(jk thanks for the heads up. generally people I’m interested in on patreon I just cough up the change but its good to have options. ) And as always the best way to get good advice is to put out some mediocre advice and let people who know more correct the record lol
there’s also https://kemono.su/ (fair warning, lots of vaguely horni anime art) which archives tons of patreons/other similar services. doesn’t seem to work with patreon-hosted videos or podcasts if I recall correctly, but definitely works with other posts/images
It may be the basic ubuntu telemetry (relatively non-invasive, but still a concern for the privacy-minded) sent by this tool unless you opted out at install:
https://github.com/ubuntu/ubuntu-report
from that page:
So it would not surprise me if it was scheduled to send, failed, and then re-triggered upon activation of a new network connection (the VPN).
Edit: Or even more likely, it is a connection from networkmanager to connectivity-check.ubuntu.com
https://ubuntu.com/core/docs/networkmanager/snap-configuration/connectivity-check
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s literally the same as browsing a website. Your feed reader isn’t a full web browser and as far as I know most don’t execute javascript. They will still generally fetch images, and fetching the feed itself is just an http/s request, but it may or may not always be a request to the same web server as the website of whatever publication you’re subscribing to. So IMO you’re already starting from a somewhat better position in terms of data leakage, since the feed isn’t loading analytics software or advertiser javascript or any of that stuff which feeds the vast majority of bulk data collection in the private sector.
One downside might be that if you have your feed reader set up to automatically poll for updates regularly, you may forget and it may do that polling on networks you didn’t intend to (when your VPN is off or you’re on school/work internet).
If you have a specific threat model, or a couple, that you want to guard against, it’s much easier to come up with solutions that thwart those exact threats, than just trying to be “as private as possible” all the time (very difficult, all technical solutions have tradeoffs). You could make the requests through tor. You could use a proxy to encrypt your traffic up to a server you control before going out to the various sites. You could use a VPN service.
Those all have different tradeoffs: tor exit nodes might be widely blocked from fetching content from a lot of sites, and it might be hard to connect to tor period on some locked-down networks, the server host and their ISP can still see some details about your traffic if you run your own proxy or VPN server, but it is another step removed from your local network/isp and the site both tracking you directly by IP, user-agent, etc. VPN services might be tracking you themselves, might be working with governments, but they, similarly to proxies, interrupt the tracking done by your local network or the websites in question, with the added bonus of blending in with the traffic of other users (but they are often blocked by local network admins, and occasionally by websites as well)
As an aside, RSS-based podcasts are a place where this tends to get interesting since the field is dominated by big distribution services. Assuming HTTPS is in use, most podcasts you might subscribe to can’t easily be tracked by your ISP or network admins, since they’ll blend in with all the other traffic going to say, acast, libsyn, iheart, whatever, and HTTPS blocks them from seeing the full URL or data in transit, only the domain name from SNI. They can only tell that you downloaded data from a podcast network, not what podcast it was
note that I said provider not developer. Obviously people don’t have much choice and their location isn’t a reason to cast judgment on them, but what jurisdiction a service provider operates out of is pretty impactful. I’m certainly not envious of the current political situation in the Kid Starver regime
I was going to say it’s pretty ironic that a privacy focused provider would be based in the UK what with their laws lately, but apparently email providers are exempted from the bill I was thinking of (no general carveout though, they name emails, SMS and MMS specifically. If you want to create a new protocol that does the same thing as email, or as SMS, its regulated as social media for some reason…)
Either way self hosting takes care of that problem. Neat!
Bit of trivia but I think I know why the 4 digit pin thing existed! It’s an out-of-the-box feature on freeRADIUS, I ran across it in a pfsense environment in the past. I thought it was neat (esp. in the absence of passwords, this was primary auth with public keys and then 2fa on top) but ultimately too convoluted for most users
so that’s 3/4 that you’re saying to avoid because you personally have deemed their moderation policies objectively inferior (and judging by 1 and 2 you probably think the same about hexbear?)
sounds like they’re just instances you politically disagree with, one of which does happen to also be massive. I’m not saying redditors should come to those 4 instances, they mostly shouldn’t (grad and hexbear don’t want most of them, .ml has been trying to not be “the default instance” since forever, and world is a shithole and already massive/centralizing), but your choice of list was transparently more political than it was about centralization, why not just be honest about that?
Or are you going to pull the “moderation policies are (or should be) objective and apolitical” canard?
“I hate centralization, we should do less centralization”
posts a list of instances to avoid, 3/4 of which are actually much smaller in active users than his own, presumably just all instances he politically disagrees with
high speed charging is a separate issue to charge voltage.
I don’t have data at hand, but it is generally easier on lithium ion batteries to charge (and discharge) slower. I believe compared to charge voltage, that is a relatively small effect assuming the product is designed for it and manages things like heat. In a product where heat is poorly managed and builds up during slow charging, all bets are off I suppose
charge voltage on the other hand has a well studied effect on battery longevity. reducing the max charge voltage (or increasing the minimum discharge voltage), can extend the number of cycles the battery will last without degrading in a huge way, more than doubling cycle count (depending on where those limits are set, ofc.
they can’t do the opposite (edit: well, besides derating the battery up front, but they would never do that since it would tarnish their spec sheet/marketing claims), since from the factory it is pushing the rated voltage of the battery to the max at 100% SoC, they can’t push it past the physical limitations of the battery chemistry and construction
If I wanted to be overly generous, it’s not untrue that this is a way for google to still advertise X hours of use on a single charge, but also extend battery lifetime for the average person who doesn’t get into the settings and fiddle with things.
But this is a flawed approach. There’s nothing special about the first 200 cycles, if you want to extend the lifetime of your battery, just keep the cycles between 20 and 80%, don’t over or under charge, and it will last years longer. I think they already have the setting to limit charging like that.
but depending on how it’s implemented it may end up having the apple-esque effect of purposefully degrading the experience of older devices to push people to upgrade. And making it mandatory and invisible to the user is just malicious
oh interesting, looks like they do work now! I don’t use kemono that regularly but recall being unable to access some embedded media last time I tried. Currently both audio and video seem to work though.
Also I’m shocked that vimeo trick works lol. fantastic stuff