Amount of people surprised by this:

Reminder #891,814 to stop using Chrome and Chromium browsers and to stop supporting Google’s web monopoly.

Grass is green, water is wet, the sky is blue, and privacy settings don’t do anything.

Looking in my settings landing page, I see ads for MS365, Copilot, and OneDrive.

I’ve had to cave and use some services (for work reasons) that I’d swore I would never use. No matter how much we value privacy and look for alternative software/services when possible - we still have to eat and pay bills.

If you are in the same boat and you must use services like that, then my advice would be to keep it strictly business. Keep your personal details and personal social connections to a minimum unless where it would be otherwise beneficial for work purposes.

For anyone who wishes to cancel their Adobe plan(s):

• Change your subscription to another kind - either cheaper or more expensive. You the subscription will be locked for about 5 minutes while it processes, then it will unlock and you can now manage it. Go into the manage subscription page and cancel it. Because you renewed with a new plan, you can now make use of the fee-free cancellation window and any charges applied will refund.

• If that fails or you don’t want to go that route for whatever reason, you can contact customer support and request the cancellation fee be waived. I’ve seen a few people say they had success with this. If they still decline you, threaten to report them to your regional consumer protections agency, the press, legal sources, etc. Companies hate bad PR and would rather just waive your fee than deal with you.

I didn’t threaten. I cancelled.

I cancelled and purchased Affinity Photo 2.

For the kind of work I have been doing I have not needed to hand over any psd files. Photoshop is(was) only a small step in my workflow and the main thing I get hired for is 3D modelling services. Regardless, I still work with NDA’d content and Adobe’s terms are invasive as hell.

Just cancelled my Adobe sub. Even if I was comfortable with how they use my data (and I am most assuredly fucking not) I’m also uncomfortable with them helping themselves to the NDA’d projects I do for clients. I trialed Affinity Photo and it meets 98% of my needs and is on sale 50% off right now. Bite my ass, Adobe.

Welp, there goes my morning. Now I have to spend a few hours unfucking everything.

Never trusting this app ever again.

This is disabled if you turn off telemetry in the settings, which users should already be doing anyway. I don’t see this as any worse than what they already do.

I wish I could make useless trash and be given unfathomable amounts of money by infinitely gullible investors.

In this day and age, a bunch of processor and camera specs does nothing for me. I want to see what they plan to do with the UI and OS as a whole. Will it just be a lazy Android skin or will they go the extra mile and make it look and feel like a Windows phone of old?

The important part that you should know (and should already be using):

Remember, you can always opt out of sending any technical or usage data to Firefox. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to adjust your settings.

W11 is such a great example of how out-of-touch Microsoft’s management and shareholders are. Its market share is tiny compared to W10 and is actively decreasing and they think pulling stunts like this is going to be beneficial in some way. Like even if you follow the usual routine of enshittification, they’ve missed the entire part where they expand their userbase first before making things worse.

MS needs a leadership shakeup so badly.

A lot of lists for private alternative email services start and and with Proton, seemingly. Services like Posteo, Mailbox, Hushmail, Fastmail, etc are frequently overlooked. It’s a shame because many of these other services are great and Proton is one of the most expensive and not suitable for everyone. I’ve been with Posteo for years and I have nothing but praise for it.

As if the NSA ever needed legal permission to do whatever the hell they wanted anyway.

I am so very tired of every company nonsensically shoehorning “AI” into their software to appease shareholders and investors. Discord shut down their AI chatbot in less than a year – take notes from that.