Yep, they are explicitly not banks or traditional financial institutions and therefore have none of the standard protections. They don’t only lack the protections of credit cards, but also of banks in general.

There are countless stories of people losing access to over $10k in their PayPal account with no option to appeal because PayPal decided their Twitch revenue looked too much like money laundering. Or because a single transaction involved a card later reported stolen. Or… just because. Some people aren’t even given a reason.

hiss!

Especially from Gartner of all places. Maybe this will finally start tempering the hype in the executives.

It’s been hours now (and a very busy day), but I swear that half of that comment (including that section) wasn’t there when I commented regarding safer seas.

But there’s no mark showing the comment has been edited either.

Scurvy must be eating me brain.

Good news! No need to wait for unofficial servers. Over a year ago they opened a feature called safer seas where you can play without PvP!

Good news! Over a year ago they opened a feature called safer seas where you can play without PvP!

100% true, and a great counterpoint.

Windows ACLs are far more complicated than they have any right to be, and file perms are generally far simpler on Linux.

The solution to that isn’t to post even more blatantly state controlled media just with a different flavor of boot sole.

Come on now.

https://youtu.be/3bdQPhqL3xo

100% valid choice. I’d argue that it’s even the correct one.

That said, those specific examples are all “solved”. My issue is that the overwhelming amount of Linux pushers here tend to act as though those issues are literally unsolvable.

The ads are nearly all controlled from a single yes/no switch a single level deep into the settings menu. And that switch has not been reset by updates in at least four years. Since I’ve joined lemmy, every single “Microsoft is pushing more ads into Windows” article I’ve seen has been talking about ads controlled by this same singular switch.

Things like the pushing of the Microsoft account and Recall are mostly avoided by using their Professional SKU/License/OS version and using GPO to disable those features. Or to take specific steps during install. You have to use the tools they have for corporate customers that have specific legal guidelines that prevent them from being able to use whatever MS’s new revenue extraction trick is.

Bullshit? Yes. Should anyone have to do this shit to have a decent OS? No.

But if you’re savvy enough to navigate Linux, you’re more than capable of navigating this shit on Windows. It’s not impossible.

I work in this space profressionally. Systems administrarion, architecture, design, and integration. Please take your single sentence “hot takes” elsewhere.

Windows is far from “a shitty product” or “broken”. It is developed by horrid anti-consumer motherfuckers out to extract as much profit as possible from their least profitable user base: home users. Evil as hell, sure, but so is nearly every large corporation that makes shit that fills your personal hovel you call home. If that makes them untouchable for you, that is a great choice. But that does not factually impact the usability or usefulness of the product.

Linux is awesome and necessary. Open source is the only way this whole mess keeps working far into the future, and I am no stranger to compiling shit from source and submitting pull requests.

My problems with the Linux community, specifically on Lemmy, are these: Linux is not “just easier” and depressingly still not ready for the average consumer unwilling to tinker. The overwhelming majority of complaints about Windows so frequently posted here are solved problems that people pretend are entirely unfixable, or refuse to learn how to fix. For many people venting about their computer, it would be easier to direct them how to fix what they have rather than try to use it as an opportunity to push your religion OS of choice.

If you can manage Linux, I promise that “fixing” a Windows install is well within your reach. Plenty of problems with it, but “broken”? “Unusable”? Take a look outside at the majority of the world, or even the fucking Steam user statistics and get back to me on that. More than good enough for the overwhelming majority.

Glad to see another voice of sanity regarding Windows.

If you haven’t learned by now, on Lemmy the only valid option for dealing with Windows configuration and basic Windows admin tasks is to yeet Windows and go to Linux.

And the Police won’t investigate because of whatever mental gymnastics of the day they come up with to avoid the paperwork.

“You never actually recieved it, so it was never your property to be stolen.” Or something.

Everyone knows that if you don’t eat the cork then you aren’t getting your money’s worth.

I would be surprised if this didn’t hold true for many companies, especially when adjusting for inflation.

Yes, you’re correct.

But that rollout doesn’t make headlines like all the ones from the US government telling people to use encrypted messaging like WhatsApp or Signal. That’s what got them to WhatsApp to begin with. FBI tells everyone very loudly to get off standard texting. They jump as a collective to where half of them already are.

As I’ve already alluded to: this has precisely zero to do with the technical aspects of security. Ease of use does matter (why pushing to Signal didn’t work at the time the FBI spooked everyone), but only a little bit, and is overshadowed by momentum of where people already are.

I might be able to get my family off WhatsApp with the recent article about it being banned from (I think it was) Congress’s phones.

But again, this isn’t a technical problem where you can just point at what’s obviously the better choice. There are complications of personal relationships, individual resistance to change, whether or not you’re willing to train your family members, etc.

My grandmother is in her late 80s and it is astonishing that she can even manage WhatsApp to pariticipate in the family group chat. I’m not upending that and causing her the added stress, work, isolation if it fractures the family groip chat, and signing myself up for all that extra work to try and drag people to new platform and hold their hand through the bumps… just so I can be comfortably principled, using the best option, and trying to prevent Meta from getting info about me for a few more years that they likely are getting through other means.

I’ll revisit as the elders age off.

I care about my privacy, but I’ve thought long and hard about my specific threat model and what is and isn’t important enough for me to make a big deal out of. For me, this is an acceptable sacrifice.

Doesn’t have to be that way for anyone else. Just has to work for me and my life. And it does.

Ultimately I’m just trying to give reasons why people are still on these platforms. I took the initial comment I responded to at face value. I’m not really looking to debate here, and my opinions don’t invalidate anyone else’s.

How is that fucking legal?

Give us this very sensitive information, we promise we won’t misuse it, and we’ll let you fiddle our AI as a treat.

Momentum of where friends and family are.

It’s nice to be able to say “well they’re not worth talking to then”, but at some point I need to be able to reach my parents so they can babysit my daughter. Or be able to know that family will be in town and expecting me to be available. Or be able to have any way of knowing what life events are happening to my loved ones without having to wait for it to be brought up in casual conversation months later as if I should already know.

My extended family and friends do a poor job communicating on a good day. If I try to add another hurdle, I’m not the one who wins that fight.

You can block specific posters and communities, but so far keyword filtering is only possible through specific phone apps.

I think an instance admin was working on something for doing that natively though.

I mean, I’m not a dev and I haven’t dove deep into the forks in a while. I just remember that they added something to their readme on github during one of the recent “firefox is dead” cycles that said that LibreWolf’s focus of privacy first makes it poorly suited as a general use daily driver.

They were getting swamped with people looking for help because the defaults caused certain sites to not function or something.