It’ll have a devastating effect for people who work in the industries.

Those of us who don’t play AAA games or watch Warner Bros or Paramount movies don’t really have much to lose here. Worst case scenario there are always Nigerian and Uzbek movies.

I, as an Australian, have been saying all along that the social media ban should focus on the addictive and problematic features of social media, rather than a blanket ban. Hell there was a good quote I saw recently on Bluesky by Lance MacDonald:

“People saying “kids will find a way around this” have no idea what “this” is. When it comes to YouTube, there’s nothing for them to find a way around. The government is forcing all kids to have raw unfiltered access to YouTube. The only thing they’re removing is parental controls.”

The EU is at least acknowledging the harmful elements. Here’s hoping they go “ban on the harmful features of social media without age verification”. Then again if the Google Play Store can serve as a middleman on that front then Google will get their wish of being an internet gatekeeper and these features will be enabled by default even for adults (which it shouldn’t be).

I tried that, Windows FOR SOME FUCKING REASON keeps opening new holes in the firewall anyway.

Why do people use PopOS? I genuinely don’t get it.

Fedora Kinoite is, probably, the best recommendation.

I’m not really interested in maximum privacy, at least right now. I’m slowly moving there though.

I don’t see many ads, and the ads I do see are never food items. I think this canned rambutan was the first food ad I’ve seen in years.

I can’t even fathom this being a coincidence.

1. I have Freetube installed but I found no reason to really use it when I have this browser extension and adblock (though I don’t have one enabled for YouTube so I have no idea why I’m not seeing ads). I can probably do what Remove YouTube Suggestions does with Tampermonkey or Violentmonkey anyway so I might switch.
2. Didn’t realize Tampermonkey wasn’t open source. I’ll look into it when I can eventually be bothered.
3. I can’t use a Passkey on my phone. GrapheneOS doesn’t support passkeys.
4. Piracy isn’t worth the hassle to me, though it’s not like Crunchyroll has been much better lately.

AdGuard, ProtonPass, TamperMonkey, Time Tracker, and 10ten have those permissions. The others don’t. I don’t think any of these extensions would be able to function without these permissions.

I use AdGuard rather than uBlock Origin for adblocking, because it allows me to opt-in and only block ads when they are aggressive enough to be annoying. But I’ve not been trying to minimize fingerprinting. The issue is just that everything I used in this instance came with either a tacit or explicit promise not to track me and I don’t know which is lying.

Other extensions I use are:

1. Remove YouTube Suggestions
2. 10ten Japanese Reader (just now disabled)
3. Tampermonkey
4. Proton Pass (because my government services require 2FA, but only offer an official government app that uses the play integrity API, or a Passkey which is only natively supported on Windows or Mac)
5. Time Tracker - Web Habit Builder
6. Improve Crunchyroll (which seems to have stopped Crunchyroll from forcefully dropping my resolution to 144p).
7. SteamDB (just now disabled)

September 2025

I had removed all but Duckduckgo and Startpage from my browser.

My browser extensions are a good angle. If they’re selling my data to fund themselves that’d explain some things.

As far as I can remember, only the Wikipedia one.

Looking it up my ISP isn’t exactly trustworthy, but there have been no clear allegations. I’d say it’s the most likely cause if not my Firefox extensions.

EDIT: I just got another theory, Cloudflare, I’ll add it to the list.

1. Tibet had a different language, culture, government than the Republic of China.

2. Didn’t say Tibet was a good nation, just an “other nation”.

Obama didn’t behave as weirdly as Biden. He facilitated neo-nazi’s taking control of Ukraine’s government and that prompted Russia to annex parts of Ukraine. The difference is that Obama behaved like is normal for an American president and it doesn’t seem like war was his goal, Biden behaved incomprehensibly and was either deliberately pushing for war to further his own political ambitions or he was too senile to know what he was doing.

It does say PRC in the heading, but you’d be forgiven for missing it.

South China Sea? Granted building a military base in another country’s waters isn’t technically an attack but … come on.

Also Tibet. Whether or not it was a legitimate “state” it was definitely an “other nation”.

What is this referring to?

It was Biden that goaded Ukraine into flaunting it’s NATO ambitions while making it clear multiple times that America would not come to Ukraine’s aid. Europe is really being screwed here from both sides, on principle they support democracy and self-determination but they are entirely dependent on the Americans to stand up for that.