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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Apple is a bit like Microsoft in that regard. Their browser (safari) is so tightly integrated into their operating system that removing it is basically impossible. Due to that, they can use/abuse it for basic functionality like a pdf reader instead of creating a separate app for it.

    Android, on the other hand, doesn’t even have a real default browser. While Chrome ships as the default since android 4, it’s basically just the app tacked on top. Since PDF readers on android existed before Chrome became the default, Google was never really bothered with including a build in PDF reader in their browser. It simply wasn’t necessary. And since most browser depend on chromium, which lacks this functionality, they don’t have it either.

    Firefox on Android has the option to open PDFs, so if you want it, that would be an option. It isn’t a limitation of the operating system, Google simply couldn’t be bothered and most others just use copy + past on Chrome.



  • Or have a public social media account and a ‘business’ one I use to share my own music or something? My dual-boxing MMO accounts?

    Wanna bet that you are already breaking TOS with both of these things? And I don’t mean SimpleLogins TOS, but the one of the social media platform and MMO. Most big platforms only allow one account per user, no matter how the account is used. Sometimes you can create a business account, but that’s still linked to your private one. Same goes for pretty much any online game, you are limited to one account per person.

    I don’t think that there is any sense behind these limitations, but simplelogin isn’t concerned about that, they only care about the legality of your actions and limit their service accordingly.








  • It was a bit of a hyperbole, I have no idea about the exact amount.

    Let’s say you charge your 2000mAh battery every day and your PSU is 10% more efficient than your charger (the difference is most likely not even this big).

    2Ah × 5V x 356d= 3.56kwh

    3.56kwh × 0.1 = 356Wh

    356Wh would be the difference per year, that’s about 12ct per year.

    Now estimating the power usage for fediverse messages is very hard to do since it depends on a lot of different factors (your device, cellular or WiFi data, amount of hops needed to reach you, general state of your nearby network, your instances infrastructure).

    The only even remotely similar thing I could find was emails with pictures producing about 20-40g CO2, which only slightly increases with more recipients, and Reddit usage comes at about 2.5g per minute. Comparing these two numbers just shows that all estimates done are pretty much useless for us since we have no idea how they are done.

    But if we go with a low estimate of 0.1g (slightly above SMS and somewhere around spammail level) per user seeing it and a few hundred to a thousand users seeing this even if they just scroll past, we reach the CO2 equivalent of 1kWh pretty fast without even talking about long term storage and future indexing. Not to mention that comments produce something too since they need to be federated, albeit not so much as the post itself.

    So while 10 years was a bit much, 2-3 years would be very much in the realm of possibilities, but no one knows or can even properly estimate the actual numbers.





  • Vanadium is purposefully made this way. It tries to minimise profiling by making your actions noise in a big mass of users. That only works if you use the standard config without anything to discern you.

    Mull is the other extreme of this. They try to eliminate fingerprinting by reducing the amount of trackable things in your browser.

    It’s hard to say what really is the better option. You can’t completely eliminate fingerprinting, and the more you try, the more you will stick out of the masses.


  • Yeah, but it lies.

    No it doesn’t, at least not if the update isn’t already a month overdue

    But a future Windows update will reset them without informing the user.

    I’ve done 3 years worth of updates in one day cause I needed too. Pretty much everything was reset including registry edits, but the privacy toggles were one of the few things that stayed persistent. Maybe it’s a EU special feature (wouldn’t be the first), but at least here they won’t change back silently.