This article lacks a lot of nuance. I got suspicious of the lack of statistics… Here’s a much better read with more info.

From now on whenever I talk about Android with Google Play Services I’ll refer to it as the “shit sandwich OS”

Finally a good, nuanced article on this topic, thanks for sharing. Only drawback is that the author doesn’t seem to be aware that degoogling your phone is a viable alternative, especially with manufactures like Fairphone offering this out of the box.

Lots of people (including myself, previously) fall for the narrative that Apple can financially justify not spying on their users because their hardware is expensive. Versus Google, who have always been about ads and data mining.

This logic unfortunately fails to consider that a publicly trading company will always use all methods at their disposal to keep up profit so shareholders are happy. Expensive hardware was probably enough a decade ago, but the golden rule is: as long as a company can fuck you over in a way that increases profits, they absolutely will, given enough time.

We need federal privacy law in the U.S. and we need it fast.

Wow, you just… described the problem we had on our Windows PCs that I never managed to describe

I use Gramophone from F-Droid for playing MP3 files which are in folders. One of the tabs in Gramophone allows you to navigate your main music folder and it’ll treat your folders as playlists!

Best comment I’ve read for a long time

Yeah wouldn’t suggest using your real phone number

This is the correct answer. If you don’t need notifications:

Make sure you enable the auto frost service in Shelter’s settings, enable auto frost for WhatsApp in Shelter and replace the icon on your home screen with a Shelter shortcut.

You can also use a trustworthy VPN to route traffic from the entire work profile or only from WhatsApp.

Damn, Astrill is expensive though. Friend in China is currently happy with Mullvad + Shadowsocks. A few hiccups here and there, but it works pretty well and is fast enough for streaming, too.

They also have guides to a few more involved methods in case Shadowsocks is blocked.

Exactly. We already have stuff like OpenStax. Great content, but comparatively little adoption by faculties.

Doesn’t appear to.

But looks like even GNOME Web supports extensions now. So no reason that something like uBlock origin couldn’t be implemented right?

Thanks for taking the time to answer! I did read the Flexlauncher docs which also recommend the Chromium command, I was hoping there’d be something like that for Firefox because it’s just a matter of time before ad blockers become handicapped in Chromium. But guess that’s the only solution then.

Got Flexlauncher on my setup (Debian running on an old laptop) too and was hoping you could share some advice:

• what’s the best way to launch websites as “apps”? Bonus points if I get to keep uBlock Origin :)
• currently using a wireless keyboard only and running to the trackpad when it doesn’t suffice, what air mouse would you recommend?
• that wallpaper looks great, could I have a link?

First had Kodi on a RPI, but I got fed up with Kodi, partly because there are too many moving parts and partly because there’s no great way to watch YouTube.

Then found Flexlauncher, which has already been suggested by someone else. Slapped Debian on the RPI and then realized that getting smooth HD YouTube video playback is impossible outside of Kodi, because of hardware (?) limitations.

At this point I decided that enough is enough and just got out the old laptop in the household no one uses anymore, same Debian + Flexlauncher combo with Stremio and Freetube. Set Debian to do auto login and start Flexlauncher automatically. Works great, but controlling with Keyboard only (and using the laptop trackpad when nothing works) gets a bit annoying. Looks like an airmouse is the way to go.

Ah, interesting…

Isn’t forced arbitration when the jury deciding on the case is on the payroll of the company you’re having the problem with in the first place?

Damn, did you consider buying it used? Should be faster than what you any through and cheaper. And considering the modularity, less risk if the laptpp wasn’t treated well.

And there’s a reason for that:

"[Amazon makes] every merchant that sells through their platform sign a “most favored nation” guarantee that they will not charge less for their products anywhere else – which means that the price is the same everywhere.

And that’s the heart of the California antitrust case against Amazon: Amazon’s market dominance makes it impossible to survive without offering your products on Amazon; to succeed there, you must turn over 35-45% of your gross to Amazon. That leads to higher prices on Amazon, and, thanks to the most favored nation deal, it pushes those same higher prices to every other retailer."

So basically the price on their website is what the company would charge you if they would want to be a sustainable business (or they’re trying to recoup their losses from selling on Amazon).

Source

All my homies buy the off-brand Kitkats that, despite the significantly lower price, use Fairtrade cocoa.

For more convenience, the newest version is also available via the IzzyOnDroid repo, you can enable it with one tap in Drod-ify.