Décentralisation is just how it’s structured, it has nothing to do with privacy. Email itself is decentralised.

I would recommend using a service like duckduckgo which lets you generate @duck.com email addresses for anonymous signups

OSMand is what got me off Maps. It’s one of the few apps I pay monthly to support. It does a ton of stuff Maps cannot and never will do, like local trip recording, customizable everything and displaying OBDII data.

Yeah, I’m not sure why some have such a hard time understanding this. It’s like they want it to be more complicated than it is, and always searching for explanations. Sometimes there will be no explanation for the way you’ll feel. The sooner you realize that, the better.

It will be effective if the prohibition takes the form of these companies no longer existing, at least in their current form, OR if the majority turn against them, making them irrelevant. An age gate won’t do anything, not on its own

Underage drinking is still more common than it should be, despite strict laws. The point is, it doesn’t do any good to go after the consumer, regardless of age. in order to make a meaningful impact, legislation would have to destroy or significantly neuter social media companies altogether, globally. Anything else will be a disappointment.

The more effective way to reduce these harms is through social/cultural change, but that’s easier said than done.

Prohibition didn’t work for drugs either, so why would it work here? Why do we need to learn that lesson over and over again?

It would add steps and make it more expensive, but how would you prevent registered companies from selling access to anyone who wanted to use that connection? You can’t really. Like the user above said, they’re ignorant to think they could force control. Users will find ways to circumvent these measures and will always be a step ahead.

In the case of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, etc. they have control of the routes in and out of the country. In other words, if an individual is inside one of those countries and tries to connect to an outside resource, that connection passes through a government-controlled device and every request is ostensibly approved or denied. This would not work in most other countries. Those governments would have to wrangle many disparate entities to seize control at scale. Even then there are ways to disguise connections beyond using a VPN.

(I feel like most people here are gonna say “duh, we know”. This is for the people in the back.)

No, you cannot ban VPN tech. The cat’s out of the bag. You and I would still gain access. But an attempted ban could have quite the chilling effect on the average person, driving the tech underground and enabling bad actors.

You need to start a museum lol

If I read this right it goes beyond the cheap no-name Chinese stuff that we hopefully all know to avoid by now. This would prevent US companies from outsourcing manufacture to foreign countries, which pretty much all companies do at this point

Goteem

Yeah, growing up as a teen it was the opposite. I was burning CDs and had this phone stuck up my ass

Yeah, fair enough. If it works, it works, and to each their own.

The suggestion from the user I replied to, of needing a browser toolbar, did get in my craw a bit. Like what is it 2005? I don’t think I’ve even used one since before Chrome was in beta.

One of my banking apps (Citi) didn’t even work in stock Android on a Pixel. It thinks I’m rooted lol.

Everything works well enough in the browser though. Nowadays I just do all that stuff on a desktop PC. Not everything needs to be an app or even done on a phone.

The desktop versions of bank websites have everything I need, whereas mobile versions can skip out on certain features. Plus, these apps tend to hoard perms for “security” reasons, or so they say.

If you have a strong password and legit MFA (like TOTP or a physical key), use a trusted device/browser that’s good enough. There shouldn’t be a need to grab my location or nearby devices.

Bonus points if the bank lets you review login sessions and deauth devices, flags things like impossible travel, etc.

Credit unions tend to do better. DCU is one example. They excel at security, don’t do any silliness with perms in their app, let you review logins and devices, and have a strong MFA implementation. The big private national players just want to sell you to data brokers to pad their margins while you pay ridiculous interest rates on their crappy products and get nothing in return.

Do calls like that happen? Unfortunately, yes.

Is it a reason to lock down and enshittify every computing platform, every OS, every Internet-connected device until we own nothing, control nothing and can’t install what we please?

It’s an age old tactic of manipulation to start with something true, exaggerate the threat, and apply it everywhere possible.

Most (if not all) modern browsers support multiple search engines which are configurable and selectable from a dropdown in the omnibar. There’s no need to remember dozens of shortcuts or add a dedicated toolbar anymore.

Does anyone remember those SD cards that had wifi broadcasting capabilities for transferring content off of a dumb device? This was like 15 years ago. Seems they’re not available anymore.

ETA: after some research, the brand was eye-fi and they bricked all the cards in 2016 upon going under. There are similar things out there now but availability and price aren’t that great.

They renamed “ticket” to “work item” to “issue”. (We all still call it a ticket)

Stories? Events? Kanban?

Fuck you, I need a text box, date field and some box to tick that says I’m done.

All this so that some VP with their thumb up their ass who spends 2/3 of the year in Florida knows I’m working!

• Brazil
• Pulp Fiction
• A Clockwerk Orange
• Delicatessen
• Bad Boy Bubby