(Not that person)

1 File transfers can be done via apps like localsend, pairdrop/snapdrop (selfhosted, I wouldn’t use the public servers), or simply putting files on a shared server, etc.

2 This is impossible to correctly answer until the new phones are actually out. Reason being we don’t know the restrictions (or hopefully not) that Apple will arbitrarily apply to the port. The iPad, for what it’s worth, can easily mount USB C drives and other accessories, so, hopefully Apple continues in that vein of sanity

3 no

4 my iPhone is my actual phone phone and the pixel is wifi only.

Your first point is made irrelevant by the law existing. It doesn’t matter what Apple says now, they must comply or face fines for violation. Maybe they’ll bring that up at a future court hearing to which I say: I hope the EU imprisons Tim Cook if they try. Why? Fuck em that’s why

They’ll very likely try some fucky shit. Good news is 1) simply the existence of proper alternatives, even if required to be sideloaded, is a MASSIVE step forward and 2) I assume the EU will pursue them if only to suck money from their coffers. Blocking it to a EU citizen who is outside the EU absolutely violates the spirit of the law and the EU should come down on Apple with all their power if/when that happens

I personally use Fennec and Bromium whenever using Android (I’m a sick fuck who hot swaps between an iPhone and a Google Pixel phone). Fennec for a lot of stuff is fine, but much like the default Firefox, it’s still slow- although better. Bromium and other Chromium based browsers on Android, especially on older shittier hardware, are really hard to beat. I find myself using Bromium a lot just because it’s simply faster. Firefox/Fennec with native support for actual ublock origin though… nothing beats that browsing experience as far as replicating real desktop browsing. Bromium can’t keep up and Google doesn’t want Chrome to. Brave can offer a similar blocking experience but at what cost? I fucking H A T E crypto and even their features that you can turn off, just seeing references to them and such pisses me off. Honestly wish someone would spitefully fork Brave anonymously and remove any crypto references. Last time a team did it openly Brave got pissy and tried to get the project taken down… Even though it’s open source. So, fuck them.

Do you have ublock origin installed? It eliminates all those popups in my experience.

This is pretty much what happened, yes. I’d offer an important expansion on “innovative features” though. Chrome was objectively faster at everything. Loading pages, starting up, all that stuff. If all you care(d) about was a super fast, modern-feeling browsing experience then Chrome was all there was.

I was one of those “fuck Bill Gates!” dudes circa 2008 or 09 or whenever Chrome came along. I had been using Firefox for years because, I dunno, nerd shit. All my nerdy buddies used it and said I should use it, so I did.

And then Chrome came along and like you say Google was the cool kid on the block. They were building out Google Fiber (remember that? Feels bad), “taking it to the man ™️!” in the form of ISPs. Oh God, how I wish they had won that fight… Even the might of Google proved incapable of breaking the collusion of government and corporations that empower the ISPs in the US…

Anyway, Google was, if I’m being fair here, doing an amazing job with PR.

They were building up and out Android OS, providing an actual competitor to Apple’s (basically) first to market iOS.

Mozilla simply couldn’t keep up. It was already pretty niche pre-Chrome, but post-Chrome it was just IE/Edge and Chrome basically. Firefox was left far behind by the general public, forgotten and, if remembered, remembered only as “the browser for nerds.”

I’m back on Firefox now after Google’s billionth threat to end adblockers in Chrome. That plus Google’s clearly unethical practices. I don’t agree with everything Mozilla does/has done and some of the stuff that comes prepackaged in Firefox is unnecessary in my view, BUT there’s little point in denying their superiority over the competition in many ways.

I let people play on my lawn just to bring balance to the universe. Unless they don’t clean up their dog’s shit. Then old man mode erupts.

Normie is incredibly common online in general. It’s not just relegated to weird right wing sites either.

I’m in my mid 30s and even I gotta say… you sound a bit like “old man yells at cloud” with this take. Just chill out a little bit. You’re making the rest of us approaching-middle-agers look bad.

