Probably depends on who can force who to which extend and gain how much.
I'd argue the US still has the most control, may that be good or bad..
I dont want my data with any of them, so i prefer smaller alternatives, designed to be more secure, but probably also more of a hassle if stuff breaks..
Sadly these giants probably still get plenty of data because they control most of the internet.
Most fastboot options dont show the logo until windows bootloader comes along.
Though i am not sure how or why the logo is displayed when windows loads? Is that the same image? Loaded and displayed again or just didnt clear the display?
Yes, it can execute code regardless of OS installed because it persists on the Mainboard and loads before any OS, making it possible to inject code into any OS.
One at a time, but comparing A to B, because B is also doing bad things doesnt negate nor justify the impact of A, which in this case, i'd say is worse.
Yes, I believe it is slightly preferable to be under surveillance by an unstable democracy with a history of disregard for other nations laws, than to be monitored by China’s Communist Party, which has previously used such data for oppression and manipulation.
Though i agree and would make, if possible, both responsible for their actions and control over others. And here it also seems, there is more control over the big sea than in Asia, making one marginally better than theother.
Choose the walled garden, live in the walled garden.
To be fair, this is for retailers, not consumers.
And ideally you can enter the serial-number on a website and know when it was produced and sold, this should be enough for you to know if its yours or not (or e.g. it was resold)
ublock works perfectly, anything else shouldnt be used
If its only you and you want best security, setup a VPN system. (Tailscale, Netbird, or others are quite easy)
If someone else should also, and you dont want everyone to have to use a VPN, then you can expose some services directly. Of course behind CGNat you need some third-party system to allow this (e.g. cloudflare or a rented server).
I am not a big fan of cloudflare, they are a huge centralized company, easily allowing tracking across websites with clear-text access and kinda discouraging learning how to secure things yourself (which you have to do anyways, because you are a service provider and only cloudflare is not enough if its still publicly accessible though them)
But in the end its your choice. They easily allow you as service provider to protect yourself from DDoS attacks or allowing IPv4 access when you are behind CGNat, things you just cannot easily do yourself, certainly not without costs.
I have EndeavourOS, but with the nature of Bleeding Edge packages, things can break, so setup automatic snapshots with btrfs (you want this for your data anyways).
Bleeding Edge packages have the advantage of you getting the latest features, patches and improvements, which is required for some gaming cases.
i had arr in one stack and media in another.
Now in my kubernetes cluster everything is separated, but arr + torrent is in vpn and automatically uses the vpn-sidecar. And media (jellyfin + jellyseer) is separate.
This. You can also directly connect via IP address when enabled on the target, very handy.
Its probably also one of the few which have started developing Wayland support on the host side.
Currently only clipboard and video sharing works, mouse and keyboard are close..
wayland is very restrictive and things like full keyboard/mouse reading/writing need special handling (and afaik a mouse write method wasnt really available from user permissions so far)
Downloading from youtube is piracy? How? If it was like a Youtube Red show, sure, but the normal videos everyone can see for free?
For me piracy begins with aquiring things or features which usually cost money to get whilst also taking into account if its obvious a thing should cost money in such an environment (thats also how our piracy laws are worded here).
So our piracy laws also classify things as piracy if it was obvious the deal was too good to be true like Windows for 2$ on eBay or chinese ROM cards for 5$ with hundreds of games.
Videos on youtube, including music, are a normal occurrence. A full blockbuster movie is usually not.