[Richard Stallman] usually does not browse the web directly from his personal computer. Instead, he uses GNU Womb's grab-url-from-mail utility, an email-based proxy which downloads the webpage content and then emails it to the user.
If you're not doing this you're not properly paranoid.
This is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics. Every hack in the business has used it in times of trouble, and it has even been elevated to the level of political mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas.
The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumour campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows.
“Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-f****r,” the campaign manager protested. “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”
“I know,” Johnson replied. “But let’s make the sonofab****h deny it.”
Mandriva was a Linux distribution that went out of business years ago. OpenMandriva is one of the projects that rose from its ashes with some of the same personnel and code base. It is an independent (not a fork) and community run distribution that, I think, does quite a lot with very limited resources.
I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do about it.
I don't think you quite understand just how stupendous the amount of data Google processes from YouTube alone is. There is basically no way for hobbyists to provide an equivalent service. Very few companies have those kinds of resources. If you want, you can of course try running a PeerTube instance, but you rather quickly run in to problems with scaling.
I find it almost miraculous YouTube exists to begin with. It is no accident Google has very few competitors on that front, and I don't think YouTube is even profitable for them. Without Google's deep pockets and interest in monopolizing the market, YouTube would have withered a long time ago.
Trust me, I want a solution too. But 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. All of that is processed, re-encoded, and saved with multiple bitrates. You can't compete with that. YouTube might eventually keel over from Enshittification and its own impossibility, but replacing it with anything meaningful will be a challenge.
I had Windows 8.1 but as the end of its maintenance was approaching I saw the writing on the wall with Windows 10 and especially 11 and I wanted no part of that. When 8.1 was put to pasture I returned to Linux and I have been content ever since. Seeing where Microsoft is taking Windows I'm more and more convinced that Stallman Was Right. I control my software, not the other way around.
After Thunderbird's UI overhaul I jumped around a bit and landed on Claws Mail. It's fairly old fashioned, but I personally prefer that and find it clear and logical. It's a good client.
He does appear to be reasonably black, yes.