Apple is a bit like Microsoft in that regard. Their browser (safari) is so tightly integrated into their operating system that removing it is basically impossible. Due to that, they can use/abuse it for basic functionality like a pdf reader instead of creating a separate app for it.

Android, on the other hand, doesn’t even have a real default browser. While Chrome ships as the default since android 4, it’s basically just the app tacked on top. Since PDF readers on android existed before Chrome became the default, Google was never really bothered with including a build in PDF reader in their browser. It simply wasn’t necessary. And since most browser depend on chromium, which lacks this functionality, they don’t have it either.

Firefox on Android has the option to open PDFs, so if you want it, that would be an option. It isn’t a limitation of the operating system, Google simply couldn’t be bothered and most others just use copy + past on Chrome.

And both of these companies build and purchased more renewable energy sources than all 100+ countries combined. Microsoft has committed to be carbon free by 2030, and while I don’t belive in their commitment, they at least seem to be trying contrary to most nations. They even invested in nuclear plants for their power needs.

You can fault both companies for a lot of different reasons, but in terms of carbon emissions due to power usage, they are better than 99.9% of the countries on that list.

Google builds entire datacenters with their own transformers and power lines, if not their own powerplants. You plug these datacenters directly into the high voltage networks that don’t have big capacity problems.

The low voltage grids in residential areas on the other hand were build as cheap as possible, so increasing the load by 20% is already too much for most of them.

Or have a public social media account and a ‘business’ one I use to share my own music or something? My dual-boxing MMO accounts?

Wanna bet that you are already breaking TOS with both of these things? And I don’t mean SimpleLogins TOS, but the one of the social media platform and MMO. Most big platforms only allow one account per user, no matter how the account is used. Sometimes you can create a business account, but that’s still linked to your private one. Same goes for pretty much any online game, you are limited to one account per person.

I don’t think that there is any sense behind these limitations, but simplelogin isn’t concerned about that, they only care about the legality of your actions and limit their service accordingly.

They get that same location data with or without maps. As long as you are using stock android, Google knows exactly where you’ve been even if you enable airplane mode. They get your position with WiFi networks and other phones around you and store that data with timestamps. Maps doesn’t give them any extra data, it simply binds you into their ecosystem.

Technically yes, but the Google and Googlegetmanager scripts are used in so many cases that you want to keep them active permanently.

Considering that most VPN adresses are linked to suspicious, if not outright illegal, activity, its quite reasonable to assume that they end up on automatic block lists.

You are definetly in a bubble, even if its a pretty big one. Owning a pc is pretty much a prerequisite for going into comp-science or working in IT.

Out of all the 30 odd people I know of at my workplace, one other apart from me has a gaming pc, and two others have consoles. The rest doesn’t play any games at all.

As a general rule, the goal is simply to assume control over the government, as is the case in Ukraine.

Yeah no, that’s just plain wrong. Russia, at the very least, is committing cultural genocide if not much worse. Ukrainian families get broken up so their kids can be better indoctrinated.

Tbh, that’s pretty much the only thing Youtube did in the last few years that I can’t really complain about. I despise their business tactics, but using your VPN to get regional prices just fucks it up for everyone. In first world countries, it’s one or two hours of work. The same price in poor countries would be up to a monthly wage, that’s why it costs them less. Abusing this will only end in most companies removing regional differences and blocking VPNs completely.

There are other methods to get the same functionality, use them instead of creating problems for others.

Latency is a non issue if you make the service even remotely decentralised. One server per EU country is enough to push the latency below 50ms, which is more than playable, even for shooters and MOBAs.

It was a bit of a hyperbole, I have no idea about the exact amount.

Let’s say you charge your 2000mAh battery every day and your PSU is 10% more efficient than your charger (the difference is most likely not even this big).

2Ah × 5V x 356d= 3.56kwh

3.56kwh × 0.1 = 356Wh

356Wh would be the difference per year, that’s about 12ct per year.

Now estimating the power usage for fediverse messages is very hard to do since it depends on a lot of different factors (your device, cellular or WiFi data, amount of hops needed to reach you, general state of your nearby network, your instances infrastructure).

The only even remotely similar thing I could find was emails with pictures producing about 20-40g CO2, which only slightly increases with more recipients, and Reddit usage comes at about 2.5g per minute. Comparing these two numbers just shows that all estimates done are pretty much useless for us since we have no idea how they are done.

But if we go with a low estimate of 0.1g (slightly above SMS and somewhere around spammail level) per user seeing it and a few hundred to a thousand users seeing this even if they just scroll past, we reach the CO2 equivalent of 1kWh pretty fast without even talking about long term storage and future indexing. Not to mention that comments produce something too since they need to be federated, albeit not so much as the post itself.

So while 10 years was a bit much, 2-3 years would be very much in the realm of possibilities, but no one knows or can even properly estimate the actual numbers.

Not to discourage such thoughts in the future, but your single post asking here probably used up more electricity than what you would save over the course of the next ten years.

As long as even basic features like push notifications are locked behind Google services, I’d hardly count that as a win. The Google monopoly on android is even worse than the Microsoft monopoly on PCs. Microsoft has at least some good alternative with the current Linux environment, but Googles only competitor is apple with an even worse system.

Sure there are projects like LinageOS and GraphenOS, but both are still reliant on micro G or containerised Goggle apps.

The majority of people play at least some competitive games and most of those simply don’t work due to anticheats. These game usually are also the most important ones to them.

The main character of the novel “Infinite Mana in the Apocalyps” literally has the traits “I’m the Main Character”, “Plotarmor” and “Nexus Events”, so you are good with that choice.

And you didn’t understand what I said. While you can not monitor closed source at the code level, you definitely can monitor the apps behaviour. Even the automatic threat protection from the playstore protect function is worth more than the measly amount of people looking through smaller projects codebases.

I hate Google with a passion, but with all their control over android devices, they are more than capable of scanning apps for malicious behaviour and automatically removing them. These few apps in the article are the 0.01% of malicious apps that their algorithm didn’t detect.

If we are talking about bigger projects with hundreds of thousands or millions of downloads, than this may be true. But smal scale projects have so few people actively looking through them that even to automatic scan done by the playstore has a higher chance of catching malware. It doesn’t even have to be bad intent, two years ago there was a virus propagating trough the Java class files in minecraft mods which reached the PCs of quite a few devs before it was caught.

I don’t dislike FOSS, a lot of the apps I use come straight from github, but all this talk about them beeing constantly monitored by third parties is just wishful thinking.

Vanadium is purposefully made this way. It tries to minimise profiling by making your actions noise in a big mass of users. That only works if you use the standard config without anything to discern you.

Mull is the other extreme of this. They try to eliminate fingerprinting by reducing the amount of trackable things in your browser.

It’s hard to say what really is the better option. You can’t completely eliminate fingerprinting, and the more you try, the more you will stick out of the masses.

How is that even supposed to work? These search engines need per definition massive databanks to search through. Either you need your own crawler and indexer which is more than just inefficient, or you are limited to a relatively short list of curated static results.