Why should it be? A faulty software update from a 3rd party crashes the operating system. The exact same thing could happen to Linux hosts as well with how much access those IPSec programms usually get.

And both of these companies build and purchased more renewable energy sources than all 100+ countries combined. Microsoft has committed to be carbon free by 2030, and while I don’t belive in their commitment, they at least seem to be trying contrary to most nations. They even invested in nuclear plants for their power needs.

You can fault both companies for a lot of different reasons, but in terms of carbon emissions due to power usage, they are better than 99.9% of the countries on that list.

Google builds entire datacenters with their own transformers and power lines, if not their own powerplants. You plug these datacenters directly into the high voltage networks that don’t have big capacity problems.

The low voltage grids in residential areas on the other hand were build as cheap as possible, so increasing the load by 20% is already too much for most of them.

They get that same location data with or without maps. As long as you are using stock android, Google knows exactly where you’ve been even if you enable airplane mode. They get your position with WiFi networks and other phones around you and store that data with timestamps. Maps doesn’t give them any extra data, it simply binds you into their ecosystem.

Tbh, that’s pretty much the only thing Youtube did in the last few years that I can’t really complain about. I despise their business tactics, but using your VPN to get regional prices just fucks it up for everyone. In first world countries, it’s one or two hours of work. The same price in poor countries would be up to a monthly wage, that’s why it costs them less. Abusing this will only end in most companies removing regional differences and blocking VPNs completely.

There are other methods to get the same functionality, use them instead of creating problems for others.

As long as even basic features like push notifications are locked behind Google services, I’d hardly count that as a win. The Google monopoly on android is even worse than the Microsoft monopoly on PCs. Microsoft has at least some good alternative with the current Linux environment, but Googles only competitor is apple with an even worse system.

Sure there are projects like LinageOS and GraphenOS, but both are still reliant on micro G or containerised Goggle apps.

The majority of people play at least some competitive games and most of those simply don’t work due to anticheats. These game usually are also the most important ones to them.

And you didn’t understand what I said. While you can not monitor closed source at the code level, you definitely can monitor the apps behaviour. Even the automatic threat protection from the playstore protect function is worth more than the measly amount of people looking through smaller projects codebases.

I hate Google with a passion, but with all their control over android devices, they are more than capable of scanning apps for malicious behaviour and automatically removing them. These few apps in the article are the 0.01% of malicious apps that their algorithm didn’t detect.

If we are talking about bigger projects with hundreds of thousands or millions of downloads, than this may be true. But smal scale projects have so few people actively looking through them that even to automatic scan done by the playstore has a higher chance of catching malware. It doesn’t even have to be bad intent, two years ago there was a virus propagating trough the Java class files in minecraft mods which reached the PCs of quite a few devs before it was caught.

I don’t dislike FOSS, a lot of the apps I use come straight from github, but all this talk about them beeing constantly monitored by third parties is just wishful thinking.

How is that even supposed to work? These search engines need per definition massive databanks to search through. Either you need your own crawler and indexer which is more than just inefficient, or you are limited to a relatively short list of curated static results.

That’s just your bubble. Most VPN users just want to circumvent geo restrictions.

Besides that, the general VPN “propaganda” is that it encrypts your traffic and no-one can see it. The average user gets baited by that and doesn’t care to look further into it.

Can they find out?

No, not really. The Metadata doesn’t have a “pirated” flag and something like the product key doesn’t get saved. Microsoft themselves probably know due to their telemetry but even they can’t be bothered about it. I would bet that even you send a pirated document to the Microsoft CEO, they wouldn’t notice or even care enough to look for it.

But as always there is the important rule of “don’t fuck with work stuff, ever”.

It’s already questionable why she is editing company documents on here private PC without either a dedicated and remotely managed work particition + VPN or an O365 online work account. These documents fall under far stricter data safety regulations and the way it is right now, she is personally liable for any data leaks.

Thats probably 1500$ in apple parts. These parts most likely already include R&D costs as well as the additional increase for their brand.

Firefox is not the better browser in anything but privacy. Maybe it could win in customisability, but that’s something only a few percent of users care about.

It has longer load times and sometimes breaks sites entirely while using about the same resources. Yes, the reason for that is that website creators don’t deliberately support it, but the normal user only cares about functionality.

I still use it and recommend it to anyone that asks, but saying that it’s the better browser is just delusional.

You don’t play many competitive multiplayer titles then. Anticheat us always a pain.

Battleye and Easy Anti Cheat are Linux native, but just cause that’s the case doesn’t mean they will work. Half of the games using them either never had an official linux version or are currently broken again.

A few games using Xigncode and nProtect work too, but there the number is even lower.

Punkbuster worked on wine for 5 years but often needs to be installed manually.

As for the more aggressive ones like Riccochet and Vanguard, you can’t even run them in a VM environment.

I don’t get what the issue is with eliminating unnecessary jobs. It doesn’t create any extra work for the customer (you have to place all items on the conveyer and put them back into the cart either way), it isn’t offloading any extra work to the other employees and it saves anyone involved a fuckton of time.

1. Running fibre really isn’t as complicated as you make it out to be. The only problem is that you can’t do any 90° turns, so just running it along the walls isn’t possible. And the fact that the lasers each cost about 30€ for your standard 10G connection isn’t really helping either.

And I really would like to see the job where running fiber gets you $200/hrs, i would switvh to there on the spot. The most complicated part is splicing 2 cables together and that isn’t all too hard with the right tools and machines.

2. The article isn’t talking about cables at all, but rather the ethernet protocol that is used as a standard for data transfer for a long time now. It has nothing to do with the debat over fiber vs. copper.

For pictures that problem was fixed barely one month after the hype began. With good prompts and a second round of editing through the AI, that’s a complete non-issue.

You’ve got tax, insurance, retirement plans, trainings…

The average wage will be around 200k. Still a lot for the average person, but not much for an experienced programmer/ sysadmin.

If we are talking about malware and vulnerabilities, home users are a far bigger and easier target then corps.

Corporations have a custom firewall, proxy servers, VPN connections for all clients and double safeties for all important processes. While they are an interesting target for big organisations like terrorists and secret services, they have near to no value for the average Internet thiefe. Even if one could get in, there are no bank accounts lying around with money in them.

Home users have none of that, once you are on their PC you get everything. Sure their bank account will only net you a few thousand on average, but you get it easily.