How much longer will each of us keep using YT? It feels like the end is coming. Of course it all depends on each person’s values and choices. And how fast YT tries to ratchet us down.

Capitalists hate capitalism. Competition is so irritating, because someone might undercut you. (And other people would cheat to win, just like you would, so you can’t ever relax.)

You’re talking about the wrong thing. The Mozilla Foundation is and has been acting a fool in recent years. Firefox, the open source program, is doing mostly OK. Obviously the two are closely connected, but they’re definitely not the same thing, and this matters when discussing policy.

Now now. If Mozilla is breaking the law here, of course someone would report them for it. There’s no need to shoot the messenger when everything was predictable.

I appreciate your apprehension. Fortunately, you don’t need to speculate. Go try it and find out.

That’s true but it also depends what attack vector you’re trying to defeat. If someone is doing a timing attack and you’re running through a VPN, it might be harder to work for them, depending on where they sit.

The potential for timing attacks has been known since the beginning of Tor. In other words, more than a decade. But that doesn’t mean you can’t defend against it. One way to defend against it is by having more nodes. Another way is to write clients that take into account the potential for timing attacks. Both of these were specifically mentioned in the article.

Based on what was in the article and what’s in the history books, I’m not sure how to interpret your comment in a constructive way. Is there anything more specific you meant, that isn’t contradicted by what’s in the article?

It’s curious that you claim privacy and anonymity are clearly differentiable but didn’t bother to define either of them. Is your claim accurate? We have no idea, because we don’t know what you’re talking about.

George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, and Corey Doctorow already covered the basics, and two of those authors did so decades ago. Why are you asking this question now? What is it that you want to hear that they didn’t already say? Or are you asking us whether we’ve read those authors?

You’re the one who brought in a personal political view, and basic history realize your claim, which is why you didn’t actually cite any.

I mean, what’s a good example of cancer culture? If some white guy says something horribly racist, and then he loses an election, he complains about cancel culture. But that’s a good thing, because we don’t want racist bastards in office. Of course he doesn’t see it that way. So he looks for some new term to describe the phenomenon, some way to make himself a victim.

The term itself was created by right wing people who decided to deploy it against those they didn’t favor, as an excuse to justify their own bigotry, but the idea of public shaming and goes back centuries if not millennia. Quite naturally, the establishment has a strong interest in public shaming if it will keep them around longer.

You can do DNS in multiple ways. The question is what you try to do, or what your software tries to do.

Joke’s on you. Many of us stopped buying TVs years ago.

Of course he keeps his credit card number and such private. So he cares about privacy.

What you are talking about is related to privacy, but about others’ actions. How can companies and governments abuse us by spying on us? That is where we see interesting things. If I wanna fix my car with a $50 part but it’s off brand so I gotta pay $500 instead, that’s not cool. If McDonald’s charges me more for a Big Mac right after pay day, that’s messed up. If the grocery store charges more for a box of eggs because their ID system knows the customer is poor, that’s messed up. And this is the present and future. These examples are all about privacy, control, and equality.

You know corruption is there somehow. Revolving doors, friends of friends, that kinda stuff is unavoidable. We can try to limit the effects, but it will never totally go away.

It sounds like you have isolated yourself. That is a choice you made, that you can change in the future.

Also, words matter. Meaning matters. You might die alone many decades from now, but almost certainly you won’t be executed. When you’re feeling down and you intentionally choose words that are false, you’re feeling your own state of mind.

I think we should be precise. The badness began before generative AI. Generative AI makes things worse because now you are less sure when you’re looking at total junk, but the junk ratio itself doesn’t depend on that.

What you talking about as apathy, that’s not what’s happening. Google has 90% or more of the search market because it’s the default, because it pays to be the default, even when it’s worse than alternatives. The only people who are actually apathetic are the ones who know that alternative exist, are relatively easy to switch to, are superior, and still don’t. That’s not the majority of users.

I used to enjoy watching, but after you take a few years off, it’s not something you’d casually pick back up.

I think that’s a matter of perspective. IMO it didn’t work, it was broken, that’s why we’re even talking about it.

Nope, sorry. That technical hurdle is easily solved. In reality, this is about advertising and snooping.

They can do that anyway. It’s called credit.