…and then everything you do and say gets monitored by the CCP…

Sounds like a bunch of crap I don't want, and they're adding more crap according to this article. And if they are indeed going the way of WeChat, becoming a "super app" and partnering with Chinese and crypto companies, that makes me very nervous about privacy.

I had a wiener dog that absolutely SLAYED moles like it was his job. Seriously, I bet he killed more than a hundred over a few years. I guess it kind of was his job, wieners are bred to hunt burrowing animals like that. Dachshund is German for "badger hound".

Anyway, he got a little older, fatter, and lazier, and we also moved to an area with tougher soil, so his mole slaying days were over (we thought). But then we got a young German Shepherd, and he figured out that he could find the mole (his downward pointing ears made him good at that), start digging the hole, and then stand back and let her take over. Then after she did all the hard work of grabbing and killing the thing, he would steal it from her and come present it to us very proudly.

He wasn't a terribly bright dog, so I was really impressed when he started doing that. The German Shepherd was way smarter than him by any measure, but I think she didn't care that he was taking credit for her kills. She was just having fun helping him. Both excellent dogs, I miss them a lot.

Lol. So many ponies

Kate McKinnon. She was on SNL for a long time, and she's not-so-secretly the best part of a lot of the movies she's in, even with minor roles.

Lol Jesus Christ, the surprise Shrek envelope

Obviously there are various forms of sugar in a lot of things, it's just a carbohydrate. My point is that there is zero reason to ever ADD sugar to any food, period. It is not an essential nutrient and it does not add anything beneficial other than flavor. It only promotes tooth decay, diabetes, and eventual organ failure. Yum.

Yep, that's the main problem with all the buzzword substances that diet culture is obsessed with: fat, salt, carbs, etc… All of those are fine in moderation, but the problem is that the processed garbage that the average person eats for lunch contains a RIDICULOUS amount of those things.

Not sugar, though. Sugar is just bad for you, full stop. 😆

That's not heterophobia, that's just being horrified by ignorant bigots that are also hetero.

The mildly homophobic nature of the question is hilarious. "Would you want to live forever if you also had to be a little bit gay???"

Sounds like this is for any loyalty cards with a barcode that you scan in a store. So if you're in the US, a lot of grocery stores have these, and some other businesses like Starbucks. Similar to Stocard: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.stocard.stocard

SIM cards do sometimes malfunction, so if that happens and you glued it in you're kinda screwed.

Worth what? It's free! And yes, it's open source. It can also be self-hosted if you're paranoid.

This is utter nonsense. First, let me point out that this is an ad for Surfshark, a VPN company. They're trying to sell you their service by scaring you.

Second, their methodology is absolutely useless, it's an easy and very common way to come up with a clickbait article like this. They're just looking at app store permissions, and assuming the app with the most permissions is bad and the one with the least permissions is good. Which is utter nonsense, it might be that the apps with more permissions NEED those permissions because they have more FEATURES.

I could make a "language learning" app that ONLY asks for the audio recording permission, and then sell audio recordings of my users to the highest bidder. But Surfshark would praise my literal spyware as "privacy-focused" because it only needs one privacy permission!

The way to ACTUALLY do this properly would be to fully audit each app, find out WHY it's asking for additional permissions, go over the full privacy policy, and do some packet captures to figure out when the app is phoning home to send data, and what servers it's connecting to. Contact the app owners, ask them why exactly their app needs each permission. Consult some experts.

But that's too hard for Surfshark, they just want to write a scary article so that they can sell you a VPN that doesn't really make you safer on the internet.

EDIT: You know why I dropped Surfshark? They started bundling a "virus scanner" in with their "privacy-focused" VPN client. So my "privacy" tool wanted to scan all my files all of a sudden? GTFO.

Yeah a lot of these little VPN companies are getting bought up by larger companies with unknown investors, it's kinda worrying. There's one company that owns ExpressVPN, PIA, and CyberGhost now: https://www.kape.com/our-brands/

Kape Technologies (previously named CrossRider) has a pretty sketchy history of making adware: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/06/09/from-israel-unit-8200-to-ad-men/?sh=7c46d70e26e2

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You can do a lot better by buying your own modem and router, but that can be expensive. The thing you're doing right now is a good idea if you don't want to spend a lot of money, whine at your internet provider and get them to send you a better router.

You don't use Mullvad for their performance, you use them for their insanely paranoid security and privacy practices.

And for the record, I was never impressed with Surfshark speeds. I dropped them when they bundled a virus scanner into their VPN client, that's sketchy as hell. I don't want my VPN provider scanning my files.

You are incorrect. Look through their blog archive (scroll to the bottom): https://mullvad.net/en/blog/

They've been posting steadily for over a decade, maybe the posts just got more popular this year on whatever sites you browse

You're not wrong, BUT that's why Mullvad offers other forms of anonymous payment, the flexibility lets you be as paranoid as YOU want to be. You can pay in Bitcoin, or you can literally mail them an envelope of cash with no return address. Amazon scratch cards are just the most convenient option, and as always, you trade security for convenience.