You are definetly in a bubble, even if its a pretty big one. Owning a pc is pretty much a prerequisite for going into comp-science or working in IT.

Out of all the 30 odd people I know of at my workplace, one other apart from me has a gaming pc, and two others have consoles. The rest doesn’t play any games at all.

Tbh, that’s pretty much the only thing Youtube did in the last few years that I can’t really complain about. I despise their business tactics, but using your VPN to get regional prices just fucks it up for everyone. In first world countries, it’s one or two hours of work. The same price in poor countries would be up to a monthly wage, that’s why it costs them less. Abusing this will only end in most companies removing regional differences and blocking VPNs completely.

There are other methods to get the same functionality, use them instead of creating problems for others.

Proton pretty much always complies with government access requests, and they never claimed otherwise. They, however, don’t have access to the content of your emails due to their encryption, meaning the data they give to governments is restricted to what you give them. They can at most give out your name, payment information, and backup mail if you voluntarily gave that info to them.

If YouTube decides to mangle the original content to fight back… then maybe that’s finally the impetus people will need to switch platforms.

Switch to where? Everything that’s not just a different youtube frontend is either shit or doesn’t pay the creators. Federated FOSS sites aren’t an option either cause once an influx of users outside the tech bubble happens, the server capacity will hit ground bottom.

Nur weil neue Projekte als Open Source ausgeschrieben werden sollen (unabhängig davon ob es wirklich passiert), kann man nicht mal so eben die komplette IT Landschaft umbauen. Selbst in mittelgroßen Unternehmen läuft so ein Projekt über Jahre ab und da gibt es keine Ministerien die dann widersprechen wollen.

As long as even basic features like push notifications are locked behind Google services, I’d hardly count that as a win. The Google monopoly on android is even worse than the Microsoft monopoly on PCs. Microsoft has at least some good alternative with the current Linux environment, but Googles only competitor is apple with an even worse system.

Sure there are projects like LinageOS and GraphenOS, but both are still reliant on micro G or containerised Goggle apps.

The majority of people play at least some competitive games and most of those simply don’t work due to anticheats. These game usually are also the most important ones to them.

And you didn’t understand what I said. While you can not monitor closed source at the code level, you definitely can monitor the apps behaviour. Even the automatic threat protection from the playstore protect function is worth more than the measly amount of people looking through smaller projects codebases.

I hate Google with a passion, but with all their control over android devices, they are more than capable of scanning apps for malicious behaviour and automatically removing them. These few apps in the article are the 0.01% of malicious apps that their algorithm didn’t detect.

If we are talking about bigger projects with hundreds of thousands or millions of downloads, than this may be true. But smal scale projects have so few people actively looking through them that even to automatic scan done by the playstore has a higher chance of catching malware. It doesn’t even have to be bad intent, two years ago there was a virus propagating trough the Java class files in minecraft mods which reached the PCs of quite a few devs before it was caught.

I don’t dislike FOSS, a lot of the apps I use come straight from github, but all this talk about them beeing constantly monitored by third parties is just wishful thinking.

Vanadium is purposefully made this way. It tries to minimise profiling by making your actions noise in a big mass of users. That only works if you use the standard config without anything to discern you.

Mull is the other extreme of this. They try to eliminate fingerprinting by reducing the amount of trackable things in your browser.

It’s hard to say what really is the better option. You can’t completely eliminate fingerprinting, and the more you try, the more you will stick out of the masses.

How is that even supposed to work? These search engines need per definition massive databanks to search through. Either you need your own crawler and indexer which is more than just inefficient, or you are limited to a relatively short list of curated static results.

There is nothing that Valve could change about this with the current way games are licensed.

All your Steam account is is a collection of lifetime leasing contracts between you and the seller. Steam already forces third parties to give you liftime access even if the game is pulled from the store page, but that contract gets voided once one of the two parties ceases to exist, be it the buyer or the studio that sells the game.

Legally binding the games to your account instead of you also isn’t possible since in most countries you either have to be a real person or a registered entity to form contracts.

Yeah, but it lies.

No it doesn’t, at least not if the update isn’t already a month overdue

But a future Windows update will reset them without informing the user.

I’ve done 3 years worth of updates in one day cause I needed too. Pretty much everything was reset including registry edits, but the privacy toggles were one of the few things that stayed persistent. Maybe it’s a EU special feature (wouldn’t be the first), but at least here they won’t change back silently.

I’ve spent ways less time editing the windows registry than I’ve spent trying to fix all the dual monitor bugs with linux.

Windows issues/changes are a 30 second google search away, linux issues often enough require a 1 hour deep dive into multiple forums.

I’d be somewhat ok with Kernel anticheat if they would work, but the simple truth is that they do nothing of value. COD has Kernel anticheat with Riccochet and is flooded with cheaters. Valorant has only slightly less cause riot updates Vanguard more often.

But guess what, it usually takes 1-2 days for new cheats to reach the relevant forums, maybe a few days more until they are more widely aviable. At most cheaters have to spend another 5€ every 6 months, but that’s it. They don’t care, the amount of money spent on accounts every other month is already way higher.

The only two things anticheat like vanguard protects you from is script kiddies that google “valorant cheat .exe” and Linux only players. And the former could just as well be filtered out without Kernel level.

Live service and always online are two entirely different things, and the former isn’t inherently malicious, unlike the latter.

I’d, for example, consider all Paradox grand strategy games as live service with major updates dropping once or twice a year (followed by like twenty bugfix patches cause they fuck up every time, but that’s besides the point). Sure, every major update comes with a new dlc that isn’t exactly cheap, but you also get a lot of free content with each release. All their major titles are entirely different games now than they were at the 1.0 release.

What ubisoft does is just a tacked on battle pass that gets a few worthless items/skins so they can call it live service and have a justification for their always online verification model. That’s purely an anti piracy measure that fucks legitimate players more than pirates.

Their goal isn’t to completely shut this down, Google is fully aware that that’s impossible to achieve. They just want to annoy enough people and make it complicated enough so that the userbase doesn’t grow any further.

That’s just your bubble. Most VPN users just want to circumvent geo restrictions.

Besides that, the general VPN “propaganda” is that it encrypts your traffic and no-one can see it. The average user gets baited by that and doesn’t care to look further into it.

While it does look really cool, I already know that a lot of people will struggle with motion sickness.

It’s a fast paced game and while the trailer suggests that you can stay stationary for a bit, it still shows a lot of fast sprints and dodges every so often. Doing this movement with a controller will absolutely fuck up your entire sense of balance and direction.

I will still check it out, but it looks a bit like the doom VR game that was a great concept but was limited by reality.

Das würde ca. 99% aller durch Werbung finanziert Websiten killen. Klar wäre der Tot des 384. Technik Magazin Clones kein Verlust für das Internet, aber die Folgen wären doch etwas weitreichender, da hat es sich mit jeglicher Art von kostenlosen Content erledigt.