“I need internet at home for work!” - Okay, so plug in the one computer you work on? Do you really need to blast 100% of your home with internet via Wi-Fi, probably not. Even if you do (for some reason), why do you then also have to give little Timmy a Wi-Fi capable tablet at all? Download some episodes of Paw Patrol and let your kid watch them offline…
I know none of this is actually about protecting kids… But even if it was, their reasoning and methodology sucks.
some of the 16 to 21-year-olds surveyed saying they had viewed it “aged six or younger”.
So there may have been a problem at least 10 years ago. Does that problem still exist? (never mind the obvious “is the problem parents ignoring their kids on a tablet”…)
Josh Lane was addicted to porn by 14-years-old after first finding it via a Google search when he was aged 12.
Okay, now let’s address the parents being the problem. By default, Google’s “Safe Search” is on, and the kid actively searched for porn. So no parental supervision of the 12 year old kid on the internet. Someone setup a google account, and changed the default settings to show those results. (oh, but that person is 25 now, so that was also 13 years ago…)
Almost all of the big websites have parental control settings that would alleviate the vast majority of these “problems” if parents actually used them. Parents being willfully ignorant isn’t going to be resolved by legislation. They know that. This is all a smoke screen to put the entire population behind a firewall and control the narrative. It isn’t even a very thick smoke screen.
I just don’t agree. First, I don’t think a monopoly is an inherent part of nature, and further I disagree that monopolies exist because some company just makes the absolute best product and people end up always choosing it. A monopoly’s key feature is not giving the consumer a real choice through shady and unfair business practices.
Also, windows is not the better product. They don’t make the best OS. Arguments could be made that they have a better OS for gaming, but for almost everything else they are worse than basically every alternative (not just Linux) but still dominate market share due to lack of consumer choice. At the retailer, hardware is tied to an OS - if you want macos you have to buy Mac hardware. If you want chromeos you have to by an underwhelming netbook.
IMO, keeping windows around just in case a company does some underhanded shit like kernal anti-cheat or invasive DRM so you can give your support to the company doing the underhanded shit is a detriment to progress.
I’d rather struggle to learn freecad than keep windows around even though fusion360 is easier (for me) to understand, because I don’t want to reward bad behavior. If those of us that can switch don’t, then things don’t get better. I couldn’t have made the switch if thousands of people more knowledgeable and talented before me hadn’t taken the first steps. It’s soapboxy, I know, but I also feel it’s important.
It’s all about where to draw the line, and what you are able to tolerate, I guess. The biggest problem with that though is continuing to support a game / Dev / publisher that is consistently doing these awful things.
If you aren’t able to tell your friends “no, I’m not playing that game, and here’s why” then the industry will just slide deeper into these terrible practices and the entire games industry gets worse. Some people don’t even understand what anti-cheat is doing (and think it works), and if those of us that do, that they trust, don’t explain it to them, they won’t have the opportunity to make an informed decision of whether to support it or not.
Yea, but honestly that’s not a Linux problem imo. Invasive anti-cheat has been a deal breaker for me since its inception. It started as “I don’t want to deal with your shitty software always running in the background eating up my CPU cycles, need maximum performance baby” and then quickly became “I’m not giving your shitty software kernal access to my entire machine, I don’t trust you”.
It’s made so much worse when you realize it doesnt even actually stop cheaters…
All of them i’ve actually wanted to try out I was able to stream via the xbox game pass website in a browser. It is not a perfect experience, but it is “good enough” on a decent internet connection. I understand that if you physically have an xbox you can also run the game on that and stream it to your linux desktop for much better performance and latency, but I have not tried this myself.
That said, it is pretty rare. The only ones I’ve tried that with were fortnite (a friend wanted to play the lego game mode, but it was short lived - starved for content, lol) and starfield (it was free on game pass and I wasn’t sure I wanted to buy it).
Can someone explain like I’m 5 searXNG?
Like, I vaguely understand the terms everyone uses to explain it but I don’t really understand what it does or how it does it. I’ve used a public instance of it that the maintainers of my Linux distro provide and is set as default search on a fresh install. The results weren’t terrible but did take some time to load, which is the main reason I tend to use other engines.
If I self host it do I get better performance? What about results? Are they different on different instances?
Either parents or the school… and if the school doesn’t have a pretty significantly locked down network, that’s a separate problem.
Also, you’re right, I misspoke. While some of the bigger websites have decent-ish parental controls, I was more thinking of device specific parental controls. The amount you can lock-down (and monitor) a phone you give your 12 year old is pretty impressive. I’d rather parents did that than hand the monitoring, censoring, and access over to various government agencies all over the world.