wow 10 months flew by since this was posted and since then the United States had a surprise privacy bill that is bipartisan that sort of addresses the issues you and I mentioned. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/07/congress-privacy-deal-cantwell-rodgers/

This bill was proposed around the same time the TikTok ban was announced. I speculate that law makers had a difficult time framing the arguments against TikTok when “the data of citizens have no protections so there was no easy legal grounds to forbit the likes of TikTok to harvest it”

From what I’ve heard, this bill is pretty good. I need to educate myself more on it, however.

was it ever? I participate in interview rounds at my company (several tech screens a month) and I must say a candidate’s email was not something that drew attention

you’re able to unsubscribe from all those protomtions . . . that is in settings. Personally, a once-a-month newsletter of everything that is new is helpful bc I don’t need to put in the effort tlinto keeping up

For backup and sync I use Syncthing. I can specify which folder on which devices I want to sync to which folder on the server.

I use a folder based gallery on my phone so when I move stuff around on my phone (or on my server) it gets replicated on all my devices.

I also have a policy to sync specified folders (and subfolder) with my family’s devices. No more " hey can you send me all the pics from the XYZ trip"

We take a trip. Make a subolder for that trip in a shared folder dump all our pictures there, get home and open the folder on the computer and prune together.

Debian has the advantage of not using snapd like Ubuntu does. You have to not only remove snaps but also instruct the package manager not you pull in snaps as dependencies and not to favor snap packages.

I have fond memories of Ubuntu being my first distro many years ago but pushing snaps onto users to compete with flatpak is a nuisance.

You can still buy a lifetime licenses of office but you have to buy it from 3rd party sellers and then validate the license with M$. Example Deal..

I bought 2 of them and also saved the install binary to have office suite.

I use libreoffice personally but I have family members that get frustrated when they cannot find the same formatting options

newsblur

People like having choice, it was never about saving space in phones.

If you look at which company (apple) and the time of removal of headphone jack (around the time their wireless buds were announced), you’ll notice they removed choice so the consumer can only buy more expensive wireless buds, or many many dongles.

The “save space” is an absolute lie. The international (EU, Asia, etc) version of the iPhone has a dedicated SIM card tray. The US model? No tray, just a freakin placeholder where the international version has the SIM tray. Yes, there is a volume of space that can fit 2 headphone jacks on the US iPhone that is just empty.

Look at this iFixit video where they call apple out on it. The placeholder is huge. at ~1:17+

I’d really want to know what’s driving them

likely ego

The letter is a post on his own blog . Hard to distill into a summary so I recommend reading it get more context. But it seems to have boiled down to:

• How It Was:

  • Strong adherence to the “don’t be evil” ethos, focusing on societal good over profits.
  • Open, transparent communication and decision-making processes.
  • High morale, with a culture of learning from successes and failures.
  • Work focused on benefitting the web and users, rather than Google’s immediate interests.
  • Collaboration and lack of internal silos, encouraging innovation and autonomy.

• How It Is Now:

  • Shift from user-centric to Google-centric, and then to individual-centric decision making.
  • Eroded transparency and increase in organizational silos.
  • Decline in morale and a culture of distrust between employees and management.
  • Focus on short-term financial gains leading to layoffs and defensive employee behavior.
  • Lack of clear vision and leadership, resulting in confused and ineffective management.
  • Overall deterioration of Google’s unique, innovative culture and values.

Brave has superior fingerprint protection, they achieve this by randomizing the browsers fingerprint. Visit EFF’s cover your tracks to test your browser.

To achieve the same functionality that brave achieves out of the box with Firefox I need many extensions and then when I profile both browsers, Firefox is more resource intensive. Brave’s blocking is native to the browser. I will give Firefox the W because I’ve read that uBlock is technically more capable. But as a long time Firefox/uBlock user who switched to brave - this has not been noticable.

As for accessibility, I can configure brave to be really aggressive at ad blocking, tracking blocking, fingerprint blocking, and restricting JS even, and all those options I can set from one place instead of in different settings/extensions. When a website breaks, I click on the button next to the URL and immediately have options to granularly dial down the “protection” or add a website to my trusted list. In Firefox I was annoyed to having go through settings for the extension.

Brave plans to continue supporting Manifest V2 after Google kills it. For Ungoogled Chromium, however, it’s still undecided, likely depending on whether UG contributors are willing to maintain it.

Brave has superior fingerprint protection, they achieve this by randomizing the browsers fingerprint. Visit EFF’s cover your tracks to test your browser.

To achieve the same functionality that brave achieves out of the box with Firefox I need many extensions and then when I profile both browsers, Firefox is more resource intensive. Brave’s blocking is native to the browser. I will give Firefox the W because I’ve read that uBlock is technically more capable. But as a long time Firefox/uBlock user who switched to brave - this has not been noticable.

As for accessibility, I can configure brave to be really aggressive at ad blocking, tracking blocking, fingerprint blocking, and restricting JS even, and all those options I can set from one place instead of in different settings/extensions. When a website breaks, I click on the button next to the URL and immediately have options to granularly dial down the “protection” or add a website to my trusted list. In Firefox I was annoyed to having go through settings for the extension.

Brave plans to continue supporting Manifest V2 after Google kills it. For Ungoogled Chromium, however, it’s still undecided, likely depending on whether UG contributors are willing to maintain it.

no problem! that’s what the internet and forums are for :D

Rebble was easier to get working than gadget bridge. just something to consider

A step in the right direction but until there are more robust privacy laws in place, this will not go away.

If their gov is restricted on buying from data brokers, are other governments, foreign entities?

The inherit issue is the American’s data can be harvested and sold. Setting up legal restrictions toward certain entities will just cause those entities to “legally self identify” as another entity. Or do business with an entity that is allowed access to American’s data.