Apple does extensive audit of mobile apps, including limitations of tracking. So the app cannot spy on something you are not letting it to know. But you are giving it a bunch of info voluntarily.

I’d say using that app on iOS is similar to making a food delivery order using a loyalty member ID. Basically, you are letting the company (McDonald’s) know who you are, what is your phone number, where do you live, and what do you like to eat. And if they wish to, they could use all that to purchase your profile from a data brocker. Or they can sell that info for a few cents to make up on that discount.

Wrong guess. There is Germany on the list

Nice try fed /s

But if you are genuinely curious, here are a few things you can pay for with XMR:

1. You can pay for VPN, many providers like iVPN and Mullvad accept it.
2. There are anonymous hosting platforms like https://njal.la.
3. Recently I discovered Nostr, which is a distributed Twitter alternative less centralized than Mastodon, and there are paid relays you can purchase access to with Monero.

I personaly donate to some Russian media outlets with XMR, which is not exactly a service purchase, but a good way to help them to survive government pressure.

Mostly holding with occasional spending on services that do accept it

I’m afraid that if the sanctions will continue to be a go-to method of dealing with geopolitical rivals, we may end up with a few divergent forks. One for US and “the west” block, one for Chinese comrades with their junior Russian partners, and maybe one for Indian code gurus who don’t like both sides and have capable engineering resources themselves.

Not nationality but alleged involvement with sanctioned organizations. There are plenty of Russian names on maintainers list remaining.

I really don’t see broken images often, it doesn’t bother me at all. I’d prefer to keep Option #2, especially if we could increase the period of how long the images are stored in the local proxy.

Cool! This makes more sense now

I don’t know enough of this technology, but the article says they do fracking to “release geothermal energy, not oil and gas”. So I imagine it will have the same ecological damage as fracking. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can explain where I’m wrong.

Yeah, I see someone already told you that American soldiers have been there already, long ago this new deployment. But they didn’t bother to prove it to you, and you didn’t believe them.

Well, let me Google it for you. Very quick search reveals this article from 2017:

https://apnews.com/general-news-2ccf317f293d4be59b92cec5554c3db4

Back then it was “dozens of soldiers”, nothing close to thousands another person claimed, though. But I think it’s safe to assume the numbers grew since then.

Oh come on, the header is a clickbait. There is a US military base in Israel already, it’s been there for years. The article is about an announcement that they are sending another missile defense battery with personnel alongside

You can do 2FA with Keepass, just not TOTP. Add a key file or a hardware key on top of your master password and you pass “something that you have and something that you know” test

The new Leaf starts below $30k in US. But the range is still not great at 120 miles tops

Pumpkin spice flavored beer is horrendous. Change my mind.

I thought it’s more involved. Like the face ID tech used in phones

Yeah, I don’t think these cameras are used to ID people routinely. Government already has my photo - I have passport anyways. However, face scan is much more sophisticated and they cannot take it with overhead cameras

I draw a line between a photo and biometric face scan. I have a photo ID, so my government already has my picture, but face scan that is tied to my identity and allows for accurate identification is something new

No, I think that many people in my line were first timers, so they did both

Why, for tracking of course!

Russia is no more totalitarian than any Western “liberal democracy”, their elections no more rigged than ours.

Ahahaha… Very funny. Can you please tell me how many politicians are imprisoned for their dissent in western democratic countries? Maybe there is a liberal democracy where the same person has been a president for 20 years plus 5 years as a prime minister? Or a democracy where a single party held majority in federal parliament for 21 years with last 8 years having more than 2/3 votes? By the way, it allowed them first to increase a presidential term from 4 to 6 years to let that one president to rule longer between elections, then to change Constitution to let that one president to be elected for his 5th term and potentially for 6th. Hey, what about a country where it is a crime to publicly say something about armed forces that contradicts what government tells people via government owned media? Up to 3 years in prison for that, you know… Like in any other western democracy, right? And that country has quite a few more laws criminalizing various public activities.

I get what you are saying about ruling class status quo, etc. Maybe from a perspective of someone who wants a radical change of the political system, Russian system might look not that different from western democracies. But totalitarian state feels very differently for people living in one. There is no political freedom, no freedom of speech, no choice, no chance to protest. Say something wrong and go to jail. It’s not an exaggeration, there was at least 3.5k prosecutions for social media posts or sometimes even for likes. The situation with freedom got much worse in last couple of years since the war with Ukraine began.