The article said that they track the movements of bodyguards. I doubt Trump or Biden use anything remotely related to fitness. Obama might have.

I’m using Fennec which also removes telemetry, but many standard users are not comfortable installing apps that aren’t on Google play.

They mention that the shared codebase means they can add functions back in, so there’s that. To me that reads like a hard fork that they’d have to maintain independently.

The link you shared is the company profile only and doesn’t mention any controversy about telemetry being shared with China.

I’ve been googling for a bit, and there are articles concerned this might happen from 2016 when the takeover was announced, and plenty of discussions on reddit, hacker news, y-combinator, quora and even on the official Opera forum (not deleted or redacted, mind you), but there wasn’t any clear evidence that telemetry is being shared.

While the concern remains valid, I’m also asking myself whether it’s that much worse than Chrome, Brave or Firefox sending telemetry to the US? I’m neither American nor Chinese, and would consider both governments hostile. Which one of them has access to my data is merely a choice between plague and cholera.

So in the end it’s on informed users to block transmission of telemetry themselves, regardless of their browser of choice.

True, but it’s the only thing you can do if your company forces you to use them…

How is that the app’s fault?

The browser versions of teams and outlook are surprisingly stable. The desktop software for both are beyond broken.

No, they really can’t. They own and operate the redditstatic domain and rent the server space from AWS. De jure that makes them the hoster.

Um… Did you read the article? It’s about moving their EU Headquarters from Ireland to the Netherlands. GDPR applied before and after. This is specifically about Irish censorship requirements.

I wouldn’t really compare the pro version, when the regular one works better and has extendable storage via SD card and comes at $149 retail, with offers as low as $129 around.

Annual hardware revisions are nice and all, but in my understanding they don’t actually improve what the end user get to experience.

The main advantage I see in the shield is the ability to sideload apps, such as SmartTube for adfree youtube with integrated sponsorblock, ftp server, torrent client etc., and not least use VLC as a media player. Plus you can customize the launcher or replace it as a whole to tailor the UI to your exact needs.

Agree, of all the companies out there, Apple isn’t the one I entrust with my data. Pretty happy with my Nvidia Shield instead, the OS is open enough to allow monitoring all telemetry, and I’m happy to say that after switching everything off that Android enabled by default, nothing really gets out there. I’ve sniffed connections on my router as well, and it only really connects to where it should.

Edit: Aww look, I’ve triggered the fanboys ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ASUS RT-AX88U with Merlin firmware. Running stable since 2019 or so.

Edit: https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/

Sure, it’s being done. Xiaomi TVs have custom ROMs available, and I’m sure a bunch of others. Thing is, state of the art TVs are are not exactly cheap, and you need one to hack it in the first place. Most hackers do it for free, so they can’t exactly go on a spending spree.

Sure, waste electricity while being unable to use the TV as intended, and cause some additional wear & tear. Great idea.

The regular shield does just fine for me, I can attach hard drives to my router and mount them as smb shares, and then access movies with VLC Player.

Smart Tube Next is developed for TV only. Works like a charm.

https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube

Don’t use the .com website with the same name!

That’s been discontinued, Tubular is the active fork.

That’s not what this is about, the article is simply garbage. They are enforcing a kernel level anti-cheating system that is incompatible with Linux (where no third party gets kernel access, and rightly so). This locks out all Linux players, including Steam Deck.

You might max out your throughput with popular torrents, else it’s indeed just steam I’m aware of to deliver. And then the question is really whether you download that many games that it actually matters.

Even on my 100 mbit line, downloading 50GB from steam takes me only about 1h. At 350mbit that should be less than 20 min, vs. ~7 min at 1gbps.

Personally I don’t download enough to justify the surcharge, I can easily just let it run through the night, or start in the morning and be done once I’m out of the shower and had my breakfast.

But the company doesn’t have the money. Stock value means investor valuation, not company funds.

Once a company goes public for the very first time, it’s getting money into its account, but from then on forward, that’s just investors speculating and hoping on a nice return when they sell again.

Of course there should be some correlation between the company’s profitability and the stock price, so ideally they do have quite some money, but in an investment craze like this, the correlation is far from 1:1. So whether they can still afford to build the data centers remains to be seen.