I too hate this trend. A robotic voice answering the phone didn’t bother me, but now some companies have replaced those with AI systems and I find myself becoming frustrated and angry much more quickly with the latter.

It drives me up the walls when people tell me they’re using AI to write their emails now. If you thought USians were stupid already, give it a few more years of AI usage! You can just see people’s eyes glassing over when you try to discuss anything of import. We’ve seen AI-induced psychosis, but I predict we’ll see a rise in dementia rates if we don’t put an end to this.

Edited to add: after some reflection, I think what makes me so angry is the apparent assumption by whatever megacorp implements these that I, their customer, am stupid enough to be fooled or influenced positively by this. It’s condescending.

This is just FUD to herd people into areas where they’re easier to track. Do they really think we’ve forgotten about Snowden? I also highly doubt any of these elected officials give a damn about privacy.

Anyone in upper management or in an executive role, cops, and HR personnel.

Even while I was still a clueless lib, when I saw insurance companies sponsoring the DNC, I knew we’d never get publicly-funded healthcare.

Politics isn’t a sport, and the political compass shit is just the sorting hat for (Western) Poli Sci majors.

I am a Marxist-Leninist with a lot left to learn (and read). I was a sort of ultra-left “Marxist” (firmly in compatible left territory) until I started lurking on here and reading comments by Cowbee and other comrades.

What is to be done? Same as it ever was, build the party of the working class. For a global revolution to even be possible, the empire must sufficiently collapse. A year ago, I would’ve said it might’ve taken another few decades to really get going, but it seems we’ve left the decades where weeks happen and entered the weeks where decades happen. Let’s just say I’ll be really curious to see what happens when gas tops $10/gallon on average in the USA.

Agreed. PCs will wind up being for power users only, both due to cost and the decline in tech literacy.

But also, Nvidia is already salivating at the idea of people streaming games from what amounts to glorified chromebooks. Whether those are actually running a Google OS or a Microsoft one doesn’t ultimately matter - the point is that they will be locked into a walled garden with minimally-powerful hardware. Can such a device even really be considered a PC anymore?

If you are able to set up OpenWRT on your router and run Mullvad through that, you can cover your whole network as one “device.”

I recommend everyone get their own modem/router if they are able to. ISP’s don’t provide them for free and you have no idea what monitoring they do with their hardware.

How useful is the heart rate tracker on the PineTime? I’ve seen comments saying it hurts the battery life and isn’t accurate, but I don’t know if that’s been addressed with more recent updates.

I suspect the involvement of the CIA or some of their rogue assets, either mobsters or gusanos. He was allegedly warming towards Cuba, and I think that may have been part of the motivation. Blowback Season 2 made a pretty convincing argument for that scenario.

My “favorite war” is class war. 🙃

I think the main difference is that MB is geared for every user to look the same, whereas with LW every user is presumably unique, but not persistent between sessions.

I haven’t heard of Konform, so I’ll have to look into it. Thanks!

Educate yourself, and question everything. No one is worth following blindly. If you don’t understand the “why” of something, keep digging until you do. Critically thinking is the most valuable skill you can have, so develop it as much as you can.

If the website in question belongs to a tech/hardware company, you could consider reaching out to Gamers Nexus (after you’ve given the owners of the site a reasonable amount of time to address the issue). They’ve published this kind of stuff in the past.

I’m hoping the implementation is something like ‘check this box to confirm you’re over 18,’ and nothing more.

I honestly don’t even know what would trigger that, unless that bank just really hates you using any gecko-based browser.

I generally despise the push for separate apps for everything anyway, but the banking ones are among the worst since so many of them are tied into Google Play. If my bank were to disable its website and only function with an app that required Google Play certification, I’d change banks. I’d be tempted to go old school and do banking in person, but who knows what kind of security cameras they have in banks now.

“Wage theft” is defined as the theft of wages by employers, and it’s actually a crime in several states. “Minimum Wage Violations” would be people being paid less than minimum wage, “Overtime Violations” would be people not being paid overtime, “Rest Break Violations” would be people not receiving breaks, and “Off The Clock Violations” would be people working without getting paid.

Pretty sure claiming hours you didn’t work would be considered some form of fraud, but I don’t see any kind of fraud listed on this graphic.

EDIT: Of course, theft of labor value would dwarf all of this, but capitalists don’t see that as theft.

“Browser hardening” is a somewhat nebulous term; I’ve seen it used for both privacy and security interchangeably. I continue to hear that Gecko-based browsers (i.e. Firefox and its forks) are less secure, but I do not know exactly how that plays out in the real world. Security and privacy are sometimes at odds, and your threat model should help you choose which to prioritize and when. If you don’t know how to weigh them, you may need to refine your threat model.

Vanadium is a hardened browser, yes. I don’t have personal experience with it so I can’t make any recommendations on its settings.

Mullvad Browser and LibreWolf have two completely different strategies to avoid fingerprinting. Mullvad Browser operates on everyone having the same configuration to blend in - if you want to use it, you need to avoid changing any of the settings. LibreWolf, on the other hand, works by spoofing a different fingerprint every session. It will look unique to Cover Your Tracks and the like, but it will be different every time you close and reopen it. Again, it works best if you don’t mess with the settings.

I believe both Mullvad Browser and LibreWolf come with uBlockOrigin pre-installed. Just about anything you want to do regarding blocking ads or scripts can be done in UBO’s settings; do NOT add extra “privacy” add-ons as you will only make yourself easier to fingerprint.

If you’re looking for something to use with actual accounts (like banking), use hardened Firefox (with arkenfox) or a hardened chromium browser. Neither Mullvad Browser nor LibreWolf (and especially NOT Tor) are designed for that use case.

As an aside, you can use multiple browsers for different use cases. I honestly think that’s best practices at this point, but you’d have to be good about not overlapping your browsing on them (i.e., not visiting/logging into the same website on multiple browsers).

Glad to see this. Motorola seemed like a solid choice. Hopefully we’ll get some specs and release dates when they officially unveil it. I know it was pushed back to 2027, so I’m hoping for a Q1 2027 release. I’ve been holding off on getting a pixel in the hopes of getting a non-Google GrapheneOS phone. It would be nice if I don’t wind up having to wait too much longer.