I understand you perfectly and I also think that an OS must work in the background and adapt exactly to what I want to do. This is possible with Windows, but certainly not in its default form. This is what I mean by the need to have more advanced knowledge than with Linux to achieve it. It’s not well documented, but Windows itself has some features that allow it to be done, starting with the famous GodMode. In more recent times there are also some OpenSource utilities that take care of this (I would have wanted these in my early days with the first Windows versions, although in 3.1, 95, 98, XP… there weren’t that many unwanted intrusions either, just annoying BSODs at times and endless updates of hours sometimes).

Unlike Linux, on Windows you need to be a advanced user for it to offer you real freedom, but it can be done. This is why I always laugh when they say that Linux is more complicated than Windows, which is false, Windows is only somewhat more intuitive to handle if you take it as it is or if you limit yourself to the configuration menu. But when you enter the Services or the console commands, the intuitions are over, there you have to know what you are doing so as not to turn your PC into a paperweight.

At least in Windows 10 it’s optional, you can set your preferences in the settings of the Notifications. The News are only on by default. I see only Notifications when there are Updates or if there is some system issue, nothing else.

This is what a pyramid scam is all about. Throughout history, for as long as capitalism has existed, every crisis ended either with a war or not, but in any case the rich have become richer with this one. As with any Ponzi scheme, the drivers of this system collapsing disappear with the bucks, leaving the bankrupt losers who believed in the system behind.

It’s so that certain people have time to count their winnings, crisis exists only for normal people.

It seems that in the end he won

I am very clear that this summer is going to be the coolest in the rest of my life

It’s latin arabic looking text, maybe this way you see it

In any case, I do not understand that Tik-Tok or similar can be on an official government mobile, nor is it allowed on company mobiles. These are for work and related things, not to watch silly videos and play Candy Crush, for this they can use their private phones.

Yes, this gentleman seemed somewhat angry

Google translate is a calamity translating from Spanish, I’ll correct it, thanks.

I remember this story:

Detailed and unmissable instructions to carry out such a delicate and complex task, in 15 steps.

1. Pick up the cat and cradle it with your left arm as if it were holding a baby. Position the index finger and thumb of your left hand to apply gentle pressure to the cat’s cheeks while holding the pill with your right. When the cat opens its mouth, drop the pill inside. Allow him to close his mouth in order for him to swallow the pill.

2. Pick up the pill from the floor and the cat from behind the sofa. Cradle the cat again and repeat the process.

3. Bring the cat out of the bedroom and throw the slobbering pill in the trash.

4. Take a new pill from the box, cradle the cat, now in the cat’s right arm, keeping the hind legs firmly grasped with your left hand. Pry his jaws open and push the pill into his mouth with your thumb. Keep the cat’s mouth closed for a count of ten.

5. Get the pill out of the fishbowl and the cat off the cabinet. Call your wife.

6. Kneel on the floor with the jack held firmly between your knees. Keep the hind and front legs still. Ignore the growls the cat makes. Ask your wife to hold the pussycat’s head with one hand while she pokes his mouth open with a wooden ruler. Drop the pill in and vigorously rub the cat’s throat.

7. Remove the cat from the curtain roll holder. Bring another pill from the box. Remember to buy a new ruler and repair the curtains. Carefully sweep up pieces of porcelain figurines for later gluing.

8. Wrap the cat in a large towel and ask your wife to hold him flat, with only his head visible. Put the pill in a straw gas. Open the cat’s mouth with a pencil. Put one end of the straw in the cat’s mouth and the other in yours, blow.

9. Check the package insert to make sure the pill is not harmful to humans. Drink a glass of water to restore your sense of taste. Apply bandages to your wife’s arms and clean the blood from the carpet with cold, soapy water.

10. Bring the cat from the neighbor’s roof. Take another pill. Put the cat in the closet and close the door on the cat’s neck, leaving only the head out of the closet. Pry the mouth open with a dessert spoon. Drop the pill inside with a rubber band.

11. Go to the garage for a screwdriver to put the cabinet door back on its hinges. Apply cold compresses to your cheeks and check when the last tetanus was applied. I put the shirt I was wearing in the washing machine and took a clean one from the bedroom.

12. Call the fire department to get the cat down from the tree across the street. Apologize to your neighbor who crashed into his fence trying to escape from the angry cat. Take the last pill in the box.

