Moonrise2473

I have friends that send me tiktok links via whatsapp and then they ask questions about it like "what do you think, scam or not". I used to open them with cookies rejected in ddg browser but now it pretends to freeze after 4 seconds of play, then it says that i must open it in the app and replaces the "play" button with a fake button that leads to google play.

I assume that there's no way to watch it anymore without an account and without the app, right?

Note for Americans: here WhatsApp is the de facto communication standard. Literally nobody uses SMS/iMessage/Facebook messenger/signal. And carriers still charge 2 euro for a MMS which completely kills iMessage/RCS (if accidentally send MMS, it's expensive)

I switched phones and instead of copying manually /Android/data/media/com.whatsapp I used the new feature of pairing via qr code.

Besides that's a not very well designed feature (you need to start transfer on the old phone before logging in the new phone) because they really want to store unencrypted backups on Google drive, the transfer completed in a short time.

Maybe too fast, I was expecting at least one hour to transfer the 5000 photos 10gb, instead it completed in 20 seconds.

So I told myself, ok photos not transferred, I'll just do that manually and directly put them in the photo archive on my PC rather than keep them mixed with all the "happy holidays" trash.

I browse the old phone to /Android/data/media/com.whatsapp and... It's empty. Wiped clean after the "successful" transfer process!

Luckily I had set syncthing (the fork on fdroid, the one on play store doesn't have access to whole storage) to have a full overnight backup! On my PC I still had all the photos, almost deleted too as I noticed that I didn't set the "trash can" option

Conclusion: go to download syncthing fork from fdroid and have a safety net from mistakes like this

And of course they want a credit card on file for "age verification" 😉 or they won't let you chat with the bots

One of those two sites is distributing adware. Which of them?

File Converter (FOSS) by Adrien Allard was hosted on file-converter[.]org since a decade. Then someone a few weeks ago snatched that domain and it's now distributing adware. Almost identical design for the page, 100% designed to deceive users to download a different product, as it's called Zamzar.

And the label doesn't say anything about it, doesn't have the "don't throw in the trash" logo.

Those LEDs are glued in, there's no way to remove batteries before discarding the item

A week of downtime and all the servers were recovered only because the customer had a proper disaster recovery protocol and held backups somewhere else, otherwise Google deleted the backups too

Google cloud ceo says "it won't happen anymore", it's insane that there's the possibility of "instant delete everything"

I've enough.

Last year the automatic updater was rebooting windows without any warning after the uac prompt. The problem continued for months before being fixed

This year I got an update a week. Very annoying to get the same "why u no reboot? I need updates" question every single time I turn on my PC.

Today when updating it kills explorer.exe without any confirmation and doesn't bring it back to life.

I don't think that their paid enterprise customers are doing the ~~beta~~ alpha testers like this. Is it really necessary to push nightlies to end users? It can't be tested casually for a couple of days then pushed?

I disabled the updates check and will update the nextcloud desktop client manually every 5 years if I can remember. Added an exception to Winget so it doesn't update it. I lost my patience.

It's a 8th gen Intel laptop CPU with 64 GB of ddr4

Definitely a bargain!

I want to try bitmagnet on the dev server at work (yes, we have permission to use it for personal reasons as long it's legal) but for obvious reasons it must be tunneled through a VPN.

Bitmagnet it's a local search engine that discovers content via DHT. It just asks peers for content, then when you come back the following month it should have found many interesting stuff

Problem is that from a network point of view it looks I want to download every single torrent ever made so I wouldn't want to have my workplace ip address associated with that.

Because the network traffic is minimal and for this content I don't care if the provider does data mining, I would like to use a free VPN with gluetun.

But I can't find a free one that works. From the officially supported only windscribe and proton have a free offer, but windscribe free doesn't have OpenVPN or wireguard, while proton VPN free blocks me immediately as soon as the program talks with other peers, even if I don't actually download anything.

So back to the question, which free VPNs are working with gluetun, someone has experience with that?

AAAD it's a freemium sideloaded app that allows you to install unofficial apps for Android auto.

At startup it sends some device identifier to his server and checks if you have a license, otherwise goes in trial mode where you can try one app every month.

It doesn't ask any additional permission. No storage, no phone/IMEI and no location. If you uninstall it, somehow it knows you previously downloaded it.

Tried to reset the advertising id, no change

My questions:

1. How the hell the app is able to fingerprint the user like that, persisting uninstalls?

2. How to reset the counter?

The university allows URLs as a "person name", so the spammer bots filled forms everywhere filling with my email and the spam URL as my name. So i'm getting bombarded by "legit" emails with a spam url as in "hi SPAM_URL"