Brewchin

By “that shit”, do you mean every website/app that may contain age-restricted (not just sexual) content? Because that’s what comes into force in the UK next week.

I’ve been dreading this for decades. 🤬

It’s not just Reddit, nor are they the first to roll it out early.

Doesn’t every Instagram user automatically have a Threads account now? (Even if they’re unaware of it.)

Meta faking Threads user count that way on top of what’s happened with X user count would explain this “milestone” quite easily.

Thanks for checking and the update.

Oh no… anyone know what this means for DuckDuckGo?

Le petit mort , ahem, comes in many forms…

What?! Think of the shareholder value! /s

My take on ads is this: I’ve been using the internet since 1989 - before search engines, advertising, SLIP/PPP/ADSL, etc.

When ads began to appear on websites in the late 90s, I was OK with it. A banner ad here, etc. Then they started to move. And flash. And make noise. And then popups, and pop-unders.

At that point I started to BLOCK THEM ALL. If your business model is a game of distraction from the site I’m visiting, then fuck you, your family, and anyone you’ve ever met.

Moving on to UI web-based stuff, the demise of excellent sites like AltaVista (with its superior search syntax) and the growth of Goooooooogle (with its astonishingly and intentionally shit search syntax), the progress and intention was obvious.

There was a brief period where Google, etc, provided what people wanted. But that time has passed. Now it’s all in on GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.

tl;dr: Once advertisers started to behave like gambling sites, they were yeeted to the hell in which they belong.

Inevitable, really. And zero surprise it’s coming out of China.

Reads more like an advertorial. Low on detail, high on “passkeys are the future”, and plenty of typos.

“Muh freedums profit” outweighs life. The silent bit spoken aloud. Cool cool.

As expected from this timeline and this garbage conglomerate.

If you’re after text, there are a number of options. If you’re after group voice, there are a number of options. You could mix and match both, but “where everyone else is” will also likely be a factor in that kind of decision.

If you want both together, then there’s probably just Element (Matrix + voice)? Not sure of other options that aren’t centralised, where you’re the product, or otherwise at obvious risk of enshittifying. (And Element has the smell of the latter to me, but that’s another topic).

I’ve prepared for Discord’s inevitable “final straw” moment by setting up a Matrix room and maintaining a self-hosted Mumble server in Docker for my gaming buddies. It’s worked when Discord has been down, so I know it works. Yet to convince them to test Element…

Classic “I’ve made a HUGE mistake” moment from yet another “thought leader” suffering from AI/layoff FOMO. 🙄

That sounds more like Flipboard than Pocket?

But I’ve not used either in many years, and I’ve never been a fan of algorithmic discovery, so it’s possible Pocket went down that route, too.

Pocket won’t be missed. Self-hosted alternatives like Wallabag are better and private, so switched to it many years ago. Integration (and enabled by default, requiring about:config to disable) ensured I’d never use it out of principle.

Fakespot (the website) was genuinely useful to help ID scams on Am*z*n Marketplace, though I never used the extension. But I think that enshittified in recent years, so (in the style of Stephen King’s Misery) it’s probably for the best.

Related, the Keepa extension is useful as a price rigging detector, but I expect that will “number must go up!” soon enough, too…

Short answer: Eventually, yes. But it also depends on what you mean by “privacy” and “danger”, and what else you’re doing with your NAS.

Longer answer:

Your NAS can be used in the ways you want, and with the privacy levels you want, without signing up to or using additional cloud services. By choosing to use QuickConnect, you’re trading some of that for convenience.

History shows that most providers will have a data breach. What that breach includes depends entirely on what you given them and what they’ve taken. Including what their ToS and Privacy Policy says, and has ever said the entire time you’ve used it. That’s assuming good faith and competence, as some services gather more. And then there are things like court orders, some of which you’ll never hear about.

It also depends on their security model. It’s quite likely that they’re using their own certificates (as it does when you browse to your NAS’s web interface), so would mean they’ll be automatically decrypting and re-encrypting the traffic going through QC. This will often be stated as “end to end encryption”, despite not really being that.

If your concern is filenames and such, then it’s likely visible to them. Whether they record them is up to their current policies. If your concern is the contents of your screen, video or audio, then it is unlikely. Especially with things like SSH or remote desktop that may have their own transport security.

However, if you use your own remote connectivity option (eg. WireGuard, Tailscale), you’re not sending data through their servers.

FWIW, I use Photos and Drive, and both naturally work seamlessly on my LAN. When I’m outside my network, I usually rely on what I’ve saved for offline use. But when I want something specific, I use WireGuard to VPN to my home network to get it. No cloud services and no “I hope they don’t get breached this week” garbage - just a secure point-to-point connection between my device and my home.

tl;dr: It’s less about what a company says/does about their service, and more about not giving them the opportunity to get it wrong, do bad things, etc.

Hard agree. Mindsets stuck in 2005 or before when cool and useful stuff was, just, free online. We were such summer children then.

Anyone still like that obviously shouldn’t be in charge of anything sharp or dangerous…

Anyone remember websites and RSS? Those were the days.

Why does everything have to get shovelled into someone’s walled garden…

(Speaking about updates and notifications here, not discussions.)

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That’s very much what the Opinion section in the Guardian is all about: an all comers free-for-all written by anyone who cares to submit a piece. Generally unrelated their news journalism and general mission/ideology.

I see why they do it: opposing views and so on. But in the current society of headlines are everything, knee jerk reactions, polarisation and the idea of a middle ground being treason, etc, we get “Why are the Guardian saying x?!” 🤷‍♂️

The US$75 Lifetime price has traditionally been their Black Friday deal, regardless of the usual price.

Anyone’s guess if that deal will still be a thing, given their recent behaviour, though.