Original article is 404, so probably a fake or other error.

Yes. Unfortunately, these systems are also a great gift for any upcoming fascist regime (like the Trump junta currently) which will not only happily continue using the existing infrastructure but also extend it like mad.

Maybe humanity’s greatest weaknesses overall: the lack of foresight and the lack of wisdom learned from historic precedents (e.g. Nazi Germany? Forgotten by now). Everything’s always about short-term goals, ignoring any long-term disadvantages. See also: climate disaster.

Its popularity.

Currently playing Talos Principle Reawakened (the UE5 remastered version). For anyone wondering whether it’s worth it, yes if you have the hardware for it. Because they also massively improved one of the most complex but also most frustrating mechanics in the original game (with the recorder thingie). So there are very useful improvements overall. Also, it has an entirely new DLC I think, which is again noticeably harder than the 1st DLC Road to Gehenna. Game looks great as well, but you need serious hardware for it. It’s not very performance efficient anymore. :) The Talos Principle series are probably the biggest and best 3D first-person puzzle games out there, together with the Portal series. Absolutely recommended.

Other than that, I’ve played The Ten Bells and Exit 8. These are great small anomaly-hunting games. I’ve never played this genre before so it was a great discovery for me. If you’re curious about this genre, start with Exit 8. If you liked that and prefer more horror elements in it, as well as a bigger “map”, play The Ten Bells. Awesome small games, needing only like 2-3 hours to finish.

In other words: Users of proprietary OS like Windows have so little control over their own devices that it’s newsworthy when the vendor allows you to uninstall 2-3 bundled things out of many more. But only in some countries! It’s pathetic.

I prefer FLAC. Don’t know if there’s an option in whipper for that. But the Arch Wiki has an article for converting: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Convert_FLAC_to_MP3

Corrected, thx.

I use whipper. It’s a command-line application but it’s easy to use and works great every single time. At first you should let it analyze your drive which is the only step more involved. Here’s a mini tutorial for that I wrote for myself but you can also read it on the project page where it’s probably more up to date:

2. Analyze the drive’s caching behavior: $ sudo whipper drive analyze

3. Find the drive’s offset. Consult the [[AccurateRip’s CD Drive Offset database|http://www.accuraterip.com/driveoffsets.htm]] for your drive. Drive information can be retrieved with $ whipper drive list. $ sudo whipper offset find -o insert-numeric-value-here. If you omit the -o argument, whipper will try a long, popularity-sorted list of drive offsets. If you can’t confirm your drive offset value but wish to set a default regardless, set read_offset = insert-numeric-value-here in whipper.conf. Offsets confirmed with $ whipper offset find are automatically written to the configuration file. If specifying the offset manually, please note that: if positive it must be written as a number without sign (ex: +102 -> 102), if negative it must include the sign.

4. After that you just rip any disc by running: $ whipper cd rip

And just as an example, here’s my ~/.config/whipper/whipper.conf:

[main]
path_filter_fat = True
path_filter_special = False

[drive:<drive ID>]
vendor = <vendor>
model = <model>
release = <release>
read_offset = <my offset>

[whipper.cd.rip]
unknown = True
output_directory = ~/music/_ripped
track_template = new/%%A/%%y - %%d/%%t - %%n
disc_template = new/%%A/%%y - %%d/%%A - %%d

Just for reference, this is what the Google Play services app transmits roughly every 20 minutes to Google if it has network access:

Phone #
SIM #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your logged in Google account
IP address

And that is when you have disabled ALL telemetry in ALL of the options, even the most hidden ones. So this is the minimum amount this app is always gathering from every Android user using the Google Play services app, no matter what you selected. Other Google apps (like the Play store app) could then contain additional telemetry on top, this is just the common base of all Google proprietary apps. Or the minimum amount of privacy violations you get when using proprietary Google apps on your phone, no matter what.

If you use GrapheneOS, I’d recommend not installing/using ANY Google apps at all (not even Play store or Play services). To get apps, you should use (roughly in this order of priority): 1.) GrapheneOS’s app store for the built-in apps 2.) Accrescent app store (has several good open source apps, is intended to be more secure than F-Droid) 3.) Obtainium (for getting open source apps directly from their source repos) or if you really can’t get into Obtainium, use F-Droid instead 4.) Aurora Store (for getting apps from the Google Play store without sending too much data to Google. Only do this if there is no open source app available for doing the same thing).

To fully mitigate the removal of the Play services app, you also should probably install/configure something like ntfy with UnifiedPush to get battery efficient push notifications and ideally use apps which also use that, e.g. the Molly fork instead of Signal. It’s quite easy to do, just something to be aware of. Otherwise your battery drain might be a bit higher. Then you’re also independent from Google’s push notification infrastructure. But you need a UnifiedPush server to go along with it, either self-hosted or use a public one. There are some privacy friendly ones public ones out there.