Years some companies make virtual temporary cards.

Belgian Post does that, prepaid MasterCard with IBAN. They or the partner bank does KYC (no choice) but shops don’t get your data.

technology is coming for bicycles too

Went from e-bike to fixie and ironically enough this isn’t a joke. I’m happier and healthier now.

Is also dangerous to associate emerging technology with big tech, sure they make some and sell some at tempting discounted prices BUT they are not the only ones and when aiming so you leave then an open field.

the only realistic platform

you know of, I don’t know where you live (nor do I want to) but alternatives do exist and if not you can self host some.

Even if rooted and used without account via PrivateQuest?

Freedom to be exploited or exploit others even harder for “success”.

Sarcasm aside there are state equivalents, e.g. CCPA.

Worthwhile yet tricky. Companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, etc are full of experts in statistics and they have access to a lot of storage space. If use a service from those companies, say 4hrs per day between 7am and 9pm, at a certain frequency, e.g. 10 requests / hour, then suddenly, when you realize you actually do not trust them with your data, you do 10000 req/hr for 1hr then that’s a suspect pattern. Then might be able to rollback until before that “freak” event automatically. They might still present you as a user your data with the changes but not in their internal databases.

So… I’m not saying it’s not a good idea, nor useful, but I bet doing it properly is hard. It’s probably MUCH harder than do a GDPR (or equivalent) take out request then deletion request AND avoiding all services that might leverage your data from these providers.

I don’t think that’s possible. I think streaming in practice (not in theory!) is nowadays monitoring everything you do with the content they provide. In fact you yourself blocked your own TV from accessing the Internet.

Anyway I saw quite a few technical solutions (general purpose computers) but I didn’t see any service to then use those with. There are quite a few streaming services I would trust though, e.g. public services like Arte.TV or PBS (well… I did, not I’d be cautious) that can be accessed without an account.

So it depends in the end of what kind of content you mean to stream. You don’t have to answer that specifically but… if it’s not something that is genuinely public, available on services like PeerTube but instead rely on surveillance capitalism, e.g. YouTube, Netflix, etc then I’d argue the kind of streaming itself you want is not compatible with your privacy requirements.

Edit: I’m not streaming except public radio (specifically fip.fr that’s all) on my desktop. I just download the content I need what from whatever sources provide it DRM-free. It’s both a technical alternative and a healthier practice IMHO.

No https://search.f-droid.org/?q=waterfox and they don’t seem to list it on their official page either. Please show your interest at https://github.com/BrowserWorks/waterfox/issues/4002

so long as it’s optional, local, and private.

… yes but also

• open source,
• open model,
• all annotations done with proper respect to
  • labor law (ideally verified by 3rd party)
  • IP
• clear on ecological cost
  • CO2 eq in model card (ideally verified by 3rd party)
  • analogy non technical user can understand

… which makes for a rather limited list.

My own constraints https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/CollaborationRelyingOnAI recommendations welcomed, both on such rules but also on models that do fit, if any.

fabien@debian2080ti:~$ history  | sed 's/ ..... //' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail
# with parameters
     13 cd Prototypes/
     14 adb disconnect; cd ~/Downloads/Shows/ ; adb connect videoprojector ;
     14 cd ..
     21 s # alias s='ssh shell -t "screen -raAD"'
     36 node .
     36 ./todo 
     42 vi index.js 
     42 vi todo # which I use as metadata or starting script in ~/Prototypes
     44 ls
    105 lr # alias lr="ls -lrth"
fabien@debian2080ti:~$ history  | sed 's/ ..... //' | sed 's/ .*//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail
# without parameters
     35 rm
     36 node
     36 ./todo
     39 git
     39 mv
     70 ls
     71 adb
     96 cd
    110 lr
    118 vi

Maybe I interest you in pgrep? pkill? killall?

Because I can tell it to do whatever I want. I get to control the device I own. Pretty basic. Same principle for my others devices, so deGoogle Android phone, earbuds with open source firmware, keyboard with open source firmware, Zigbee for IoT, etc. My stuff should do what I want.

That’s what shadow IT is for.

You try through the normal channels, explaining why, and if it’s not enough, you find a way to still be productive DESPITE the rules of the place. Then eventually you move on to a saner place.

I’d add CopyParty to https://privacy.purchasewithpurpose.io/category/file-storage/

Honestly why even ask the question or read the ToS when you know the business model of Google?

To be clear Google is NOT a technology company! Google is an advertising company which, unlike traditional advertising companies selling physical ad space, sells online ad space. Through vertical integration they also happen to distribute software, e.g. Android, Chrome, etc, services e.g. Google Search, GMail, GDrive, GCloud, and hardware, e.g. Pixel, Nest, etc which they are not giving for free but at a low price, and infrastructure, e.g. Google Fi.

… but ALL those products are ONLY existing to sell ads!

I let derive your own conclusion for Google Fi and every other product they provide.

TL;DR: of f*cking course.

I got very confused by this title… I did search on DuckDuckGo and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_modding was a top result but not far behind was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modding which is not specific to video game.

Because this is the Linux community I would clarify that it’s about game modding, not general modding.

Who could have guessed… /s

AFAIK the packets are for discovery of other devices relying on mDNS / DNS-SD which is used by plenty of other services.

More importantly though, does it matter? What are you actually broadcasting while doing so? That you are using KDE Connect? Also the typical use case for it are on trusted networked, e.g. home WiFi but if it’s problematic on public networks then do not use KDE Connect on other networks?

Edit: what alternative device discovery solution could be used by KDE Connect to make it more private on untrusted ntetworks?

Ugh… why? I mean it’s a fun process to distro hop and better understand the different package managers, boot process, default services, etc but beyond that I’m confused at what the point is.

FWIW one can distro hop “virtually” in minutes using containers via Podman or Docker (or even QEMU to be more isolated) with images that do have a window manager, e.g. https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ provides Alpine, Arch, Debian, Enterprise Linux, Fedora and Ubuntu with i3, KDE, MATE or XFCE. Switching from one to another takes minutes (basically download time of image content) and if you mount the right directory you can even use your own content for your tests.

Edit : if one wants to install nothing https://distrosea.com/ is quite neat but it’s online.