It's so ridiculous when corporations steal everyone's work for their own profit, no one bats an eye but when a group of individuals do the same to make education and knowledge free for everyone it's somehow illegal, unethical, immoral and what not.

The recent advent of governments worldwide trying to force corporations to build backdoors into their services for the 'safety of children' or to 'counter terrorism' arguably does more harm than good for the common people.

Their generous offering of 10gigabytes of free storage along with a private, ad-free, end-to-end encrypted experience always sounded too good to be true. There was no way they could sustain that business model long term. At least they're giving users enough time to jump ship and have not sold their data to Notion (judging by their twitter replies).

they don’t “plant trees” but rather contribute very little amounts to existing programmes

Ofcourse they don't plant trees themselves, it's a search engine with a small team. They donate their entire profit which averages upwards of a million euros every month, to local tree planting initiatives across the world and that isn't a 'little' number at all.

“Every search plants a tree” is a lie. It’s not every search, but rather every couple clicks on an ad

I agree, they were 'a bit' misleading with that in the past. Although they did state in their tree counter earlier and somewhere in their website/blog that it was roughly 45 searches (in Germany, depends on region) which raised enough money to plant a tree. They've since removed most, if not all of the misinformation.

They use Bing results making them useless

Since when does using Bing results make a search engine a 'scam'? DuckDuckGo also uses Bing results, would you call that a scam as well? Ecosia uses Bing search results because it's close to impossible to make an independent search engine which gives satisfactory results without the resources of a tech giant.

They aren't E2EE by default. You have to enable it manually.

The clip is from a documentary called "A President, Europe and War" and it is not fake AFAIK.

I'm using BasicSync since a few weeks, the location permission is completely optional. This is what the app says:

Location permissions are optional and are only needed when restricting allowed Wi-Fi networks. Even if the permissions are granted, they will not be used unless there are allowed Wi-Fi networks configured.

How is it not? It's IT, Information Technology

I use Ecosia, it plants trees with the profits from its ad revenue! Results are sourced from Bing and Google.

@[email protected] is right, the following FAQ is from the uBO's YouTube Mega Thread on reddit.

How often should I manually update filter lists? Can I somehow automate this?

YouTube filters are in a list named uBlock filters - Quick fixes. The list updates every 12 hours. It's the only list you might need to update - only if this page says it's fixed, but you're getting the message.

If you're not getting detected. Don't update. Current estimated cost for just ONE of uBO's CDNs: HERE. This is with other lists updating every few days. uBO's not a company, it's a volunteer project using free services, which have limits that we cannot cross.

Yeah, I made this post after reading that article. There is clearly a problem with how domains and their renewals are managed. I'm not sure what a solution would look like, though.

I ditched Chrome about a year ago for Edge and just recently switched to Firefox, shouldn't really be concerning as long as there are alternatives.

Yes, my default search engine is Ecosia.

I haven't changed it manually though, I installed their extension and it changed the default; if this matters in any way.

The @ is only required for making posts on Lemmy from Mastodon, not replies AFAIK.

You only see posts from people you follow, you can just unfollow (or mute/block) whoever you don't like to see on your timeline. If you're scrolling the trending/explore page then maybe you should try switching servers or just stick to the home feed which has toots only from the accounts you follow.

They also run bookwyrm.world! A fediverse alternative of Goodreads.

If you're using Bing anyways, consider switching to Ecosia, it's a non-profit search engine, they pull their search results from Bing and plant trees across the globe with their profits.

It might not be for extremely privacy conscious people because they do send some of your data (obfuscated IP addresses, user agent string etc.) to Microsoft because they use Bing but it's still orders of magnitude better than using Bing directly.

Not to discredit your arguement but isn't Signal also centralised?

You don't need internet to access the passwords stored in Bitwarden if you have their local clients installed. It stores an encrypted copy of your database locally to your device which syncs (updates) over the internet.

Just FYI, in India the president (head of the state) is more or less a ceremonial figure. It's the prime minister (head of the government) that you're probably talking about.