Potentially. They are denying it’s true, and I don’t think any more evidence has come out besides this one claim.

I pretty much always use a VPN these days because I hate Comcast and don’t like them seeing my traffic. I like nextDNS because it gives me centralized management and filtering of DNS for all my devices, it’s definitely worth the $20 a year. I forgot to mention I also have the extensions CanvasBlocker, WebRTC Blocker, and LocalCDN but I think it is likely just ublock origin (and nextDNS filtering) that got my score to 96%.

96% using Android Firefox Beta with ublock, nextdns, and a VPN.

I became a paying subscriber for kagi today. The way I justify the cost is it’s saved me time digging up technical information at work and that increase in efficiency is worth money to me. Also, I hate ads and SEO crap, and $5 isn’t really that much these days. I’m trying to reduce my reliance on Google so it’s nice having an actual superior search experience, even if I have to spend a little money for it.

I’m still on my trial period but I think I’m going to pay when it runs out, I’ve been really happy with it so far. I think it’s saved me a good chunk of time at work I would have wasted digging through Google SEO crap so it feels like it’s worth spending a few bucks on.

Thanks for the link!

Can you share your argument with Stross? I’ve always enjoyed his writing.

I don’t remember the numbers but their ads division has been showing massive growth over the past several years, they make billions selling ads these days.

Not quite a disaster but a credit card got hacked, my Microsoft account was locked for suspicious activity, and I received a very targeted phishing attempt for my banking credentials. I’m now a paid subscriber of Bitwarden, set up a shared vault with my partner, and have 2 yubikeys arriving later this week.

Yes, if I didn’t know any details about what specifically happened or where in the house it happened. I think I would just put it out of my mind and never think about so it wouldn’t ever bother me. If I knew too much I could see it coming to mind more easily and potentially being an issue for me.

If you pay there’s an option for chatgpt4 that can use Bing to search. There’s also various plugins that can let it interact with all sorts of additional data sources. Not that you should use it like a search engine exactly, but it can be useful for search if you configure it correctly and understand that it doesn’t “know” anything.