When to use a VPN
VPNs are not magical fixes for privacy and security on the internet. However, there are some specific situations where they are useful tools.
Network blocks and internet censorship. VPNs can help you access sites and services that are restricted by your local network or government. That's why downloads of VPN apps in Russia skyrocketed in 2022, after the country's invasion of Ukraine and more services became blocked. The same trend happened in Virginia and other U.S. states after they passed laws requiring photo identification for adult websites.
Piracy. Internet service providers can sometimes detect when you are pirating movies, TV shows, music, or other media and send you angry letters. You can avoid that entirely by using a VPN when you download or torrent copyrighted material. Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free... but use a VPN.
Region-locked content. This is a popular selling point for VPN companies that is actually true: VPNs can help you access online content that is officially restricted to a certain region. Switching your VPN server to a different country can change what movies and shows are available through Netflix, and UK-based VPN servers are frequently used to access BBC iPlayer content in other countries. However, this is not always reliable, as service providers will usually detect VPN servers after a while and block them.
Accessing your home network. Setting up a VPN server at home is one way to access devices on your home network (such as self-hosted security cameras, media servers, and remote desktop) without opening up more of your network to the rest of the internet.
There are other more niche use cases for VPNs, but those are the most popular ones that aren't completely made up.
I feel like simply knowing that X, formerly known as Twitter, paid for neo-Nazi content and promoted it is all I need to know about their content moderation policies.
The law does seem like a generally good thing, but I doubt that anyone who would care hasn't already abandoned the platform.
This whole thing has the smell of Microsoft pulling the strings to gain more control over the bleeding edge of AI. Idealists losing out to cold capitalists seeking profit and control is something we've seen many times before.
I don’t think anyone except for employees there know
I wouldn't even bet on that. It seems that no one has a full picture of what is going on.
And they won't collect information about the subscribers, right?
6'3" 215lbs was reported. I don't believe that for a second.
TL;DR (if you can’t be bothered reading all of the below) - Fosstodon will wait and see what happens, but if Facebook’s new service introduces any issues that could negatively impact our users, we will defederate.
This is Fosstodon's official stance on the whole Facebook joining the Fediverse debacle.
It's not great. The people running rblind.com have forked Lemmy and hope to remerge upstream at some point in the future. Their own fork has a number of outstanding issues: https://rblind.com/post/569070
This post is inaccessible to anyone who is blind.
So here's the content of the original post on /r/blind:
Since the news broke regarding the forthcoming changes to reddit’s API and the ippact that will have on the third party apps and tools many of us rely upon the mods here at r/blind have been working on an accessible option for those who either cannot or will not be staying on reddit. As talk of alternatives like mastodon, lemmy, and the like have increased we decided that it would be best to reveal what we have been working on, hence this post. Several days ago we shared this with those of you on our Discord server and have been asking for feedback.
This project is by no means finished or polished, and is currently operating on development backend code and a beta UI to allow for access to still unreleased features that our community needs such as up/down votes displaying state changes, and nested comments, read this as there are and will be bugs and outstanding accestsibility problems. However, the advantage of this platform is we control the servers, the UI, and can fix accessibility concerns ourselves instead of relying on a for profit company or the generosity of app developers to do it for us, not that the latter is unappreciated.
So please be understanding of the above and we hope those of you who decide to join and see what we have done so far for all of us, and please report problems as you find them.
You're not the audience they're looking for.
Elon Musk could lose 99% of his wealth this month, then 99% of his remaining wealth next month and still be better off financially than 99.99% of everyone. He's not ever going to experience financial distress.
This is a good reminder. Thanks.