Defense in depth is a concept they teach you in cybersecurity 101. But that’s expensive and time consuming, so you end up with shit like this.

You could take care of like 90% of that just by blocking X.

The bigger problem for me personally is that my bank uses the app to verify certain transactions and there doesn’t seem to be a way around that. I’m planning on moving to GrapheneOS on my daily phone soon, my solution will be to have my old iPhone run nothing but my banking apps. It sucks but privacy sometimes involves sacrifices.

Ultimately Discord is a corporate-owned social media platform, and like all corporate-owned social media platforms their best interests rarely intersect with the best interests of their users. Centralised systems like Discord always end up with a power imbalance between the users and the administrators, and if you break their rules they have it within their power to just vapourise your community without a second thought. Your organisation or community only exists for as long as you toe their line.

I mean if you want to help someone in an abusive relationship, telling them to just leave doesn’t really work there either, and for a lot of the same reasons. But you can support them in other ways until they’re able to do what’s necessary to leave.

We probably shouldn’t be using Discord but you’ve got to meet people where they’re at. Telling someone to just drop a service when all of their connections are there is unhelpful at best.

Not the person you replied to, but I did work in the music industry for a little while. The short version is that streaming services and especially Spotify pay artists like shit. They work on a revenue share model based on the number of streams an artist gets per month so there isn’t really a fixed number, but it hashes out to fractions of a cent per stream typically. Even the more “generous” services like Tidal or Apple pay just over a cent per stream on average if you’re pulling in serious numbers of streams. I did the math once, and to make the minimum wage from streaming alone in my country, an artist would need to be pulling in over 600k streams per month on Spotify. Most artists will get a fraction of that. This is also assuming that the artist is entirely independent with no labels and distributors to cut in too, so the true number will be much higher for most.

If you purchase an album from an artist on Bandcamp once, that’s almost certainly going to be orders of magnitude the amount they make from streaming that same album over and over again.

Can also recommend the JM21. I just wish the battery life was better.

That works from the ISP end, but this legislation makes websites themselves accountable. Even if it was about ISPs, as you said they can’t see what you’re doing to stop it and there’s too many use cases for VPNs to just block the protocols outright.

So how do they plan on figuring out if any given user behind a VPN is in Utah?

That thing is so ugly that it almost loops back around into looking cool again

Damn man, go for a walk or something.

You’re very angry for a person who literally used the term themselves a couple of comments ago. What term would you rather use then? It’s colloquial, everyone knows what I’m talking about. Are you the kind of person who gets angry when someone doesn’t call it “GNU/Linux” too?

Obviously capitalism makes pretty much everything worse but let’s not pretend AI wouldn’t have issues without capitalism too.

People hate inconvenience more than they hate their data being mined.

If we’re being real I don’t really trust anyone with my data.

Yet you participate in society. Curious.

Depends on where you’re watching YouTube, but there’s options for most devices. On PC you can use an ad blocker such as uBlock Origin, or a browser with a built in ad blocker like Brave. If you use a phone you can use the mobile browser version (not perfect but pretty serviceable) with a browser that blocks ads. There’s app options for Android such as Greyjay, and modded YouTube apps such as Revanced and Morphe. There’s an app called SmartTube Next that works on most smart TVs. If you have a VPN, setting it to Albania will cause ads to not be displayed on most services even if you’re using the official app and works on every device I’ve tried it on. There’s probably more ways but those are what I’m aware off the top of my head. There is no reason that in 2026 anyone should be seeing ads on YouTube.

I’m guessing you’re in the US. In many parts of the world including where I live, it’s the messenger app. If you don’t have WhatsApp you’re pretty much not communicating with most people.

Generating content with AI to throw off crawlers. I dread to think of the resources we’re wasting on this utter insanity now, but hey who the fuck cares as long as the line keeps going up for these leeches.