161–170 of 182 posts
So far I'm yet to find a convincing candidate, but if someone here can recommend one such phone, that doesn't require my bothering with rooting, and that is expected to be maintained, I'd really appreciate it.
Well, I guess I can get an iPhone if I ever get really serious about ditching Google, but for now I don't hate them enough to move on from Android.
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I will only access youtube in ways that limit its tracking and anti-features. That means always using Tor and Youtube-dl/Invidious/Newpipe. Never use the official frontend or any of the official apps.
Then you may have noticed that you can’t access Google through Tor. They intentionally send you to a captcha you can never solve.
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To what end? Seems like a lot of work for a tiny return relative to the size of their Government.
Not blackmail in the sense of "give us money". Think more "do us a favor".
I'm surprised to see that Fastmail is not listed as a Gmail alternative. I've tried it, Protonmail, and Zoho as replacements. IMO, Fastmail has the simplest interface and best suite of tools. I had trouble setting up an alias with Protonmail. Fastmail provides very clear instructions for this right on the app. Zoho was cool in that it lets you use a custom alias for free, but it just felt too cluttered. I also rememb…
I'm surprised to see that Fastmail is not listed as a Gmail alternative. I've tried it, Protonmail, and Zoho as replacements. IMO, Fastmail has the simplest interface and best suite of tools. I had trouble setting up an alias with Protonmail. Fastmail provides very clear instructions for this right on the app. Zoho was cool in that it lets you use a custom alias for free, but it just felt too cluttered. I also rememb…
I cut Google from most of my life years ago, and switched mail to MXRoute.com instead. I have nothing but great things to say about them. Grabbed a special offer back then, 10 years/XX GB for something like $99 total, including all the domains i can think off and all the users i want. Compared to what was available at the time it was super cheap, and it has had like 99% uptime since. Latest offering, free of charge,…
I also had to dig around to see where they're based. According to: https://mxroute.com/policy/
> "MXroute LLC is a Limited Liability Corporation in the state of Texas. All services provided by MXroute may be used for lawful purposes only. "
Not a dealbreaker to me, as I am a native Texan by birth, but might be an issue to someone looking to avoid 5-Eyes.
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Unfortunately, at least in my experience with several different accounts, the Takeout metadata is mostly deleted, and sometimes outright changed, from the original files. I try to infer, interpolate, and recover what I safely can during PhotoStructure imports of Takeout archives, but mostly it made me want to dig deeper into my storage closet to try to find the hard drives that had the actual, original files on them.
> the Takeout metadata is mostly deleted, and sometimes outright changed, from the original files. Are you talking about the inferred bit from other sources like phone location history? My experience may have been different because I paid Google for extra storage so that I could store the original versions of all my photos (For those that don't use Google Photos, Google offers "unlimited" lossily compressed photo sto…
I'm happy if your files weren't put through a blender!
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Could one use AWS AppStream [0] or Mighty [1] or similar tech to proxy-view YouTube? [0] https://aws.amazon.com/appstream2/ [1] https://mightyapp.com/
I bet you would only get a few pages loaded before being captcha'd since the IP is still one of a cloud provider.
Is the browser extension "https everywhere" still useful? I find modern firefox versions will default you to https automatically now. (for what it's worth, doesn't chrome do this now too?)
The extension is still worth running, though, as some sites I visit have a perfectly fine HTTPS version, but don’t redirect to it (some even serve HSTS header there).
This reminds me of people trying to cut out plastics from there life. This is hard because plastic is cheap, convinient, useful and it's embedded in every product in modern life.... Just like Google