And if you’re somehow younger than me then I gotta say… actually, keep it up. Your apparent lack of being terminally-online (oh no, I used a recently coined term…) is definitely healthier than whatever the fuck the rest of us are doing.

Revanced has sponsorblock though and has for a while

I was using Heimdall and it was having some weird corruption(?) issues. Switched to homarr when I saw it the other day and it’s great. It has small icons (for phones) medium (for like tablets) and large (for desktops/laptops) all can be changed independently so you can optimize for mobile and desktop usage. Très bien

Which is annoying tbh.

Would be nice if the smart whatever (see I forgot their app name already while typing) team would… team up somehow with the revanced team and they agree on one name, one app. Having two apps for what is essentially the same OS with a different skin is… silly. Like an app for Apple TV and a different app that does essentially the same thing for iOS.

I see updates from as recent as last week on github?

On that note, if anyone sees this comment or another and wants to try YouTube revanced (or extended) DO NOT JUST BLINDLY GOOGLE AND CLICK THE WEBSITE THAT COMES UP FIRST

I have no idea if that site is owned by a legit dev or not. What I do know is the legit devs directly say on github, where the source code can be reviewed, to NOT download from any other place than github.

Sorry for the PSA but I just don’t want people downloading possibly malicious code from random sites. It’s easy to fall into the blindly search, blindly install hole.

I think it’s just the ease of GUI for people. This isn’t to shit on anyone, btw. A lot of people don’t like dealing with the keys and IPs involved, few as there may be, with setting up wireguard.

If someone else has a compelling difference or reason to use tailscale then I’d be happy to hear it. I tried it once and it worked fine enough. But wireguard works just as fine and takes the same time to setup if you already know what to do. Like wireguard seriously takes 2 minutes.

There’s absolutely no way they force the usage of apps. How would people without smartphones use their websites? From a laptop, on the website? And if they use a non-standard browser like a fork of some weird shit? I know financial places are run by 70 year old boomers but there’s no way they’d try this as it just goes down a rabbit hole of constant IT work. Certainly not every bank anyway. The entire concept of a place even thinking to do this is hurting my brain because it’s some incompetent. You either hire a million CS people and try to fix problems all day or lose all your customers instantly. A large portion anyway. If this is true for the UK then that little island is gone in more ways than I previously knew. Pure incompetence.

Anyway I wasn’t assuming you were dumb, just maybe hadn’t tried it for some reason. It’s like asking if your computer is plugged in and the switch is on first.

You can just use the websites for any bank or credit card, etc. instead of the app. It’s less convenient and usually a way shittier experience, but, that’s the price of not using Google (or Apple, Microsoft, etc.)

Use Firefox on desktop

Use Firefox (or Mull or Fennec- both are forks) on Android. I have Bromite too for times Firefox is being fucky.

On iOS unfortunately due to Apple’s (soon to be lifted) browser restrictions, the default Safari browser is basically as good as any other since Apple forces other browsers to basically just be reskins of Safari (forces webkit usage). I do recommend Firefox Focus if you want stronger, Brave-like adblocking without using Brave obviously. Focus seems to block close to the same level as ublock origin + Firefox on a desktop. It’s barebones by design though, so not ideal for everyone. I know Google/Mozilla are working on non-webkit Apple App Store approved browsers for next year when that law goes into effect (might not be available officially for NA users, not sure how that is gonna play out yet. Hopefully EU sues Apple for $100B for doing that if they do.) Hopefully that means official actual gecko based Firefox is coming fucking finally. Firefox with ublock is all I ever asked for. I’d even take Safari with actual ublock but unfortunately Apple is Apple, the annoying little fuckers.

What extensions does chrome have which are useful that Firefox doesn’t?

