route my traffic to a different country where I don’t live in and them viewing my activity is potentially less of a problem

Depending on where you live, and where your service resides, this could be tricky.

In the US, for instance, if you’ve chosen a provider in Australia, then a FVEY agreement could be in place to share that data. This gets around the technicality that intel gathering is not occurring on US soil and is not being done by the gov.

And again with the US, if you’ve chosen a country that’s not amiable to sharing user data, the US could very well be justifying that country as a target for pilfering data anyway.

So, that would leave choosing a service provider within the US, which should need to go through the FISA courts for any access to citizen data, but who knows after the Snowden revelations.

I guess that’s the state of privacy if you’ve got a nation state that’s targeted you for surveillance. Only way around it I can think of is data to be encrypted in transit and at rest, and only you control the keys. But that’s not something that’s going to happen with something like mainstream email anyway, too inconvenient for most folks (and you also don’t know if your recipients are security conscious either).

No I hate MS. I won’t ever forget the pain that was developing edge cases around Internet Explorer (fuck IE 6, that shit was the worst).

I’ve been using mine for 10+ years, maybe changing batteries once.

I currently use it with a NUC loaded with linux mint, and have the UI HD scaled (it’s an out-of-the box option).

The only native functionality of the actual smart tv that I use, is the power button.

Everyone has these feelings

Not me!

Sheeeeeeit!

It can also happen if google can’t obtain/verify an id with their normal means (e.g. ip + browser type/settings + cookies + …).

I get challenged all the time and I’ve been on the same static consumer ip, but I go through some precautions to make it more difficult to id me (dump all browser state on restart, disable js except for trusted sources, ad blocker plugin, privacy conscious browser + settings, etc.). I still use a vpn in certain scenarios, but still get captchas either way.

Terms Apply*

*Applicable double penalty for door usage during peak utilization periods, weekends, and holidays. Doors left open will accrue triple penalties after the first 30 seconds, doubling every 30 seconds thereafter. Any attempts to circumvent usage rules forfeits half of remaining door credits; attempts include but not limited to: climbing out windows, busting through walls like kool-aid man, suicide, etc.

Last I read was that apple was going to throttle their usb-c ports being used with non-apple blessed cables. And those cables are supposed to be pretty spendy, as they’re going to be “apple taxed”, <cough> I mean certified as apple is calling it. I hope the EU puts the smack down on them for trying to create such a loophole in interoperability requirements.