letter agencies. I’m a TOR relay operator and the main reason I’m running it is to give people in oppressive regimes a better chance at exchanging free information. To these people getting spied on by western intelligence agencies is probably the lesser evil compared to their own tinpot dictatorship governments.

Another main reason why I took off my hat back then was because I was a broke college kid with garbage internet speed and my only computer was a laptop. Torrenting shows sometimes means I need to have my laptop on for days. Now I have an entire homelab setup with a dedicated VM on one of my servers for torrenting and I can afford fast internet. I was pleasantly surprised how efficiently I can torrent when I got back sailing recently.

They already do this. I was offered to plug some kind of monitoring device into my car for a period of time to determine my driving behavior for potential lower rates. I went for higher rates.

I wouldn’t call going from mad profits to okay profits a sign of downfall. Having decentralized technology doesn’t mean decentralization will actually happen. For instance look at E-mail. It is technically a decentralized service, but most people still uses services provided by big tech vs operating their own servers. Such a system does give you more choices, but don’t expect this future will be without big tech.

Then you need both anonymity and privacy. Sometimes you do need both but they’re not the same concept.

Privacy without anonymity is you using the bathroom with everyone seeing you walking in. They know you used the bathroom but have no idea what you did inside.

Anonymity without privacy is like you pissing on the street with a ski mask on. Everyone saw what you did but no one knows who you are.

Having both is walking into the bathroom with a ski mask on. No one knows who you are nor what you did inside.

I share a YT premium family plan with my parents and some friends. When I want to watch something that I don’t want YT to track I just switch to Newpipe

I got some insight from a friend who works at a major supplier for these retail stores in Canada. He said how they manage prices is that when they anticipate a rise in cost they’ll jack the price all the way to a future projected target instead of following the current inflationary rate so that they won’t need to constantly quote their customers different prices. They don’t care because they know it will get passed downstream.

https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/

I use a roll reverser app on my macbook to get around this problem. You can configure touchpad to be natural and mouse to be traditional

It depends on your threat model. Do you think Google knowing your video watching preference is dangerous? For me I don’t care if Google knows my music and video preferences in general. If I’m watching things that I don’t want Google to know I use Newpipe on a VPN. But sensitive document uploaded to Google drive? Not anymore.

I haven’t looked into their code yet but that’s an interesting thought. I wonder if you can fork their code and operate an instance where private messages are disabled.

I do understand the reaction. I have relatives in China that believe the HK protestors are foreign spies and a threat to national security that needs to be hunted down. They also thinks the political interference scandal is all made up by the Canadian government. If that’s the information you hear day in and day out then it’s natural that you believe in it and become upset when your reality is getting challenged.

I also agree with you on the last part. It doesn’t make sense for Trudeau to take on India for no reason at this point in time when India is crucial to the West in the Indo-Pacific strategy. Unless the matter is serious he has nothing to gain and everything to lose.

Fellow Canadian here. Aside from the obvious troll farms I’m wondering shouldn’t Indians be more concerned of these kind of conduct than others? If the world turns a blind eye imagine in the future if the Indian state label you as a “terrorist” for saying something they don’t like, you are not even safe even if you managed to get out of the country.

I second this. Got an open box pixel 6 pro this year for $400, still blows most non-flagship current year phones out of the water.

When I quit mainstream social media platforms half of my friend added me on signal and the other half agreed to just text me. Would I miss out on some group events? Maybe, but I don’t need to be in every one of them. If I want any sort of group gathering I’d just organize one.

Your cousin just sounds miserable and it’s really her loss for judging people by a tool of communication.

Because it works, has okay configurations out of the box, and I just don’t really care enough about the points mentioned in this article to make the switch. I only use it for cases where I don’t expect privacy like government websites. As soon as you open an account there they got all your info anyway.

I use Brave as a secondary browser mostly for government websites because sometimes my firefox privacy settings breaks them and since many of them are poorly designed a technical issue over your account may result in hours on the phone to resolve.

I consider myself right leaning but I don’t think subscribing to right vs left wing ideology is nearly as important as supporting liberty vs authoritarianism. A lot of folks on both sides claims to believe in liberty but in actually they’re authoritarians in disguise because they just want the government to step in and eliminate dissent. I have a close friend who’s an anarcho communist just like you and whenever we have these discussions it just stays on a thought experiment level and has never harmed our relationships. Since at the end of the day we agree that people should be left alone.