Reminds me of Tom Scott’s Emojli

Monetary devaluation is the only thing that gives any thin-veiled justificstion for price increases. Anything not covered by the inflation calculator is greed.

Well, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. They are a large player, so they are under a bunch of scrutiny.

But at the end of the day, WhatsApp clearly states it takes all this information. They only claim to keep your messages end-to-end encrypted.

I wonder if this applies to text messages only, or to things like voice memos, images/videos, gifs, etc. as well.

WhatsApp doesn’t let you send documents if you don’t give it full access to your files. Sure, maybe they pinky-promise don’t do anything but this is Facebook we’re talking about.

The same caveat goes for photos and videos - you can’t even send a photo if you don’t give it the camera permission and gallery access, something it clearly doesn’t need just to send a single picture.

Additionally, WhatsApp loads previews of websites. Sure, on the privacy violations list that’s pretty low-priority but I’d still like to not have a link contacted before I can take my 3 seconds to look at it and decide wether it’s worth clicking. Especially since a lot of my contacts send obvious scams (“send this message to 10 contacts for a chance to win a free iPhone” type bullshit mostly).

Revoking WhatsApp’s contacts permission will not show peoples’ nicknames - it will only ahow numbers. Yet you have to give yourself a nickname on WhatsApp, so they clearly have some interest in your contacts. Otherwise they wouldn’t block it outright when it’s an already implemented feature to show nicknames for numbers not in the contact list.

All quite suspicious if you ask me. Although I don’t work in cyber security so it’s clearly just incoherent rambing from me.

AFIAK privacy laws are still the same as before we left the EU

I can confirm

Depends. According to the GDPR for any processing of PII you need consent from the data subject or a reasonable basis why you have to act upon the data (your servers communicating with an IP adress is neccesary for your service to function). Saving the adress isn’t, so you need consent or other legislation under which you’re required to store it that trumps the GDPR. That’s the so-called “overriding legitimate interest”. It doesn’t mean “interest = money”, “data = money” therefore “data retention = overruling legitimate interest”.

Keeping leaked data or scraping it from public sources is still problematic since you do nees consent.

If you’re approached as a 3rd party by someone with data who sells them to you you are obliged to make sure the data you’re given has been aquired with consent. Often times checks aren’t in place, and ultimately, if you’re given “bad data” by the intermediary you cab always claim they kenw they should’ve notified you but didn’t.

If you’re scraping leaks, well, there’s no one between you and the data subject who can take the fall. You’ve knowingly collected “bad data” unilaterally.

Yup, it affects all chromium browsers AFAIK

A question: What is preventing the site using one huge cookie for all purposes, thus preventing fully functional use of the site without also enabling all other forms of tracking?

Is such a strategy really feasible? Adding legislation that a game has to be made operable in a reasonable manner after the publisher discontinues support for it in no way influences this strategy.

If someone wanted to do such elaborate botnet defamation attacks in hopes of getting the game playable on 3rd party servers they could’ve done that already without legislation.

Bots making the game unplayable is a problem, but opening the servers in general would help the problem as private servers can implement harsher requirements for players than official ones usually do, opting to rather make a huge bot-filled cesspool as you’ve already said.

However, this proposal isn’t a general “all games must have FOSS self-hostable servers” proposal. It’s just a “if you kill a game it still has to be alive afterwards” proposal. Whether publishers open servers or not before they shut theirs down is their decision without the proposal as much as it is with it.

Since the game is at EOL it cannot generate any profits

Releasing server side source code opens up a route for abusing the game studio making the game

If, as you said, as the game is EOL it doesn’t make profits, then it can’t cause losses either. Otherwise it’d have to be kept alive.

Since if some 3rd part wants to profit off of running private servers of that game, all they have to do is make a flood of bots in-game and on the game’s communication platforms (eg discord servers, communities on Reddit or even Lemmy)

Uh… If they’re 3rd-party servers then hosting isn’t paid for by the publisher. Additionally, game publishers don’t pay for hosting of Discord/Reddit/Lemmy communities. And even if they did if the game is EOL they’d axe that too if it induces any cost.

This coupled with finding as many in-game exploits as possible can drive up costs enough to bankrupt the studio.

It absolutely can’t. The game is DEAD. It causes no profits or losses. Nothing aboit the game matters to the publisher anymore except for brand/reputation for a possible sequel.

forcing them to release server side source code, which the corpos can then grab and monetize the crap out of

Nothing explicitly forces release of source code, any reasonable server application wpuld suffice, open-source or otherwise.

The “corpos” usually make the games. The monetization concern is minimal since a server for a game isn’t anything a corporation couldn’t make on its own if it wanted, nor is it something groundbreaking.

