This is Google we're talking about. If their algorithm identifies you as a high value user in a high value location, they'll absolutely shove you more ads than usual. This is why ads companies love tracking people to identify such users.
That's not true. Phone manufacturers need to pay if they want to include Google Play in their devices, it's not free. It can cost as much as $40 per device.
Unlike in the US, unlimited calls and unlimited sms is not a thing in many countries where WhatsApp is popular. In contrast, WhatsApp calls and messages are free. This was quite significant, especially early on when WhatsApp starting to get popular during the J2ME / Symbian era.
Now that everyone use it, if you don't use it you'll be that one weirdo who don't use WhatsApp and people may choose to not contact you at all (especially if it'll cost money to call you). Even businesses and banks have WhatsApp account these days, so not using WhatsApp will inconvenience you if you live where WhatsApp is dominant.
You might not be aware of it, but in India (and SEA), using whatsapp video call is a lot more common than calling using your carrier's phone service. No one would think twice when receiving a whatsapp video calls there.
Right now deepfakes doesn't work well when the face is viewed from extreme angles, so you can ask them to slowly turn their face to the side or up/down as far as they can until the face is not visible. It also doesn't work well when something obstruct the face, so ask them to put their hand in their face. It also can't seem to render mouth right if you open it too wide, or stick out your tongue.
I base this from a deepfake app I tried: https://github.com/s0md3v/roop . But as the tech improves, it might be able to handle those cases in the future.
Edit: chance that the scammer use a live deepfake app like this one: https://github.com/iperov/DeepFaceLive . It also supports using the Insight model which only need a single well lit photo to impersonate someone.
Could be because they have more users slowing down the repo servers, especially for debian as it's used by a huge proportion of docker images, which tends to pull a bunch of packages during the build process eating tons of bandwidth.
Nvidia cards are mostly working fine these days as long as you're not using Wayland. If you're using Wayland, be prepared to encounter lots of minor annoyances, and perhaps some bugs that completely break your workflow depending what you're using Linux for (e g. on server you don't have to deal with sleep issues, but in desktop it's an annoyance while on laptop it might be a deal breaker).
You' can try installing yt-dlp. That one is still actively maintained. YouTube also actively trying to broke it, so the one available in debian repo might be out of date.
The only time I see websites break on Firefox is due to Firefox blocking their tracking script and somehow the website doesn't work because of it. In those case, it's not the browser's fault that the website doesn't work without the tracking scripts.
Other people mentioned Google Meet doesn't support background blur in Firefox. Firefox is actually capable to do that in the past few months, but you'll need to spoof your user agent to chrome, so it's not Firefox fault.
I got curious and started looking into this. Looks like you can enable background blur in google meet if you're using the latest version of firefox, I just did myself to confirm.
All I need to do is by spoofing the user agent in about:config, by setting general.useragent.override to Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36.
"I've got nothing to hide" is not a good enough reason to give up privacy. "Watch out for terrorists" is not a good enough reason either. These days, "Think about our children" seems to be the argument of choice to encourage people to voluntarily give up their privacy.
It's not that simple. Google is now a major driving force in the web standard consortium. Forking Blink doesn't stop Google from pushing more and more ridiculous web standard. The only way to stop it is by reducing chromium market share which will also reduce Google influence in the consortium.
This browser monoculture stuff will surely bite our asses someday. I just hope Firefox (and its derivatives) would still exist to take chromium refugees when Google show its true color in the future.
I do all my personal browsing on Firefox now. I'm still using chrome, but strictly for work stuff. It's nice to keep those activities separate, especially since many apps I use for work still discriminate against Firefox.
This is Google we're talking about. If their algorithm identifies you as a high value user in a high value location, they'll absolutely shove you more ads than usual. This is why ads companies love tracking people to identify such users.