Rethink does not require you to use their own DNS. You can choose from several or just use the system DNS.

In addition, it has on-device blocklist where you import rules from various public lists. Just like a desktop ad blocker.

And, of course, I have a VPN configured by downloading a wire guard config file from Mullvad and importing it into Rethink.

You don’t count using YouTube scrapers as de-googling because Google might make it break some day? That makes no sense.

On Android, entering lockdown mode does the same thing. You can do it by pressing volume-up and power at the same time, then tapping Lockdown.

You don’t strictly need a PiHole. You can also import a giant hosts file.

having a pull request merged is in no way a proof of ownership of the repo

That’s literally what I was saying! That was the entire point of my comment!

their own preferences for tab width… ending up in an identation abomination

Can you give an example where a person’s personal tab width breaks things? One tab per logical indent, and then spaces for alignment. How does this break anything? I know for a fact it doesn’t or else people like me wouldn’t advocate for it. What breaks indenting is mixing tabs and spaces for indents, and obviously that’s foolish. You can’t blame that mistake for causing an “abomination” when it’s something that would violate any code style specification, whether using spaces or tabs. You yourself could set your IDE to emit only 2 spaces when you hit Tab, and that would also violate your code style spec if you mix those indents into a file with 4-space indents, and that has nothing to do with tabs at all.

Doing stupid things in the code that violates the code style are stupid things that violate the code style. No matter what whitespace you use. But having a personal setting to see 8 spaces per tab isn’t one of them if you only use tabs for logical indenting and not for alignment.

All tabs or all spaces for indents result in the exact same thing: good looking code. But tabs then have further advantages. Easier outdenting, better accessibility, etc. The only benefit to forcing spaces is that some random program you use for code comparison or whatever might default to something other than 4 columns for a Tab and your code looks a little wide until you change your settings. That’s nothing compared to the advantages of tabs. Turns out that “benefit” of spaces is actually a drawback because no one is allowed to view the indents as anything but whatever column width you personally think it should be.

Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment. It’s perfect. Lets people visually indent as much as they want in their settings, but manually aligned things stay manually aligned. Forcing indents to always be… whatever number of spaces you personally like is dumb.

Plus then you can outdent with a single Backspace in every text editor ever.

Am I stupid? How is this in any way confusing?

I kept re-reading this line and it made no sense. All I need to do to claim ownership of a project is merge a pull-request? Do I own Laravel because I’ve gotten a pull request merged? (emphasis mine)

Merging a pull request and having a pull request merged are two completely different things, and one very much requires you to own the project or have contributor rights to it. Which is exactly what the scammer is looking for proof of.

How was the author confused by this? Or am I somehow the dummy here?

Even with just HTTPS they can’t see anything other than the domain name. With VPN, ISP’s only see one domain: the VPN itself.

Every modern VPN that having an app which runs continuously on your device will do DNS over the VPN, too. I’m just saying that, if you configured the DNS yourself, on a Raspberry Pi or something, maybe you didn’t change your DNS and maybe its leaking.

You should also make sure your web browser isn’t set to use something else like Cloudflare. In Firefox, this is controlled through the “DNS over HTTPS” setting. You want that to be OFF.

A good VPN provider will have a tool on their website to check for DNS and WebRTC leaks. Mullvad VPN has this, for instance.

I don’t think so. The first step when connecting to WiFi is to agree to the terms of service that allow the manufacturer to legallly spy on you. Without agreeing to that, they’d be breaking the law.

You really need to read the article, and specifically the linked article within that details the court proceedings. Anticompetitive behavior is illegal, and Google did lots of it, and did so blatantly, and deleted evidence of doing so.

The 30% they charge isn’t the issue. The issue is the anticompetitive actions they took to keep themselves from ever having to charge less than 30%.

I don’t have a choice when using the app, though I have been removing the tracker from the URL.