Ah, then I can sleep calmly I guess. There are some group pictures with me, but none have me tagged specifically so I guess that’s not as bad.

Well, everyone had their photos taken for their IDs, and these photos might’ve easily been stolen or leaked… Wonder if this would be enough for such a system.

Ah, okay. I just wanted Vanadium because it came with the OS, but if I were to install another anyway - I am content with a FF fork, where Ublock Origin is indeed available. I was just very surprised that Vanadium did not block the giant element that has “Ad” in its html name…

It says the content blocker there is “Basic + Adblock Plus”, and Adblock Plus is known for its not-so-great reputation (like whitelisted “acceptable ads”) compared to UBO.

Yes, but even things like Bitcoin or Litecoin are much easier to use privately than bank cards. You can swap from Monero to them if Monero is not accepted, for example. You can buy them without KYC if you know where to look. With a bank card or something like Paypal, you’d need to use a “drop” (a random person to KYC your accounts) if you want anonymity, which is illegal so a normal person wouldn’t risk it.

That said, while I use crypto for digital purchases like domains, I would rather use cash for physical ones. Or gift cards if available (where I am, they’re almost-nonexistent and the only ones I’ve seen can only be bought with another bank card).

It’s only been two years though.

Monero doesn’t quite work this way.

I really wish I could use Vanadium as my main browser, but two downsides are really noticeable: a) adblocking is not as good as with Ublock Origin (for example, on TVTropes the ads themselves were removed but not the HTML elements they used to be in) and b) the multiple-choice search engine turned out to be quite important for me. So a Firefox fork it is.

While I do use crypto for digital purchases, for physical ones I would much rather pay cash. I either shop in-person or order delivery to the online store’s physical office where cash can be paid, which is usually the only delivery method without extra cost anyway. Our big Amazon-like marketplaces only accept prepayment, but pretty much all others with a physical office accept payment on delivery.

Counterpoint - younger generations grow up in the same poverty as their parents (so that any subscriptions are unlikely) and even if they don’t - their media needs may not fully align with what their parents would buy. So children in my experience do find ways to pirate. Maybe not the best ways, but still.

I doubt any FOSS restriction is doable at all. As for the supply chain - xz showed this is indeed possible… But no one can guarantee that every encrypted client would be able to get such a well-hidden backdoor, and that it will stay undiscovered, and that it wouldn’t be invalidated with an update… But yeah, the only way this can be combatted is having more eyes on such software.

If a backdoor is forced to be added into any project, wouldn’t someone be able to fork it and go on without the backdoor? Maybe even the original dev incognito…

Where I live, 3G is going to be phased out, but 2G is staying seemingly indefinitely. Not only for the old phones, not only for all the dying villages that are not getting any upgraded equipment, but also for all the automation dependent on it. Apparently quite a few places did it like this.

IDK, a kid not knowing how to pirate is weird too, at least where I live. That would mean their parents actually buying them media, which, in my experience, is not that frequent of a sight. I had classmates who had subscriptions just to feel good about consciously paying for the content (they were also upper-middle-class). The rest didn’t really think about ethics and just pirated, the information on how to do it spreads through kids’ collectives pretty easily. It seems to me that many of them don’t even know that what they and their families are doing is “piracy”…

After reading various news amd stories about phishing, I no longer think anyone is really “too smart to be phished”. Not the matter of “If”, but “Under what circumstances”.

I don’t think he would go submarine diving, it would be more in-character for him to try and fail a moon vacation.

From the couch, I don’t understand why a humanoid body would be best for this… We humans have to work with what we initially had, but why wouldn’t a robot be better? Seems like even a wheeled/threaded cart, or a quadruped with arms could be more practical in a lot of situations…

I much prefer RiMusic. Doesn’t require an account, doesn’t have the problems you described, is FOSS, and is on F-Droid. While my main collection is local, I rely on this for discovery.

Would that mean censorship of moobs?

Maybe Divest/Lineage could be an option instead. Although you have to choose a device wisely (and even among supported ones, some have trouble unlocking the bootloader), there is a chance you’d find a suitable cheaper one.

Personally no regrets spending $300 on a Pixel 7a but still painful to hand over this much.