I’m sorry - paying for an audit is somehow a conflict of interest? How exactly is that?
As someone who had to contract auditing firms every year, and personally sign off in their report as part of our compliance, I would love to hear how I should have …what? Won the audit lottery? Applied for some sort of government assistance? Prayed to an audit fairy godmother?
Who the F else is paying for our audit? I want free audits! I bet everyone does.
Ah, I believe this is what’s called “a conspiracy theory” if you had more details.
Agreed, I was warned off of PIA 5+ years ago.
In a few cities it’s good. NYC, Chicago, where white people live in DC, and maaaybe SFO come to mind. (LA your subway is only for movies, F off). Literally everywhere else it’s a travesty of busses designed to institutionalize and reinforce classism and poverty. So it’s bad, and no one wants to use a bus system (lack of tracks? Lack of charm!) of it served wealthier neighborhoods.
I used to use Power Delete Suite to nuke Reddit comments.
Aside from the Ars Technica article in the xpost, there’s a lot of “it depends.”
It depends on not just the OS, but if it’s a custom image built for Dell or HP or Asus etc. computers, what settings are on, what settings were on by default, what bloatware is pre-installed, etc.
Typically, all MS or Apple really want are to know what apps you have installed, zip code, email address, IP address, crash reports, and possibly keywords they can associate with advertising. That’s their baseline wish list, which is all advertising fodder, and depending on your settings, that can quickly expand to “anonymized” (it’s not) cookie use, tracking of websites visited, etc.
If you have a custom image (i.e. a Dell specific version of Windows) the laptop manufacturer will look for access to roughly the same data.
With the whole Copilot fiasco, recording things like keystrokes and screenshots really are potentially in play now. But, again, only if you have foolishly installed Copilot and turned that stuff on. And that only after huge public outcry. So there’s always a non-zero risk of that, but do your due diligence to know you settings.
Can you strip out bloatware and tighten down Windows to a reasonable degree? Sure. But because MS can and does change system settings without your consent, you might find in 6 months an article about a setting you turned off, that they turned back on and you had no idea.
“Just” as in nothing that demands a phone number to validate. Meaning that OP will be asked to enter a phone number when signing up and may not have to worry about it being the same one as their email account.
In /r/privacy they started implementing the new social credit system where not only do you need karma, you need fresh karma, called a “Contributor Quantity Score.” So my usual aged, pop in every few months account with decent karma is effectively banned for being (actual term) “lowest value” because I’m not on Reddit commenting every day.
As for their plans, seems like a probability where they just want us to pay $5.99 a month to make the problem (they created) go away.
Namecheap let me register with just a Tuta email. Payment could maybe go through an online prepaid debit card. Never had a human check AFAIK.
Yeah, I would want to eat food and whatnot, so I wold probably want money which I can trade for goods and services.
Lol, I’m a privacy advocate. I’ve seen how many websites have my data, and played the cat and mouse game of opt out requests.
This is a dream. I would mourn my stellar credit score, degrees, and professional certs, but I would go pick up shifts as a plumber’s apprentice and just go enjoy life.
For the kind of people that use IG handles as a way to keep in contact, do you truly think you can say “Oh, I only have Mastadon” and even have them know what you’re talking about?
Stay strong! Just because people call to you from their walled garden doesn’t mean you need to lock yourself in there as well.
Depends entirely on the audience. The problem with privacy issues is that privacy nihilism sets on quickly, and people with short attention spans and no intrinsic idea of how much they’re being ripped off quickly take refuge in the comfort of a no-friction status quo.
An IG account isn’t a phone number or email, and I think it’s weird that young people treat it like it is.
Just say you don’t do social media, and if they can’t respect that, it’s a quick test as to if they’re your people or not.
Well, up until only a generation or two ago, no one born into those paces actually did have a choice to stay or not. It’s not easy to leave a family support network, especially in a niche environment.
That being said, living in the desert, I saw tons of Midwestern tourists that underestimated it, and quickly got into basic trouble that I learned to avoid as a child. Bit, the people that were always cool and always prepared to deal with a harsh environment were the people that had spent time in Alaska. Spend time in an extreme place, and you learn to respect any extreme place, and be perfectly fine.
And the extreme cold option is always an option on the table. Not nuclear winter, but one bad volcanic eruption can affect large parts of the globe. Just ask folks in 1816, when an eruption in Indonesia led to a year with literally no summer in most of the northern hemisphere. Totally brutal famine in Europe, as one could also expect from AMOC collapse.
Yes. I’ve lived in West Africa for about 7 years total. I’ve seen plenty of 50m deep wells pulled by hand go dry or collapse. People collecting water from puddles after a rain, rather than walk a mile to the well.
The old guys in Mali and Niger talk about being kids, roaming forests and keeping hyenas from eating the goats. One village I knew was named “it’s an elephant.” It’s all gone now. It’s been gone for 30 years. The elephants, the hyenas, the forests north of 13 degrees N, are mostly gone.
But some trees are still there, all the way into the Sahara. There are oasies and seasonal lakes with fish and wells and crops. Herders graze goats and donkeys in narrow bands far into the Sahara.
Im not saying it’s great, but im not saying it’s absolute devastation and hell on earth. I’d rather be there than some isolated community in Alaska or Siberia.
That’s when you dry out the stuff you grew when it was only 100°F
Also, Millet, sorghum, cow peas, pigeon peas, cactus, okra, and sweet potatoes are the crops that already grow in the Sahel, where it’s usually right around triple digits. People live like this right now. They have for generations.
I know, it’s just kind of laughably shouting they don’t know what either an audit or conflict of interest actually are.
The hardest part some times is finding an audit firm that isn’t stupid expensive, but also won’t do a shit job and give you a report that looks like some knock-off free LLM didn’t write it to maximize their own payday. I love a good audit report with findings, it means I didn’t waste money. But my shit is (well, was, at another place years back) locked down tight, so we didn’t ever expect anything terrible.