Agreed, I use VPNs a lot but I never used even once a commercial VPN and I wouldn't use Firefox free one either.

As a matter of fact, those can just concentrate the watching and tracking to one more single point yet.

I use several VPNs at the same time that don't change the default route on my desktop and several others on my router which may change the default route or not. On the desktop, it's to access protected resources. On the router, it's usually to optimize latency and throughput by routing through more efficient gateways over the public Internet using servers I have control of.

MAGA types cherry-pick past forecasts to paint all forecasts as extreme. Being Evil With Data

...screw the UK. Even Eskimos wouldn't visit.

Blaspheme!

Maybe they're merge into a single person: Xump!

"We now have the best pandas, everyone says so! All the other countries have ugly smelly bears that eat people and get into trash, but pandas are peaceful and cute, like me!

Only Australian koala bears can compete, but we're gonna buy Australia, and they'll thank us! Pandas and koalas will have babies together to make the Master Race of bears, just like Crypto Christ strongly asked for while I was taking a shit on my Golden Flushy Throne. MBGA!"

Overhaul English to not require gender'd pronouns; problem solved! Auto-tagging people's gender in everyday speech is obsolete, it serves no purpose other than making religious troglodytes happy, the same fools who tried to jail Elvis for dancing sexy. F 'em! They can move to Afghanistan if they still crave Gonad Cops.

...almost nobody would qualify. Besides, I have bone spurs, my bribed doctor said so.

In the old days one either vented mental issues by beating the shit out of their own family, and/or becoming a babbling religious nut.

" And AI whipped it up in a few hours of me going back and forth with it."

This is the key. You are no doubt, a capable programmer, and you used this tool to do more work. Which is what most good tools do. Woodworkers don't buy chair making machines, etc. So many are touting that you can just say, "I want an app that does..." and get that app. Or that a junior programmer can suddenly be far better.

I see a weird future where junior programmers are going to be lured into a very bad place, some senior reject the new tech and become comparatively useless, and some seniors become fantastically productive.

Before flash was even practical, computers kept BIOS on true ROM and used a small persistent storage commonly called CMOS for configuration. It could be a pain because the button battery that maintained it could die.

These days, you could use a small flash for configuration and a larger one with write disabled in hardware for the boot code.

On the other hand, by far the greatest threat to your laptop is someone wanting to steal it outright and sell it off. They're not going to bother with anything on it, just blow it away with a bootleg copy of Windows and call it a day.

The people looking to profit from information on your laptop will do it from half a world away while you are using it.

This can be used to regain access to laptop you won that has been hijacked by DRM you don't want. Since it requires physical possession of the laptop, it doesn't pose much risk to the end user.

I just disable secure boot. If the device leaves my control long enough for someone to do something with it, it has to be treated as potentially compromised with or without secure boot. Why create an additional recovery roadblock for myself? Security is a funny thing if you think about it carefully enough.

Always lock your car so when someone steals your $5 flashlight they also break your $500 window. Always install security lights so criminals can see what they're doing when they break in.

Pondering the 2nd...

Trying to kiss up to Dictator Xi and Dictator Donnie at the same time, that's a tricky dance.

We disagree on what defines doing business in the UK. The justifications you provided can easily be rewritten from the other perspective:
They serve content and ads from the US. They make money from ads served from the US. The content served from the US serves their goal, whatever that goal is, financial or otherwise.

Internationally commerce, maybe, but they're not doing business within the UK. It's a lot closer to someone selling a doodad that gets sold overseas as well.

Right, which is why it's on them to enforce it (IMO). They want to dictate this crazy shit, they can implement it. Why would the onus fall on the website?

That's what makes it an analogy, and it's stretched on purpose. The question is still, once it reaches a point where you would agree it is overreaching, like in this stretched example, what does that change? It should be prevented from getting to that point - fix this before it's a step too far. As that famous poem goes, "First they came for..."