All VPNs do is change who has your browsing data: your ISP or the VPN operator. You may or may not trust either of them not to keep records, in either case you have no way of verifying this.
I remember reading once that in the very first years of the existence of the German Democratic Republic, television was the form of mass media that was most critical of the regime. It just wasn’t as influential yet as newspapers and radio, so they didn’t care about it as much; when it became more popular, it too came more under the control of the communist regime.
I certainly agree that the Internet should be by and for individuals; whether we can in the long term do completely without corporations, I am not sure, but the current “algorithmic curation” is definitely a problem.
I mean I agree with that in principle, but: before the Internet, of course big corporations influenced kids and adults! Before the internet only big corporations had the resources and practical ability to distribute any information to a lot of people.
The promise of the internet was that we would have a society where we could all have a say and the flow of information would be democratized. You are right that, because of “algorithms”, that promise hasn’t really been fulfilled.
I think it originally did under old Unix, it was what /home is nowadays; “Unix System Resources” is a backronym.
No it wouldn’t, but people would only see them if they were part of a preexisting community where such things are posted or they specifically looked for them.
On the Internet, censorship happens by having too much information for our limited time and attention span, so going after recommendation algorithms will work.
Now that we do so many things through a browser and WebKit/Blink (which run everywhere) have become the de facto standard browser engines, the OS no longer matters as much as it used to.
Didn’t that happen a long time ago which is how we got MATE?
I no longer follow developments in GTK based DEs much because nowadays KDE Plasma is so clearly the best choice for me, but it has long been my impression that GNOME just wants to be its own thing that doesn’t really care about anyone not using GNOME. This is probably because the main role of GNOME is to be the DE for installations commercially supported by Canonical, Red Hat, etc.
Now that we have Matrix? I would have agreed with you in 2010.
Probably mainly a matter of saving costs, you get a web interface and a standalone app from one codebase.
Desktop apps nowadays are mostly written in HTML with Electron anyway.
From a technical point of view you are right. But commercially, I am pretty sure many companies and developers that used to make Flash games now make mobile games. There are many mobile games that are ports of old Flash games.
It was on its way out when smartphones and HTML5 became widely adopted. Smartphones didn’t support Flash and HTML5 made sure that the things you used to need Flash for were just implemented in web browsers. Maybe you remember something along those lines.
Wikipedia says at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#End_of_life that the EOL was announced in 2017 and took effect in 2020, much less than 10 years ago.
Adobe Flash Player was deprecated some years ago, so there is no longer any functioning official software that can play Flash games. The modern equivalent are mobile games.
The reason why reimplementing it is a worthy thing to do is to preserve old software, same reason why console emulators exist.
Free software doesn’t have owners. If someone else did a better job of being the “benevolent dictator” of a fork of Linux, everyone would start using that fork. Arguably this is a more free-market system than non-free software.
Debian testing. Seriously. That is reasonably easy to install and configure unlike Arch or Gentoo, but doesn’t come with “user friendly” corporate crap like Ubuntu and its derivatives.
Most likely the best distro for KDE is KDE neon, but that doesn’t mean that much.
I use it on Debian testing and am very satisfied with it, KDE has never been so stable.
That says it is speech to text, not text to speech
which Debian? Have you considered Debian testing or unstable?