(not actually everything, but I get your hyperbole)

How is it hyperbole? All artificial neural networks have “hallucinations”, no matter their size. What’s your magic way of knowing when that happens?

there must be a bit more to it than that. AIM, Skype, and several others were viable options with existing userbases.

Once upon a time in a messenger landscape far far away there lived a king called XMPP. It had a lot of powerful children, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google+, and even Skype amongst them. And they all worked together in a big federation towards the commonwealth of all, freely sharing their metadata. But then some of the children grew greedy, jealously guarding their own gardens behind higher and higher walls, breaking down the federation. And thus the era of the warring messengers began. But prophecy foretells of a prince to unite all the disparate standards in one big Matrix again, completing yet another revolution of the XKCD 972 wheel of time.

For real though it was phone numbers. WhatsApp always worked based off of phone numbers, which is an identity confirmation method that was immediately familiar to most people at the time, even more so than email.

Oh you are right, I misread that. Thanks for pointing it out.

it’s definitely more pro-privacy than Brave or FireFox. I’ve never had to jump through a captcha to use Google in those browsers.

You have this backwards. Google showing you captchas is basically them saying they can’t match your browser to any know (shadow) profile they have already stored. So they aren’t sure you are a human and if so which one specifically. Getting harassed with a captcha is essentially like a badge of honour for your browsers privacy settings.

Firefox has no extensions so no Adblock.

That’s because so far every browser on iOS had to use WebKit as it’s HTML rendering engine, meaning that even if you installed another browser manually you were basically still using Safari under the hood. IIRC the new DMA rules include allowing other browser engines like Gecko, so Mozilla is probably already working on making addons available. I mean they are available on Android, so why wouldn’t they make them available on iOS now that they finally can?

At this point somebody should really create a /c/Aipocalypse community or something to collect stuff like this.

Cryptography ⊋ Blockchain

A blockchain is cryptography, but not all cryptography is a blockchain.

Well I guess that depends very much on what you mean by being on life support. Like financially speaking? Oh yeah, they are more or less entirely dependent on Google. Regarding user numbers? Sure, Statcounter says 3.3% currently. Technologically speaking? Not really, quite the opposite actually. Besides Apples WebKit and Googles fork of it called Blink there is but one game in browser engine town, and its name is Gecko.

Now? Want?!

The highest GDPR fine was 1.2 billion.

This isn’t the GDPR but the DMA. That said, fines there are even steeper, 10% of global revenue for the first offence, 20% for repeated offences.