Having issues with it as well. Mostly when downloading things that need me to be logged in somewhere

Of all the replies, this is the first one to actually make a good point instead of random google-bad handwaving.

Thank you

No need to be sorry. English is not my first language. I appreciate the correction.

No VPN ever protects you from ad-tracking. Like literally none. That’s not what they are for. VPNs protect you from someone intercepting your traffic on the way to the websites you want to visit. It protects you from malicious public wifi or a malicious ISP. It does not anonymize you in any meaningful way.

Addition just to explain: Google is tracking you on the website you visit, with the help of said website. So no matter whether you use a VPN or not, if you visit that website with or without a VPN, with all the fingerprinting that happens nowadays, they would probably just get a datapoint like “Oh, user X just moved from home internet to VPN” and that’s it.

Like it literally does nearly nothing if you don’t ALSO do 100 other important things to anonymize yourself. A regular user has nearly no chance to stay anonymous the moment they use a regular browser and a VPN would not help them at all.

THIS IS A PAID SERVICE.

Dude, they don’t only do ads. Google has a whole bunch of payed-for services that are never touched for ad-tracking. This is one of them. You are implying that Google Cloud would also use ad-tracking based on customer data, which is absurd.

Please stop spreading this FUD. Just because the free services are payed for by ads does not mean that everything they do is.

(edit: Paid, not Payed)

So your argument has nothing to do with the product itself and everything to do with “hurr Durr Google bad”.

Which is fine, and a valid opinion, but has nothing to do with the product.

I’m annoyed because 90% of the comments here imply or outright state that google will use this data for ads or other means, which has no basis in reality.

I’m super confused by the FUD spread in nearly every comment here.

Pretty much every argument boils down to “we don’t trust google does what they say”, which is funny because I’d like to challenge anyone to provide evidence that google actually sells any of your data. They sell advertising slots that they promise will find the right people, but your data never leaves google. No advertiser gets to see it.

This VPN service promises and has been independently audited to never log or analyze your traffic and even has built in provisions to anonymize your traffic within Google so they can’t reconstruct it.

So apart from the questionable assumption that google is blatantly lying, what’s the argument here? Apart from maybe missing some popular VPN Features like country selection.

Also this is for people that already pay for Google storage anyways, so I don’t see the problem for the intended target audience, it’s sticky an improvement in privacy for them and they get it for free. It sure as hell beats getting your traffic intercepted and ads injected into random http pages like some ISPs do.

But it does. If the universe was deterministic, choice would be impossible because all outcomes would be predetermined.

Quantum randomness may not directly provide free will but it does exclude determinism, which would make free will impossible.

I’m mostly with you except for the determinism. Not only do we KNOW that the universe is fundamentally probabilistic and not deterministic, all our technology works extremely hard to combat random errors because small electronics are absolutely not deterministic, they are just engineered to have a low enough randomness so we can counteract it.

How old are you?

That really is one hell of a hot take 😀

I for one really love the zoomed out preview on the right that has become popular in recent years.

https://jason-williams.co.uk/assets/img/2020/debugging_screenshot.png

Really hard to do in a terminal. If you have errors you can see very fast where they are located/clustered in the file and can already tell just by the shape of the program where it is.

Another example: GUI color picker directly in my editor as a tooltip above color values in css/html templates.

Another example: inline preview of latex or Template fragments.

That’s why you do regular restore tests on separate systems. That should be standard procedure for any company. A fully encrypted disk should be noticable immediately.

If your backups are online and not in a warehouse, you are doing it wrong. Even my own personal backups are on disconnected disks. What a bunch of amateurs.

Because he has a lot of nerdy friends that use signal? Same reason anyone else would choose one messenger over another i’d guess.

Not much difference because both signal and WhatsApp use the same protocol and encryption.

That’s actually exactly what they did and the reason that the new pixels (starting at 6) get 5 years of support.

It’s not much but it’s a start.

The whole effort is called project treble and has been underway for a loooong time. But it’s really hard because it affects every single Android vendor.

I get what you mean but please read the study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41347-023-00304-7

They themselves note that the very small sample size would be an issue. They say they would need 78 people for even remotely confident results, then they initially targeted 74 people, of which 20 dropped out.

Let me be clear that I too want to believe that social networks are bad for people, but studies like this one do very very little to provide any meaningful data to base my opinion on.

Sample size, 50 students. Lol nothing to see here. This has no value whatsoever.

If you are not saving things to a remote location, you will lose all your shit in a flood or fire. Remote storage has gotten cheap enough to make it practical.

Hetzner storage boxes cost 3.8€/month for 1TB, which is more than enough for the important things people have.

Backblaze is 70$/year for unlimited data.

For a handful of servers, try zabbix. Every distribution has a packaged zabbix agent. It has everything: web ui, a way to Auto discover things with a bit of setup, nice graphs, alerting, LDAP User Management if you need it, a way to define per person/group alerting/notification schedules. And the community is big enough that many common services (fail2ban/postfix/MySQL/etc.) have premade custom monitoring scripts. Adding your own metrics is also very easy.