Fuck you very much for conflating privacy with illegality.

Still, linux desktop is going up, with a fraction of the marketing power Windows and Apple have.

This isn’t entirely true. Linux is getting a lot of help from Microsoft. <wink wink>

A bit cumbersome if you are traveling and using a different public wifi every time though

You’re not wrong. But you’re probably also familiar with the “secure vs. convenient” dichotomy: the closer to the “secure” end of the spectrum you get, the more cumbersome things will inevitably get. If you feel like you’re jumping through too many hoops and you don’t know what for, chances are you’re overshooting the target in terms of your threat model and might get away with doing less.

1. Disable DNS once. Find out URL/IP of captive portal that way.
2. Add to hosts file (Win/Lin/Mac). Maybe even give an alias: “captive-school”, “captive-library”, etc.
3. Turn DNS back on. The hosts file will take prerogative over DNS settings, i.e. it is resolved first.

“When gold was at US$4500, silver should have been US$300, but has been suppressed for all these 50-odd years by banks who’ve been short the whole time – and maybe I should get mad at myself for playing in a game where it’s manipulated, right?”

Read: “I should have won bigly, but I didn’t. But my ego tells me I can’t be wrong, so the game must have been rigged.”

Boy, does that remind me of someone…

Fuck this guy, the other guy, and fuck their corrupt moneymaking schemes.

“Using free Chinese models that you can run locally and offline is a security risk. People and businesses high on AI should be forced to use our expensive cloud-based models that funnel all their data through our servers and can be turned off or price-hiked by us at any moment!”

Most lists from https://github.com/blocklistproject/Lists

It does say that, and yet I’ve been doing it for years without issue. You just need to know what you’re doing, i.e. you need to be able to tell apart the connections that are required to make a site work from those that aren’t needed and can be blocked without issue. If you don’t, Tracker Control will break a lot of sites, and they probably don’t want to deal with the resulting support requests.

But if you’ve been using NoScript for a while, you will feel right at home with TC and be able to use it with browsers as well, which is where a lot of tracking happens.

And now, everyone!

“IN THE LAND OF THE FREE
AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE!”

That’s the thing: if constituents only get their info (or opinions) through chatbots…

…by axing or redirecting (read: embezzling) funds once spent on actual science?

The critical part is: how many supposed “quality” alternatives have been proven not to do any logging? Mullvad has been proven to be solid. They were raided and had jolly little to hand over to authorities on their customers.

How many of the other VPN services can say that about themselves?

So… Here’s another resource that will become available again once the bubble pops?

they forgot what actual competition is

That’s an accurate diagnosis. U.S. big tech companies all follow the same playbook: use VC to buy off or price-dump to death all of your competitors. Become a monopoly. Then enshittify and extract the maximum amount of wealth from b2b and retail customers by increasing the cost of your services.

Any sane country would have drowned these companies in anti-trust cases and carved them up. But political leadership at the time was too high on neoliberal free market ideology and the fairytales these self-styled “tech geniuses” wove around themselves. Now big tech has effectively bought off the U.S. government.

They’re in for a nasty surprise when they find out that the U.S. is not the world, and the rest of the world can do pretty well without the U.S…

Good luck expanding that to the rest of the world which is just discovering that, while not perfect, China’s open weights models are

a) good enough for 95% or all companies out there
b) a lot cheaper, also because they’re
c) self-hostable, meaning: they’ll always be available, unlike U.S. cloud AI which you’ll be cut off from whenever Diaper Donnie feels it’s time for yet another bribe.

I second this. Firmware on these controllers is really hit and miss. My first controller (gen 5, iirc) worked flawlessly out of the gate. My second (gen 6 (?)) would co connect and then disconnect again. A firmware update (on Windows, grml) did the trick back then (and now I’m not touching that shit again).

It’s a mixed bag really. Disabling JavaScript thwarts a lot of tracking efforts. But at the same time it puts you into a very small niche of users that, combined with other data points (user agent, IP location) makes you pretty fingerprintable.

Coming from a fellow JS Disabler, mind you.

I feel you. Handoff was dodgy af. I’ve switched to BasicSync for this very reason. It’s a minimal Frontend, handling only execution conditions on Android. All config is done through the webUI. It works great and avoids some, if not all of the trust issues.

It feels like nitpicking, but there’s a relevant difference here. If you can only access the weights (and not the training data and the learning algorithms used), it’s hard to get (say) a Chinese model to freely talk about Tiananmen Square Massacre. (Just tried it locally on Deepseek R1; it’s doable, but takes some prompt hacking.) The models may be freely available, but there’s bias and censorship baked into them.

It’s nice that these things are open source

Open weights != open source