Whoof. The burn.

Glad to see some people understand how much more problematic Trump is than anything that Harris would be doing.

Firefox is open source. It's not going anywhere; even if Mozilla Co. goes broke and closes down the Mozilla Foundation.

Most reasonable consumers won't go for this. it's a greed play.

Give me mice that I own; not mice to rent.

Disgusting. Utterly disgusting. This idea belongs in the garbage bin.

No.

It is hard to have both; but not impossible. You can still be privacy friendly without sacrificing necessary functionality.

It will require that the "provider" of such a dataset constantly scrub, sanitize and remove data that would cause privacy hazards as quickly as reasonably possible however. That in and of itself is a technical challenge; though not impossible.

Ideally there's not a whole lot of data that needs to be kept.

Legitimately all that needs to be stored is a few things:

• Location (GPS)
• SSIDs (Wifi APs only)
• Cell ID & MCC/MNC (Cell Towers only)

and things they MUST NOT STORE OR SHARE like:

• IPs of contributors for longer than a few days
• un-hashed BSSIDs (Wifi/BT)
• MAC addresses (Wifi/BT)
• IMEI/IMSIs (or other cellular identifiers derived from them)
• APs that don't exist in a fixed location (Think mobile hotspot SSIDs) for longer than a fixed amount of time.
• BT devices
• Non-unique SSIDs or IDs that may indicate no user config took place and manufacturer did not differentiate device ID. (Things like "SETUP" with no unique number (SSIDs like"SETUP-be3fd34d" would be valid) or "[ISP]@HOME" or "[ISP]Wifi" which provide no meaningful discriminators)

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10397#issuecomment-2218346384

Looks like there's several causes.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/3766

I don't know how soon Tubular or NewPipe can fix their app; but it seems like a few simple changes will do.

I should point out that this isn't always "Google is trying to block adblockers" again!

Google can, will, and does simply change how the YouTube watch pages look, feel and operate behind the scenes quite regularly.

Thankfully we have people like those at the FreeTube, NewPipe and yt-dlp projects to sift through those changes and update the code to cope with the new output.

Freetube does work; it simply requires you switch to the Invidious API or have "Fallback to non-preferred API on Failure" enabled. (which honestly you always should have this setting ON).

Personally; I refuse to change my preferred API; so the "Fallback to non-preferred API on Failure" just works.

also yt-dlp does work but you need to upgrade to latest nightly/build.

yt-dlp version nightly@2024.07.09.232843 from yt-dlp/yt-dlp-nightly-builds [d2189d3d3]

YT-DLP fixed already; I use it locally in conjunction with MPC-HC.

yt-dlp -U or yt-dlp -U nightly

Or download latest nightly.

yt-dlp version nightly@2024.07.09.232843 from yt-dlp/yt-dlp-nightly-builds [d2189d3d3]

In general; I strongly don't recommend anything on the Google Play Store except the Google Dialer.

If the Google Dialer is not to your liking; I strongly recommend only trying Dialers you will find on F-Droid.org

Junk science article.

All discoveries use some element(s) of the scientific method.

The entire method in and of itself isn't required to be 100% rigorously applied 100% of the time. However, the method is a starting point and does lead to discovery over time.

While it helps to apply the method to ensure clean and proper discoveries which can, hopefully, be reproduced and investigated, the fact that not all sciences or discoveries apply it rigorously is largely insignificant.