I’m not sure what “safe” or “mostly private” means to you in this context. The Vodafone filtering proxy might stop you from visiting some websites that host malware.

My aunt spent a long time working in education in the USA, much of it in leadership roles. When she incorporated lessons on critical thinking into the curriculum, it resulted in a lot of pushback from parents who did not appreciate their kids applying the lessons at home.

People who actively resist the use of critical thinking will seem cognitively impaired because they are, in fact intentionally impairing their cognition. My intuition here is to blame religious fundamentalism, but that’s not a well-researched position.

Any attempt to regulate big tech needs to be gated on big tech sized user counts.

Violent racist rhetoric posted to a forum with 20 monthly active users might lead to one lunatic ranting on a street corner to be ignored or mocked. The same thing posted to Xitter sparks riots.

It looks like it offers:

• A virus scanner or application firewall
• A filtering proxy intended for blocking websites known to be associated with malware
• A service that notifies you if certain personal details are published in public, but shady lists
• A filtering proxy intended for keeping kids from accessing content their parents don’t want them to

It is possible this would involve keeping a log of your browsing activity. Most of it doesn’t sound especially useful, especially in the likely-crappy form an ISP is going to provide.

the permission known as “Draw Over Top” that’s required to do screen recordings/screenshots.

That’s not exactly intuitive. I had no idea that permission would allow an app to take screenshots. The warnings given on the permission screen mention other risks, but not that one.

It’s open source. The alternative, if project governance actually starts making problems for end users is that someone will fork it. Cloning the plugin/theme repository makes that a bit more hassle, but it’s entirely doable.

That’s not to say there’s no room for more CMS projects. Wordpress is a little clunky, and variety is good.

If only there was some way to find out. I guess we’ll never know.

Zero. It seems like software is increasingly expecting to be deployed in a container though, so that probably won’t last forever.

Television as a medium, defined by scheduled programming became obsolete as soon as internet-based streaming became viable. The viewer being able to choose what to watch and when is vastly superior.

Piracy was viable a bit earlier, and I quit watching traditional TV then.

I hate the whole bloody smartphone ecosystem for shit like this. Microsoft Palladium was widely seen as a nightmare scenario when it proposed ceding a bunch of user control to the OS and app developers a couple decades ago, even by the mainstream press. It seems Apple and Google used it as a roadmap, likely because people don’t know how to use computers, and that doesn’t seem to be improving.

The part of the modern mobile OS security model that does have merit is that apps aren’t trusted. The PC model, even in multiuser operating systems with fancy permissions was that apps are user agents which are always doing something the user asked for, and therefore trusted as much as the user. The glut of spyware for Windows in the early 2000s proved that false.

The fact that somebody else doesn’t know how to use a computer shouldn’t force me to cede control over mine to participate in the modern world. Root is a bit of an escape hatch, but it’s a blunt instrument on Android, and Google tries to help app developers stop me from using that as well. I’m starting to feel like Richard Stallman was right about everything and I should go be a digital hermit, only running software I compiled from source.

I don’t know where you live, but it is not normal for prospective employers to ask for your medical history most places, and is legally questionable if not outright banned under the anti-discrimination laws of many countries.

Power corrupts, and concentrations of power attract the corrupt.

It can be subtle, such as business deals just favorable enough an impartial observer would say they’re not bribery. The not-bribe leads to a not-favor. The lines become blurred.

I see no reason to believe that it is.

I find it useful when outside the USA to be able to communicate with American luddites who refuse to install messaging apps.

Messages between two Apple devices are safe, and messages between two Android devices are safe, but messages between an Apple device and and Android device are vulnerable.

This is not very accurate. Some Android devices come with Google Messages, which will use Google’s encrypted version of RCS if the carrier supports it. People who don’t know what all of that means should not assume their messages are encrypted.

What they probably can do is issue an update that lets owners point it at third-party servers, and publish the API. They might even be able to publish the source code, though there’s a chance they don’t own all of it.

Linux is a kernel which is often bundled with proprietary components. Android, for example uses the Linux kernel. The whole desktop operating system you seem to be thinking of is a Linux distribution.

There have been many Linux distributions with proprietary components over the years. SUSE’s YaST configuration tool used to be proprietary, for example. There’s probably something current along the same lines, but there’s not much demand for semi-proprietary desktop Linux.

People who currently use drugs illegally are also forbidden from having guns in the USA. Hunter Biden was convicted of the related offense of lying about it on the background check form.

Yes. I’d rather not be, but most people I know in person use it, and do not regularly view or share content using anything else in a one-to-many format.

What I won’t do is install any of their mobile apps or regularly use their chat. When people try that, I reply hours later using something else.

There’s concern about it where the content has utility beyond art, such as academic research and raw datasets.

That’s not to day art isn’t useful, but much of what people value about it is originality.

Does it count if I already know whiskey is bad for me?