13. Tie the cat’s front legs to the hind legs with a string. Tie it securely to the kitchen table leg. Look for heavy duty gloves. Hold the cat’s mouth open with a small crowbar. Put the pill in its mouth followed by a big piece of meat. Keep the head upright and pour a pint of water down the cat’s throat so that it swallows the pill.

14. Have your wife, if she can drive, take you to the ER. Sit quietly while the doctor bandages your fingers and forehead, and while the pill is removed from your eye. On the way back, stop at the furniture store to buy a new table for his kitchen.

15. Make an arrangement with an architectural firm to redecorate the house and call the vet to find out if he has any hamsters, or the like, to sell you.

No problem: pulverize the pill and put it on the cat’s hair.

Because it’s decentralized, if the block this site it redirect to one of the others. Every user has an cloud instance of Z-Library

Well, Swisscows is a good search engine, but it has a strong family safe filter at level Flanders which you cant quit. SearX is a good meta search engine, but sadly the different instances are not very stable, another one is MetaGer, a German Meta search engine, very good, also Qwant is a valid engine, even Startpage is a good and private engine with own proxy, but it’s a front end of Google and also use advertising. Whoogle is a good engine with the Google engine, but without the Google crap and tracking, It’s FOSS and has several instances. A French engine Peekier, very nice, instead of a list in the results, shows the thumbnails of the pages. Mojeek, a good privacy search engine. Anyway it’s recommended to use several different engines, this increases the results, since what one does not find, another may do.

Sadly yes, but it is usable and, even being a private company, in terms of privacy much better than Google or Bing, offering a very valid product. Other search engines that we use (DDG, Startpage…, the problem is that OpenSource search engines, if They do not work as frot-end of any commercial search engine, they are not useful for much, they do not usually have their own bots and databases because they lack the corresponding infrastructure, for this reason the current ones that use AI can replace this problem and will be the future) as well They are proprietary, no big deal, other priorities prevail. My Favorite anyway is Andisearch (Little startup, 2 Devs, Jed White and Angie Hoover)

You.com is a privacy-focused search engine built in Palo Alto, California, United States that summarizes web results using website categories, contrary to a traditional search engine which shows a list of links.[1][2] The search engine was founded by former Salesforce employees and opened its public beta on November 9, 2021.[3] In an interview, co-founder Richard Socher stated he wanted a search engine with a balance of privacy and personalization.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You.com

This is why I never used ChatGPT or Bing, nor this thingy of Google. There are a lot of secure and more private alternatives, like YouChat, Andisearch or Perplexity.ai, which you can use without problems.

https://you.com (you can switch to even more privacy, using it in Private Mode)

https://andisearch.com (Maybe the most private SearchAI ever, own reader mode and summarize function in the search result, there you can see also Videos without the need to access the page. Anonimous, no ads or tracking)

https://www.perplexity.ai (Which I’m still testing)

Also not a problem (no phone number needed and a fakemail for the account), apart you can also contact Safing also in his Blog, Reddit and via mail, not only in Discord.

Yes, maybe, but I don’t see a big problem, there are a lot of devs, even tose with FOSS projects in Discord, for example Andisearch, and some of the other AI projects, because include it`s fuctions in Discord itself, not possible in other social networks. For Example Midway or BlueWillow only works in Discord itself. That Discord tracks the user like FB and others, isn’t really a problem with extensions and privacy tools which almost everybody use nowadays to show them the middlefinger, even Portmaster itself, which blocks all this crap that pages like these want to put in your system.

That a company uses Discord, Twitter or another major social network does not mean much, they simply use the most commonly used networks. This simply has practical reasons, having contact with more users there than they would have in a network where only a tiny percentage of them participate. Perhaps with the massive migration to Mastodon and other federated networks due to the fall of Twitter, this would change in the future.

Portmaster is a good and nice app, beter than Pi-hole, but avoid to use the SPN it has, it has very bad critics of several users. It seems that it doesn’t work as promised and it’s apparently been in alpha for quite some time with no recent developments.

See comments in AlternativeTo https://alternativeto.net/software/spn--safing-privacy-network/about/

The only thing AI is useful for me, is to use it as a search engine, to talk to a bot I already have enough with telephone customer service. For search engines it is true that YouChat is very good, but I also use Andisearch (the first search engine with AI) and now also Perplexity AI, which is also very good.

I’ve good experience with vgy.me, which I use also with ShareX. Good privacy (delete EXIF data, good encryption) and stable, max 20 Mb/image, all share links.

https://vgy.me

The decentralized system is always the best solution, be it in social networks or in energy needs. Both naturally discredited and hampered by large corporations and monopolies, aided by like-minded legislators in our capitalist system.

