Yes, it’s a dangerous combination of media/IT illiteracy/incompetence within the general public and profit-driven proprietary social media algorithms that only aim to keep people engaged for the longest time, no matter the content they are being served. And usually, the more extreme the content is, the higher the engagement, the more revenue to be made from serving ads to the users and selling their collected data. This currently leads to a rise of misinformation, anti-scientific thinking, and so on. Which just so happens to align with extreme right-wing ideologies.

Well with food something unusual at first feels weird but once you try it it might actually be good. I’ve had this experience quite a lot. Probably shows how much you’re conditioned to liking certain foods just because you’re used to them and grew up with them. So I’m not gonna judge how this would taste. But the first impression was like “ugh”.

Technically, everyone has a Facebook account, or at least a shadow account at Meta. Since they are one of the biggest data gatherers in the world, they gather data from all sorts of sources about people, not just from your active usage of their apps, sites and services. It’s extremely likely that they have quite a bit of data on everyone. Many proprietary mobile apps, for example, initiate connections and transfer some data to Meta or Google. Even apps that have nothing at all to do with them otherwise. Many websites do. Many applications and games do. Integrated proprietary software in various devices, e.g. smart TVs, does. Also, WhatsApp is used by I think ~30% of the world’s population now(?) and they started syncing/sharing all that data (mostly metadata but metadata is also very revealing) with Meta several years ago. Since WhatsApp also shares your whole contact / address book with Meta, they also effectively have a (mostly) full social connections graph on about a third of the world’s population, based on WhatsApp usage data alone… so overall they’ll have even more.

Unless you’re efficiently blocking or otherwise interrupting all of those connections, on every device, or are able to really effectively use different IPs and never reveal all of the IP addresses associated with yourself, it’s likely they still have quite a bit about you. If you’re logged into a personally identifiable Google or Meta account on your phone, for example, and your phone is in your WiFi, then it’ll have the same public-facing IP address as your computers, meaning they’ll be able to enumerate all of your devices based on what they gathered on that IP address alone. It means that IP address can now always be linked to your person for Google/Meta/and so on.

And then there’s always the possibility of the apps or websites not making your device directly connect to Meta/Google/… so it looks like only the 1st party gets your data (which always seems OK), but afterwards or in the backend it can still transmit or share the gathered data without your knowledge to those companies. This can also happen without the 1st party noticing it, because Meta and Google are often integrated in a lot of things, for example in SDKs or popular libraries. For example if you develop a mobile app using Meta’s SDK, then by default (opt-out) the resulting app will transmit various kinds of telemetry data to Meta. Unless the developer disables this consciously, which many do not know or care about, it will simply be on and active. Sometimes they also have special data sharing deals with certain companies. Google has even more ways of being included in all sorts of things, they are almost omnipresent. For example Google is doing checks whether your Android-based mobile phone is carrier-locked or not, on behalf of your carrier, not your carrier. Google also receives your (personally-identifiable) IMEI and telephone number alongside every single location request your phone is doing, even from an app that’s completely unrelated to Google. [unless your Android has configured a non-standard SUPL server, which isn’t even an option in most Androids, or you use GrapheneOS which uses a proxy SUPL server to strip that bit of personally identifiable data before redirecting it to the real SUPL server (which most likely is your provider’s, which in turn is most likely just a redirect to Google’s SUPL server in the end)]. These are just examples off the top of my head, there’s even more weird stuff happening of course.

So it doesn’t really matter if you have active accounts at those companies, or not. They still know a lot about you and your devices, and sell that data to governments and whoever else bids the most for it. And even if they don’t know you yet (if no link to your person is currently possible for a particular data set), which is highly unlikely but may be a possibility if you’re truly careful and use different IPs all the time, they still gather all these records, and it only takes one single mistake on your end and they’ll be able to link all records they gathered from that particular IP address to your person as well. Not only that, but they could even statistically calculate that based on what you visited or what you wrote somewhere online, or even how your typing style is, that you’re likely this particular person, even if the data is still “anonymous”.

It’s really hard and really inconvenient to escape all the data gathering, in practice the only thing you can do is minimize it. Most users don’t care at all or don’t want to deal with the extra effort and simply let everything flow out. It’s a much easier online life, but it’s also an almost fully surveilled online life.

• No good operating system preinstalled by default
• No headphone jack anymore

The word “likely” should be stripped from that headline. It will definitely happen. Just as mass migrations will happen due to losing a lot of habitable areas. Many coastal cities/areas will also be gone (submerged) in only a few decades.

I’m barely still a Millenial. Which is kind of cool. I don’t like the “generation names” before or after that much, and I liked that I grew up with non-invasive tech and non-existent smartphones during school. I was able to grow up with tech but none of the tech I dislike today. Also, tech was still easier to understand back then. I was able to learn how to create web sites for example when HTML, CSS, JavaScript and CGI was still in its infancy and not very complex yet. Of course I learned the growing complexitty as it all developed but the point is that it kind of grew with me. Which probably made several things easier to get into in the first place. Also, I still grew up with almost forgotten values such as privacy, and my whole youth life (as well as dumb things you did when young) isn’t available online and therefore “gone”. I kind of like it that way.

