This is inaccurate. See my other comments.

Au contraire:

A VPN, or virtual private network, helps protect your online privacy by encrypting your internet connection and masking your IP address, making it harder for others to track your browsing activity. It also allows you to bypass geographical restrictions, giving you access to content that may be blocked in your region.

The whole point of VPN is privacy.

It all depends on what you’re supposed to be protected from. Vpns protect your Communications from being intercepted and keeps your location anonymous.

So you are in fact unprotected from being located identified and tracked. You are also unprotected from having your Communications intercepted by a man in the middle.

If you’re on a public unsecured Wi-Fi network you are totally exposed. If you are on your own router connected through an isp, the ISP knows everything you’re doing, and attaches your billing information to that data and uses it.

So I really don’t think unprotected is a scare word. It is an accurate description of your situation.

Ayep. Probably including where you live and what you do for a living.

It is worse than that. They often share your information directly, or initiate services that require your participation, and of course you must prove who you are to do so.

For a while there, after hitting 50, I was kind of happy they thought I looked so young. 🤔

Find a local special interest group that gets together to practice. Check meetup.

It could be FOMO. Personally, I see value in keeping social media from children. The problem is I don’t believe this is all about that. As usual, it’s all about surveillance.

XMPP works through gateways, so any SMP or PBX Voice call is routed through the standard network, so is not secure. VOIP and the XMPP chat features, however, can be secure and private. The encryption exists and you can host your own servers, which covers both of the privacy concerns.

I’m old enough to remember when network television didn’t cut important scenes from shows in order to show me commercials.

If these businesses are getting so much efficiency from laying off their employees, why do they need increasingly more advertising?

I doubt there are enough of us who block (when it is even possible) to seriously affect revenue.

Also, if they can break their contract with me to pay for a service with no commercials and force me to watch them anyway, I have no compunctions with denying them the extra profit.

I did it recently because it was only way to update my Lenovo Legion BIOS. I bought an SSD on a stick, so it is a fully accelerated windows to go installed via Rufus.

The main problem with USB drive setups is the xfer speed of SDRAM, so I suggest you go for an SSD stick.

And heck, I’m on Ubuntu and have no problems. I played BGIII and Cyberpunk 2077, full graphics,no glitches. Currently back on Skyrim with a couple hundred mods using Vortex.

Any Linux distro with Protontricks should be fine.

I had the same issue for a Lenovo bios update. I finally just installed windows to go on an ssd memory stick and booted that to do the update.

Yes, I am nuanced enough to understand the security issues and respect that - on their equipment.

As for monitoring, there is a very large and prosperous market for products to do exactly that, and we are frequently told we have no right to privacy on company equipment.

The watched pot never boils. The watched employee is constantly distracted, stressed, and wondering when he will be admonished or fired for something he doesn’t even know is a problem.

I had to read up on that to know what it was about. While I’m all in on unions and collective bargaining, I’m not keen on Communism as a political approach. the original idea was a plausible answer to the woes of the struggle between groups of people, but it does not acknowledge that the problem is human behavior. Specifically, a portion of the population that will always seek dominance, regardless of the means or declared ideology. This is what happened with Communism. The assassination of the white revolution in order to insert the red revolution is class 101 in that fact. The United States’ founders understood this, which is why I’m still behind the checks and balances approach to power.

Yes, it eventually is subverted and must be re-established (sometimes forcefully) but it is as Churchill said, Democracy is the worst form of government… except for all the rest.

Yes, I do tend to over explain and it does annoy people, especially my son. I have a near pathological need to make sure others understand the why. I’m working on it.

Been looking into Stoicism lately, and not explaining yourself (to people who don’t care or can’t comprehend) is one of the tenents - not wasting precious energy.

Aha, okay. It would have been redundant to put that in there since we had just gone through that process together. I’d also mentioned my reservations in earlier emails.

Thanks for explaining it, it didn’t occur to me. You are right though about alternatives. He’d actually offered to seek another way, but I was emotionally unable to accept that at the time due to all the effort already sunk. For me it was cutting my losses, and I might have done myself a disservice there.

It comes from knowing how the tools work. AARP has job campaign workshops where they help redesign resumes to first be successfully read, and then include the exact keywords the seek. Then it is up to you to carefully study the job description to modify your resume to match the needs, while remaining honest, of course.

This, you do for every job. Basically, it’s okay for businesses to lean on AI and automation, but applicants are cheating when they do that. Hypocrisy at its most pure.

Yeah, the check for things like invisible text,etc.

Well, as a .NET developer, until a few years ago, that hang-up would have been totally justified.

I kept windows in some form for .NET development until Core became viable. Even now I have to keep it around, even in hardware bootable form. VM is insufficient when windows is required to update the BIOS. (Thanks, Lenovo.)