Thank you for this “no u” comment. I always assume my comments are incoherent to a large extent. It turns out, this one at least reads just fine.

I don’t live in the US despite being a citizen.

Proof is in the pudding indeed.

Disagreeable but doesn’t fit any “right-wing” mold. Can’t use the “Nazi” card, so I will go with the “commie” one instead.

“Yet you participate in society! Curious!” is next I guess.

As always, “Nazi Bar” analogies and their likes are only used expediently. Otherwise, it’s all “Must perfection precede praxis?..” when it’s about the senate, congress, M$ (this thread), or even the nation state itself as an entity.

Our posturing will have no limits… as long as it doesn’t disrupt our comfy life too much, and doesn’t lead us too far astray from the bounds set by the establishment uniparty directly responsible for most genocides post-WW2.

If they have “souls”, then they don’t have brains. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have ever worked in that place.

Facilitating genocide is not even needed to keep you away from that company, despite the New M$ PR push from a few years ago.

Further more, they wouldn’t have thought “protest” was going to force a change, when world-sized interests are at stake.

So, while commendable at first glance, one can’t help, with a more elaborate look, but see this as yet another posturing attempt, if still, in this case, worthy of very little praise for the potential personal sacrifice that could be incurred.

You want to do something actually useful, even if passive? Let’s see at least 10s of millions of Americans refusing to pay federal taxes all at the same time. Then the world might start to believe that anyone is really that bothered about genocide, and consider it an actual moral deal breaker.

No “we” shouldn’t.

I mean “we” shouldn’t pay a subscription to any service whatsoever, and support our favo(u)rite artists directly (if this happened, and only 1/50 did the support, the artists would still be making more than they currently do).

But even if “we” are not of that opinion, “we” SPECIFICALLY shouldn’t be using Tidal. Literally any other genuine service with a lossless tier (or lossless only) is better, unless it’s “audiophile”-first, then also avoid.

and of course you as a user are only protected as long as the chain of TOR doesn’t for some reason snitch on you.

Off-topic, but how come you don’t know that the whole point of TOR is that, theoretically, the chain can’t (trivially) snitch on you even if it wanted to?

What you describe incidentally can be done trivially with three servers from three good free VPNs, by creating chained tunnels yourself with network namespaces. Which means, taking the opposite of your point, that you can use good free VPNs with very good confidence about your safety/privacy, as long as there is no end-to-end collusion going on.

“free” vpns and privacy are basically contradictory.

While this has been swallowed as a fact for a few years, it happens to be both not intrinsically true, and can be potentially very dangerous.

It assumes that non-profits and collaborative endeavors don’t exist, where there is no “product”. And it’s like saying networks like TOR are unsafe because they are free.

Someone else already covered the danger of the reverse assumption that “paid” equates “safer”, regardless of what service we are referring to.

People will look for and use “free” VPNs no matter what, unfortunately. So while we can’t guarantee safety for anyone, the least dangerous course of action is to guide people to the least suspect options. e.g. using Proton’s free tier, or Bitmask (Riseup, Calyx) via known open-source clients with known permissions/modes of operation.

As is often the case, clever-sounding generalizations usually end up being shit for advice.

You are in a thread where a user is having a problem because of the push for flatpaks, and because of some distros like Fedora crippling their packages and providing objectively worse alternatives on purpose (because they don’t want to risk RH IBM getting sued). If the user was using some sane community distro like Arch, the user would have never come to realize that such unnecessary issues even exist.

As for flatpak hate specifically, see my ramblings here.

Users are better off using a “freeworld” ffmpeg package, or not using Fedora at all. The cisco decoder is shit.

your life will be better if you stop using both flatpaks and openh264.