Only rich studio bosses and investors are allowed to exploit Hollywood.

As said: it’s not just the current government. As soon as the data is on a government server, it’s every single government for the rest of my life. And that’s a gamble I wouldn’t be willing to take.

And there’s a big difference between a police agency spending lots and lots of time and money to get to the people they’re interested in (gestapo, stasi, whatever) and them already having the data and being able to filter by whatever criteria they want at zero extra cost within seconds.

When it comes to my data, I treat everyone like they’re my enemy. Some of those enemies I do have to trust with parts of my data, otherwise I couldn’t live a normal life but I still would want to avoid giving a single entity (especially one that literally has power over people) too much at once.

Also, I do live in a country with plenty of public services and a more or less functioning government. Still, 20.8% voted for literal Nazis in February and no matter how often I vote for someone more sensible and how many protests I join, that probably won’t make those people less hateful.

Explain to me how running the registry office gives them nearly as much info about people’s preferences as a dating app does. They may know who people are married to and if they have children. From that they might have a rough idea if someone is straight or not and that’s about it. They don’t know if some who’s in a heterosexual marriage is actually bisexual or even uses the marriage as a socially accepted front to hide being gay from their family. The state has no idea where an umarried person lies on the spectrum from aromantic-asexual to bouncing from orgy to orgy on a daily basis. They don’t know if someone is into BDSM, roleplay, doing it outdoors or threesomes. They also rarely know much about non-sexual hobbies.

All those things may show up in dating site profiles or if not there, in the private messages sent between users. And this is not even about a government not being trustworthy now. Anything that gets put in such a site will stay there for the foreseeable time and even the most stable democracy might be just one freak election away from having a weirdo in power who thinks that people who like sex with their socks on don’t deserve health insurance.

Of course that’s also a risk with private dating platforms but at least for those the government would have to subpoena this kind of data from them instead of having it always available without the public even knowing if and what they’re analyzing.

I would rather not have the state sit on a huge database of people’s sexual orientation and other preferences, thank you very much.

Important note: this is about quantum teleportation. They transferred data between two quantum computers without a cable or wifi. Teleporting matter, let alone matter in useful quantities is far off.

Are we sure this is MK8 and not some MK9?

With the trend to make ever larger but thinner phones, we’ll eventually end up with an A3 sheet of paper. I just want the 5/5S/SE1 or Mini form factor back. I don’t care about thin phones, only about being able to use the whole screen with one hand.

Wanna bet if Tesla gets an exception?

Oh yeah, gods forbid anyone plays a game that hasn’t been sold legally for decades…

Ah alright, then they must have changed it since I last added a new app. The last few years I just published updates and they all went through almost immediately.

I doubt that. From what he said somewhere on Pixelfed, the beta is only on Android right now and you don’t need approval to publish something on the Play Store. From personal experience, apps appear within a couple of minutes. On iOS, the usual approval time would be 3-4 days.

For those who want the old tabs back: under settings -> appearance, you can set the ui density to compact (sorry, can’t tell you the exact name, I have my system set to German)

I don’t think “boring” is the right word for Outlaws. It has much less of the repetitive stuff that has plagued Assassins Creed for years now and instead puts in stuff that’s less frequent but more memorable. I’ve played for about 10 hours so far and it’s been the most fun I’ve had with an open world game in a long time. The annoying stuff is mainly bugs (not too many for me so far) and quality of life stuff like infrequent save points. A few patches down the road this could still become game of the year material.

So far I was fortunate enough to not experience the weird AI bugs but that checkpoint system is sooo infuriating. There’s a side quest where you need to infiltrate a rather large imperial base on Toshara and even the tiniest misstep halfway through the quest will send you back outside the base. It’s 2024, my PS5 is powerful enough to just dump the whole world state from RAM to SSD within a second or two. Why can’t I save manually during a mission?

Other than that, amazing game. It just feels like Star Wars in a way that nothing since KOTOR and Jedi Knight 2 did.

I‘ve had the honor to already see a live demo of the first area (perks of knowing some of the devs in person) and the level of polish is amazing. Especially the animations, effects and sound design. Even this early version feels so much more impactful than many finished games. The trailer doesn’t do it justice, so watch out for whatever they show next.

I came into this discussion from the technical perspective (of which I’ve done plenty of research, both in university and in my job) that commercial VPNs don’t do what most ads want you to think they do. Your ISP sees a lot less than they want you to think, VPNs use just the same encryption algorithms as everyone else and while public WiFi isn’t great security-wise it’s not as if anyone will read your bank password the second you connect. I still stand by those claims.

Then, the discussion drifted towards who you’d rather trust with the things that aren’t encrypted (mostly DNS and connection metadata. Someone has claimed that many messengers are unencrypted but I think they have confused a lack of user-to-user encryption with user-to-server encryption), your ISP or some VPN provider. That’s the point where we diverged: as I had no need for a VPN myself (because of the reasons mentioned above), I had not researched individual VPN providers and was not aware that Mullvad apparently has a strong track record. For that I apologize. Still, in a thread that started out with someone not knowing if they need a VPN at all and most discussion has been very general, I would not assume that anyone who comments is familiar with a specific provider without them being named explicitly. Also, I’ve stated in at least three places that I was explicitly talking about VPN providers like NordVPN and Surfshark that are prominently (mis-)advertised. Those I still would not trust further than I can throw them.

But I guess that’s online discussions. We’ve talked about two different things and took a while to notice. I’m thankful for the correction and I hope you can understand where I came from.

I checked and there is only a single comment that mentions Mullvad (other than yours that I’m replying to right now) that’s visible on my instance with no specific explanation why it’s better than other offers other than that you can pay with cash. If I’ve missed something, I promise you that it’s not in bad faith, it’s just that this distinction didn’t come through clearly.

I hadn’t heard about Mullvad before today and a quick look at their website made it look not very different from the fear-mongering you see with the others. Only after your comment I noticed the Why Mullvad VPN link at the very bottom that explains what they do differently. I’m still skeptical about some of the claims and especially of audits that they themselves requested but I’m happy to see that there are providers that seem to be more trustworthy than the ones that are constantly shoved down our throats and I’m definitely happy to have learned something new.

May I suggest that you write a top level comment that explains in detail why Mullvad is better than other services so OP (and others who stumble over this thread) has an easier time finding it?

Edit: minor typos and grammar

Oh I most certainly don’t have much faith in my local ISP. But I have even less faith in some VPN startup funded by venture capitalists who may or may not be cutting corners on security to save a few bucks on their ends even if they’re not actively malicious. At least my local ISP has been around for decades and is closely monitored by both a government agency and independent customer protection groups.

And yes, I do live in a place with a very strong regulatory framework. Our ISPs are bound by the EU GDPR and our highest federal court has confirmed multiple times that even saving connection metadata without a case-specific court order is illegal. Sure, they could break those laws but a commercial VPN provider can do just the same with the difference that not as many people would notice.

Sure, if you know that your ISP abuses your data, go ahead and do something. Though I would recommend changing ISPs before you give even more money to some other company who may or may not do the exact same thing to your data. I’m specifically not talking about TOR or some VPN that you host on your own. I’m talking about companies like NordVPN and Surfshark.

The analogy of locking your door doesn’t quite fit. Locking your door doesn’t cost you 10 dollars per month and doesn’t require you to hand your keys to the guy who sold you the lock.