If you use Google’s Play Services and/or other Google proprietary apps and services (they are standard on all commercial Android phones), then your battery will be drained slightly more due to it having spyware (euphemism: “telemetry”) integrated. The Google Play services app, for example, does transmit at the minimum this data roughly every 20 minutes to Google:

Phone #
SIM Card #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your  logged in Google account
IP address

And that is just if you have disabled ALL telemetry in ALL of the options, even the most hidden ones. So this is the minimum amount they are always gathering from every Android user, no matter what you selected. To make matters worse, the Google Play services is typically installed as a “system critical app” which means you as the owner of the phone can’t even uninstall it or reduce some of its permissions.

(If you have an iPhone instead, and think you’re safe from this, no you aren’t. Apple also collects a minimum amount of telemetry data which you cannot ever completely disable, it just does it slightly less frequently (IIRC, it was like every hour or so, compared to Google’s every 20min at the minimum).

And then there’s also the advertisement ID, a world-wide unique identifier set in all commercial Androids as well as iOS, for apps to track you. You can only reset it to a new random ID but never disable it fully.

To stop all of this bullsh!t, and also to stop the additional battery/resource drain caused by this, I recommend getting a Pixel phone and replacing the proprietary stock Android OS with GrapheneOS and then not installing any Google apps/services on top of it. You can get apps via F-Droid, Obtainium, Aurora store (those are the convenient methods). You can use ntfy as an alternative to the Google firebase messaging (notification) service that you won’t have access to when not having Google Play services running.

Well every major tech product probably needs to have “AI” somewhere anywhere, otherwise you’ll probably have a problem of being too honest marketing disadvantage because there will be potential buyers who don’t understand anything about it but think “Thing with AI is better than Thing without AI”, period. Doesn’t even matter if there’s any AI involved anywhere or if the AI feature is actually useful. Unfortunately the tech industry is always heavily riding on hype trains and AI is the current one.

Considering that it’s the FDP, they’re probably primarily doing it to protect corporate interests, not the rights of the general population.

What kind of world do we want to live in? What would be the safest theoretical thing? They can’t assign one police officer per citizen, as they don’t have enough police officers. So that’s a big resource constraint. But they will soon have the tech to videotape and audiotape every single cititzen using small insect-like drones that are almost impossible to find. And before that happens, they want to know who everyone online is, what they’re doing and what they’ve done in the past, present and future. They want to know what sites you visited, who you’ve spoken to, what you’ve spoken about, and so on. And after they know this in the online world, they want to know it in the offline world too (using cameras with mics and person detection capabilities). How far will they go with their securtiy madness? It won’t be long until the average citizen has zero (not just a little, zero) privacy, neither online nor offline, probably not even on the toilet or in the bed. And like I said, if you want the ultimate security, you need to assign one small surveillance drone per citizen for a complete 100% surveillance everywhere and all of the time. If you don’t care about privacy and only care about security, that is your end goal. Is that really the world you want to live in?

AFAIK, browser choice is still limited (as usual with Apple) because every browser on iOS needs to use Apple’s WebKit engine. That means they only differ in UI.

Problem is, when you don’t oppose stuff like that, stuff like that gets added more and more and it’s all opt-out and some day you’ll have an update and something’s turned on by default and you don’t realize that for a year or so and then you’re like “shit, was this really on all the time”. Even worse when they hide settings well in the UI, or use dark patterns to annoy or trick you to enable a setting that’s actually bad for you.

Opt-out stuff is just bad, even in small doses. It’s always kind of a scam. I wish Mozilla wouldn’t need that kind of stuff. I mean they could be the knight-in-shining-privacy-armor browser, compared to Chrome/Edge/Opera/… But they are all similar unfortunately (by default). Yes, Firefox is still less worse than Chrome/Edge/Opera are by default. But “less worse” doesn’t equal “good”. Yes, you can configure Firefox to behave well, and by using a good preconfigured user.js these settings also will stick after updates. But you shouldn’t have to do that in the first place. The common user doesn’t do that and shouldn’t have to. The Firefox forks like LibreWolf or Mullvad Browser for example do not have anything bad enabled by default. And it’s likely they won’t ever have anything bad enabled after updates. So it is possible. The only reason the common browser makers aren’t doing it is because that gives them (or their business partners) less data/money.

