Russia is reportedly planning to block WhatsApp as well.

I switched off after having found that its privacy settings prevent extensions like Dark Mode from reading your dark mode status in the OS. There’s a workaround but I might as well use something else.

That’s overkill. Shaun’s video on Harry Potter is less than two hours long and tells you all you need to know.

The store came to be as an “f you” to Apple, as evident from the email exchanges at the time. The 1984 trailer from Fortnite seemed to be in the same vein. I don’t think that particular trailer was for the purpose of promoting the EGS, as there’s not a single hint to the store in the video or its standard placement.

If it were purely self-serving, they’d agree to settle with Google on special terms similar to those offered to a number of other publishers. Court proceedings last for years, as would be obvious to Sweeney, so sacrificing years of revenue for the distant prospect of having to pay 0 to the platforms is easier explained as being ideological than a business decision.

We know WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol for encryption, but it also collects a lot of metadata. Arguably still better than Telegram that collects everything. Its secret chats may be e2ee but nobody uses them even for discussing sensitive matters, and they don’t work on the Desktop.

Removed

Depends on whether piracy is less of an ethical issue than supporting a sexist transphobe.

The corporate overlords are inherently right-wing, which is why they fund, build, and embrace those platforms. There’s no revolt in joining them.

That’s what they say, but I’d expect it to be producing some results even in the event of Bing being down if that were the case.

It didn’t return any search results during the Bing outage, as experienced by me personally and reported by others. At least one blog post claims it relies on Bing.

As far as I know, Startpage uses Bing, not Google now. The same is true for Ecosia.

Its Russian founder recently praised Musk in an interview for Tucker Carlson.

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As of today, the revenue share is still the same as before the last acquisitions, right? The entry requirements are the same and the discovery tools aren’t worse? If so, and the issue is with the layoffs and unionization, that’s true for countless other companies, especially in gaming.

I fully read your comments before responding. I also had a look at the Chomsky interview, which contained some of the other points already addressed in the open letter I linked. I’d say you were on the money when you brought up China and how some or more people on the left end up siding with it in their quest to call out the US. I think we’d also agree on that there’s nobody we agree with 100%. My problem is that I find it shallow for someone to not be able to harshly criticize the US government without siding with (or praising) Russia or China, let alone acting as their agent by repeating their main talking points. That’s where I’d want to draw the line at least as far as openly recommending those people, and possibly where we differ the most.

From this I get the broad sense that Chomsky does not side with Putin nor does he support the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

What I get from it is the same thing as enlightened centrism. The Trump-style position of “very fine people on both sides”. The kind of spineless response that only enables the fascists, as they’re the ones to force their views on everybody unless clearly and consistently opposed. Another example? “I’m not racist but”, because that’s exactly the structure of his response at your link. He spent just a bit on criticizing the invasion only to spend 95% of the time on echoing Putin’s narrative of it being related to the expansion of NATO, the US, and some made-up promises (most recently reiterated in Putin’s interview to Tucker Carlson). Also worth noting that for Putin, the kind of wishy-washy “all sides bad” response is precisely the goal of the many years of influence operations, as exemplified by the trolls from Olgino posing and organizing US demonstrations as both Blue Lives Matter and BLM, pro- and anti-Muslim activists, among other things (documented at the same link with reliable sources like The Washington Post).

Authoritarianism is what it is no matter the label, so that’s what I meant by comparing him to the tankies. Putin’s views often revolve around the idea of the greatness of the Soviet Union, which also explains his intent to rebuild it by force. Chomsky’s position on Ukraine is easy to find with a simple search for “Chomsky Ukraine”. Personally, I like this response to his talking points which echo Putin’s.

As noted there, the agreements you mentioned are essentially made up. A dictator like him doesn’t need to be triggered to act. Look up the role of the Russian FSB in the 1999 apartment bombings that helped his rise to power, shortly followed by his hostile takeover of the independent media station NTV. Another highlight of those years was the inaction and censorship related to the Kursk disaster, clearly showing that from the very beginning, Putin cared only about power, not the people. We can go on and talk about the 2002 hostage crisis in Moscow, the 2005 and 2006 killings of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya and others to no end, but let’s just focus on the first year. Would you argue that in the first year of Putin’s presidency or even before it, the US managed to somehow wrong him and turn him into a dictator? That would be wild, especially given that Yeltsin reportedly picked Putin as his successor specifically over his work in the KGB in order to protect himself and his family. Then if you really want to attribute any of it to the West, go farther back, into Putin’s own memories from his KGB work in Dresden and his reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall. He expected order but that was ruined by the demonstrators, resulting in the revolution. Even from this event alone, it’s easy to explain his reaction to all the revolutions in the post-Soviet countries, be it Georgia or Ukraine, which were his first targets for the invasions.