Why should it be? A faulty software update from a 3rd party crashes the operating system. The exact same thing could happen to Linux hosts as well with how much access those IPSec programms usually get.

Apple is a bit like Microsoft in that regard. Their browser (safari) is so tightly integrated into their operating system that removing it is basically impossible. Due to that, they can use/abuse it for basic functionality like a pdf reader instead of creating a separate app for it.

Android, on the other hand, doesn’t even have a real default browser. While Chrome ships as the default since android 4, it’s basically just the app tacked on top. Since PDF readers on android existed before Chrome became the default, Google was never really bothered with including a build in PDF reader in their browser. It simply wasn’t necessary. And since most browser depend on chromium, which lacks this functionality, they don’t have it either.

Firefox on Android has the option to open PDFs, so if you want it, that would be an option. It isn’t a limitation of the operating system, Google simply couldn’t be bothered and most others just use copy + past on Chrome.

And both of these companies build and purchased more renewable energy sources than all 100+ countries combined. Microsoft has committed to be carbon free by 2030, and while I don’t belive in their commitment, they at least seem to be trying contrary to most nations. They even invested in nuclear plants for their power needs.

You can fault both companies for a lot of different reasons, but in terms of carbon emissions due to power usage, they are better than 99.9% of the countries on that list.

Google builds entire datacenters with their own transformers and power lines, if not their own powerplants. You plug these datacenters directly into the high voltage networks that don’t have big capacity problems.

The low voltage grids in residential areas on the other hand were build as cheap as possible, so increasing the load by 20% is already too much for most of them.

They get that same location data with or without maps. As long as you are using stock android, Google knows exactly where you’ve been even if you enable airplane mode. They get your position with WiFi networks and other phones around you and store that data with timestamps. Maps doesn’t give them any extra data, it simply binds you into their ecosystem.

Tbh, that’s pretty much the only thing Youtube did in the last few years that I can’t really complain about. I despise their business tactics, but using your VPN to get regional prices just fucks it up for everyone. In first world countries, it’s one or two hours of work. The same price in poor countries would be up to a monthly wage, that’s why it costs them less. Abusing this will only end in most companies removing regional differences and blocking VPNs completely.

There are other methods to get the same functionality, use them instead of creating problems for others.

It was a bit of a hyperbole, I have no idea about the exact amount.

Let’s say you charge your 2000mAh battery every day and your PSU is 10% more efficient than your charger (the difference is most likely not even this big).

2Ah × 5V x 356d= 3.56kwh

3.56kwh × 0.1 = 356Wh

356Wh would be the difference per year, that’s about 12ct per year.

Now estimating the power usage for fediverse messages is very hard to do since it depends on a lot of different factors (your device, cellular or WiFi data, amount of hops needed to reach you, general state of your nearby network, your instances infrastructure).

The only even remotely similar thing I could find was emails with pictures producing about 20-40g CO2, which only slightly increases with more recipients, and Reddit usage comes at about 2.5g per minute. Comparing these two numbers just shows that all estimates done are pretty much useless for us since we have no idea how they are done.

But if we go with a low estimate of 0.1g (slightly above SMS and somewhere around spammail level) per user seeing it and a few hundred to a thousand users seeing this even if they just scroll past, we reach the CO2 equivalent of 1kWh pretty fast without even talking about long term storage and future indexing. Not to mention that comments produce something too since they need to be federated, albeit not so much as the post itself.

So while 10 years was a bit much, 2-3 years would be very much in the realm of possibilities, but no one knows or can even properly estimate the actual numbers.

Not to discourage such thoughts in the future, but your single post asking here probably used up more electricity than what you would save over the course of the next ten years.

As long as even basic features like push notifications are locked behind Google services, I’d hardly count that as a win. The Google monopoly on android is even worse than the Microsoft monopoly on PCs. Microsoft has at least some good alternative with the current Linux environment, but Googles only competitor is apple with an even worse system.

Sure there are projects like LinageOS and GraphenOS, but both are still reliant on micro G or containerised Goggle apps.

The majority of people play at least some competitive games and most of those simply don’t work due to anticheats. These game usually are also the most important ones to them.

And you didn’t understand what I said. While you can not monitor closed source at the code level, you definitely can monitor the apps behaviour. Even the automatic threat protection from the playstore protect function is worth more than the measly amount of people looking through smaller projects codebases.

I hate Google with a passion, but with all their control over android devices, they are more than capable of scanning apps for malicious behaviour and automatically removing them. These few apps in the article are the 0.01% of malicious apps that their algorithm didn’t detect.

If we are talking about bigger projects with hundreds of thousands or millions of downloads, than this may be true. But smal scale projects have so few people actively looking through them that even to automatic scan done by the playstore has a higher chance of catching malware. It doesn’t even have to be bad intent, two years ago there was a virus propagating trough the Java class files in minecraft mods which reached the PCs of quite a few devs before it was caught.

I don’t dislike FOSS, a lot of the apps I use come straight from github, but all this talk about them beeing constantly monitored by third parties is just wishful thinking.

How is that even supposed to work? These search engines need per definition massive databanks to search through. Either you need your own crawler and indexer which is more than just inefficient, or you are limited to a relatively short list of curated static results.

That’s just your bubble. Most VPN users just want to circumvent geo restrictions.

Besides that, the general VPN “propaganda” is that it encrypts your traffic and no-one can see it. The average user gets baited by that and doesn’t care to look further into it.

You got Hyper-V approved on a work desktop? Man I wish I had that much luck.

Most Windows issues and annoyances can be fixed pretty easily with registry tweaks. This specific issue requires you to go trough the major effort of changing a single 0 to a 2.

As long as its still easier to completely debloat windows instead of debugging Linux, your so called win is still far away.

Can they find out?

No, not really. The Metadata doesn’t have a “pirated” flag and something like the product key doesn’t get saved. Microsoft themselves probably know due to their telemetry but even they can’t be bothered about it. I would bet that even you send a pirated document to the Microsoft CEO, they wouldn’t notice or even care enough to look for it.

But as always there is the important rule of “don’t fuck with work stuff, ever”.

It’s already questionable why she is editing company documents on here private PC without either a dedicated and remotely managed work particition + VPN or an O365 online work account. These documents fall under far stricter data safety regulations and the way it is right now, she is personally liable for any data leaks.

In a dorm its legal but may be against your contract.

At school/work you probably aren’t officially allowed to charge your devices, so it’s theft.

Even if you are allowed to charge your phone at work, they technically may have to meter it and tax it as additional benefits depending on your country.

Thats probably 1500$ in apple parts. These parts most likely already include R&D costs as well as the additional increase for their brand.

Firefox is not the better browser in anything but privacy. Maybe it could win in customisability, but that’s something only a few percent of users care about.

It has longer load times and sometimes breaks sites entirely while using about the same resources. Yes, the reason for that is that website creators don’t deliberately support it, but the normal user only cares about functionality.

I still use it and recommend it to anyone that asks, but saying that it’s the better browser is just delusional.