MI is great, I played 1+2 when they were new (in the 90s), they were brilliant back then. These days, they’re probably still good point&click adventure games. There were some special editions or remasters which probably make them play well on modern machines. They belong to a long list of awesome LucasArts point&click adventures during the 90s and early 2000s. Most of these games are great. You should definitely try them out, especially if there are remasters available. But you can also play the originals using ScummVM most likely. Ron Gilbert is like the mastermind behind the series. He still creates adventure games to this day. And they’re all pretty good, but the genre is kind of niche these days. It wasn’t niche back then. It was just as big as action or soulslike games are today. The Monkey Island titles were probably the most successful or popular ones of the bunch. But there are some others which are equally good. Adventure games are rare these days but basically they are like puzzle games where you have to solve certain situations by combining items, finding items in the first place, trying different approaches, and so on. You kind of know once you’ve overcome a challenge when you were able to progress further in the game. There’s little to no handholding, but also little to no handholding needed. There’s one timing-based riddle in the original Monkey Island which I never liked that much, but it’s still a funny one. It’s not hard but it doesn’t really fit the genre well because nothing else is timing-based. It does fit the game’s art, setting and humor well though. The soundtrack is nice indeed. This is probably the most well-known track: https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=FoT5qK6hpbw

Yes, but my post is for the people who DO care about privacy issues. I also don’t like the defeatist’s attitude. You can always start making things better. My post is for those who want to make a better informed decision, that’s all.

Yeah, you should use Linux regardless. ;-)

Well this whole area is mostly based on deceit. Like if they claim they MAY do something they will absolutely do it all the time, if they claim they aren’t getting anything from it, it just means they aren’t getting anything directly, but indirectly instead, or from a different involved party. I also like the message at the top of the page: “Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data.”. Under some circumstances you have rights. Which is weirdly accurate. Because in most circumstances, they will just sh*t on data protection rights. Which is also evident by everything being opt-out, rather than opt-in. And then, most likely, even when you disable everything, data will still flow somewhere. Then again, it’s an industry-wide problem. Not specific to Jagex.

Oh yeah, the Crusader games were fun. They probably also aged well. OK, their controls are really annoying and weird, and you kind of have to “cheat” a bit in that game at some points (e.g. by shooting an enemy outside of the screen, so it can’t shoot back, otherwise some situations are really hard). But yeah, fun games, great action, many explosions and mayhem. And since it’s isometric 2D graphics there’s nothing really bad about them either. Except maybe for resolution or aspect issues. Also good sound/music.

Reasons are the data transmissions happening by default and Mozilla’s questionable inclusion of add-on things like Pocket. See for example:

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/mozilla-firefox-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil20/

vs.

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/librewolf-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil8/ and https://www.kuketz-blog.de/mullvad-browser-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil22/

You might need to translate the site to English. If you compare that, you can see why it’s easy to recommend the forks over the original. That said, you CAN configure Firefox to also behave well, but that takes an extra effort. It is far from there by default.

Well, they’re only doing what they announced already like 1-2 years ago. So we knew it was coming. This is also accompanied by Google making YouTube more restrictive when viewed with adblockers. Google is (somewhat late, to be honest) showing its teeth against users who block ads. I always expected it to happen but it took them quite some time. Probably they wanted to play the good guys for long enough until most users are dependent on their services, and now their proprietary trap is very effective.

On the desktop, you should switch to a good Firefox fork right now. Firefox can also be used but needs configuring before it’s good. The forks LibreWolf or Mullvad Browser are already very good out of the box. There’s the potential issue of the forks not being updated fast enough, but so far these two have been fast. Mullvad shares a lot of configuration with the Tor Browser, so using it may break some sites. LibreWolf might be “better” for the average user because of that, but otherwise I think Mullvad is the best Firefox fork overall.

On mobile, Firefox-based browsers aren’t recommended, because on Android, the sandboxing mechanism of Firefox is inferior to that of the Chromium-based browsers. And on iOS, all browsers (have to) run on Apple’s proprietary Webkit engine anyway, but well this is Apple we’re talking about so of course it’s all locked-down and restricted. It’s one of the reasons I don’t even like talking about Apple that much, just be aware that as an iOS user, your choice doesn’t mean as much when it comes to browsers, and your browser might not behave like you think it does on other platforms.

So on mobile, I’d suggest things like Brave, Cromite or Mull. Or Vanadium (GrapheneOS). If the browser doesn’t have built-in adblocking capability which sidesteps the MV3 restrictions, make sure to use an ad-blocking DNS server, so your browser doesn’t have to do it. But you still need it. Adblocking not only helps you retain your sanity when browsing the web in 2024, but it also proactively secures you against known and unknown security threats coming from ads. So adblocking is a security plus, a privacy plus, and a sanity plus. It’s absolutely mandatory. As long as the ad industry is as terrible as it is, you should continue using adblocks. All the time. On every device and on every browser.

The ad industry is itself to blame for this. There could in theory be such a thing like acceptable ads, but that would require ads to be static images/text, not fed by personal data, and not dynamically generated by random scripts which could compromise your security, and not overly annoying. Since that is probably never going to happen, you should never give up using adblockers. Since they basically fight you by reducing your security and privacy, you have a right to defend yourself via technical means.

While this does seem overly restrictive and out of place there, the result of this isn’t bad, because everyone should be at the most recent vesion at all times, period. If you aren’t, you’re exposed to more security holes and bugs. So it’s weird that that program forces you to do that, but it’s still not bad that you’re forced to do it. If you get what I mean. For some less-caring users who’d otherwise never install updates, forced updates are actually a net positive.

Added it, thanks.