I hope this leads to the death of Androud and the rise of something more open to replace it. There was a huge market for it when Android came out in competition with Apple's closed model, but now that Google is closing up Android, let's hope alternatives get some attention. Unfortunately, alternatives will mean no tap to pay, no RCS, etc., for a long time, since Apple, Google, et al., turned these things as proprietary as possible, but I'd still like a decent alternative to get enough power to eventually change those things.

It's reCAPTCHA. What "their garbage internet" are you referring to? The singular internet, the one you're on right now? reCAPTCHA is used on tons of websites. It used to be useful until Google turned it into a machine learning training tool rather than a bot filtering tool.

Don't blame the people being exploited and tell them to carry and keep multiple devices charged when you probably wouldn't want to have to do that either.

Some are required in order to approve purchases or to access customer service on case a fraud warning prevents a transaction from going through the first time or if you just need some savings money transferred to your checking in order to make a purchase which you might use a mobile app or call customer service to do rather than having to go home and come back to the store. There are several reasons to need to access your money when you are outside of the house. The things that require the app authentication vary by bank, but some are going to be urgent enough that it's going to risk purchases getting rejected if you don't have the app with you at all times.

Usage is rising because corporate executives started getting kickbacks and thinking they could cut staff by implementing it. But developers who have actually had to use it have realized it can be useful in a few scenarios, but requires a ton of review of anything it writes because it rarely understands context and often makes mistakes that are really hard to debug because they are subtle. So anyone trying to use it for a language or system they don't understand well is going to have a hard time.

Not a new thing, and I can definitely see good uses for this information. What they should have done is made it so that the one being tracked gets a log and real time notification any time someone is tracking them. This would alleviate some of the toxic spying behavior simply by making it transparent rather than covert.

Also Google on 2008: "By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage."

But the shithead exec is supportive of fascists which means privacy is secondary to the desires of the current regime. That's just a standard part of fascism. And if the current regime is allowing untested backdoor code to be inserted in the Treasury department and NASA and the CDC and most major social media to strip out protections for people they don't like, climate change, etc. Just imagine what someone who actually supports them ideologically would be willing to do.

I mean it's kind of like the "humans evolved from monkeys" or whatever primate you want to substitute for monkey. No, they branched off from a common ancestor though.

I mean lots of people get mixed up between BSD, Linux, UNIX, and all the variations over the years. Is MacOS a version of Linux? No. Is a human a type of ape? No. Are MacOS and Linux way, way closer than either are to Windows, hell yes. Just like people are way closer to being monkeys than swallows. There's a lot of mixed breeding in both examples and a lot of total incompatibilities as well.

No. At least not in the way most people expect.

It does block some tracking and ads that Chrome alone allows or explicitly adds. But it simply shifts that tracking to Brave. The idea was that you'd still get the benefits of that tracking by giving all of your data to Brave instead. I honestly never was convinced by this considering your data is still being sold, just by a different company so it doesn't sound much better to me. Supposedly, according to them, Brave is more trustworthy and gives you more control over what they track and sell, but I don't trust that business model. There's no real incentive for them to do what they said they would.

Yeah. They can't get Mastodon moderators to suppress negative publicity like they can on Reddit and other platforms.

$20 to unlock the API killed it for me. If it has a built in way yo lock it down, it's not an open platform and is a great way for bugs to brick a device.

I think it's safe to say that all of the LLMs have been training their systems on any site they can get their hands on for some time. That's why apps like Anubis exist trying to keep their crawlers from killing their bandwidth since LLM companies have decided to ignore robots.txt, copyrights, licenses, and other standard practices.

Even if Copilot was suspended, the idea was put into the heads of managers and executives. My work laptop current has three applications constantly locking files as they track everything I do and every file that gets touched and upload it all to the servers. Git now takes a ridiculous amount of time to check in and push files since it creates tons of small changes to the cached files that a the tracking applications block further changes or uploads until they can record the information. It takes about 30 seconds to a minute to check in a single small file. Something that used to take a second or two at most. Worst part is if I'm in a WebEx meeting, the fighting over caches in it and git and any other processes,often causes deadlocks that crash the machine. I'm constantly apologizing for being late for meetings because the laptop crashed and had to reboot. It's gotten to the point that they finally gave me a much faster laptop rather than just excluding cache and git folders and such from the tracking because the people who want literally everything tracked don't know what cache or git is, much less how much useless data they're gathering or how the AI that analyzes it all is going yo get distracted by the garbage and not find any useful data anyway. Microsoft needs to get in the game to push the others back out.

Unfortunately, not everyone has a choice in who they work for in end-stage-capitalism. Work is about survival, not ideology. The majority of Americans are not far-right capitalists, but the vast majority of CEOs are, and it's not really possible to survive long enough to start a small business in most of the US without investment from a far-right capitalist or inheritance (usually also from a far-right capitalist family member).

Signal isn't that kind of app. It protects your data in flight, but only has minimal protections after the recipient gets the message. It's a whole other game to protect data at the endpoint. If you can't trust your recipients to protect data, then you shouldn't send them data needing protection. In order to do that you need control over all levels of the device receiving the data, hardware, operating system, file system, and software. Anything else will always leave openings for data at rest at tge destination to be compromised by untrustworthy recipients.

Don't format, just create separate subvolumes for the distros and keep the home subvolume mounted on each root then delete the root subvolume of the distros you don't want when you're done with them.

TL;DR: You should have both due to the explicit breaking of the robots.txt contract by AI companies.

AI generally doesn't obey robots.txt. That file is just notifying scrapers what they shouldn't scrape, but relies on good faith of the scrapers. Many AI companies have explicitly chosen not no to comply with robots.txt, thus breaking the contract, so this is a system that causes those scrapers that are not willing to comply to get stuck in a black hole of junk and waste their time. This is a countermeasure, but not a solution. It's just way less complex than other options that just block these connections, but then make you get pounded with retries. This way the scraper bot gets stuck for a while and doesn't waste as many of your resources blocking them over and over again.

Problem is not the law, but that the companies implemented it in as annoying of a way as possible to get people pissed off about the law and force it to be dropped, or for what actually happened which is that it's too much work to not opt-in to the cookies which essentially makes it opt-out not in.

And the idea to remove the requirements for "simple statistics" or whatever terminology they use will just get abused by using other illicit tracking tech to link the cookies to uniquely identify a person anyway. So it will effectively make the popups unnecessary in any circumstances and still allow tracking for marketing and surveillance.

Reduce spam bot accounts and other malware, as well as to allow for user discovery so you can find your contacts more easily. It's not designed to be an anonymous service, just a private one.