I stand corrected, thanks for taking the time to write an informative comment. I haven’t ripped a CD in like 15 years :P

In the end, I found I don’t really care that much, since lossy Bluetooth works well enough for earbuds on the go, and good old cables are still available for more serious listening.

Plus, the truth is that most people can’t tell the difference between lossy and lossless without doing A/B testing, and some can’t tell even with that

Audio CDs contain 44.1kHz 16-bit PCM. If you got FLACs out you transcoded them, and transcoding from lossy to lossless is generally undesirable

EDIT: I stand corrected, I forgot that PCM is not a codec.

They don’t want to protect, they want exclusivity.

Is HWID not the go-to activation method? I’m a bit out of the loop

The 1% is a concept from another generation.

It’s the 0.1% now.

Operating is bloat, you only need input/output

TIL what the W stands for

It seems like your whole threat model is avoiding DNS poisoning, which is fine, but I fail to see how you can compare using DoH/DoT to a VPN.

so no one can even read which website you want to visit.

Except for the DNS provider (in your example, Google, so… yikes), the operator of the network you’re on (since the destination IP can be rDNS’d or WHOIS’d, or simply grabbed from the Host header if your browser still tries HTTP first). Any traffic that is not encrypted will be snoopable. Traffic volume and connection times to each destination can be analyzed.

By contrast, a VPN will also use secure (if you trust the provider ofc) DNS servers for your requests, plus making all of the traffic completely opaque except for “going to this server”.

no app, no account, no money required

You can also make your own, free VPN service with a little technical knowledge.

Since Wireguard uses UDP and peers only reply to a received packet if it’s expected and valid, it won’t show up in port scans and barely increases your attack surface. Tailscale and Zerotier are quite nice, but personally I dislike NAT-punching protocols.

Sigh. This will most likely come up in every legalization discussion in the future

There seems to be a gross misunderstanding of how everything works here. Any platform will need to provide data to authorities when “asked properly” - as in, receives an actual order from some enforcing body that has authority on the subject in question. No commercial company will fight the CIA in court to protect your data. The best you can hope for is that they minimize what kind of data they collect about you in the first place - in the case of E2EE, they will only have access to IPs and other metadata such as connection timestamps and nothing else. But all of the services you listed will collect at least IPs and most will do phone numbers as well. The only difference with Telegram is that they’re transparent about it. You can either avoid using commercial platforms altogether, or use them in a way such that data retrieved from them will be useless. But believing that “Signal will never give my IP to law enforcement” is delusional.

Being thankful for the US “subsidizing” military defense and foreign bases? Sure, you definitely build bases in other sovereign countries out of the goodness of your hearts and not for your own tactical and espionage interests. No European would shed a tear if every US troop fucked off tomorrow

Indeed… IPv6 needs to be actively disabled, not enabled, by default.

Can’t you hide bot accounts from your settings?

Unless your ISP provides IPv6 connectivity, which gives every endpoint a globally-routable address. Firewalling at the router only works because of NAT.

Point being…?

It is absolutely not, but I understand it’s easy to lose sense of scale when you go into billions territory.

Uhh… what? Not saying that those things aren’t real today, but are you sure they were the cause of the fall of Rome? lmao

Which, you know, is fine. Maybe if people had an idea of how much power is required to run them, they would think twice before using a gigawatt to output a poem about farts, and perhaps even wonder how OpenAI can offer that for free. Btw, a 7b model should run ok on any PC with at least 16GB of RAM and a modern processor/GPU.