My only recurring issue with Firefox, which may have been fixed I dunno, is it for some reason it “isn’t officially supported” or whatever exact wording to use hardware security keys (like yubikey, which I use on every account that allows it). It’s only certain websites that don’t want to work though. Like google, Microsoft and many others were fine but I think paypal didn’t want to work properly but it does work on Edge, Chrome, probably Brave. Overall annoying as fuck at times but I deal with it to be out of Google’s-world

That’s one of the coolest things he’s ever done though. You’re redeeming Trump in my eyes right now

See my problem with stories like this is everyone walks away thinking “the good thing happened.” But this isn’t a resolution. It’s halfway there. In a sane society if you make an obviously insane request like this for a bullshit and insane reason you should face consequences for even trying. And I know that makes people uncomfortable and “but the legal system!” comes up a lot. I don’t care. Change it. The CEO and every lawyer that ok’d this request from the court towards reddit should bare minimum be fired and probably fined/face their own criminal charges for even trying this shit.

To me this is effectively the same as finding a diary on the ground that says “I smoked crack and sold a gram to my sister in 10th grade” and some overzealous insane person tries to have a court force somebody who saw them drop the diary to reveal the identity so they can be prosecuted for a “crime” far in the past which very well may never have happened. I mean, if we’re going to have a dogshit legal system, and we do, the least we can ask from the multibillion dollar thieves (the capitalist corporations) is they do their own goddamn detective work. No, don’t find hypothetical posts. I can post that I shot JFK. I time traveled over 2 decades before I was born and I did it. Is the problem with trying to use anonymous “confessions” not surface level obvious? There is no evidence beyond the confession! And I’m no lawyer, but generally speaking a confession alone won’t convict anyone. Actual evidence is required. Assuming this shit was actually done, piracy occured, the ISP won’t keep any sort of logs that long and the odds of their harddrives containing that specific media years later? Doubtful. Maybe the judge breaks the law and allows a more broad warrant not just limited to specific movies. I think a skilled attorney gets that evidence tossed anyway since it was gathered illegitimately. Basically it SHOULD BE goddamn nearly impossible for them to ever prove anyone ever did anything like this without the person walking down to the local FBI office with their harddrives in hand, ISP logs and a written confession of all the shit they pirated since middle school. Maybe mention the time they stole gummy bears from their cousin in 3rd grade too.

I dunno, this shit just pisses me off because it’s so brazen and also just so fucking lazy. Like, put some fucking effort into being assholes for fuck’s sake. Trolling through decade-old reddit posts where some dude vaguely referred to his ISP letting him pirate is the best a billion dollar studio can do? It’s just sad really. The CEO and lawyers should voluntarily resign, go home into a dark room, and commit seppuku. We should really bring that tradition of failed higher-ups having at least the dignity to fall on their own sword (literally) back.

The right wing militias could be dealt with easily, but no one wants to just do it. You declare them armed enemies of the state, make lists of the leadership and anyone associated that you can, go in like a military conquest with blackhawks and all the firepower, take them all down, shut down all their sites, and then immediate take down anyone in the following months who wants to do lone wolf shit saying it’s because of the raids. Yeah it won’t be pretty, but some short term asspain is better than decades of them just existing.

That’s how you’d do it, but tbh, my biggest problem isn’t the worry but rather the absolute knowledge that the feds could do that any time they wanted easily. But they wouldn’t stop there. They’d turn around and have to “both sides” (because advocating for equality for humans is the same as genocidal death cults, according to many liberals (which is both republicans and democrats)) the shit and start rounding up all 12 of us socialists in the country. So, I have mixed feelings on it. Currently the answer from me is do not do it. If there’s a significant push from actual leftists (no, not the disgusting libs like Pete or another Biden) into power then I’d advocate for immediate destruction completely and utterly of all the Nazi-related groups. No mercy for Nazis. People used to think that was something to say and mean it. Guess those days don’t exist anymore based on how people never want to advocate for what’s necessary to destroy the dealth cults.