Only real option is to crypt them before putting them on the VPS, but at this point a VPS is pretty useless.

So if Proton is in a position where banks are shutting down payments Proton has bigger problems.

In a perfect world you would be right.
But it would not be the first time banks or credit card shut down payments for legal businness because they were forced into doing that by social or political pressure.

It would be simple for a government to say something like “you do businnes with Proton, you can no more operate in this country” to a bank or a credit card company.

Almost 500 million users market.

I know. I was only pointing out that you can have a waterproof phone and a replaceable battery. Obviously you need to do better than the S5 but it is nothing impossible, even wanting to keep the audio jack and the USB ports.

The two features are not mutually esclusive. I owned an S5 which was waterproof and had replaceable battery more than 10 years ago. It did not seems too hard to do

It is not that simple.
For hardware attacks, older hardware are probably safe since the attacks are specifics to some newer features. I really doubt you can deliver a Spectre attack on anything up until the Pentium or even later.
On the software side, there could be some security bugs to which some older version could be vulnerable since there were not the vulnerable code at the time. Granted, there could be some security bugs that were not yet discovered in older codebase.

I would love to know how you would decide if the scan or copy of my ID, with picture, I send you by mail, or upload with a web form as a jpeg, is real or a fake.

Maybe you are right but the actual facts are that even outside OF there are underage female prostitutes that do it for money or the latest bag from some high end brand and often are prey of some predator. Only difference is that off-line prostitution is harder to find.
OF is only folowing what it is happening in the real life, making it easier obviously, but it don’t create any new dynamic.

Wait a moment, maybe I understand wrong (English is not my first language) but I understand that you said that the Great Filter is the reason why we don’t see them and point out 3 possible points.

I dispute your first point to be not really an explanation or an option since saying “never feasible for any civ, no matter how advanced” just seems to be a too harsh limit on what a civ could do, which looking at our past history seems an unreasonable limit.

My friend, that’s exactly my point. That is, they’ve had enough time to show up but they are nowhere to be seen.

Your point seems to be that since there is the Great Filter (btw, to be proven) then there is no one else out there.
You exclude way simpler possibillities like the option that a civ just a couple centuries ahead of use could already be colonizating the nearby stars, they just are 1000 LY away so we cannot yet see them (assuming we even know what to look for).

1. interstellar travel is never feasible for any civ, no matter how advanced,

I like the idea behind the concept of the Great Filter, but that point does not seems logic as it would imply that irregardless of how advanced a civ is, they would not be able to build anything that can even make just a one way travel to a star just a few year light far away. Right, it is not simple, but a civ even just a couple centuries head of us should be able to do it.

Also, probably nobody capable of traveling the stars wants to settle a planet. Once you figure out how to make huge spaceships (which you’ll need to travel interstellar space) you’ve essentially learned how to make cities in space.

I don’t think it is a valid point. Yeah, if we can build a ship that take us to Alpha Centauri it would lool like a small city, but that does not mean that it can last forever and the traveller would never need to settle on a planet. And looking what the humans did in the past, it seems logic that while a part would want to continue to explore, another part would want to settle on a planet.

Our solar system would support a lot of people if we just used the resources available for space habitats, and by “lot” I mean in the quadrillions. And it turns out that all you need to support that population is a star to provide energy, and some planets to source materials from.

So with that in mind, why bother finding another habitable planet?

Because it is habitable and can be used as a transit point, advanced outpost, refuelling base or any other use you can do of an habitable planet where to do things you have not to fight even with the environment (tourism for example).

Maybe the services that don’t need to sell your data to be in the black.

I am using both of them without any problem.

The main advantage of Flatpaks (and things like AppImage) is that you have a single “executable” with everything you need and sometime that is useful even if the software is Opensource but the building dependencies are a nightmare. Subsurface (a dive log software) is an example.

If the AUR package is a simple build (or a binary which is a converted package) then go for it. If you need to start building a lot of additional package from AUR to meet the dependencie then I would suggest, in order, to look for the Flatpak (or AppImage) package or to install an helper to build the packages

The fact is these are high tech machines. To follow your example with the car, you don’t need to replace the battery but an ECU, for which there are no available design and you have no idea how to build it.
Add to this that probably if you make a mistake in your try, you destroy the machine.

Basically what ASLM is saying is that they can brick the machine with a software update and even if not bricked the machine cannot run long without specialized maintenance and spare parts (that they obviously will not provide anymore). True, China can try to clone them, but even if/when understand how to make them, you then need to make them, a thing which seems out of question for now for China (else they already would have such machines).

For example, Visa is forcing art platforms to ban (legal) adult content or face blocking.

Only because the social pressure after the metoo charade. Visa itself was more than happy to allow these transaction before it. And once all this stigma on adult content will pass, Visa will be more than happy to allow these transactions again. They are money to them.

Firefox can do something like this with the “send tab to device”, not sure it is what you want

They also weren’t an excuse to keep property off the housing rental market at scale.

True. But given that houses were off the market even before, I don’t think it is exclusively their fault.

For example Milano historically always had about 30% of the available homes empty, and that even before Airbnb.

I agree with you to some extend.

What I do not agree about is the implicit assumption that if AIRBNB is banned then every house that was used for short-term rental would become available on the long-term rental market.

The main advantage of the short-term rental (obvious higher profits aside) is the fact that the owner is sure to be able to get back the house if/when he need it. So many owners saw the possibility to use an house with AirBnB (or other similar ways) a lot more attractive than keeping it empty (paying the taxes on it) and much less risky than having a long-term rental where the tenants could be turn out to be a bad one.

Because often it is a nightmare to evict a tenant that do not pay the rent.

I can speak for where I live where a lot of people gone to the short-rental way exactly because that way they have the certainty that when they want the house back, for every reason, they have it.

To me AirBnB is not the problem, it is the wrong solution to a real problem.

Vanilla gnome is perfectly fine by itself if you understand the workflow.

Well, maybe it is the DE that should be able to adapt to my workflow and not the other way around