I’m sorry, but that’s private.

I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do about it.

I don’t think you quite understand just how stupendous the amount of data Google processes from YouTube alone is. There is basically no way for hobbyists to provide an equivalent service. Very few companies have those kinds of resources. If you want, you can of course try running a PeerTube instance, but you rather quickly run in to problems with scaling.

I find it almost miraculous YouTube exists to begin with. It is no accident Google has very few competitors on that front, and I don’t think YouTube is even profitable for them. Without Google’s deep pockets and interest in monopolizing the market, YouTube would have withered a long time ago.

Trust me, I want a solution too. But 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. All of that is processed, re-encoded, and saved with multiple bitrates. You can’t compete with that. YouTube might eventually keel over from Enshittification and its own impossibility, but replacing it with anything meaningful will be a challenge.

I bought Tales of Maj’Eyal from GOG and have been playing the Linux port. Yeah, I’d say it’s my favorite. Even if I hate it sometimes.

They were, but as I understand they are once again independent. I’d still rather stick with Librewolf, but I’m glad there are options.

Seriously.

The last time I remember Firefox having serious memory leaks they called it Firebird. Guess I’ve been lucky. Or in a comfortable ignorant haze.

UK is still a member of the Council of Europe and ECHR. It’s confusing, but those are distinct from EU, which the UK is not a member of anymore.

Well thanks a lot, now I’m sad.

Check out Posteo. It’s affordable and focuses on privacy.

Okey, it’s like this: You and youtube both generate two keys, public and private. Public keys are public, anyone can see them. Doesn’t matter. When you send a message to youtube, you encrypt it with their public key. Now, the trick is, the encryption is asymmetric, which means that the message can only be decoded if you also know the private key, which you never send anyone but keep hidden. Right? This way, as long as your private key is secure, you can not realistically decode the encryption from outside just knowing the public key. Thus setting up a secure connection is just an exchange of public keys.

This is more or less how I understand it.

As I understand it, the account is on your machine only. If you delete your profile, it’s gone, unless you made backups. But I may be mistaken.

Have you looked in to Jami?

Public forums aren’t private, no.

My pp is plenty small. Thank you for your concern!

Not sure what is going on there. With me, scrolling jumps around but it’s usually related to opening and closing the virtual keyboard. For some reason opening the keyboard messes with the screen position. Annoying, but not unusable. A reinstall may be in order, but pmOS recently had broken installer images, so try to make sure that’s fixed before doing that.

I’m following the stable branch and upgrading when a new version drops. pmOS has been pretty good, but every now and then a full reinstall has been necessary. I’ve been using PP since the Mobian community edition.

Yeah, PinePhone is currently one of the few acceptable options available. Affordable, fixable, private. Even with it’s flaws, it’s pretty good. Unfortunately mobile linux needs to mature a lot before other companies will jump in, but lack of hardware and attention seems to be still hampering the development. A conundrum. Still, all’s not lost yet.

Broken how? It’s buggy but usable for me.

PinePhone with postmarketOS and Mobian as a backup OS. It’s good enough for my needs, but I do wish Linux phones had more options. For one, I’d like a smaller phone than the PP.

I decide what speech is welcome in my home.

Amen.

Well, fuck the trees then, I guess.

I pay 1 euro a month for e-mail that I think is secure enough. I think that’s it at present.

Alan Turing was instrumental in breaking the German Enigma code for the allies.

Cartoon? ‘Tory’ literally means ‘robber’.

Yeah, it’s a clever one too. And dark. Excellent joke.

I’ve stuck with DuckDuckGo for years. It’s mostly gotten pretty good if you search in English. Other languages can be iffy.

Sure. I try to disable or disconnect cameras and microphones when possible. My laptop’s camera has tape on it and on my PinePhone I’ve disabled the camera with a switch.

I don’t know, you seem to be asking a lot of questions and that makes me suspicious…

I know. I recently bought a new gaming console and damn, it’s a mess. I’m going to sell it because I just can’t accept what console gaming has become. I miss the NES.

I hate this future. Even when we get cool tech it’s thoroughly tainted by privacy issues and advertisement.

Cats don’t have accounts.

Throwing in Posteo for your consideration.

Hear hear!

I am not a product for these corporations to sell.

Well color me surprised.

Why would you ever think that?

Recently? This is a long time coming. Users have been accepting all kinds of shit from big players without complaint. Even if they protest it’s usually just performative and they keep using the services, sites and software that violates all kinds notions of user and privacy rights. Most people unfortunately are (understandably) not equipped to really even understand the kind of shady shit these companies pull on the daily. The internet is going to shit and its users will gobble it up and ask for more. It has been frustrating watching this happen, but there’s really very little that can be done.

Check out Posteo.

Choosing a browser has been picking between terrible choices for a long time now. It’s a shame.