Your prudery and moralism bores the hell out of me https://randomrantdispenser.neocities.org/rant04-2024-07-18

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Joined 11 days ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2026

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  • lol the downvotes

    “You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

    You can buy a game license on Steam. Your only access to it is through them, you can only install and play it through their store. You need to have their program running to check your license and also probing your system to see what you are running and logging your activity. If the company so decides, they can remove your access to the game because you never bought it, they only gave you a license. This market model removes player’s autonomy and keep everything locked out of players control.

    Or you can buy a game on GOG. After you buy the game you don’t need GOG for anything, you have full control of the installation file and can back it up however you want and install wherever you want. You can use their launcher if you want to log your activity for social features but that’s optional. You bought the game and have your copy, publisher and distributor can fuck off forever.

    Yet, people believe not owning and controlling the games you paid for is “better”…
    (not knowing how games used to be, and what online stores have taken from you, is a tragedy)

    Oh, the game is not available on GOG? That’s because the publisher doesn’t want consumers to have any control over the game, they want to control how, when and where you can play it, including revoking licenses if your own self-hosted private servers don’t follow the moderation rules the company wants, and if you still buy it you are just keeping this anti-consumer market model viable - just like consumers made lootboxes, pay-to-win, battle passes, single player games requiring online verification, and everything that enshitified gaming viable. Market share is no metric for service quality.






  • I wrote about it some time ago:

    “This might be my favorite debloat tool since you can create a quick script online and it has tons of options, however, if you don’t know what you are doing, don’t go messing around, because they go overboard with options and let you uninstall tons of packages that break Windows functionality and I have no idea why the option is even there. It’s like, “For a lighter experience, how about deactivating upper limbic appendages?” and just like that you agreed to removing your arms.
    Privacy Cleanup - all options pretty cool. Disable OS Data Collection - all pretty cool, but I’d be careful with Application Compatibility Framework, and only select Application Impact Telemetry there. Configure Programs - all pretty cool, but I’d skip browsers unless you are planning to use any of them. Secure Improvements - now, it’s all very well documented there what each option does, but do you really understand what they do? Do you trust their info is updated to any other change Windows might have made? If you don’t know what those options are about, I don’t recommend touching them - some even disable convenient stuff, like AutoPlay and AutoRun for when you connect something to your USB port. Block Tracking Hosts - all cool too. Privacy Over Security, UI For Privacy, Advanced Settings - don’t touch it if you don’t know what you are doing. Remove Bloatware - mostly very cool, but a lot of stuff on the Windows App list you should be very careful about removing. Rule of thumb: If you don’t know what it is, don’t touch it.
    After having your script ready and downloading, you run as administrator, and it will take a long time to complete. After manually clearing what you could and running a debloat script, it’s also always good to run Get-AppxPackage on PowerShell to see what was left behind and then use Get-AppxPackage -Name “PackageName” | Remove-AppxPackage to get rid of it. There is always some Bing, Yahoo, Zune, Skype, Edge, Xbox, Teams, Weather, Maps, crap still lurking…
    I always used to remove Windows Store, but Microsoft has removed your access to its utilities directly through browsers. Even trying to install through PowerShell will fail without it. So, yeah, it’s bloatware, but be careful about removing it now.” https://fuckbigtech.neocities.org/#06-01

    Last privacy.sexy update is March 2025, and Microsoft has been rolling out a lot of updates that have been changing a lot of stuff, so probably there will be broken scripts.
    Just keep in mind that, despite the script’s name, there is no privacy on Windows ever. It’s just a debloat tool that will help your performance and battery runtime.





  • You are talking about End-to-End Encryption. Zero-Knowledge Encryption means they don’t have access to your mailbox because they don’t know the password, it’s not stored on their server, they only know the hash it generates (which is used to verify you know the password, but the password itself is never exposed).

    Even though they can’t get inside your mailbox they know all the incoming and outgoing metadata (addresses of emails sent/received) so they know your traffic (there is no way to encrypt metadata anyway, it would be like giving a letter to a mailman but not telling him who to deliver it to), but, say, court orders them to give access to your mailbox, they have no way of doing it, only someone with your password can read your emails.