route my traffic to a different country where I don’t live in and them viewing my activity is potentially less of a problem

Depending on where you live, and where your service resides, this could be tricky.

In the US, for instance, if you’ve chosen a provider in Australia, then a FVEY agreement could be in place to share that data. This gets around the technicality that intel gathering is not occurring on US soil and is not being done by the gov.

And again with the US, if you’ve chosen a country that’s not amiable to sharing user data, the US could very well be justifying that country as a target for pilfering data anyway.

So, that would leave choosing a service provider within the US, which should need to go through the FISA courts for any access to citizen data, but who knows after the Snowden revelations.

I guess that’s the state of privacy if you’ve got a nation state that’s targeted you for surveillance. Only way around it I can think of is data to be encrypted in transit and at rest, and only you control the keys. But that’s not something that’s going to happen with something like mainstream email anyway, too inconvenient for most folks (and you also don’t know if your recipients are security conscious either).

No I hate MS. I won’t ever forget the pain that was developing edge cases around Internet Explorer (fuck IE 6, that shit was the worst).

I had to squint at the “Quart Bags” one, and was really hoping it said “Queso Bags”.

As in, you had some legit purpose for needing to put Costco brand "Que Bueno’ nacho cheese into a ziploc bag on a regular enough occasion that it warranted 3d printing a dispenser for them.

I think I will ponder this for my nightly meditation as I fall asleep tonight.

For me it’s funeral potatoes, or half the desert dishes from various potlucks that would happen in the chapel gym.

Jokes on them though, all those recipes are posted online now! Don’t need a temple recommend for that shit lol.

a big business isn’t supposed to directly undermine another big business

Apple has entered the chat.

(See: Their walled gardens, e.g., any browser that wants to bring their own engine to iOS.)

I’ve been using mine for 10+ years, maybe changing batteries once.

I currently use it with a NUC loaded with linux mint, and have the UI HD scaled (it’s an out-of-the box option).

The only native functionality of the actual smart tv that I use, is the power button.

Guess no one in that state has met Starla. Nobody thinks I’m a failure because I go home to her at night.

My wife flips her fucking lid.

Reminds me of the Family Guy episode where Brian owes Stewie money, but rather than pay the debt back, Brian buys a disguise to hide from Stu.

So trump doesn’t have money to pay for the $200k Georgia bond, but he has the money to pay for a mustache marketing this bullshit?!

I’d go with state actors first.

When a particular social media platform is centralized, you can buy yourself a say percentage of stock and have sway over it (cough tencent), or have a useful idiot ruin the platform (cough musk), or another useful idiot to run propaganda you like anyway (cough truth social, cough fox news, cough newsmax…), or yet another that will sell out it’s host country’s citizens for cold hard cash (cough facebook).

But when that social media platform is decentralized? Well, then you’d need to figure out how to poison the well early on to stave off adoption. The Saudi Arabias, UAEs, Chinas definitely don’t like the idea of lemmy, and it’ll be way harder for them to control if critical mass is hit.

It can also happen if google can’t obtain/verify an id with their normal means (e.g. ip + browser type/settings + cookies + …).

I get challenged all the time and I’ve been on the same static consumer ip, but I go through some precautions to make it more difficult to id me (dump all browser state on restart, disable js except for trusted sources, ad blocker plugin, privacy conscious browser + settings, etc.). I still use a vpn in certain scenarios, but still get captchas either way.

In a similar vein is to look for government auctions in town. I’ve got a major public university in my city, and it maintains a permanent auction warehouse. Like once a month they sell all kinds of stuff, from mini fridges to laptops by the pallet.

I just need Zuck to require a VR hat to access facebook

Didn’t he already require facebook to access VR “hats”? Oh yeah, he did it for occulus headsets.