Since the bot flood can be made nigh untraceable by having them operate out of an unfriendly state (say, Russia or China)

The bots would attack servers nit owned or operated by/for the publisher.

and there’s no studio acquisition necessary to get server side code, this would be a perfect extortion method that’d fly under the radar of antitrust legislation

What does any of this have to do with antitrust legislation? If anything, this would curb the publisher’s monopoly over the game servers although that in and of itself isn’t even an illegal monopoly.

Making a “allow 3rd party servers” update and a basic server application wouldn’t hurt an indie studio much. For beheamoths it isn’t even a drop in the ocean.

The GDPR was enacted in 2016 and came into effect in 2018. The UK left the EU in 2020.

I don’t think they repealed it. And besides, it applies to EU citizens regardless.

Google has its own browser, its own search engine, and provides a somewhat easy method to access the majority of the Internet and does it well.

The problem isn’t that it does it well, it’s that it did it well and it doesn’t anymore.

They dominate the market and can afford to make the search AI-inflated bullshit without any revenue losses.

Another part of the problem is the integration. Some google websites are rendered inoperable on Firefox, while others are made to have a worse experience.

A third part is giving its services preferential treatment onstead of having thekr algorithm be unbiased towards in-house services.

Edit:

Once upon a time the best browser game in town was Internet explorer. Similar stuff happened (actually even less blatant then Google). Microsoft basically controlled Web standards. The biggest sin they did was bundle IE with Windows, at least according to the US suit.

I’ve also made the switch from win10. There are a lot of “small” things that add up. The constant nag messages. Updates. Start menu ads. That was mist of it on Win10. I’ve had some experience in win11 at work, and I can say the new UI is abysmal (honestly I couldn’t care less about the UI as far as look/textures go, but one thing I can’t stand is slow animations for every little thing. If I open the start menu, I want it open as soon as I press the keyboard button, not 0.5s later. When I snap a window, I don’t need 0.5s of my life wasted on watching the “beautiful” animation. I just want it on half the screen instantly. Whenewer I close a window, I don’t want to have it fade out and distract me, I want it either gone or a popup asking me wether to save, discard or cancel show as soon as I tried to close the window. I want the Control panel back. I knew how to use it, and navigating menus wasn’t animated to consume 0.5s for every screen change. The animations were what pushed me away the most. I assume you can turn the off, but I never bothered since I changed computers often and would just rather put up with it rather than spend time tweaking each and every computer I wanted to use. The UI is why I don’t like win11, and the MS requirement is why I won’t let it touch my computer.

I have to say, switching to Linux was very frustrating as I had to google every little thing and most sites are filled with ad garbage even with uBlock on Firefox turned in with most of the lists, so that was frustrating. But now, after just under 2 years of Linux use, I can say the switch has paid great dividends. I can do a lot of menial tasks much faster (highlights are fike conversion with ffmpeg, combining PDFs with pdfunite, navigating folders using cd and tab completion (I’m the type to have a lot of folders in one parent directory to whkch I know the names, so typing the name is faster than looking for it manuakly and clicking on it), not to mention all the programs I used that are on Linux open 3-5 times faster.

Another big quality of life improvement are updates - updating apt packages with one command and Flatpaks with another, not having to reboot while doing it and not having programs prompt for updates individually is all something I never knew was possible before switching over. Linux has really impressed me with how well it works and how much of a laid back attitude it resembles, as opposed to the whiny Windows forcing its will upon you with its updates, ads and bloat.

As most others said, pretty much any distro is fine. You have a powerhouse of a laptop, so running a Windows VM inside of KVM would pose no problem, but if you can, I’d advise to try avoiding a VM.

Teams is basically just a web app masquerading as a classic application using Electron, so you can just use Teams inside of your browser of choice with minimal features missing (the only one I noticed was green-screen, but I didn’t care that much about it).

Even if you use a lot of Office, you’d be surprised at how similar LibreOffice is to MS Office. The UI is a lot worse IMO, but 99% of the features are there. Tables in Word/Writer seem to behave quite a bit differently for one which can get annoying, along with the usual problems of switching from one UI to another. As for formats, LibreOffice supports MS Office extensions. There are some differences in rendering because of what I see as MS bullshit, but it’s limited to padding, font size, etc. (and missing fonts), but if your teachers are open to it you can easily send them the original as well as a PDF reference just in case.

I didn’t use Office web apps for a few years now, but when I did they were missing a lot of features (more than 80% i’d say), but others say the situation has improved, so you can try that in your browser of choice like Teams.

If you need the desktop Office apps, you maybe could use Wine or something to run them on Linux, but I don’t have any experience with that so I don’t know how well they behave or how the setup is.

