That’s what shadow IT is for.

You try through the normal channels, explaining why, and if it’s not enough, you find a way to still be productive DESPITE the rules of the place. Then eventually you move on to a saner place.

I’d add CopyParty to https://privacy.purchasewithpurpose.io/category/file-storage/

Honestly why even ask the question or read the ToS when you know the business model of Google?

To be clear Google is NOT a technology company! Google is an advertising company which, unlike traditional advertising companies selling physical ad space, sells online ad space. Through vertical integration they also happen to distribute software, e.g. Android, Chrome, etc, services e.g. Google Search, GMail, GDrive, GCloud, and hardware, e.g. Pixel, Nest, etc which they are not giving for free but at a low price, and infrastructure, e.g. Google Fi.

… but ALL those products are ONLY existing to sell ads!

I let derive your own conclusion for Google Fi and every other product they provide.

TL;DR: of f*cking course.

I got very confused by this title… I did search on DuckDuckGo and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_modding was a top result but not far behind was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modding which is not specific to video game.

Because this is the Linux community I would clarify that it’s about game modding, not general modding.

Who could have guessed… /s

AFAIK the packets are for discovery of other devices relying on mDNS / DNS-SD which is used by plenty of other services.

More importantly though, does it matter? What are you actually broadcasting while doing so? That you are using KDE Connect? Also the typical use case for it are on trusted networked, e.g. home WiFi but if it’s problematic on public networks then do not use KDE Connect on other networks?

Edit: what alternative device discovery solution could be used by KDE Connect to make it more private on untrusted ntetworks?

Ugh… why? I mean it’s a fun process to distro hop and better understand the different package managers, boot process, default services, etc but beyond that I’m confused at what the point is.

FWIW one can distro hop “virtually” in minutes using containers via Podman or Docker (or even QEMU to be more isolated) with images that do have a window manager, e.g. https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ provides Alpine, Arch, Debian, Enterprise Linux, Fedora and Ubuntu with i3, KDE, MATE or XFCE. Switching from one to another takes minutes (basically download time of image content) and if you mount the right directory you can even use your own content for your tests.

Edit : if one wants to install nothing https://distrosea.com/ is quite neat but it’s online.

digital privacy and security

I bet there is an amalgamation going on there.

People who wants to maximum amount of security might not care as much about privacy, thinking relying on a famous actor which spends a ton on security (and runs ads to say so) give them privacy, typically Google or Meta, while ignoring their interests in using private data for profit.

The other way around some people claim they cherish privacy, which sounds like your uncle, yet can not realistically achieve it by using outdated systems leading to poor security and thus potentially bad privacy.

The 2 go hand in hand yet are different.

LineageOS and asked if I could use it […] He went to the Google Play Store and installed Files by Google after logging into my account.

Ugh… sorry to say but if your goal is “what a phone without Google services” then your father did not understand that. He might be able to help you but he might not. The point though is that have to clarify with him WHY you want to try that. Only then can he help with the how.

Anyway for music I recommend VLC, it even has an option to become a Web server to receive file. If you do exchange files often with your Linux desktop I also recommend KDE Connect which helps for SMSes too and more, you can even define custom commands. I recommend removing the PlayStore entirely and relying solely on F-Droid and on a case by case basis potentially on .apk from sources you trust, e.g. Signal Website.

Which of these commits https://github.com/rsyslog/rsyslog/commits/ as actually made with “AI” support and how?

Yes.

TL;DR: I don’t actually know, that’s how much I care.

Agree but nobody forces you to use anything except ProtonMail or ProtonVPN. In fact I have a visionary account and I mostly just use ProtonMail. I do use ProtonVPN but I also have WireGuard. Also my ProtonMail addresses are behind domains I host. If tomorrow I decide to switch away from Proton, I can.

So… sure Proton is not perfect and centralization is bad but IMHO it’s like saying Firefox is imperfect so it’s fine to use Chrome or Chromium browsers. Imperfect alternatives to BigTech and surveillance capitalism is better than relying on the things you hate until something “perfect” never comes along.

Looks like, I’m not familiar enough to spot obvious differences.

something watching, logging connections to everyone connected to that torrent

Might be, FWIW there are quite a few ways to torrent in a rather private way, namely require encrypted connection, have a blocklist, require to be behind a VPN, etc … but in the end you still share data with strangers, that’s the core premise. The whole point is to facilitate the sharing of data reliably but then who joins the pool is outside of the protocol itself.

For a bit of mindfuck check kdialog : Tool to show nice dialog boxes from shell scripts

Maybe the shell truly is enough BUT in some cases, say you want to help somebody who for some reason doesn’t want the terminal, you can bring the bare minimum of UI to give utility. My favorite example is the file picker e.g kdialog --getopenfilename "*txt" | wc -l as most CLI commands do support a filename as input.

On mobile check out OctoStudio.

IMHO qrcode-terminal is pretty good.

• ~/Prototypes for … my prototypes, typically either starting from an empty directory or cloning a repository and adapting it for my needs. I have this directory on nearly all my devices, desktop of course but also NAS, server, phone, standalone XR headset, etc.
• ~/Apps in addition to ~/bin, typically binaries but all AppImages

FWIW I’m not recommending or not this service but they are :

• based in the US, yet
• provide international roaming
• e-SIMs (so nothing to send)

so it might be interesting in some cases for people not living in the US.

Well there are guardrails from what I understood, including :

• executing commands (off by default)
• executing commands without user confirmation (off by default)

which are IMHO reasonable but if the person this happened to is right, there is no filesystem sandbox, e.g. limited solely to the project repository.