I’m paying £20/m for a lossless family plan from Deezer… That’s how they get you 😭. Now I’d have to apologize to my family members if I took away their subscription. Used to be around £17 when I started a few years back.

I do not recommend getting a family plan.

Not any more 😭

You should probably also consider CalyxOS, which supports most Pixel phones and, for me at least, seems to work with banking apps using microG while removing all of the pre installed Google bloat and providing a firewall.

That said, I haven’t tried GrapheneOS. From what I hear you can lock it down even more and there are more features.

The company should be sued into the ground. This is horrendous

I thought that OEM unlocking was removed years ago? That’s why I’ve not bought Samsung phones since the mid-2010s.

They had a thing that would blow a fuse if you unlocked your phone. Did they get rid of that for a while?

Not if they end up banning VPNs, which is already something being discussed. If that happens, I might genuinely leave the country.

Dude. I just bought a used 6A last week.

I wrote my CV site in React and Next.js configured for SSG (Static Site Generation) which means that the whole site loads perfectly without JavaScript, but if you do have JS enabled you’ll get a theme switching and print button.

That said, requiring JS makes sense on some sites, namely those that act more like web apps that let you do stuff (like WhatsApp or Photopea). Not for articles, blogs etc. though.

No idea why they were collecting identification then.

Even worse, since the hackers got a bunch of the data at once, the company must have held onto those pictures long after they registered people to their service, which they likely didn’t need to do.

The drivers license thing is likely due to a law passed by the UK a few days ago requires all mature content to be behind an age check. And not a “Are you 18: Yes / No”, more like “we will check using ID and photos of you”.

It’s the most hated piece of legislation in a while, with already 100 000 petition votes in 3 days to repeal it.

What are the rights around protesting in America? Is it legal for you to be arrested like this?

As mentioned by another user, all drives fail, it’s a matter of when, not if. Which is why you should always use RAID arrangement with at least one redundant drive and/or have full backups.

Ultimately, it’s a money game. If you save 30% on a recertified drive and it has 20% less total life than a new one, you’re winning.

Here’s where I got some.

https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives

I looked around a bit, and either search engines suck nowadays (possibly true regardless) or there are no independent studies comparing certified and new drives.

All you get mostly opinion pieces or promises by resellers that actually, their products are good. Clearly no conflict of interest there. /s

The best I could find was this, but that’s not amazing either.

What I do is look at backblaze’s drive stats for their new drives, find a model that has a good amount of data and low failure rate, then get a recertified one and hope their recertification process is good and I don’t get a lemon.

I got some 16TB drives recently for around $200 each, though they were manufacturer recertified. Usually a recertified drive will save you 20-40%. Shipping can be a fortune though.

EDIT: I used manufacturer recertified, not refurbished drives.

Yep. Pretty sure that was deliberate on Musk’s (or his cronies) part.

Imagine working at X and being told by your boss “I’d like you to make the bot more racist please.” “Can you convince it that conspiracy theories are real?”

I’m pretty sure I’ve been using the Simple Gallery app they mention for years.

It looks like it is still open source. However I do see on the Play Store page that their contact details are in Israel.

The Pro version, the one I use, claims to collect no data at all. Not sure how much I trust that.

Maybe it’s time to look for a new gallery app…

EDIT:

The open source code has not been updated since 2023, and neither has the Pro app. However the non-pro app has been updated in 2024.

Therefore, it might be safe to use the open source code version on GitHub, but I wouldn’t touch the free one on the play store.

I wouldn’t use the Pro version on the play store as you would be funding these companies and they could push an update in the future.

EDIT 2:

As mentioned here, a popular fork of many of these now abandoned Simple apps is the Fossify project. If you liked the app I’d recommend looking at that if you want to keep getting security updates at the very least.

I think it’s if you want to have user management. There’s some sort of admin console you have to pay for, but I don’t use it.

To be honest I had kind of forgotten it was a thing. If you’re using this for a business then you might want to link it to your OIDC (Microsoft account etc.) and therefore pay for those extra features.

However if you use it to connect to your own devices or those of your friends like you would with TeamViewer (via device IDs and per-device passwords) as I do, you won’t have to pay for it.

Give it a go and see how you get on!

Been using them for years.

It’s completely free, open source and has:

• Unsupervised (for headless servers) or supervised (helping out relatives) access
• Easily file transfers
• Cross-copy paste
• Identification server (what gives out connection IDs) can be self-hosted or you can use theirs for free
• Can control PCs from mobile app (though not vice versa apparently they support this now!)
• Experimental web browser client.

EDIT: I forgot, but it’s also much better at compressing video effectively than realVNC, which is what I used to use. Performance and latency remains fairly good even at low bitrate.

For a little while, I even used to play point and click games remotely with my brother over it. Probably too much latency for an action game though.

If your kid has half a brain he’ll do what we did as kids when porn sites were blocked on the home WiFi: He’ll just get a VPN.

And when VPN websites were blocked on the home WiFi, we’d just download their apps on mobile data.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Better to educate your kids on their natural urges and letting them use the more moderated sites than have them go down the more dodgy rabbitholes. No kink shaming but some of the things people do are nasty.

I think they are bundling this into their regular app, so they’d have to put every guardian read on the list😅

Ok, so it’s an encrypted, open source whistle-blowing feature in their app / system.

The article is light on technical details but if it makes whistleblowing easier and safer than for example emailing their editors that’s probably a good thing.