You could easily run a VM with KVM with the specs you listed. Personally I find the installation of KVM and Windows VM creation a bit convoluted, but there are great tutorials availiable online and it’s a one-time ordeal of maybe 15-45 minutes (including VM creation, depending on how fast you want to go/how familiar with the Linux command line you are), so not that bad. Utilizing virt-manager limits command line use to just the first setup of KVM. Installing the VM can be done graphically using virt-manager.

I don’t know how drawing tablet passthrough compatibility in KVM is (probably great though). RedHat drivers enable shared clipboard and dragging files over between the host and VM, so even that should be quite painless if you choose to go the VM route.

I’d look at it in regarda whether or not Google can get your data (or more somply), do you volountarily connect to Google’s servers: if not (Piped/VPN) I’d count that as being degoogled. If yes (Invidious etc.) you’re still getting the video from Google servers (albeit without ads) but Google still gets their grubby hands on some info about you. By ‘volountary’ I mean if you block connections to Google with e.g. Noscript and keep google enabled (be it tag manager, gstatic, fonts or user-facing services like Youtube). If you have to enable gstatic or tag manager on a few sites because they’re broken, I’d say that’s involountary since it’s not your reliance on Google showing as much as it’s the developers’.

Being 100% disconnected from Google servers is outright impossible these days.

The only correct choice.

It didn’t create the system, and it doesn’t have the power to replace it.

But it does support the system by being a part of it

What happens if a mistake was made and an NFT is erroneously issued (for example to the wrong person)?

That person has it now. They mjght volountarily be willing to send it back with another transactions or the courts could force them to do so (as in give fines, request keys, send to prison, or just have the government own and ooerate all the wallet keys and simulate transactions eith blockchain just as the technology used in a very janky way)

What happens if the owner dies? How is the NFT transferred then?

Similarily, either the government does all the transactions with ‘your’ keys for you, or you write down the keys in your will and have someone of trust (e.g. a lawyer) do the partitioning/transactions part in your stead.

Who checks that the original NFT was issued correctly?

The seller and buyer beforehand, mostly

What about properties that are split? What happens if the split isn’t represented in the NFT correctly (e.g. due to an error)?

Rebalance by having everone affected send their portions for redistribution to a trusted entity

As you’ve said yourself, NFTs seem wholly unsuited for keeping track of general ownership on a large scale. All the problems do have solutions, but they’re either complicated for the owners or it’s someone else controlling people’s keys, defeating the entire point.

It could. It may or may not. I agree decentralization is a good thing, but do governments agree as well? First of all, governments are very resistant to change if that doesn’t play into their interests (real or percieved like this privacy violation). Using a traditional database to keep track of ownership seems cheaper (since they already do it) but most of all simpler. I’m not too familiar with the way blockchain functions so I may be wrong, but say someone wants to sell a car. In the current state of most countries you just draw up a paper or fill out a form, maybe get it notarized and pay taxes. A database seems flexible enough that if your sale didn’t get logged and the buyer got pulled over and questioned, they could provide the contract and clear up any questions about ownership. Or say the ownership was stripped as part of a court order. If it was a database, then changing the records is simple, but with blockchain the court would either have to get you to transfer the ownership volountarily, force you to disclose your keys or have some mechnism of forcing a transaction from the requester account (which as I understand it seems what blockchain is here to stop abd a core part of the specification). Alternatively the government just uses blockchain instead of a database, managing all the keys, wallets and identities (as in they have everyone’s keys and do all the transactions) which is the same level of centralization as a database, but with extra steps.

Ownership was (and is) a social contract, and a flexible one at that. Things get gifted volountarily, sold, taken away lawfully and inherited in a single jurisdiction by the thousands daily, and not all of these are well documented. Blockchain seems very limited in what it can do flexibility-wise which makes it unsuitable for keeping track of ownership, and that’s not taking into account that either everyone would have to actively use the blockchain for their sales and be familiar with the technology (decentralized) or having all the wallet keys operated by the government (defeating any useful feature of the blockchain for citizens). Adding blockchain into the mix will just complicate the transfer process and centralize it (as in we either do all validation on the blockchain or none), and with the fact that all the transfer history is centralised in the blockchain (despite it being decentralised in storage, it’s still explicitly stored and accessible) it would serve as just another venue of privacy violation and opression.

Maybe blockchain could be useful for things like, say carbon credits, or similar government-issued ‘currency’, but I don’t see it applicable to validating general ownership on a large scale for the general population, ever. The ‘digital Euro’ proposal, also being blessed by the buzzword Blockchain seems very distopian to me as well. Here, with currency being used I can see how it would be applicable in the real world (instead of heavily unstandardised land deeds, sales contracts and other proofs of ownership you have strictly defined currency units), but this also seems like a gross privacy violation as the government (and maybe anyone) can see where you got your money and where you’re spending it down to the cent.