Yes. The owner/developer is Kape technologies, an Israeli spyware/adware company.

To quote from cnet

For maximum privacy, I recommend VPN providers with a jurisdiction outside of Five Eyes and other international intelligence-sharing agreements – that is, one headquartered outside of the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. So it initially seems like a positive sign that, while CyberGhost has offices in Germany, it’s headquartered in Romania. German entrepreneur Robert Knapp says he founded the $114,000 startup on the back of low-wage Bucharest labor before flipping it for $10.5 million in 2017.

The issue is who he sold it to – the notorious creator of some pernicious data-huffing ad-ware, Crossrider. The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users’ browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.

Crossrider was so successful it ultimately drew the gaze of Google and UC Berkeley, which identified the company in a damning 2015 study. (You can read the Web Archive version of that document.)

This practice, commonly called traffic manipulation, is condemned web-wide. And the only difference between it and one of the oldest forms of cyberattack, called man-in-the-middle (MitM), is that you clicked “agree” on the terms and conditions.

Whether or not PIA or ExpressVPN or the other providers owned by Kape fulfill this data scraping and ad-serving pipeline in my mind is irrelevant. Choosing to do business with them rewards bad actors when there are other VPN sellers who don’t have such a tainted lineage.

I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of an open internet. Taking a few legitimate problems and exploding them up to destroy anonymity online. And VPNs are not the solution when using privacy-preserving workarounds are either outlawed or just don’t work on any major website.

That it goes hand-in-hand (especially in the USA) with a neo-fascist right wing in control opposed by the most limp-dick “left” is extra troubling. What was the inception point for this trend? Oct 7, 2023? Were too many people shown images on TikTok of Palestinian civilians being mercilessly bombed?

Sad part is I like the design, but it’s been over-exploited by big tech corps for the past 8 years so now I have to hate it because of the new symbolic meaning it has taken.

There are situations where the compression can benefit end users as well, such as loading less image data on a capped cellular plan. Transmission of data is not necessarily free for the recipient, either.

Webp and avif are nice, but I think their inherent base in a video codec makes them a bit funny, e.g. lack of progressive decoding. I await our jxl future. Jpeg is dated and we can do a lot better than a format defined in the early 90s, as venerable as that format may be.

It’s like holding onto mp3 when aac and opus exist, or mpeg2 when hevc exists. The only benefits of the old stuff is less computation required, which only matters if you are using some seriously primitive hardware in 2025.

Depending on the image in question, lossless webp can have enormous savings. I have in mind screenshots from OpenRCT2 where you can save the whole park in one image. Because that image will have a limited, sharp color palette webp lossless can work magic on it compared to the source .png. In fact in that case it also massively out-performs webp lossy.

Indeed, I’m not justifying surveillance in either country. Just reflecting on how it’s been portrayed and is progressing here in the USA

I think it’s much simpler than that. I think he just wants to make money and sees an opportunity to enrich himself. These people don’t have a sense of morality, only a “fuck you, got mine” basic American individualism

The irony is I remember growing up with numerous stories about how expression is locked down in China and everything there is surveilled and if you speak poorly against the government you’ll get arrested etc. And thank goodness we are free in America to express ourselves even if it’s against the government because, my gosh, I might not like what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it!

And as if with no sense of irony and not even a remote bit of critique, all those stories about surveillance in China (true or not, I don’t know) were actually true, are currently true, or are becoming true here in the USA. And in many cases they’re just sold as commodities back to us e.g. ring doorbell cameras.

And a final thought: the USA used to be able to justify many of its foreign interferences on a sort of moral high ground, including freedom of expression and all that. That mask was slipping but now with Trump2 seems to have just fallen off. The pretense has given away to crass might makes right international relations. I consider the USA becoming a hyper surveilled state to be part of this story.

The secondary use here is when you get asked in performance evaluation time how much you’re incorporating AI into your workflow. And you’d better not say “none” so you keep generating these nonsense documents and throwing them away so it appears like you’re using AI

Their primary use case in the office that I’ve seen is asking someone a question and having them send a LLM response where they clearly didn’t read what you asked and the response they sent you does not answer the original question. It’s so cool!

A redundant comment already made by someone else: to consider the power draw of the computer if you leave it on 24/7

One thing to keep in mind is the IP address might not reflect the actual user’s location.

deleted by creator

I’m picking up what you’re putting down

Of course they know. They are knowingly making an addictive product that simulates an agreeable partner to your every whim and wish. OpenAi has a valuation of several hundred billion dollars, which they achieved in breakneck speeds. What’s a few bodies on the way to the top? What’s a few traumatized Kenyans being paid $1.50/hr to mark streams of NSFL content to help train their system?

Every possible hazard is unimportant to them if it interferes with making money. The only reason someone being encouraged to commit suicide by their product is a problem is it’s bad press. And in this case a lawsuit, which they will work hard to get thrown out. The computer isn’t liable, so how can they possibly be? Anyway here’s ChatGPT 5 and my god it’s so scary that Sam Altman will tweet about it with a picture of the Death Star to make his point.

The contempt these people have for all the rest of us is legendary.

Reminds me of all those stupid “cyberpunk 1994, office nights 1998” ai slop playlists on YouTube. They all have a common theme: they don’t represent or even remotely sound like the kind of music from the year they claim to take you back to. and the tracks, if one can call them that, are the same repetitive, thoughtless rhythms. If you go to YouTube to find some background music to listen to, these kinds of uploads dominate the search results today. And it’s all D-tier shit.

Anubis only does a proof of work challenge if you lack a specific cookie that it gives you. You can temporarily enable JavaScript, pass the challenge, get the cookie, then disable JavaScript.

I use uBlock Origin, btw, to make selectively enabling/disabling JavaScript per domain a simple two-click task.

For me the experience is not flawless, but it’s not problematic either. For instance, I have never encountered random flickering just because a wrong program was open. In your case if you’re using Nvidia as a GPU and are using Wayland as a display compositor that might explain some of your problems like Vivaldi flickering, where it might not be an issue in an Xorg session.

And the fact that you have to be potentially aware of these things is one of the annoying aspects of using Linux.

IME the nicest part of Bazzite is not having to manage it. To that end, it works on my Steam Deck. But that’s nothing to do with stability, as you say. In its own ways it’s more annoying to use than a regular distro.

Clearly people are finding use for it, but I personally find those annoying aspects needless speedbumps in my own usage. Except for, again, on my Steam Deck.