Well, why would banks replace the system which allows them to charge fees for every other interaction with their services? A blockain solution would allow multiple different banks (and, possibly, even regular people) to access the data with no middlemen, and, therefore, no fees. Or, well, no fees that directly end up in the bank's pockets as profit, that is.

Getting rid of that is bad for business. So, unless something magical happens and the EU, for example, pass a law requiring the banks to switch to a more de-centralized, more fair system, it's not going to happen.

You can lose access to regular accounts as easily as to a blockchain. In fact, losing database of your password manager is even worse, because even if you have backups, they're not going to be complete.

With a blockchain all you have to worry is your private key. And you can write it down on a piece of paper, if you want, and put it away in a safe or a bank vault or something. Then, if you use it to restore your access years later, nothing will be lost.

"There are 2 types of people in the world: those who make backups, and those who don't make backups yet."

Oh, I guess that's slightly better. At least this fucking idiocy didn't make it into, essentially, law. But it also means that Nintendo (and other corpos) will not stop suing people left and right.

At what point will they sue fucking computer manufacturers, I wonder? Clearly, the ability to run unsigned code facilitates creation of code that's illegal (such as DRM circumvention tools and fucking Nintendo emulators), which, in turn, obviously facilitates piracy of Nintendo games! Poor Nintendo is loosing dozens of dollars because of those evil, evil computers which are clearly used for pirating their games and nothing else! This needs to stop!

What a lovely fucking precedent to have.

Android is sending a ton of data, though, even if you're not doing anything internet related. It, also, kinda reacts to "okay, google", which wouldn't really be possible if it wasn't listening.

Now, it obviously doesn't keep a continuous, lossless audio stream from the phone to some google server. But, it could be sending text parsed from audio locally, or just snippets of audio when the thing detects speech. Relatively normal stuff to collect for analytics purposes, actually.

Now, data like that could "easily" get "misplaced", of course, and end up in the ad-shoveling machine... Not necessary at Google's hands: could be any app, really. Facebook, TickTok, random free to play Candy Crush clone, etc. But if that data gets into the interwoven clusterfuck of advertisement might, it will likely end up having an effect on the ads shown to the user.

I've noticed that too. Intentionally veered a conversation into a different topic and, lo and behold, I get "relevant recommendation" short time later. That was, not entirely coincidentally, the same day I unlocked the bootloader and flashed a de-googled ROM.

Dualbooting is possible and easy: just gotta shrink the Windows partition and install Linux next to it. Make sure to not format the whole thing by mistake, though. A lot of Linux installers want to format the disk by default, so you have to pick manual mode and make sure to shrink (not delete and re-create!) the windows partition.

As for its usefulness, however... Switching the OS is incredibly annoying. Every time you want to do that you have to shut down the system completely and boot it back up. That means you have to stop everything you're doing, save all the progress, and then try to get back to speed 2 minutes later. After a while the constant rebooting gets really old.

Furthermore, Linux a completely different system that shares only some surface level things with Windows. Switching to it basically means re-learning how to use a computer almost from scratch, which is, also, incredibly frustrating.

The two things combined very quickly turn into a temptation to just keep using the more familiar system. (Been there, done that.)

I think I'll have to agree with people who propose Virtual Machines as a solution.

Running Linux in a VM on Windows would let you play around with it, tinker a little and see what software is and isn't available on it. From there you'll be able to decide if you're even willing to dedicate more time and effort to learning it.

If you decide to continue, you can dual boot Windows and Linux. But not to be able to switch between the two, but to be able to back out of the experiment.

Instead, the roles of the OSes could be reversed: a second copy of Windows could be install in a VM, which, in turn, would run on Linux.

That way, you'd still have a way to run some more picky Windows software (that is, software that refuses to work in Wine) without actually booting into Windows.

This approach would maximize exposure to Linux, while still allowing to back out of the experiment at any moment.

Wayland has it's fair share of problems that haven't been solved yet, but most of those points are nonsense.

If that person lived a little over a hundred years ago and wrote a rant about cars vs horses instead, it'd go something like this:

Think twice before abandoning Horses. Cars break everything!
Cars break if you stuff hay in the fuel tank!
Cars are incompatible with horse shoes!
You can't shove your dick in a car's mouth!

The rant you're linking makes about as much sense.

Overwhelming "support" is not that surprising, to be honest, when the question is "Do you support Putin or do you want to fall out of a window?"

Contribute to FOSS software.

Simply disabling registration of new accounts using Tor/VPN should be sufficient and won't affect existing users.

Although, requiring verification of accounts made via those would be a better approach. Require captchas to prevent automated posting. Automatically mark posts made from new accounts and/or via Tor or a VPN for moderation review.

There are way to mitigate spam that aren't as blunt and overreaching as blanket banning entire IP ranges. This approach is the dumbest, least competent way of ensuring any kind of security, and, honestly, awfully close to being needlessly discriminating. Fuck everyone from countries with draconian internet censorship, I guess?

Seems to region locked. There isn't a word about the game being given away, unless I log out of my account and use a VPN.
What even is the point of region-locking a fucking giveaway?

Edit: well, at least changing the region in the settings works. I guess it defaults to whatever country it thinks the IP the account was registered from belongs to?