So one of the gotchas about stopped/disabled apps is that other apps can still call and launch them. I frequently saw my apps pop back up even after being disabled, since I used SuperFreezZ to monitor them. https://f-droid.org/packages/superfreeze.tool.android/

The alternative to that would be an ADB disable. IIRC it takes the app away from userspace completely. It doesn’t touch the system-level though, so a factory reset will bring it back.

If you can’t handle setting up ADB and it’s hoops, there is an app combo that can set up a bridge and run the ADB disable for you: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.samolego.canta/

The real fun started with Android 12. Google introduced the ability for some preloaded apps to avoid being disabled and prevent ADB shell disable.

It was a few years back that I dumped Brave and had to perform the surgery to remove the service manually. I can’t remember the name exactly, but this article says “Brave VPN Service” and “Brave VPN Wireguard Service”. You sound like you don’t have it installed.

If you are using Windows, double-check your services.msc to ensure that the VPN was disabled/removed. After I got tired of fighting, I uninstalled Brave and the uninstaller did not remove the VPN service. So I have my doubts the patch would remove it.

No, after Brave installed a service level running VPN without my consent, and continued to reinstall it silently every background update even after removal, it’s a bad browser. That’s what malware does.

Comparing two companies with poor track records doesn’t make them good companies when compared to each other.

I feel like there was an app from the ACLU or EFF that did exactly that. Locked the device and started recording on panic button combo, and if I am remembering correctly had the ability to auto-upload to a cloud in case of device seizure.

EDIT: Ah, ok I was confused. It was the ACLU Mobile Justice app which was cloud based, but it was shutdown just last month. They point to external entities having access to their database as the reason.

It doesn’t even mention when Brave silently installed their VPN as a service on your system. Which doesn’t get removed when you uninstall Brave. And if you do manually remove it, gets reinstalled on Brave silent automatic update, because that’s also a background running service.

Correct me if I’m wrong but- manually configuring your DNS in the OS would still enable traffic monitoring, wouldn’t it? I always thought DNS traffic is not encrypted by default.

I haven’t followed Kotaku for years. Did they give up on covering video games? Car manufacturing isn’t even adjacent.

Any reason you avoided the official Raspberry Pi Imager software? You really can just configure a headless OS all before flashing the SD card. Choose RPi OS lite from the list, then set up your hostname, username, password, wireless and turn on SSH service. Then all you have to do after flashing is plug in power and SSH in. None of this display troubleshooting would be needed.

Two questions:

Do you have anything between the Pi and Display, like an HDMI switch? Sometimes the Pi incorrectly sets the display resolution if it can’t communicate with the display directly.

Did you use the Raspberry Pi Imager program? You can configure SSH and WiFi, before you even image to SD. It’s how I set up my headless stuff so I don’t have to futz with connecting displays.

I’m sorry I can’t speak for Apple TV, but I do know Roku. I captured about a month of DNS with a Roku device on the network. It phones home about everything. Even better, they hardcoded the DNS server on the device to prevent tampering with ads in their menus. I had to set up a redirect to quarantine it before eventually taking it off the network completely.

Last I recall, the most private method for general streaming was a cheap Android device from Walmart with a custom OS installed on it.

I can skip over any business that only has a Facebook page. Plenty of choices out there…

What I can’t skip is when a political candidate is only on Facebook. I can’t count the number of times I was trying to research candidates for local election and found they only had their policies on a locked Facebook page. Infuriating doesn’t describe it.

Did they comment on why it was deleted? I didn’t see anything in the article. I recall the consensus was that they made so many mistakes the only way to fix it was deletion of the repo.

I also saw in one of the comments of the Arstechnica article that the one who pushed for open-source wanted to clean up the code before publishing. Management said no, the entire team got fired/left, and suddenly the code got published with all that commercial stuff left in. Sounds about right.

I know a few services that would ban a user doing that, thinking that the client is compromised.

Yikes. I’m here for a civil discussion, so if you don’t want to discuss this with me and instead just want to attack me because you think I’m on the opposing team… well, I guess that’s what the block list is for.

I wish you luck in life.

It’s not an excuse though. It’s right there in the error message.

Where are people getting the impression I think google is some kind of saint who can do no wrong? I don’t even see the “proof” that is being used to say I’m coming to google’s defense. Just a few anecdotal theories… just like I provided.

Bot can automate views. It’s why Youtube keeps trying to move towards “engagement”. Comments, likes, etc, all require an account, which is an extra hurdle for bots.

uhhh… what?

Youtube does a ton of evil stuff, but this one is more tame. I suspect the VPN was used to bot and got banned, so the sign-in is required to better target where the traffic is allowed to go, instead of blanket banning everybody using the service.