Yes, but at least here I can choose an instance in a privacy friendly jurisdiction or one that is small enough, including a self-hosted one. It’s not a perfect shield, but federation helps a lot with digital independence (which is why it’s prominent in pre-internet theories of how to make anarchy work without collapsing into warlordism).

Spoiler alert, both British officials and EU officials are openly considering to slap an age restriction on VPN software, too. Would turn into a weird Catch-22, where you need a non-restricted VPN to download a non-restricted VPN, like in China right now.

Oh, I absolutely am blaming the politicians behind this (and the lobby groups behind them). The only strictly wrong thing Reddit does is how it implements that law, i.e., using third-party age verification that happens to also use your data to profile you and that has been shown to be insecure (Further Reading links in my post).

Agreed. Lemmy, while being very new, mimics features of ye olden times. Newsgroup era and all… But Reddit kinda started that way and then, as all good things, slowly enshittified. It seemed to resist enshittification longer than most sites. At least that was my impression. But good things can’t last. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, after all, I guess.

Here I am, not enough hands for all the cookies and kitties. Haven’t used Reddit in months and perfectly happy without it. Still sharing my sadness about seeing “the old internet” slip further and further down that slope.

There is LibreLynx Lite on F-Droid, but it is very bare bones. Do not recommend, especially while IronFox exists.

Rarely. I would say that about 19/20 pages work as expected. I do keep a manually hardened Firefox install on my device for the rare site that I do want to visit but that doesn’t load in IronFox for some reason. In my experience, VPN breaks the internet more than IronFox does. And I still want to use VPN.

Adding my personal notes on search engines here for anyone’s interest. I personally use Qwant on Desktop and DuckDuckGo on mobile. I like Qwant because they are at least working on their own index and are EU-based. On the other hand, DuckDuckGo is faster and has a more comprehensive privacy policy. I’m really trying to use Mojeek on mobile but the search results are much worse than DuckDuckGo and Qwant in my repeated experience.

Useful background:

• https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/technical/blur-pixelation-censorship-false-security/
• https://undercodetesting.com/the-vulnerability-of-pixelation-as-a-privacy-measure/

Spoilsport :P

Erm… OP, you know that blurring is not destructive, right?

Can you explain in a little more detail how enforcing online ID prevents WW3? Genuinely curious. The only thing I think of that national online ID might help with is counter intelligence, especially in defense against psyops. However, in the few cases that we do know about psyops toppling elections, e.g., Brexit, these were performed on behalf of or with the aid of party and government officials in the affected countries. If any, this would become easier, because widespread online ID silents dissenting voices, while well-financed entities can navigate and / or circumvent such regulation (also see, for example, the effect of GDPR on the market structure of attention merchants in Europe).

Introducing Athenian democracy: Place your name on a paper slip. Place that slip in a big bag. If your name gets pulled, congrats: You are now a politician for an allotted time. Also works with marble slips for extra flair.

Then they should’ve included a short TLDR even harder

TLDR: Open package repositories without some approval and oversight system, like AUR, will have even more problems in the future due to advanced coding AI and malicious foreign hackers.

Edit: Please normalize TLDR’s on bot posts with just a link.

Edit 2: I have been rightfully informed that this is not a bot post. I still think links should not be posted without a tiny abstract, one might say: a TLDR.

I have also been informed that the text does not spell out “foreign”. This is correct. The text does say

Not all of the packaging issues are as bad as the initial wave of trying to steal credentials, some are just adding ridiculous messages in Russian.

This implies but does not establish the nationality of attackers. While Arch has contributors from all over the world, it is commonly cited as being a Canadian distribution (example, see below). https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=arch

So it begins

If Chromium becomes incompatible with privacy, the only real and broadly accepted alternative is FireFox. Which implementation, and as always in these kinds of discussions, that depends on your threat model: On desktop, I am very happy with LibreWolf. Mullvad Browser is also great, especially with Mullvad VPN, though it breaks pages a little more often than LibreWolf. On Android, I am quite happy with IronFox.

Appreciate the recommendations. I will give IronFox a try.

I often feel a little ‘legislative paralysis’. On the one hand, I want as little government interference in the free web as possible. On the other hand we can see first hand that web anarchy collapses into web oligarchy. I guess the EU is demonstrating that targeted legislation, like one click unsubscribe or one click cookie denial, can improve the web experience and privacy even beyond their borders. Baby steps… When do we get one click delete all my data? And when does a single page start caring whether my browser sends a Do not track request or not? Until then, it’s back to private privacy measures… Even if that’s an uphill battle.