very much so.

i would counter that customizing one’s desktop keeps more than a few users from switching (back) to something else. they enjoy it. let 'em do it. doing so will get them on the terminal at some point anyway and they’ll learn by doing.

did they just ‘restructure’ themselves into irrelevance and unsustainable subscriber loss?

those “morons” represent the vast majority of internet users.

bad actors use shorteners to mask the actual url of their pages so their potential victims don’t know where they’re going until it is, perhaps, ‘too late’

Opening the shortened URL in your browser will instantly redirect you to the correct long URL. (So no stupid redirection pages.)

an interstitial or redirect page would be a security feature, especially for a shortener open to the public.

there’s a backdoor built right into bitlocker in the form of ‘recovery keys’–and for most users, microsoft knows what they are.

i just used a third-party mirror. found one that was better and faster than ubuntu’s own ever has been for me:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archivemirrors

in case launchpad isn’t accessible:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260425125013/https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archivemirrors

for ‘ports’, see here as well, which directs you to this mirror:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+mirror/ftp.tu-chemnitz.de-archive

https://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/ubuntu-ports/

the closed-source version of the internet.

even the crappy old bobcat-based (slow af amd apu) laptops i have here run with lid closed (they run piholes and what-not).

one of their earliest acquisitions, way tf back in '98

i had one back in the earliest of days and used to add missing data to credits. i still occasionally catch myself trying to use ‘us.imdb.com’ as its address.

They’re doing it so other people can stream their media

and they went to a subscription model, in part, so they could get their ‘cut’ from plex shares.

in the uk, the ingredients list for mcd french fries is literally potatoes, oils (rapeseed, sunflower), dextrose (when needed–i.e. early crops that are low in naturally-occurring sugars). salt added after cooking. source

very much different than what they use in the u.s., which introduces multiple allergens. source

keep the server–so much possibility there. swap the fans out for quiet ones.

have you looked at fedora’s plasma mobile spin? https://fedoraproject.org/spins/kde-mobile/

and they’ve used magicband wristband trackers and rfid ticket cards for over a decade.

the alternative is manually (and somewhat regularly during your hardware’s support period) searching a manufacturer’s web site for a bios update, hoping that your bios has a built-in flasher or there being at least a boot disk or ‘dos’ flasher you can slap on a usb to do it… lvfs is a good thing.

don’t see 'em loaded here, either. trixie (dietpi) server, aurora (f44) desktop

the qr itself is just a link to a recaptcha web page with a unique identifier in the url.

the magic is all hidden in the required app that’s linked to your google account and device, and the interactions that take place between it and google’s servers once it sees that code or link.