Did you know? Despite claiming to block all cross-site cookies out of the box, Firefox automatically allows Google to use them in your browser should you log in to one of their services.

The browser only lets you know about this once it happens, and it's on you to notice the permissions icon appearing in the URL bar. There is a link to a paragraph on a help page explaining this behaviour, but it seemingly goes unmentioned pretty much everywhere else on the internet.

This surprised me, especially considering Firefox's stance on privacy. I was even more surprised that this is done without consent. If this is for usability, Firefox should at least warn the user before this happens.

I guess this is a cautionary tale.

I was recently having issues with my Gmail account that's tied to my Epik ( a domain registrar ) account, so when I was supposed to renew my domain, I didn't receive any e-mails about it. When I decided to randomly check on my website, it seemed to be down. So I checked Epik and a domain that usually cost £15 a year to renew now cost £400 to renew as it was expired.

As a teenager who does not have £400 to spend on a domain, I decided to just wait until the domain fully expired and buy it for a cheaper price.

After some time, the domain fully expired and GoDaddy decided to buy it as soon as it did, and charged me £2,225 to renew the domain. I don't understand how a price that large is justified, considering that my website gets barely any visitors and I basically only use the domain for hosting stuff. No idea how hiking prices this much is legal

i tried using this stick as sycthe but I accidentally let go and thing got launched and broke in two, here's the final image before death

I don't know if it's just me, but browsing virtually any mainstream website without an ad blocker or with alternative frontends is becoming harder and harder to justify. It's getting to the point where adblocking isn't an optional luxury - it's a requirement to effectively get basic information about things.

Yesterday, I was trying to search some information about Ghouls from Fallout. This lead me to this Fandom wiki page which had ads on almost every corner of the website, autoplaying video in the corner, asking for my age as soon as I clicked on the site, injecting polls and random unrelated videos into the communty wiki content and being incredibly slow to browse. A query that in the past that took 5 seconds now takes 50, for what? Money?

I get that online services cost a shitton amount of money to operate, but the sheer level of degrading quality is not OK. This is just one example of how services are completely barreling towards the shitter at 100+ MPH with no brakes or airbags. I feel some guilt for using content blockers, but that guilt is being wittled away every single day because of websites like this.

LibreTube - uses Piped as video source by default. Subscriptions and playlists can be created, all without actually interacting with YouTube.

Clipious - uses Invidious as the video source. Also allows for subscribing and accounts. Lesser known client

NewPipe - Gets the source directly from YT. Allows for subscribing and creating playlists

Additionally, there's also ReVanced that lets you patch the regular YT app to include useful features.

I've been using a lot of Debian based distributions recently after half a year on Arch. The main thing I miss a lot is the AUR. The convenience of having all my packaged in one format is a huge reason why I use Arch. Is there anything like it for the AUR?

I also think that things like Flatpaks and Snaps could be useful, as I don't really want to have tons of repositories for tons of programs I install.

The amount of data this app collects actually makes my stomach churn. Jesus christ.

Has anyone noticed that apps on F-Droid or that you just get from GitHub are just better than the ultra-popular apps on the play store? Most of them are open source and have no ads or trackers. But this isn't true on the Play Store at all.

I see myself always getting apps from F-Droid now because there is always an alternative to the ad-infested bloated privacy infesting BS that I find on the play store. It's unfortunate that it's gotten this bad, where the only reason I even use the play store is to install updates or games.

I have had Google as an app disabled for the past 2 months. I don't use google assistant or anything like that and I have had no issues. I'm not going to uninstall the play store, google play services or carrier services since I know those are pretty much integral to my phone.

I've used ADB to uninstall the vast majority of the bloatware or other software on my Samsung phone, but I'm not sure if uninstalling Google will actually cause my device to become inoperable.