In terms of escaping targeted government surveillance, Australia is not the country to be in. If the Australian government is targeting you, there’s no escape.

In terms of escaping mass surveillance and of keeping your personal information private, Australia isn’t that bad. Simply the fact gmail is allowed to operate in the country means it isn’t great either though.

Strengthening privacy laws around rental property applications is currently the main privacy concern for me, and recent state law changes have marginally improved that.

I’m considering swapping from Proton Mail to Fastmail. The fact that it allows 3-year subscriptions is good (I’d prefer a lifetime plan but I understand why that’s a non-starter), the fact that it’s based local to me is good too.

EDIT: I wish it also at least offered a rolling 3-year subscription.

They look at CCTV, take an violentcustomer.jpeg, and add it to the database.

EDIT: Oh I see what you’re asking. You misread my quote, what I said is “they only scan for” and not “they only scan”.

The way Bunnings used facial recognition was as private as it could be … mostly. It is possible to run all of the facial recognition locally, but instead they run it on a central Bunnings-controlled server in Sydney. They only scan for faces of known offenders based on previous entanglements.

My concern isn’t surveillance, but mass surveillance. Because this is exclusive to Bunnings it doesn’t quite reach mass surveillance, but because the processing is centralized and Bunnings is so big it edges dangerously close.

Still this isn’t Flock, nor Palantir, nor Google.

It’s more that the lawyers have a lot of power at Fedora, because America is a failed state.

I currently use Fedora but I’d swap to OpenSUSE if I didn’t already install Fedora. None of the software I wanted to install worked on OpenSUSE but I remember my time with it so fondly.

For me the specific dealbreaker is the price. Specifically because it’s not the price of a artisanal search engine, it’s the price of an AI chatbot (both in terms of the dollar value and what they’re spending it on).

And now, to read that site’s article on javascript and see if I need to rethink whether disabling Wasm and WebGL by default is enough (Edit: That article is just a list of vulnerabilities and a guide on how to disable javascript).

it’s not worth for $10

I subscribed to the $5 plan last night for that very reason, and then immediately unsubscribed because it was the most user-hostile search engine I’ve ever used. Limit of 300 searches per month, with the 300 AI interactions that I’ll never use being a separate category. There’s also a cap of 1000 sites in the personalized results. Worst all all though the theme made my eyes bleed and every time I refreshed the page trying to get it to apply the custom CSS it ran up my 300 searches. Oh and also they only show you a maximum of two pages of results FFS. Bloody hell the issues are endless.

I just wanted the ability to uprank good sites, and downrank or block a handful. Being able to brand domains as trusted is the best solution I can think of to AI polluting search results.

DuckDuckGo allows me to block 5 sites and sync that between browsers but not uprank or downrank them.

Brave allows me to uprank and block, but not downrank or sync between devices. And it doesn’t let me uprank the au TLD (which is far more restrictive than com or org). Also after upranking anime-planet.com and searching for “The Apothecary Diaries” it didn’t show up in the results at all unless I appended “site:anime-planet.com”.

Didn’t they recently cut undersea communication and power cables in Europe?

In which case you might not even have the option to install GrapheneOS.

I still don’t get how you would cool a data centre in space. Radiative cooling is so slow.

Is your new phone provider providing a carrier-locked phone?

T495s here.

Not happening.

Games would become Epic exclusive before they give up their KLAC, and that would hurt Steam far more than it would hurt Denuvo. Steam would not make such a poor business decision.

If I were Steam, I’d insert barriers to purchases a Denuvo game. No promotion on the Steam storefront, a warning before purchase, etc.

EDIT: I thought Denuvo was KLAC for a second. Please disregard this entire reply.

Also pineapples are gross.

The Democrats make it pretty clear that they do not care about our votes, or about beating Republicans. We have to organize outside of the Democratic party infrastructure, while reluctantly voting for the lesser of two evils.

I’m not really against AI, but AI does change the reality of using the internet. I need to be able to promote trustworthy domains in my search results and accumulate such a list over years.

Brave search technically has such a feature, but firstly the owner is a homophobe, and secondly the feature isn’t really as power-user oriented as I’d like.

They’re a luddite, if the site wasn’t down then I’d doubt their credentials.

And they’ll suddenly throw away that excuse that they’ve relied on for decades, just to spite the world’s developing countries by cutting USAID funding a few months sooner?

The Democrats famously adhere to American norms. Do you think they’d suddenly start bypassing congress and appoint a special government employee to go around causing chaos? They’re entire identity is “we’d love to, but we can’t because of congress”.

Why? Why do you say this? You keep getting trapped in this idea of the DNC being “more moral” in actions, despite their actions still propping up imperialism and protecting it.

I literally just explained.