Here quite a few of the popular social media are banned. They’re still popular but now every schoolkid, housewife and grandpa knows what a VPN is. Every time I hear such news, I am afraid of crackdowns on censorship evasion in those places too…

I don’t see how most men would even find that out. Underwear is too intimate of a topic to open up about to the opposite sex.

Shoes are the most obnoxious things to shop for. Buying what you know makes total sense.

Samourai was a Bitcoin wallet attempting to improve the currency’s privacy. Its devs were arrested this year.

Localmonero was a platform where people could post listings for buying or selling Monero without KYC. There was also an identical sister site Agoradesk for Bitcoin. They abruptly shut down this year, probably afraid of similar prosecution (it happened pretty soon after the Samourai case).

Chainalysis is a company that US government works with, attempting to track and deanonymize crypto transactions. Recently a presentation of theirs leaked, disclosing some of their methods (which were very interesting for the Monero community in particular).

I used to use Vanced but switched to Newpipe, as it is noticeably lighter (also at least for me, downloads did not properly work while they were fine on Newpipe).

Not all people are rich enough to have iPhones. And if you really want privacy, you wouldn’t go for one anyway, instead choosing Graphene/Divest/Lineage. Not to mention iMessage is fully closed-source so you cannot even trust it to do what it does. I have issues wirh Signal, but at least I would take it over iMessage any day.

I highly doubt that “ending crypto crackdown” would mean guaranteeing safety for projects like Samourai or Localmonero. Or ending the relationship with Chainalysis.

To be fair, the idea of “alternative to banking” is still very much alive. BTC and LTC are very much used as currencies, even though BTC has fees too high for small transactions. Monero was developed specifically with utility rather than investment in mind - now reading about how exactly anonymity is enforced there (especially after the Chainalysis leaks), it’s pretty interesting. I kinda hope we invent something better than blockchain-based currencies that is equivalent in uncensorability, but right now it’s the closest we got.

I much prefer Newpipe, which has been amazing so far.

Yeah, Brave has even worse track record than stock Firefox.

Although it’s the only place I’ve seen that leaves a chunk of silence while the ad plays.

Very weird, I am using it daily and it works just fine. Maybe you’re using an older version? Rather than using F-Droid’s repo, I use NewPipe’s own.

At least when it came to a laptop, I bought mine without a preinstalled OS - that is far more common than preinstalled Linux.

Or, better, not use a car at all because automated license plate readers. Cars seem antithetical to anonymity in general. Better take a tram/bus/subway and buy tickets with cash. Or at least call a taxi if it’s really far from any transport stops.

Welll yeah - point was that they installed a service without consent. And not just a browser feature, but something crossing a whole another boundary. AFAIK also, while the tunnel itself was not enabled, the service itself was turned on automatically.

Also doesn’t do cosmetic filtering - like, it would remove the ad, but not the HTML box that used to contain it.

From what I understand, the limit on the lists is not the only problem with it - my main concerns are a) lists only being able to update together with the extension itself and b) some features apparently being fundamentally disallowed, like the element picker I am dependent on.

Also the recent case when they installed VPN. In general, they give off the impression that they don’t respect users’ consent a lot. Mozilla has been similarly sneaky, like with the opt-out ad tracking recently - thus I would only consider Librewolf or hardening - but Brave seems to be more extreme in their advertising business.

It’s only been two years though.

Counterpoint - younger generations grow up in the same poverty as their parents (so that any subscriptions are unlikely) and even if they don’t - their media needs may not fully align with what their parents would buy. So children in my experience do find ways to pirate. Maybe not the best ways, but still.