route my traffic to a different country where I don’t live in and them viewing my activity is potentially less of a problem

Depending on where you live, and where your service resides, this could be tricky.

In the US, for instance, if you’ve chosen a provider in Australia, then a FVEY agreement could be in place to share that data. This gets around the technicality that intel gathering is not occurring on US soil and is not being done by the gov.

And again with the US, if you’ve chosen a country that’s not amiable to sharing user data, the US could very well be justifying that country as a target for pilfering data anyway.

So, that would leave choosing a service provider within the US, which should need to go through the FISA courts for any access to citizen data, but who knows after the Snowden revelations.

I guess that’s the state of privacy if you’ve got a nation state that’s targeted you for surveillance. Only way around it I can think of is data to be encrypted in transit and at rest, and only you control the keys. But that’s not something that’s going to happen with something like mainstream email anyway, too inconvenient for most folks (and you also don’t know if your recipients are security conscious either).

No I hate MS. I won’t ever forget the pain that was developing edge cases around Internet Explorer (fuck IE 6, that shit was the worst).

The first two and the last three are the same

I read that as “all five are the same”. And I’m like damn, don’t want to work in a slaughterhouse if that’s true for you!

I had to squint at the “Quart Bags” one, and was really hoping it said “Queso Bags”.

As in, you had some legit purpose for needing to put Costco brand "Que Bueno’ nacho cheese into a ziploc bag on a regular enough occasion that it warranted 3d printing a dispenser for them.

I think I will ponder this for my nightly meditation as I fall asleep tonight.

That’s a feature. Statistically, comment quality is inversely proportional to it’s depth.

Don’t go deep diving!

(And this is /s if anyone’s wondering.)

For me it’s funeral potatoes, or half the desert dishes from various potlucks that would happen in the chapel gym.

Jokes on them though, all those recipes are posted online now! Don’t need a temple recommend for that shit lol.

It has a teleporter inside, and the loaf got pulled out too early.

Did you see that ludicrous display last night?

I’ve been using mine for 10+ years, maybe changing batteries once.

I currently use it with a NUC loaded with linux mint, and have the UI HD scaled (it’s an out-of-the box option).

The only native functionality of the actual smart tv that I use, is the power button.

Full article here (wayback machine; the original was partially behind a paywall for me).

All the scientology malarkey aside, it’s bananas to me that anything electronic is the purview of the US Copyright Office. It’s insane to me that the RIAA/MPAA et. al. lobbies have been so successful in getting the US government to do their bidding.

My wife flips her fucking lid.

I’d go with state actors first.

When a particular social media platform is centralized, you can buy yourself a say percentage of stock and have sway over it (cough tencent), or have a useful idiot ruin the platform (cough musk), or another useful idiot to run propaganda you like anyway (cough truth social, cough fox news, cough newsmax…), or yet another that will sell out it’s host country’s citizens for cold hard cash (cough facebook).

But when that social media platform is decentralized? Well, then you’d need to figure out how to poison the well early on to stave off adoption. The Saudi Arabias, UAEs, Chinas definitely don’t like the idea of lemmy, and it’ll be way harder for them to control if critical mass is hit.

I work in enterprise IT, and whenever I see new announcements from the C-suite offices that include the words “streamline” and “merging”, I can tell things are going to get worse, way worse.

I shouldn’t be surprised anymore that execs truly believe they have the perfect solutions, all of which actually make things worse, way worse. No difference to them, they’ll just fall up anyway.

Oh shit fam, another catalyst to hopefully help critical mass along.

Congrats to the dev, now they’re not dependent on the whims like the enshitifier that is spez (fuck that guy).

“No, they’re minerals! Jesus, Marie!”

It can also happen if google can’t obtain/verify an id with their normal means (e.g. ip + browser type/settings + cookies + …).

I get challenged all the time and I’ve been on the same static consumer ip, but I go through some precautions to make it more difficult to id me (dump all browser state on restart, disable js except for trusted sources, ad blocker plugin, privacy conscious browser + settings, etc.). I still use a vpn in certain scenarios, but still get captchas either way.