Because alternative clients offer features that only the for-pay official client offers, like subscriptions and playlists, and Google can’t collect data on what people subscribe to or their playlists because in alternative clients, they’re stored locally.
Google doesn’t hate third-party clients because they skip ads: it hates them because they impede surveillance and privacy invasion, which is the true bread and butter of Google.
Google clearly has the ability to break any and all third party client at any time.
My theory is that they’re conducting random campaigns of working-but-not-all-the-time on this or that client at different times to grind everybody down and force them to comply through shear exhaustion. Because if they banned all 3rd party client outright, it would negatively impact the antitrust case against them.
All the invidious instances I’ve tried either don’t work or their API is disabled - Sorry I didn’t see “through your browser”.
Not all invidious instances work. A lot of them have been hit by Youtube. But NewPipe still works - until it gets targeted too I guess. It’s a game of cat and mouse with Google - and it’s fucking tiring.
Yeah but China ain’t a democracy and Apple has their stuff manufactured in China. So you’d expect them to bend over backward to comply there.
The UK on the other hand is nominally a democracy, and Apple has no vital need to keep the UK powers that be happy. Apple could very well decide to tell them to pound sand and pull out of the country for the sake of principles, and I guarantee you the UK would quickly back down.
If Apple hadn’t complied in the UK, they would have lost a bit of profits for a while, and gained a ton of good will and credibility. They chose profits. Because corporation.
Incidentally, this whole thing should tell you how much of a democracy the UK really is.
but the old man at the dog park who only watches fox news isnt inherently evil
I’m sorry but no.
You have the die-hard racist MAGAs with the flags and the red cap. Those can fuck right off obviously.
But you also have all the ordinary folks who are NOT die-hard MAGA, but who decided that it was okay to vote for a convicted felon who tried to overthrow the government. And guess what: in a sense, they’re even worse.
Voting for Trump is crossing a line. If you voted for Trump, I really don’t want anything to do with you because you have proved to me that your sense of morality and your respect for the institutions of this country are compromised.
if you disavow every company contributing to the republican party/trump you might as well sell all your belongs, and learn to live off grid. no internet access, no power, no retail.
As much as possible, I will take my business to companies that aren’t openly terrible.
we just dont live in a black and white world
Tell that to the orange utan. He sure is about to turn the word from RGB to 1-pixel color space.
Do you really think I want to split people into people I can talk to vs. people I want to avoid at all costs? Trump is doing that. He’s forcing shitty choices on everybody. I’d rather have constructive and peaceful interaction with my fellow man. But can you honestly shake hands with a magard and not feel sick to your stomach? I can’t.
Let’s not get carried away. The scope of the comment is pretty narrow if you read it closely
The only thing I want to hear from you is that you actively disavow Trump, or if you feel this is going to hurt your business, at least say nothing at all. Anything other than that marks you as a shameless suck-up, and I want nothing to do with you or your business.
Ergo, I want nothing to do with Proton. It’s time suck-ups pay the price and see their bottom lines drop because of their dubious choices.
It makes sense, but you totally miss my point. To go with your analogy, my point is:
- I’m not interested in playing cards
That’s it.
I don’t care how fascinating the technology is and how clever Apple are: they are not welcome to implement it on my device. I didn’t invite them to setup a card game and I expect them not to break into my house to setup a table.
How hard is it to grasp that I don’t want Apple doing anything in my cellphone I didn’t explicitely consent to?
I don’t care what technology they develop, or whether they’re capable of applying it correctly: the point is, I don’t want it on my phone in the first place, anymore than I want them to setup camp in my living room to take notes on what I’m doing in my house.
My phone, my property, and Apple - or anybody else - is not welcome on my property.
It’s not data harvesting if it works as claimed. The data is sent encrypted and not decrypted by the remote system performing the analysis.
What if I don’t want Apple looking at my photos in any way, shape or form?’
I don’t want Apple exflitrating my photos.
I don’t want Apple planting their robotic minion on my device to process my photos.
I don’t want my OS doing stuff I didn’t tell it to do. Apple has no business analyzing any of my data.
assisted living facilities
Aka retirement homes.
Aka exploitation hospices when for-profits manage them.
My Dad withered in one of them - Catholic-run, too - for a few months until my siblings and I realized he wasn’t fed properly, cared for properly, and the retirement home franchisee was spending the absolute minimum on him in order to keep him alive and paying rent but not a cent more.
Ascension’s data breach is probably the least egregious thing about that company.
Here’s how it works: people who want to upload movies on Youtube create innocuous-looking channels, upload 10 or 20 bullshit videos on them for a few months to make them look innocuous, then suddenly upload those big forbidden movies you want. Youtube doesn’t react rightaway - probably because the channels have been rated harmless by the algorithm over the previous months - and for a few hours to a few days, you can download the movies. Then Youtube takes notice of the traffic increase, takes a look and nukes the account. There are a gigantic number of those sleeper accounts waiting to be activated. They’re mostly created in upload farms in asia.
The trick is finding them. It’s a game of cat and mouse between Youtube and the uploaders, and you want to find the mouse before the cat does. For obvious reasons, the movies are rarely labeled exactly what you want (i.e. don’t look for “Dune 2”, you won’t find it). But there are several keywords you can use to at least find some of them, and then you can follow the Youtube suggestions until you spot the thumbnail of the movie you want. It may be called “This guys fights in the desert and wins” for example, but the thumbnail will unmistakably show some collage of Timothy Chalamen against the desert of Arrakis. Then you can use yt-dlp to download it. But do it quick before Youtube kills the channel.
