Free adblock DNS sells your data, and I’m not interested in paying for it.

I’m really just looking for a link to a game I can send my partner and not have to deal with getting an adblocking web browser or any other adblocking infrastructure.

I will look at this, thank you

Thanks for an actual suggestion and not just saying I should get adblock, I will look into it.

Paid ad-free, there are lots of options

Can you name some? I don’t want to go the adblock route for reasons mentioned in another comment

It’s the cluttered, overly monetized apps that are the problem, not the ads. Adblock won’t stop the pop-ups or banner ads, they’ll just make them blank. Plus free adblock DNS are sketchy, and I’m not about to pay for one.

Apple literally invented that move. I can understand being frustrated with Google’s track record for support, but if you are switching to Apple in hopes of them being more pro-consumer, I got some bad news for ya.

Ah okay. I trust Microsoft to figure it out then. Thanks!

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I have a work profile with a cert authority installed in a work profile managed by Intune. If I update to Android 14, I’ll lose this?

For the record, you know you don’t have to take the USB-C adapter off the headphones if you exclusively use it for that device, right? It’s not as much of a hassle as people believe it is, they just haven’t used one yet.

I suppose that’s fair, good point. A locked-down discord is just an odd choice for that, in my opinion. Mastodon makes much more sense.

I don’t necessarily care much about the FOSS arguments and all that stuff that some of the other users complain about, but I kinda don’t like the fact that I have to verify my account and link it just to go to a discord server for updates. I’m fine with just having the main community with updates, not sure why discord has to be thrown in to complicate things. If the main community is here to stay and I don’t have to join a discord and go through the verification, hey that’s fine by me. The verbiage is just odd how it makes it sound like the community will go away and you’ll have to go to the discord. Hope that’s never the case, though.

Fair enough. Here are three ways I can see this going:

1. Get a privacy focused phone like PinePhone or Librem. I can’t speak much for them since I don’t use them, but I’ve heard good things. This is the “all-in” approach. Depending how focused on privacy you are, you may want to go this route if you want a completely stripped down Android experience without any of the Google parts.
2. Get a Google Pixel. Pixels are a very clean Android experience. No bloat from vendors or carriers since Android is Google already. Plus. Android 13 already has a lot of focus on permissions and such, and it’s only improving with the upcoming Android 14. Routinely apps’ permissions will get disabled when the app hasn’t been used in a while. You can also disable ads tracking in your Google account and in the Android settings.
3. Root a phone. I saw in another comment you likely won’t do it, but leaving it in for fairness. If you are going to, make sure you know how to root it, what it’s doing, and if that root method will work for the phone you’re going to buy. You can search “how to root xyz phone xda-developers” to get info there. XDA-Developers is the name of the forum that is home to the rooting community. I don’t recommend this path for reasons I suggested before, and if your end goal is more privacy, typically it’s either “go big or go home”. Rooting and doing a couple small things for half-privacy is just not worth it.

They open-sourced their code which is nice and can help researchers inspect their security, plus it’s made by reputable people: the guy who made Pebble! I don’t have a use case for Beeper personally right now, but it seems really cool and I’m excited to see where it goes.

What apps require root that you want? I would highly advise against rooting if you can help it, because especially if you don’t know what you’re doing, there is very high potential to brick your device or open up security issues. I would recommend learning what root actually means and what it entails, and learning everything that happens when you root so you can decide for yourself if that’s something that is necessary. Rooting modern hardware just to run an app is not really all that important nowadays. You might as well buy an android that has a custom OS already installed centered around privacy if that’s your thing.

Additionally, to actually answer your question, adb is not root. It is just a development bridge that lets your PC talk to your phone, so you can push apps or do other development related stuff. It just happens to be a part of the toolset when rooting.

Replace the context of this about art thievery, and guides about how to steal art from museums, then think about how it sounds. You’re right, discussing those things would technically be legal, but c’mon now. I don’t care or judge if you do these things, but discussing how to commit crimes in a public forum, no matter what it is, shouldn’t be much of a debate among administrators to decide to ban or not. It’s safer to just do that even if it’s technically legal. If the cops come knocking, why would they bother lawyering up for these communities when they can just hand them off to another instance that would rather advocate for them?

If you’re against the decision, the entire point of the fediverse is to have the freedom to hop to a different instance if you disagree with its administration, so why not find one you are better aligned with? Keeping the fediverse happy as a whole with less user conflict is more important than user retention per instance; no one should feel locked in.

Did you read the first sentence? You would be surprised how cheap it is, and it’s why we need more people in cybersecurity. Also, even if it required a wealthy fanboy, those exist, you know. You don’t need millions of corporate dollars to fund this kind of thing. These conspiracies don’t help anything.

I can imagine you also tell people in a bar to stop drinking.