This is the best critique of VP.net's approach in this thread. The purpose of the enclave approach is that you can be sure they're not logging your traffic. This is an advantage over competitors. But, as you say, this does not actually work. When you connect to the VPN, you don't know whether your traffic really gets mixed with other people's traffic. If it doesn't get mixed, then no matter what the trusted enclave code does, they still know all the input and output traffic belongs to you.
I would pay for youtube if they provided an official API to download videos and stream videos in a client of my choice.
I prefer to watch youtube with a custom player (mpv+yt-dlp on desktop, newpipe on android). I do not want to watch youtube on the youtube website or official youtube android app. The custom clients I am using are unofficial. They reverse engineer youtube to make it work. They often break when youtube changes something.
I can confirm the experience that sometimes searches for quoted terms yield pages that do not contain the quoted term exactly. I don't have a specific example from the top of my head.
Spectre is not going to be fixed for code within the same address space and allows to read all process memory from untrusted code. Google in V8 tried to protect against that, but they mostly gave up as there were way too many ways to affect the cache.
On the website of a big merino wool clothing store they write [1]:
> Unbound Merino clothing can be washed in a regular washing machine at a normal or cool temperature setting. You can use regular detergent, and avoid fabric softener or products with bleach.
According to you this is wrong which is surprising because they should know what they're talking about. Could you clarify? Do you have other sources?
You _can_ wash merino wool if you want to. You just don't need to. Just like with jeans. Unless you actually spilled something on them and want to get the stains off, you rarely need to wash proper jeans.
> Wool is naturally hygroscopic and thus has the ability to absorb moisture and transport it away from the body leaving your skin dry and comfortable. Unlike synthetic fabrics where sweat build up becomes a breeding ground for bacteria, wool’s breathability reduces the risk of your clothes taking on unpleasant body odour.
> Because of the above, wool clothing outperforms other fibres when it comes to odour resistance, and it doesn’t need to be washed anywhere near as frequently as synthetics. Simply airing your wool garment will help cleanse the fibre. This is an added benefit if you are hiking or biking and need to keep the clothing you carry to a minimum. Reducing the number of times you washing your clothes is also beneficial for the environment [0]
Sorry, I should have clarified what part I was replying to. I was asking about the choice of detergent. You say it must be a wool detergent with lanolin while they say it doesn't matter.
I'd like to follow this up with the store too if you convince me that the detergent matters.
I do not know about this specific case and I have not used XPrivacy but I want to chime in here and say
Thank you, Marcel Bokhorst
Your NetGuard (https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard) and FairEmail (https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail) apps are great. They are high quality, open source and contain none of the dark patterns that mobile is plagued with. They are available to download from Github, F-Droid and the Playstore. There are paid premium features to support you but if I wanted to I could still compile the app myself to unlock them.
This at most technically right and definitely wrong in practice. I am unsure if there is an existing exact definition of DRM (free) or you're using an uncommon definition of "license" but in practice services like GoG advertising DRM free and people buying DRM free all mean that there is no licensing check whatsoever.
A GoG game comes with a single installer executable (single as in it is the same for everyone, no built in license) that and the resulting game it installs can be freely copied and used on as many machines as you like without any requirements. For example you do not need to have an internet connection or be running the GoG store application.
So if you have downloaded and backed up the installer of the game you bought on GoG then for all intents and purposes you own this game. It does not matter what GoG does from this point on. You will always be able to use it.
I will concede that the meaning might has changed with time. But at a point DRM was synonymous with online-checks and/or invasive spying and infecting the operating system. And that holds in spirit in today given all the criticism about DRM. It has never been about the inconvenience of entering a serial number (even though that indeed is a bit inconvenient it is most certainly not the source of the (justified) DRM hate we have today).
The license key you entered and the following offline check when installing from CD/disk was/is considered something entirely different.
I'd argue that the only reason that games today skip the license-check has absolutely nothing to do with DRM but with it being out of fashion and not considered to fulfilling its purpose anymore.
The one exception to this is that a key for multiplayer access in mostly single player games is sometimes not included in the DRM definition. GOG has a number of games with codes needed for online access via central server; this is needed to be able to ban players for abuse and is still technically DRM but I personally consider it different type of thing when the game is primarily offline. Best is when there are multiplayer alternatives to the central server that don't require a key but that is fairly rare. Personally I don't use multiplayer anyway.
All in all, the experience from GOG is much more customer friendly than other game stores (there are only a few other tiny stores that I know about that are DRM-free and don't require their client to be able to buy and/or download games). They aren't perfect but you can download the installer directly from the website if you want or use a client if you want. Games work fully offline with no code needed. You can refund a game for essentially any reason within 30 days even if you have downloaded and played the game (there is some unspecified limit to number of refunds but it isn't tiny if you are just refunding a few you don't like). I'm not 100% certain but I'm fairly sure they don't ever remove inactive accounts.
Unfortunately, the value of DRM-free is often reduced somewhat by the "release a buggy mess and if it sells well enough fix it eventually" philosophy that most developers have these days. Not having access to updates can worst case make the game unplayable and often makes it less pleasant (of course, there are also cases where updates make it worse :/). So DRM-free isn't a complete solution for not being able to access an account, but at least once you have played a game you can play the same version again even if you can't access your account.
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