Yes. The owner/developer is Kape technologies, an Israeli spyware/adware company.

To quote from cnet

For maximum privacy, I recommend VPN providers with a jurisdiction outside of Five Eyes and other international intelligence-sharing agreements – that is, one headquartered outside of the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. So it initially seems like a positive sign that, while CyberGhost has offices in Germany, it’s headquartered in Romania. German entrepreneur Robert Knapp says he founded the $114,000 startup on the back of low-wage Bucharest labor before flipping it for $10.5 million in 2017.

The issue is who he sold it to – the notorious creator of some pernicious data-huffing ad-ware, Crossrider. The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users’ browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.

Crossrider was so successful it ultimately drew the gaze of Google and UC Berkeley, which identified the company in a damning 2015 study. (You can read the Web Archive version of that document.)

This practice, commonly called traffic manipulation, is condemned web-wide. And the only difference between it and one of the oldest forms of cyberattack, called man-in-the-middle (MitM), is that you clicked “agree” on the terms and conditions.

Whether or not PIA or ExpressVPN or the other providers owned by Kape fulfill this data scraping and ad-serving pipeline in my mind is irrelevant. Choosing to do business with them rewards bad actors when there are other VPN sellers who don’t have such a tainted lineage.

Indeed, I’m not justifying surveillance in either country. Just reflecting on how it’s been portrayed and is progressing here in the USA

He just lived in the society he advocated for. He literally believed a shooting now and then was worth the right for everyone to have guns.

You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I am, I, I — I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.

Those are his own words from 2023.

Just because it happened to him doesn’t mean it wasn’t what he wanted. For all we know, he died blissfully knowing he received a God-given bullet.

The irony is I remember growing up with numerous stories about how expression is locked down in China and everything there is surveilled and if you speak poorly against the government you’ll get arrested etc. And thank goodness we are free in America to express ourselves even if it’s against the government because, my gosh, I might not like what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it!

And as if with no sense of irony and not even a remote bit of critique, all those stories about surveillance in China (true or not, I don’t know) were actually true, are currently true, or are becoming true here in the USA. And in many cases they’re just sold as commodities back to us e.g. ring doorbell cameras.

And a final thought: the USA used to be able to justify many of its foreign interferences on a sort of moral high ground, including freedom of expression and all that. That mask was slipping but now with Trump2 seems to have just fallen off. The pretense has given away to crass might makes right international relations. I consider the USA becoming a hyper surveilled state to be part of this story.

All this boohooing about his family. His wife chose to marry him because he’s a reactionary racist transphobic piece of shit. Meaning she herself is one. The only people I feel bad for are the young kids

For me the experience is not flawless, but it’s not problematic either. For instance, I have never encountered random flickering just because a wrong program was open. In your case if you’re using Nvidia as a GPU and are using Wayland as a display compositor that might explain some of your problems like Vivaldi flickering, where it might not be an issue in an Xorg session.

And the fact that you have to be potentially aware of these things is one of the annoying aspects of using Linux.

IME the nicest part of Bazzite is not having to manage it. To that end, it works on my Steam Deck. But that’s nothing to do with stability, as you say. In its own ways it’s more annoying to use than a regular distro.

Clearly people are finding use for it, but I personally find those annoying aspects needless speedbumps in my own usage. Except for, again, on my Steam Deck.

UBlock on iphone works well and is free but is limited to safari, does not appear to even work with safari used as an in-app browser

This is the most annoying part about “content blockers” on iOS. Works fine in this one narrow context. Otherwise you need DNS filtering. I use PiHole, and I have it set up to VPN back home when I’m away to keep myself covered.

Have fun!

Fact Check: Verified true!

I’ve never seen a distro take more than 2gb RAM ootb (ubuntu gnome and kde are probably the “heavy” contenders), excluding precached files. In either case, Windows or Linux, you lose big time the moment you launch a web browser.

A TeamViewer shooter coming out to downvote you lol

They do love to get together. Sometimes publicly like at Davos to meet at the WEF. Sometimes they like to meet more secretively like at Bohemian Grove. Sometimes they all just know and pay a guy named Jeffrey Epstein.

So it kind of is a cabal. It’s the cabal of people that pay and blackmail each other for favors. And if you’re not quite in the club then you do the legal version of it called lobbying.

Coke even re-branded its operations in nazi germany as “fanta”, to be able to continue making a profit during the war.

…there’s no end to the depravity when there’s a buck to be made, huh?

The macbook pro is the perfect laptop except for the Linux hill that I must die on. Every time I look at other offerings, they all fail just like Nate is saying in some regard. Screen. Speakers. Keyboard. Touchpad. Thermals. Battery life. The MBP is truly best-in-class hardware. But I just want to use Linux…

It’s working well to kill the one planet we have to live on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mauna_Loa_CO2_monthly_mean_concentration.svg

What kind of place do you go to to find these things? Sometimes I get really lucky (see my post history about my wonderful new printer), but if I could increase my odds that would be cool.

Dude. I thought That was bad. Just now I went to arstechnica to view one article and I did the same thing to “support” the site. It was 36MB in one minute.

This seems a bit weird because as detestable as Yeonmi Park is, she’s Korean and spends her time spinning lies about Korea. Does she talk about China?

Just yesterday I was on a news website. I wanted to support it and the author of the piece so I opened a clean session of firefox. No extensions or blocking of any kind.

The “initial” payload (i.e. after I lost patience approximately 30s after initial page load and decided to call a number) was 14.79MB transferred. But the traffic never stopped. In the network view you could see the browser continually running ad auctions and about every 15s the ads on the page would cycle. The combination of auctions and ads on my screen kept that tab fully occupied at 25-40% of my CPU. Firefox self-reported the tab as taking over 400MB of RAM.

This was so egregious that I had to run one simple test. I set my DNS on my desktop to my PiHole and re-ran my experiment.

Initial payload went from almost 14.79 -> 4.00MB (much of which was fonts and oversized images to preview other articles). And the page took 1/4 the RAM and almost no CPU anymore.

Modern web is dogshit.

This was the website in question. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/welcomefest-dispatch-centrism-abundance/