Yeah it’s very weird, no idea what happened there. Maybe someone had somehow sent me a link and it was looping in the background? No clue. I gave up trying how teams and teams groups work a long time ago, the implementation is a major shitshow.

My employer. Who owns the laptop. And forbids me to fuck around with it…

I haven’t heard of either, let me check if I can run those with my user profile and not break anything I need to log on to our corporate network in the process.

It’s really not as crazy as the media makes it sound like on a general basis, but yeah. Ever since covid even the last person realized what rights remain when the powers that be go wild. My days here are numbered anyways, just a few more weeks.

Not that I’m aware of, but I’ll double check.

Been poking around a bit more, and found another entry in the Firewall that comes up right on boot, which is a service called MS.Edge.Webview2, which seems to be triggered through the Teams App (that I did have on autostart). I’ve now completely uninstalled Teams, and after a fresh boot the ad (or “media control”) seems to be gone now. Guess I’ll be using Teams from my phone or via browser in the future. No idea how that happened though, I never played any video through Teams.

I tried and it doesn’t update, even after a clean reboot with no browser open whatsoever. However I did find another entry in the Firewall that comes up right on boot, which is a service called MS.Edge.Webview2, which seems to be triggered through the Teams App. I’ve now completely uninstalled Teams, and after a fresh boot the ad (or “media control”) seems to be gone now. Guess I’ll be using Teams from my phone or via browser in the future.

Not for the sake of being able to use Linux, no. On other terms most certainly.

Yep I can access the hosts file, that’s a great idea. Will give it a shot. I just hope those aren’t IPs that MS is using for genuine requests of applications I have to use such as Teams or Outlook… But will give it a try, at least if anything else breaks, I know what to do to resolve that. Thanks for the tip!

Thought of that as well, but all ads are blocked and I get this popup even with the browser closed and after a full reboot (not just suspend and reactivate), so it must happen on system level, I assume. Checked my run on startup applications and services, and they appear to be clean as well.

I live in China, policies are to be followed. There is no “but”, and I rather pick a nicer hill to die on, when it comes to that.

Proton Desktop is not linked to your phone in any way, so enabling stealth there doesn’t have any impact on your device unfortunately.

Interesting to hear about Mullvad, maybe they did change the protocol around! My backup had always been Windscribe, they give you 10 GB traffic for free, but the reliability in China went downhill over the last year.

But my days are numbered now anyway, will be out end of July, and still got Astrill prepaid until November or so, so not going to experiment too much now.

You need to go to settings and under protocol select stealth. The other connection types are blocked in China.

Mullvad doesn’t work here at all.

The most widespread one is Astrill, though it’s quite pricey. Used to be the only one that works consistently; but Proton is a decent alternative.

My cats never cared about toilet paper, so over all the way.

Nope, according to the article, someone told her how to restore the tabs from the session file.

Oh nice, thanks! Will give it a shot.

I have disabled and uninstalled it, but office 365 still enforces it as the default save as location, so now when I use the dialogue, the system hangs for 30 seconds. Even disabled it in the policy management, but no dice.

Just sign up for their API and use chatboxai.app (free software), use the GPT4 API code, and you’ll use the model through an alternative front-end for pennies on the dollar.

I’m using it extensively and rarely spend more than 1,20 - 1,50 a month.

Not FOSS but free - ReadEra, it’s working extremely well. No ads or anything, the only feature the paid version has is cloud sync of your library, and sync reading progress across devices.

Been using it for 8 years or so, bought it at some point just because it works without a hitch since basically forever.

You really don’t, humans are by and large social animals, so while you might be able to suppress that feeling, there’s little chance to get rid of it entirely.

I agree with the other comment though that you need to build general social circles first and foremost. That’s how most relationships start anyway, through mutual hobbies and interests.

Just don’t go waltzing into any hobby gardener meetup with the only thought in mind to find a partner, but rather get involved with something you care about and then see what happens. Be that a book club, board game session, arts & craft stuff, sports, or whatever, just make sure it’s an actual interest of yours.

And if it’s the no sex part that contributes to your insecurity, then seriously, find a paid companion. If that’s illegal where you’re at, find a place you could go without repercussions. I’ve seen people transform over such encounters, no matter how frowned upon it might seem in society.