I'm sorry, I was going to reply, but my printer had a forced update and then detected an unauthorized cyan cartridge from a third party, shut down, and called the police to arrest me for violating HP's terms of servitude, er "service".
This is barely related, but I've recently discovered it using Firefox and just wanted to share my misery. If you're not using Chrome with the Google Docs extension, then Google Sheets will REFUSE to let you copy and paste with a right click context menu. But you can just press the keyboard keys to do so, or use the menu options to do so.
Like...what? It works, but they refuse to let you do it with the context menu, despite including them in the context menu.
If you try, it pops up a window and tells you that you have to install their extension or pound sand.
Linux already won years ago. Linux won so thoroughly that Windows 10 includes a Linux subsystem, almost every supercomputer runs Linux or BSD, and the majority of all mobile devices use the Linux kernel.
God, I want a THC vape. Had one once when I lost my job, apartment, roommate, etc, all at the same time.
I couldn't afford my overpriced-yet-shitty $2,000 apartment, plus utilities, by myself on any of the jobs I found. There was nothing to do but wait for a couple of weeks for family to come pick me up, so I said screw it and got a THC vape pen. It was the most relaxing two weeks I've ever had.
The pen had a nice big cartridge of Charlotte's Web. I used it A LOT. Woke up in the middle of the night at one point, still buzzed, and decided I should take a break from THC. I needed to sober up to handle adult crap, so I threw the thing away.
Proud of myself for not letting myself become and addict, even though I was high at the time. But still miss it.
Automated content farms to sell ads. So basically, instead of teams of people in Russian content farms like 5 Minute Crafts siphoning money from Google, the AI does it instead.
Another reason why advertising-based economies are stupid. It's a race to the bottom, and every single content creator has to make their content worse and worse, with more and more ads, just to break even. Fucking podcasts have automatically inserted crap now, just shoved in randomly, based on your IP when you download them.
Problem is that one day, it will. I'm old enough to be able to see the difference in how much freedom has been lost online.
It's not impossible. North Korea exists. There's nothing stopping the rest of the world from adopting the same authoritarian regulations and technology bans.
That's why people need to be involved in their governments; elections, local regulations, and what have you. It's easy to complain that things aren't perfect, or that you don't like any of the options; but being part of the process, long term, is the only real way to fix that. The more people that give up and say they don't care, the faster corruption infects everything and ruins what good is there. And trying to be clever and say that "one side is just as bad as the other" is not only a selfish lie people tell themselves to feel better about not doing anything, but it actively helps the authoritarians claim power.
The only thing that staves off corruption and authoritarianism is when the people being governed get involved and stay vigilant. Even small things like school board elections matter down the road.
You want to have a free internet? Then vote in school board elections. Seriously.
It already is. For example, it's basically impossible to run your own email server these days, because most big email providers just block residential IPs to reduce spam.
Lots of ISPs block or heavily filter things like torrents.
Your ISP might decide you having a personal server at home is against their terms and force you to make a business account. They don't want people uploading, only downloading.
Some countries are trying to weaken or ban encryption across the board.
And this is only slightly related, but things like websites that let you watch movies or shows are dying. They either all share the same server for video, or they just copy the files from each other. If you find one and watch a video with a little glitch, you're likely to find that same glitch in all the other websites too. Think things like TV logos, audio suddenly changing language for a few seconds, scan lines on old VHS or TV recordings, etc.. There used to be a lot, but now all the small players are being sued or shut down, and only the largest ones are still alive. The noose is tightening.
Nintendo:
"Let's force retro gamers to buy the Switch if they want to play our titles, by pressuring Steam to remove all Nintendo emulators, and by suing Switch emulators into oblivion."
Also Nintendo:
"Why don't retro gamers want to buy our products anymore?"
God, I only use Ublock Origin on Firefox. No TOR, VPNs, or anything like that.
Despite that, there are a handful of Google-related websites like Virustotal that now permanently trap me in repeating captchas. Youtube will occasionally decide to block my IP entirely for a week.
Let me tell you, this shit doesn't make me more inclined to disable ad blocking. Instead, I've starting finding alternatives and using a sandboxed vanilla Chromium for problem pages.
I bit the bullet and was the cringy person at work who said "peeps". After a few months of do this, it was amusing to see the word spread until my boss's boss started saying peeps in meetings.
I had a seller on Amazon give my info to another party who then mailed me unrelated erotic marketing materials with my name and info on it, weeks after my order. I told customer support, and they instantly went "we'll handle it, have a nice day" before I could even tell them who the seller was. I knew who the seller was because despite my info being in the digital order form on the website, they somehow managed multiple typos and mistakes, which the unsolicited mail also had.
It's all pre-scripted bullshit to prevent customers from doing anything about legitimate issues.
I'm still following an open bug report from a year ago where the desktop does weird stuff with AMD GPUs, like randomly scramble graphics or unmap half the screen for no reason.
I've got some older unopened v4 Yubikeys that work let me have when they upgraded to v5. I've been meaning to try them out. Problem is there's no backup. If you lose or break the thing, you're screwed if you didn't have some alternative 2FA set up.
That's a good point, and I do have some 2FA set up like that. The problem is I have to be logged into a computer, have a browser open, have the 2FA extension installed, and be able to copy and paste or type the code in before the timer expires.
That's not hard at home, but if I need to sign in to my bank account while at a library or anything like that, I'm screwed.
I think SMS is popular because it's so easy to reach the people that need the codes, regardless of platform. I just wish it wasn't so bad security-wise, you know?
I'm sorry, I was going to reply, but my printer had a forced update and then detected an unauthorized cyan cartridge from a third party, shut down, and called the police to arrest me for violating HP's terms of servitude, er "service".