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.

Pretty much every alerting system I know also has a filter option to only apply automated discovery rules to certain filesystem types.

But yes, most don’t first squashfs or mounted read-only snapshots by default and it sucks.

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?

Are you using zfs?

But it’s a gigantic waste of energy and time when you could just download a 2mb package and be done with it.

That’s a good point, India is currently also in a fantastic trajectory

They sure have Nazis in Ukraine as has every country.

But saying that the fascists in Italy have anything to do with Ukraine needs very good evidence to support such a wild claim.

But that’s even worse a comparison.

First of all, the German recovery after WW2 is called “miracle of the Rhine” (or Wirtschaftswunder) for a reason. It WAS very impressive.

At the end of WW2 Germany had a gdp of 160 billion dollars, a fully literate und educated population and a reduced but existing industrial base.

Wikipedia: “When the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, more than 400 million of the country’s more than 500 million people were illiterate, and the illiteracy rate was about 80 percent, including over 95 percent in rural areas.”

Per Capita GDP in china was 10% of that of post war Germany and china had no major industry to speak of and was mostly agrarian.

I never said that other countries did not do impressive things, but I think there is merit to the claim that few improved the lives of the population as thoroughly and fast and at a scale as china did.

The Chinese government is responsible for the biggest and fastest uplift of people out of poverty ever seen in history.

And they are also responsible for horrible horrible human rights violations against minorites and dissidents and they caused millions of needless deaths during the cultural revolution.

The second fact however does not negate the first one because they did, in fact, pull almost their entire population out of poverty and into a modern industrialized economy.

Please learn to make some space in your head for uncomfortable facts that cause conflicting emotions.

OP was right, they are an extremely successful government with a surprisingly broad support within the population because most Chinese have living grandparents that where still farmers and had no industry at all. And they now live in modern cities with modern amenities. The transformation happened in two generations.

You can’t trust any full disk encryption without it because only a TPM can verify that your bootloader and initrd are not compromised.

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.

Because it provides me with value that imho justifies the cost in addition to supporting creators more than what they would usually get from me consuming their content.

Realistically, 50% of the videos I watch are random creators I don’t subscribe to and I would not make the effort to donate to just for watching one or two videos. These people still worked for that content and deserve payment.

I could install an ad blocker and basically fuck them over for using YouTube as their platform, or I can pay money, have no ads and support them.

I think that’s a more ethical thing to do then to pretend that they don’t deserve compensation because realistically, they have no alternative platform that generates them enough money to continue what they are doing.

Nobody can make a living on peer tube or any of the other alternatives, except for maybe meta or TikTok but they are far worse.