Operating in other countries means you do need to follow their laws in order to operate in them. Being a swiss company doesnt make them exempt from the laws of other countries, and not complying risks them losing business in other countries. Their products do work, but the user needs to use them correctly to not put themselves in a position where they can be traced. The activist clearly wasnt using a vpn when accessing their email.

I do agree, dont trust proton, never trust any corporation, but i also know enough about how their tech works and how to manage my own online privacy that I know they arent just blowing smoke. I would much rather have proton comply with the law and continue to be accessible for most of the world, than have them fight for a single user who could have done more to protect themselves and potentially lose the ability to run their services for other countries. Most people arent self hosting, so they cant run their own secure services. Proton is a much better option than the fascist bowing corpos who run most of the tech world. Until self hosting becomes accessible for regular people, I will continue to recommend proton as the easiest option to have secure services with.

This happened years ago afaik, but lemmy keeps sharing it around for some reason.

For context, proton encrypts the traffic, not the IP Address. While I dont remember how long IP Addresses stay in their logs, you can easily avoid exposing your true IP address by using a VPN, which is clearly not what that acitvist had done.

Proton is still compelled to follow government laws in order to operate, and will hand over what info they have when compelled to. If that info is something their service can encrypt, such as emails, cloud storage, passwords, and so on, then it will look like jumped data when handed over. You IP address can’t reasonably be encrypted, and neither can your primary email that is associated with you proton account. If your primary email has revealing info, then thats on you for not obfuscating it more. If you arent using a VPN to access services, then your IP address will be indicative of where your traffic might be coming from. The end user does need to take extra steps to make sure their traffic is secure, and proton does talk about this in their documentation.

Proton is one of very few companies Ive seen pass third party security audits. They may not be perfect, but they are secure, and I’ve yet to see that truly disproven.

Surprisingly, Firebreak actually revealed a lot about the state of things in the RCU, at least for The Oldest House. Its not told directly to your face particularly, but it is revealed in voice lines, loading screens, and the missions themselves.

Its actually a really fun game. Still needs some work but if they keep with the updates they’ve done recently, I think it will be fine. The devs did express interest in trying to let players host their own matches in a way that allows Firebreak to survive any sort of server shutdown. The game is already P2P for the most part, so probably wont take too much work.

Incorrect. The internet didnt go away over night just cause the dotcom bubble burst. AI still has value, just not the value these companies are overinflating. Many fields of science have been able to use AI for major advancements in their fields. They just dont need chatgpt or grok to do it because those models arent very focused and specialized. Even recent research from Anthropic pointed out how little effort it takes to poison models that rely on public information as training data, vs models that use heavily curated data.

That and its not like gaming or digital design is going to suddenly stop existing. Graphics cards were valuable before the bubble, and will continue to be after.

Demand will certainly decrease, but its not gonna go away. Nvidia can easily fall back on their older business model of being a GPU company, while still supplying parts of the AI market that survive the collapse. All the other companies, however, might have a very bad time.

To my knowledge no. Theres also the issue of hardware. For example, I stupidly gave samsung another chance about 3 or so years ago, and you basically cannot put another OS on their devices without bricking them.

Or as an ICE agent recently put it, “Fuck them kids”

Would love to have this run when i clear the trash bin on whatever OS

Only remaining windows devices in my house are my wife’s gaming rig, my gaming rig, and my work laptop.

Gaming rigs are using heavily debloated windows 11 installations, and if I ever figure it out enough they will act a lot more like game consoles than PCs eventually. The moment Linux can reliably play all the games I frequent, Windows will be purged.

Work laptop is non-negotiable sadly. My work uses Windows 10 and an absurd amount of permission controls over it. I am a web developer and every time I need admin permissions for UAC, I have to send a ticket to IT and wait for them to remote into my laptop just to enter a password. Dumbest shit I’ve seen, but this company is the masters of time wasted. But at least it isn’t Windows 11 I guess.

Other devices are mostly linux. Wife’s work laptop is MacOS.

Realistically, i think this idea might work well in tandem with a sort of PDA built off a Pi. I use my phone as a computer, because its a computer. The parts of my phone that i need to be a phone are calls and text, as i dont take photos almost ever. Data is nice, but im fairly certain i had seen recently a sim module for Pi devices, so i can just bake it into that instead so i still have a mobile computer.

Someone will eventually make a better phone OS, but in the short term it seems smart to move to a dumb phone and offset everything else to a device tou can actually control.

“TheGamer” is not and never has been a trustworthy source of game news. They are horrendous for being a click bait website with shallow reporting.

Even this article is shallow as fuck. Their citation is one bluesky post complaining about a frame where a hand looks weird. The rest of the article is them complaining about AI and inferring that the animation studio is using AI based on marketing wording the studio uses.

If its made with AI, then yeah it can fuck off, but I highly fucking doubt that TheGamer is going to be the ones reporting on that with actual journalistic evidence. Hell I’m surprised they aren’t using AI themselves with how piss poor their standards are.

Fucking click bait

Realistically, change your approach to how you use your phone.

A majority of apps are not actually apps. They are a web app packaged in an apk so they can get elevated permissions and more data. Dont download apps, instead just install them from your browser as the web app they are. This is far more secure and far less invasive as generally a web app is containerized, at least thats my understanding in regards to firefox.

Instead of google maps, explore the world of open source navigation apps. Osmand has worked great for me, and tends to provide better info so im not panic merging at the last second. Theres a lot of them out there, and google maps has stagnated for so long that many of them are caught up in features. While its not open source, ive sesn a lot of people praise Magic Earth as well.

Buy phones on the premise of being allowed to use a custom rom. As much as i dont want a pixel because it is google, graphene os is battle tested and much more secure than stock android. But theres also lineage OS, eOS, and a few others out there.

If you need google play services, containerize it. I keep all apps i dont want having special permissions on a work profile. Funnily, i also keep my work apps on that profile, so if google wants my works data then they can handle the lawsuit if something bad happens lol.

I think a lot of people have forgotten that phones are tiny computers. The only real difference is the cell network, but we already have devices that can use those networks that arent phones, so it isnt an exclusive feature to phones. Android can be forked, but also we can emulate android on linux and there are already linux phones out there. If we grow the linux space for phones, then we effectively lose nothing of value while gaining increased freedom. For now, change how you use your phone, and only download apps if you have no other choice.