As for the keywords that will take you easily to burner uploader accounts, my favorite ones are “Blockbusters” (or “Blockbuster movies”) for action movies (that will take you quickly to the same plethora of shitty Marvel, John Wick, Jason Stratham, Liam Neeson, Vin Diesel and Mission Impossible rehashes, so if you’re after something a bit more interesting, follow the suggestions) and “Harlock Space Pirate” to find animes. And for 80’s movies (yes, I’m from that time), I look for… “80s movies” 🙂 I usually don’t find what I want, but again, follow the suggestions.
Finally, to throw the Youtube algorithm, most of those poster also post movie snippets with well-known titles. Don’t get bogged down in those: look at long video and dismiss anything shorter than the running length of the movie you’re after. They won’t have the right title but they’ll have the right thumbnail.
Good luck 🙂
At this point we should just ditch YouTube entirely, but alas.
YouTube is great for downloading movie rips. They’re out there if you know where to look. When you download a movie on YouTube, you’re legally in the clear: Google is doing the copyright infringement. That’s one big advantage over torrents.
I don’t buy the conspiracy theories and “the Man sees everything and needed a plausible excuse” theories (although I’ll admit the Man does see a lot more than he should…)
But I will say this: I find it extremely odd that a random McD employee in Fucktown, Nowhere, 275 miles from NYC, recognized a hooded dude wanted for murder in NYC, for the following reasons:
-
McD employees don’t look at patrons. They’re bored shitless and they’re not paid well enough to care. You could show up at any McD joint disguised as Elton John with a feather up your ass and the employee behind the counter would still tell you “Would you like fries with that” while looking right through you.
-
Do you follow the local news in a city 275 miles from where you live? I don’t. And even assuming it’s NYC and it’s a big enough city that people in Altoona pay attention, there’s a murder every 12 hours in NYC. Why would that one in particular enter the consciousness of a bored employee in a burger joint in Altoona.
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Can you recognize a hooded guy you saw on a still photograph? I can’t. I might have suspicions, but I’m almost certain I wouldn’t be positive enough to call the cops. And again, I work at McD and all I really want is go home after my shift. So I might just forget I saw someone I might have vaguely recognized.
Is this in relation to the monetary value of cryptocurrency or the anonymity of cryptocurrency?
Cryptocurrencies are just fiat currencies, like the dollar. They’re worth what people think they’re worth.
My beef with them is that they’re either pushed by scammer to empty honest but gullible people’s bank accounts, or they’re used to pay for illegal activities because they’re totally opaque and unregulated. My other beef is that they’re really securities and they’re not subject to the rules on securities for a reason that totally escapes me.
I don’t do cryptocurrencies both out of financial self-preservation, and also because I refuse to participate - and thus promote - stuff that’s generally bad for society as a whole.
And if you’re not convinced cryptocurrencies in all their forms are rotten to the core, consider this: Trump loves em. That alone is a red flag big enough to hang on a pole in North Korea.
MySudo is a proprietary aliasing software
Hard no.
Privacy.com is a proprietary financial transaction masking and aliasing tool.
Hard no.
Google Pixel phones
Hard no.
Yes, I know Pixel phones are the best option to run the best deGoogled OS out there (Graphene) but paying Google to escape the Google surveillance is just too rich for me. I’ll never get over that one. Fuck Google, even if it means running a slightly less secure OS (CalyxOS from the fine Calyx Institute, which you rightfully list).
Cryptocurrency
Hard no. I don’t partake in scams, even for the sake of privacy.
Other than that, great list. Thanks!
The stock Fairphone runs the stock full-blown Google spyware stack. Privacy isn’t Fairphone’s selling point: it’s repairability.
You can install CalyxOS very easily on it however. That’s what I’m rocking on my Fairphone 4, and it’s great. I have no issues with it.
That’s the catch: you can’t not use Google at all if you’re online at all, because Google has managed to insert itself into every little corner of the internet.
And that’s how the surveillance trap has quietly snapped shut on all of us without most of us noticing anything.
George Orwell had it wrong: the surveillance isn’t conducted directly by a tyrannical dictatorship but subtly, indirectly by the private sector in cahoots with the government. And the date he predicted was 40 years off. Other than that, he was right: we live in a full-blown dystopia now.
I use a calyxos device to share VPN, as of a few months ago.
Hotspot & Tethering
- Allow clients to use VPNs
Oh wow I totally missed that. It works great! Genius!
Thank you for that. Suddenly it makes repurposing one of my old cellphones a very simple and viable proposition.
(and I’m posting this from my laptop connected to the hotspot connected to the Calyx VPN 🙂)
get a older cell phone. Put lineage OS on it, or calyxos… share your VPN over hotspot, these are the only two ROMs that I’m aware of that allow you to do that
That’s what I thought too. So I tried it on my CalyxOS phone and… it doesn’t work: the hotspot doesn’t route through the VPN. And from what I read, it’s by design.
I have an old Nokia 4.2 running LineageOS. I might try that one.
end-to-end VPN
Incidentally, do you know if the GL.iNet devices can act as a VPN server too?
At this point, I think China is well known for infiltrating local businesses and forcing them to sell networking gear with trojans.
The US is better known for surveilling people indirectly by exploiting corporate surveillance data collected by big tech monopolies doing their bidding for them and by directly “tapping the line”. I don’t think US officials asking US companies to compromise their products and keep quiet about it would fly in the US. At least not yet. But I wouldn’t put it past them either.
To be honest, of all three, I’d rather purchase something made in Europe, even for a premium.
What software do you use to forward the texts automatically?
Actually I kind of had the same idea but for the whole phone - i.e. leave a cellphone with phone features at home (so voice and texts are received on this static phone that never gets used for anything else) and forward calls and texts on another cellphone with data only. But I don’t think there’s anything to set that up easily.
It’s okay if you’re fully in control and it’s built with redundancy.