I recently bought a replacement PC for my dad because of windows 11 (though his old computer was also over 10 years old so it was a somewhat fair upgrade, anyhow). Someone suggested I use Ninite to quickly bootstrap a lot of the programs he’d use and I was honestly surprised. It was genuinely no-nonsense and got the job done. A rare nice thing in Windows…
Yes. The owner/developer is Kape technologies, an Israeli spyware/adware company.
For maximum privacy, I recommend VPN providers with a jurisdiction outside of Five Eyes and other international intelligence-sharing agreements – that is, one headquartered outside of the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. So it initially seems like a positive sign that, while CyberGhost has offices in Germany, it’s headquartered in Romania. German entrepreneur Robert Knapp says he founded the $114,000 startup on the back of low-wage Bucharest labor before flipping it for $10.5 million in 2017.
The issue is who he sold it to – the notorious creator of some pernicious data-huffing ad-ware, Crossrider. The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users’ browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.
Crossrider was so successful it ultimately drew the gaze of Google and UC Berkeley, which identified the company in a damning 2015 study. (You can read the Web Archive version of that document.)
This practice, commonly called traffic manipulation, is condemned web-wide. And the only difference between it and one of the oldest forms of cyberattack, called man-in-the-middle (MitM), is that you clicked “agree” on the terms and conditions.
Whether or not PIA or ExpressVPN or the other providers owned by Kape fulfill this data scraping and ad-serving pipeline in my mind is irrelevant. Choosing to do business with them rewards bad actors when there are other VPN sellers who don’t have such a tainted lineage.
I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of an open internet. Taking a few legitimate problems and exploding them up to destroy anonymity online. And VPNs are not the solution when using privacy-preserving workarounds are either outlawed or just don’t work on any major website.
That it goes hand-in-hand (especially in the USA) with a neo-fascist right wing in control opposed by the most limp-dick “left” is extra troubling. What was the inception point for this trend? Oct 7, 2023? Were too many people shown images on TikTok of Palestinian civilians being mercilessly bombed?
Sad part is I like the design, but it’s been over-exploited by big tech corps for the past 8 years so now I have to hate it because of the new symbolic meaning it has taken.
A redundant comment already made by someone else: to consider the power draw of the computer if you leave it on 24/7
One thing to keep in mind is the IP address might not reflect the actual user’s location.
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I have long contended that the computer industry is course-correcting with Android/iOS/mobile. They realized their prior “mistake” of letting people actually own, control, and modify their devices. Apple and iPhone is the worst in this regard.
It’s like he selectively forgot about the Snowden leaks
Love to expand my business infrastructure in a country that’s actively perpetrating a genocide. Very cool.
More necessary than that, really.
don’t run untrusted scripts from the internet on your computer.
CEO Sam Altman warns that the rollout presents unpredictable risks.
But that doesn’t prevent his profit motive from consuming untold amounts of electricity to shove this into your face. They know what they’re doing. They know their product is used primarily to generate spam, and secondarily is designed to form addictive faux-relationships with their users.
Burn in hell. Actually, given the direction this is all going, we will all be burning in hell within generations.
The macbook pro is the perfect laptop except for the Linux hill that I must die on. Every time I look at other offerings, they all fail just like Nate is saying in some regard. Screen. Speakers. Keyboard. Touchpad. Thermals. Battery life. The MBP is truly best-in-class hardware. But I just want to use Linux…
“Holy smokes!” – in response to something not that interesting occurring
You’re spending a lot of effort complaining about your working conditions and then you see other people complain about their working conditions and your response is to get mad at THEM instead of the capitalist system and exploiting class that keeps them and you perilously employed and in your case seemingly while you’re sacrificing your body.
Pick the right targets for your invective. Instagram uploaders aren’t making your life worse.
I’m extremely excited to announce that huge companies never lie, especially when they self-publish these kinds of reports. Therefore, I trust this primary source fully.
edit: I don’t want to be misconstrued. I am not saying that their environmental report is a total lie or distortion of the truth, either. I’m saying you cannot over-rely on primary sources when reporting on them.
Your last paragraph implies that I’m naive for believing that complaining about it will make it go away, but I’ve done no such thing.
the market will sort that out
This is the naive statement.
I’m overtly anti-llm. I don’t think it’s dramatic at all to be so.
Enough has come out about how much power and water datacenters used to train and run it consume, people being driven insane by it, investors hoping to displace jobs with it, how over reliance on it diminishes your mental faculties, people from minors to adults using it to create deepfake porn of minors (literally it’s on lemmy rn https://lemmy.ml/post/32581009), its use in overt misinformation (particularly from our modern warzones and disaster areas), overt theft of writing and artistry to train these things, and last but not least: limitless spam.
I’m affected by most of those things indirectly, but the spam affects me daily. Can’t search for something on the net anymore without being served f-tier LLM-produced garbage.
So what are the good parts? Doesn’t seem like they outweigh these bad parts, whatever they are.
Signal is good so far. Firefox is teetering on the edge, but it’s also good so far (poor little fox). Lemmy and Mastodon are both great, but maybe that’s EZ mode because they’re built as alternatives to proprietary social media sites.
I pay for ArsTechnica and I feel that I get a lot of value out of doing so. And keep in mind, being a paying subscriber of a service does not safeguard the service from enshittification, so that’s quite great