Potentially. They are denying it’s true, and I don’t think any more evidence has come out besides this one claim.

I pretty much always use a VPN these days because I hate Comcast and don’t like them seeing my traffic. I like nextDNS because it gives me centralized management and filtering of DNS for all my devices, it’s definitely worth the $20 a year. I forgot to mention I also have the extensions CanvasBlocker, WebRTC Blocker, and LocalCDN but I think it is likely just ublock origin (and nextDNS filtering) that got my score to 96%.

96% using Android Firefox Beta with ublock, nextdns, and a VPN.

I became a paying subscriber for kagi today. The way I justify the cost is it’s saved me time digging up technical information at work and that increase in efficiency is worth money to me. Also, I hate ads and SEO crap, and $5 isn’t really that much these days. I’m trying to reduce my reliance on Google so it’s nice having an actual superior search experience, even if I have to spend a little money for it.

I’m still on my trial period but I think I’m going to pay when it runs out, I’ve been really happy with it so far. I think it’s saved me a good chunk of time at work I would have wasted digging through Google SEO crap so it feels like it’s worth spending a few bucks on.

Thanks for the link!

Can you share your argument with Stross? I’ve always enjoyed his writing.

I actually just login to all of my different accounts regularly to keep track of things. Nearly all spending flows out of two cards so mostly I watch them and just compare to actual cash on hand to maintain a certain balance. Anything excess gets periodically transferred into investment accounts. I’ve never really felt the need for tracking beyond this, I tried Mint for awhile once but I think my needs are just really simple. I know roughly how much money is where at all times and I can get the exact details within a few second if I have a phone or computer, that’s good enough for me.

I recently gave up on daily driving Pop OS. About 6 months ago I got a new laptop with Windows 11, which for various reasons I am not a fan of. I decided it would be a good time to try an experiment and install Linux. The biggest issue right off the bat was lack of hardware support, the fingerprint reader and the speaker amp are not supported. I spent a bunch of time researching and seeing if I could make them work but apparently it has to do with the kernel and isn’t really something I can fix. This didn’t seem like a big deal at first because I can get sound out of the headphone jack or via bluetooth, and while it was convenient to login via a fingerprint reader, it wasn’t something I really felt like I needed. Since then I’ve become much more reliant on biometric authentication, it’s just so much more convenient to be able to auth bitwarden with my finger instead of having to type in a password. More recently, I started using Proton VPN and the client is pretty crap in Linux. Switching over to Windows 11, I can login with my finger, all of my passwords are a finger print away, Proton VPN works natively with wireguard and is generally much more reliable and easier to use. It’s just a much better user experience, there’s nothing weird and janky to deal with, I don’t need to mess about in the command line to do basic things. I really loved Pop, and I’m sure I’ll boot back into it, but I’m daily driving Windows 11 until I can sort out the hardware issues and get Proton VPN working better, and I think both of those issues are out of my hands so all I can do is wait.

Apparently not by default, there’s a config you can download but I haven’t been able to get it working.

I’ve been daily driving Pop on my laptop and my biggest frustrations currently are lack of working drivers for the fingerprint reader and speakers, and the Proton VPN client is crap compared to Windows.

I don’t remember the numbers but their ads division has been showing massive growth over the past several years, they make billions selling ads these days.

That was quite the rabbit hole, I had no idea a global cabal of neonazi “Satanists” was spawned in Shropshire back in the late 1960s. I poked around Amazon and you can still currently purchase their books, which look completely ridiculous but have mostly positive reviews.

I’ve been really happy with Pop on my laptop. Tiling was a lot more useful than I expected, it’s nice being able to flip it on and off as needed.

Not quite a disaster but a credit card got hacked, my Microsoft account was locked for suspicious activity, and I received a very targeted phishing attempt for my banking credentials. I’m now a paid subscriber of Bitwarden, set up a shared vault with my partner, and have 2 yubikeys arriving later this week.

It’s the song that was playing when I first made the account and couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t already taken.

Yes, if I didn’t know any details about what specifically happened or where in the house it happened. I think I would just put it out of my mind and never think about so it wouldn’t ever bother me. If I knew too much I could see it coming to mind more easily and potentially being an issue for me.

MSG isn’t “bad” at all, it’s just another ingredient really. The campaign against it was entirely bullshit that was driven by racism against Asian people because it’s a common ingredient in Chinese food.

If anyone is wondering why stocks are tanking so hard today, this is a major factor.

The extra weird thing is they generally support Putin and Russian government policies. It’s not exactly about ‘trying to achieve communism’ for them I think, they seem to reflexively defend and support all kinds of right-wing BS depending on who is doing it. To me tankies don’t seem to be motivated by a coherent political philosophy, I think they are almost like LaRouchites where they don’t really have an actual ideology and are more like a cult.