I recently bought a Garmin to get rid of a $30 Whoop subscription and to get better battery than a smart watch with a Fitbit subscription. Garmin seems to give me everything I needed that the whoop does for only the cost of the watch.

It does mention all health data will be free still so for the time being I’m not opposed to them locking AI behind a paywall. I understand AI cost resources and is expemsive. I however, will not be using that shit. I think the default health insights are plenty for what i do. Granted I’m not a full on athlete like some Garmin users.

As long as they don’t lock what’s available now beyond a paywall I’m okay with this. But overall, I’m sick and tired of subscriptions in general.

Not sure sure if you know about this but they reason they don’t allow it in other clients is the encrypted portion. However, they built a bridge recently that allows you to use it within other clients on Linux (not sure what other OS but looks like windows too) and I’ve been running it on the Evolution client since.

Proton Mail Bridge

Got me this morning

I had tried to build one one time and got the ui down. As I started building the more complex arithmatic (chaining calculations) i realized how insanely complex it actually is. It made me realize how complex the most simple looking apps actually are.

Not sure if you use that feature but does it work like an indexer and allow direct downloads of “Linux isos”?

I think when I tried them out a while back they also had a usenet search? Can anyone clarify on this?

Came to the comments to find this question lol

Can anyone with knowledge on business explain why these companies keep going public other than the simple fact of money?

I feel like everytime a company does they go full throttle into making shareholders money and lose sight of their original company. Honestly I assumed discord was already public based on some of their monetary features that are overpriced lol.

Yeah, I’m not exactly thrilled on chrome either but at a certain point I think it comes down to “who’s fucking me the least”. Which I totally understand it’s probably still chrome but I think just like with privacy, there is no sweet spot with browsers. It’s all subjective on each person’s threshold and what they want/need.

Call me crazy, but an example I’ve been thinking about is this:

Firefox is great. But with their recent TOS addition a lot of people want to jump ship of which ive seen a lot reference forks of Firefox. If, hypothetically, mozilla followed suit and became the next google, wouldnt a lot of those forks just be getting their updates from upstream (depending on the type)? And either way, they would be gecko which is developed by mozilla. So if 10 years from now mozilla goes the data route then we could be back in the same predicament.

Of course, those forks might not add crypto or screw over creators by affiliate link highjacking so I get there’s more to it then that.

But either way, I kinda look at these things like the Signal messenger argument. Is it a perfect solution? No, some people say go further because it’s centralized but it does offer a great mix of security and eas of access. And I think those trade offs apply to browsers as well.

Anyways, thanks again and have a good one as well! I appreciate the discussion!

Thanks for actually answering my question. It was a genuine question based on my opinion for what I knew.

Based on those articles, the crypto stuff doesn’t necessarily worry me as much as the affiliate highjacking that they were caught doing. I wasn’t aware. Honey recently got caught up In a scandle just as bad if not worse (by scale of users).

And yeah, I heard Opera was pretty terrible. I wanna say I heard the developers of themselves opera left and created Vivaldi and Opera is Chinese owned I think? I could be wrong on that.

Either way, thanks.

Could you clarify some of these issues? I’m a long time brave user and have really enjoyed using it and haven’t noticed any issues besides some if their Web 3.0 integrations that you can turn off.

Always happy to find Better options though.

Not sure about the whitelisting part, but I think this is what Brave already does. Randomizing fingerprinted data as opposed to blending in. Makes it hard to build a profile on.

I used to use Plex as well but similar to your remarks, they started doing a lot more updates that added a “corporate” feel to it such as adding their own movies/tv. Nothing inherently wrong with that but in my opinion, when a platform has the option to add features such as that, that costs money. And they’re gonna want to get that money back somehow. Yeah they offer subscriptions but to me this all was a redflag that I could see them taking further in the future. Where as Jellyfin is completely free at the cost of a little extra work to setup.

For your first question, my guess would be its the largest fish. Proton probably has some users that harbor useful information but think about apples market dominace. It’s massive. And as far as I know, proton doesn’t have a business presence directly under UK jurisdiction; Apple has an enormous presence and billions in previous investments for employees and infrastructure there. Making it much easier to enforce those laws on them.

In other words, it’s like living in the country versus living in another country. My home country will have a much easier time forcing laws on me than a country I’m not even living in.

I’m unable to answer your second question though. I don’t know enough about legality.

Not 100 percent sure but I imagine that they could still operate but just with more liability on the user.

For example: I always use a VPN. It’s legal where I’m from and my ISP doesn’t give a shit that I use it. Therefore if I did anything illegal with it, it’s not really on me directly as they would have to find out who I was through the VPN provider first.

In other scenarios where VPNs don’t comply, I imagine then your ISP/Visited Sites could see that you’re using a VPN from a provider that didn’t comply and is therefore “illegal”. Now regardless of what you’re doing, you’re still using an illegal VPN and they could try to come after you regardless.

This is an extreme scenario and I don’t mean to fear mongre as I don’t understand the entire situation of the proposed law in France.

But there are “stealth” protocols with some VPNs that allow the user to look like a real user as opposed to a popular/known VPN server. Not sure how applicable this is to that but just a thought.

In short, there’s always a way… It just may take a few extra steps.

Awesome. I’ll give this a try later and get back to you. Thanks!

Thanks for adding! Could you clarify a bit on the points so I can better understand where I was wrong at?

Yeah maybe Tor Browser was the better example. Just trying to get the point out lol.

I personally have never used them. I use Proton myself (despite some news) and haven’t had any issues. I’ve heard Tuta is also great but I think one of the cons of privacy mail is that they’re not going to be nearly as polished as the big players like Gmail or outlook.

Great read from Tuta on thia topic. It’s been an issue for a while but Google going full force publicly on it causes this issue to grow greater.

I left a comment replying to someone further down about how this can be at least a little combatted and how it is with browsers. (At least to my minimal knowledge of it)