Because TurboTax lobbied to change the narrative to “we already have private market solutions for tax, therefore the government hosting a no-cost option is actually wasteful and bad for the budget”

That’s generally true under the paradigm of profit maximization unless you reach some sort of insane tech breakthrough, which deepseek seems to have accomplished

Oh my bad. According to another commenter it is sandboxed though

They have Google services but through a third party wrapper called MicroG, which keeps it sandboxed to a degree that you can keep it from doing system-level actions like this

edit: not microG, as evidenced by the strikethrough I put in very soon after receiving the first of several replies clarifying the situation. I would encourage you to read one of them before adding your own. <3

Ideally, I agree wholeheartedly. American gun culture multiplies the damage of every other issue we have by a lot

One or more parents in denial that there’s anything wrong with their kids and/or the idea they need to take gun storage seriously? That’s the first thing that comes to mind, and it’s not uncommon in the US. Especially when you consider that a lot of gun rhetoric revolves around self defense in an emergency/home invasion, not having at least one gun readily available defeats the main purpose in their minds.

edit: meant to respond to django@discuss.tchncs.de

Keep in mind that the 5 billion figure is literally just from food insecurity and famine during and following nuclear winter.

More people would die in the explosions directly, and more would die from the resulting fires + building collapses + radiation fallout + infrastructural collapse.

Given that most targets are population centers and military targets (often both), it doesn’t look good.

But yeah I mean there probably would be some survivors.

I’m pretty sure the traffic for the ads still gets sent to your device over the Internet, it’s just that the ad blocker keeps it from rendering in your browser.

I wonder if Fedora would have a toolchain for networked credential management, with its connection to RedHat and everything

Initial public offering

Imo their issue was in not forming a broader union coalition before picking their workplace

Perhaps they are bad examples, but my point was more that I think those ecosystems thrive in spite of the company that owns the upstream at this point more than because of it. They did tremendously useful work getting the projects off the ground but it ostensibly seems like they get in the way more often than not; that said, I haven’t done any open source work on either of the two. I’d be interested to hear your take, I could be pretty far off the mark.

Honestly my main examples I’d point to right now are situations like manifest V3 and Android nitpicks like the recent Bluetooth 2-tap change; don’t get me wrong, they are easy to fork and have thriving ecosystems in terms of volunteer dedication, but those forks still primarily targeted towards technical users (with some exceptions) and companies selling devices like the Freedom Phone (and other, actually neat, useful, properly privacy focused devices which is awesome!). By far, however, most users are on the upstream branch due to “default choice” psychology and have to deal with the bullshit that’s increasingly integrated into the proprietary elements that Google seems to be making harder and harder to separate from the open source ones. I suppose that’s why education and getting the word out are all the more important though.

Could be the sensationalist end of the tech news cycle getting me spun up on an overall inaccurate view of things.

There is also the point I have to raise that security update support is always a very valuable asset that can be worth dealing with some downsides to get ahold of. I’m hoping a lot of those can be pulled into open source projects on more of a piecemeal basis where applicable?

I’d be happy to be proven wrong about my rudimentary assessment. I have enough things to be doomer about and honestly it would be nice to have one or two fewer!

Chromium is still open source, as is Android to some extent. I get that the two companies (Google and Proton) are in completely different size classes, but something being open source doesn’t necessarily mean it stays healthy. Sure people can fork it, but the issue tends to lie in continuous maintenance by volunteers against continuous maintenance by a large company that’s constantly adding in anti-features along with desired ones.

I’m not necessarily saying Proton will go down that route, but trying to become big and bundled as a value proposition opens the door for that behavior once they get enough people locked into the ecosystem.

A “privacy” company acquiring and centralizing various projects to be under its umbrella seems kind of worrisome to me even if it’s done with pure intentions.

Except for phantoms, which you can’t turn off on Bedrock without bricking achievements

I had my suspicions that the issues I’ve been running into are mostly because of the worsening botting/scraping situation, and in part due to the general very slight preferential treatment Chromium browsers get on the wider Internet, where anything weird coming from Firefox automatically looks more suspicious because it’s an underrepresented browser already.

I typically just look up “Firefox Hardening Guide” and follow what looks like the best of the first few results every time I do a fresh install. Because of that, I don’t know exactly which guide I followed last, but this one echoes a lot of the steps I remember taking. I’ve since turned webRTC back on because it kind of broke discord(… I know, I know, discord is terrible for privacy but it’s where all my peeps are at!) Didn’t tweak everything outlined in guides such as the one linked, but pretty much whenever there was privacy to be gained seemingly without significant website breakage, I’d toggle it.

The user agent thing was bizarre, especially since it was also on Minecraft.net! I swapped to a generic Chrome on Windows agent and it instantly started working again and let me use the site as normal again. That said the user agent thing doesn’t always work… But the fact that it does sometimes may be a clue to why websites seem to hate my configuration.

I don’t use a VPN currently

I have found that it happens more frequently with sites I’ve either not been to before, or not visited for a long time… Again it does seem to go away after 20 minutes or so for any given website, I just find it weird that it seems to be happening more.

I might have been exaggerating the degree to which this happens… It’s been only around 5-10 occurrences since the start of the year, but it happened so rarely before that point in time I barely noticed. Could also be a coincidence, it’s just barely enough though that I’ve been starting to get suspicious and wonder if anyone else was having issues

But yeah no VPN or anything and it’s occurred across 3 of my devices, only thing in common was Firefox and that I’ve taken steps to harden it on all of them

No, I haven’t had/used a VPN while this has been occurring. Main reason I made the post was that it has started affecting my work computer as well trying to access files from various websites for pdf specs