Sadly rules science paid by lobbies, published only these by capitalist mass media.

I think so, they sell user data to Alphabet (Google) and Amazon.

But I have some skepticism, already in the past I had bad experiences with ADrive, which also offered 1TB for free, but after 2 years I had to download my stored data, because they suddenly removed the free plan.

Even for less, see, but as @Augustin_Skeldon says, its only for research and dev. For this you don’t need to buy this, IBM offers a own workshop for free. With this you have access to a real Quantum computer from IBM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwahG1s4dqI

Someday they will invent gunpowder. As far as I know, pretty much everyone uses an adblocker. But ads are not relevant, just annoying, worse are the trackers, fingerprintings, key and mouse logging, mail-tracing, header sniffing, redirects and a dozen other techniques that companies use to track user activities and against this a adblocker just doesn’t do much. Besides, we will have to start by avoiding search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., which record the history to sell it to third parties, apart from causing a Bubble filter effect.

Richard Branson is way cooler and also has spaceships.

Another stone to bury Twitter. He leaves nothing unproven to kill Twitter in record time. Musk is asocial in the sense of the word with his arrogance and ignorance.

Claiming our data? What nonsense. Of course we can claim the data that Google has or the social networks that have it and they will surely give it to us. But then what? These people make money with our data that they sell to third parties, that is, they are distributed throughout the network and we must demand them from all advertising companies around the globe, and even if they give us the data, there is no guarantee that they delete them or to whom else they have sold them. What is on the network remains on the network until the final judgment, no matter how much we claim the data from the companies. The only way to avoid that our data circulates through the network is not to sign up to any company that earns money with advertising, which is the vast majority and this since our beginning of activities on the Internet. They track our email addresses, our fingerprint that we leave on each page we visit, our location, our OS and type, the browser we use and other data that makes us identifiable and traceable, no matter how much VPN we use. Claiming our data is a bad joke, claiming to whom?

Unfortunately it is so. It is seen daily in the rise of the extreme right on all sides, promoted by related media, paid for by certain lobbies that with the current economic crisis see how their bubble is deflating. The capitalist system is only benevolent if everything works in its interests. “You like our system, you better do it”

Not all, only those who remains in Twitter.

Tutorial on how to lead a company to ruin. I hope Musk buys Google soon.

Until now it was safe to insult online, without the danger of getting your face smashed. Apparently this is coming to an end.

Vivaldi social is moderated by the team (forum by volunteers), every federated instance has its own norm of conduct and moderators, Vivaldi also collaborate in the code and devs, monetiacion of Vivaldi don’t change (see Vivaldi business model), the TOS and PP is the same as in all Vivaldi services, no ads, no trackers, no sellings to third party companies, no Big Data companies, DMCA compilamce is these of an EU product (Vivaldi is an EU product, Iceland and Norway). The user can use the instance he want, Vivaldi only offers to the Vivaldi user a instance which he can use (or not) without the need to create a new account, this don’t exclude the use of other instances of the users choice.

You can hide in Vivaldi everythig which you don’t need, it’s all open to customize it, everything between a UI of an old IE and a panel of a combat jet. But yes, for some people the settings panel maybe somewhat overhelming, it’s the biggest of any browser. If you use it in you mobile, remember that you have a encrypted sync function in a own server, not the one of Google, because of this it’s also logical to use the desktop version, if not, at least the sync function is also a good way to use it for backup (bookmarks, settings, notes , passwords, etc.), if you lose the mobile or you buy another one. But don’t forget the sync password, not even Vivaldi know it nor your stored data which is full encrypted, if you lose your password, you lose your synced data, no recovering mail.

You can log in to your instance also in Vivaldi, without problems, as I said, Ive an account in another instance and a different in Vivaldi social and I can switch between one and the other without problems. I have no intention of spamming you with Vivaldi, and no, nobody pays me, I just clarify things as they are and they are not as it is said here, like saying that you cannot log in to another instance in Vivaldi, which is false, Vivaldi social is simply an instance as a service for the Vivaldi user, neither more nor less, which allows the user to access an instance without the need for a separate account, it does not prevent at all from using other instances separately, even from the same Vivaldi instance, from there you can also browse all instances and accessing ther with your corresponding logging data. Just as it is absurd that Vivaldi does not let you use it as you want, being precisely the browser that lets you do everything you want, more than any other current browser, this is precisely what differentiates it from others. If you don’t like it, then you simply don’t use it, but stop telling falsehoods.