As someone who lives through the height of the mall era I’m sad to see the go personally. However before online shopping it was sort of a pain in the ass. Not only did you have to go to the mall for clothes shopping sometimes you would have to go to more than one. I remember school clothes shopping would be a multi day affair to buy some jeans and shirts and a pair of shoes. If the mall didn’t have the store you needed you would sometimes have to drive really far to go to that store. If the mall didn’t have what you needed you were sort of SOL. So when online shopping started to provide anything you want in a few clicks it was not just the hard to obtain stuff people bought it was everything else too. But it’s sad so many teenage sagas played out in malls for me. Friendships were solidified and dating occured there. It was a place you could hang out for a few hours with no parents and navigate teenage social life. I am sure teens will just do something else but it holds a special place in my memory.

I honestly think it’s everyone’s responsibility to make their job as hard as possible. Use providers that prioritize privacy and that are located outside the US. Don’t ever use telephony or sms always use end to end encrypted services for conversations, leave your phone at home or turn it off, use a rom without Google play services. Really drive them nuts and use cash for most purchases. This by no means stops everything but it makes it harder. You can’t stop all data collection but you can reduce it and every reduction helps.

Not much has changed. It’s really only secure if you are sending emails between addresses within the same local network like gmail to gmail. Thankfull with end to end encryption it can be pretty safe just good luck finding someone that knows how to use it. but thankfully proton makes that pretty seamless.

exactly if it’s a company they have to comply with laws. This is not a service to rely on if you doing espionage or something. It’s for people who want more privacy and choice.

Bridge

I am actually sort of worried that now that they put this out they will retire bridge. We will have to wait and see. Is having a browser tab open really that bad… ?? I suppose but I still like programs over web pages.

yeah headline should have been “told ya so”

disappointed is an interesting choice of words. But I guess not having a roving hellscape is kind of boring.

I always think it’s interesting when I read these stories. No matter how bad it gets. No matter how many red flags are raised no one is going to do a single thing. Our governments are completely failing us by doing nothing useful.

honestly it’s sort of useless for that function. The only thing my family posts is dumb crap. I still basically have to see them or talk to them to actually catch up. As a means of keeping up with people I have found FB as practically useless.

Recently it’s become even better and more stable. I don’t ever find a need to open another browser at this point.

They made it and they use it. So if they intentionally put a flaw in it that would be very stupid.

Just use new pipe on mobile and freetube on desktop and it basically fixes all the issues with YouTube.

I think not having Trump making out with Obama is clearly a missed opportunity

No, can’t see it

I think you are making more of a political and philosophical argument than a technical one. The project for tor browser and associated technologies is a 501c3 nonprofit. It’s technology is open source and can be independently reviewed by third parties. Control of the network and it’s technology is distributed and is not controlled by any single government or entity. It’s not a perfect solution but it’s better in certain contexts than other options. It just depends on your use case but the torproject is not doing anything “wrong” they are not a shill for a particular government.

I would need to do some testing but a potential flaw I can already think of is that your browser will look fairly unique to finger printers. So for instance you are already running a variant of firefox which only has about 3% of the market share. Now you are running a variant of firefox that has a really unique settings. So instead of being 1 in crowd of hundreds of thousands or millions you will be 1 out of few thousand maybe or possibly just hundreds if adoption is slow enough. Then add browsing habits to that you could potentially narrow the person down to a few dozen or even a dozen people quick. You would likely be better off using a more popular browser with just a VPN. However I don’t care what browser you use you still need to be careful if you want to stay private.

I’m in reality probably center left. I find that I tend to have nuanced views about a variety of things but I probably wouldn’t hard commit to a particular political stripe. I tend to vote Democrat but I often disagree with them on certain things as well. Sometimes I think they are not doing enough on social and environmental issues and sometimes I think they have gone too far on other issues. There are some republican theories I don’t mind but I don’t generally see this current party actually focused on anything I agree with.

How does it compare to connect for Lemmy?

I’m sorta embarrassed that it’s on my instance. As you point out it’s inactive. Also our community has been very much active in discussing removing them and what to do about them. We are definitely not complicit in it.

Yeah I am with this guy. I am basically willing to die on that hill. The average user does not understand how important the open web is. We are kind of screwed but I don’t know what else to do other than use FF and when people ask me tell them to use FF too.