I’d guess it’s some standardized way to determine which OS the browser is running under? Like it does not report the specific Linux version in the user agent header, but it does say that it’s Linux and it’s architecture. I’d assume there is just some standardized library for it and for Linux the easiest way to know where the hell your binary got launched is /etc/os-release.

What’s the point? Most of it probably switches over 10 hands through all the cash registers in shops or exchanges between people directly before it ends up in the ATM again.

Are there any cases of it being somehow useful?

A bit of an off topic thing to ask, but as long as it’s not a crime to buy it, why do you care if it’s anonymous or not? It’s like withdrawing cash in a bank. Yes, the bank may know that you withdrew cash, but what happens with that cash and where you spent it is entirely up to you and it’s very hard to track it.

Never buy and spend with the same address and it should be private enough just by design.

Yea, thank you, that’s exactly what I meant with

breakage of feed grabbing

Usually people who buy ads pay for clicks on those ads.

So, the idea is to register a click on the ad, which makes the business pay the ad agency it’s commission, but not actually visit or look at their website, which is the whole point of buying an ad.

If businesses see that paying ad agencies brings little to no actual customers, they stop buying ads. One can only hope.

They also have a paper addressing many of your concerns.
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_23.pdf

That said, I don’t use it myself, mostly because of bandwidth and processing cost reasons. I also don’t care about it that much. Ads suck, but I barely see any of them due to my browsing habits.

FreeTube supports external players, if you use it as a tool to find videos instead of watching them, it works fairly reliably, such breakage of feed grabbing hasn’t happened in years. Then you just grab the videos with MPV via yt-dlp, not only MPV is a much better player than practically anything else, but yt-dlp contributors are much faster at figuring out problems and implementing fixes.

Here is an extension you might be interested in if you want to be mischievous.

https://adnauseam.io/

It says in the description that this is a version with minimal changes that exists because uBlock is not available in China. It looks like the source is located here: https://codeberg.org/lanticy/cBlock

I wouldn’t use it if you have the ability to use the original uBlock, but if you have no other choice, this looks plausable.

Oh, no, Russian government ends up leaking each and every piece of information it has for 50 rubles per person through sheer incompetence. So, you are both flying out the window and getting your data sold.

Depends on how you rate Putin reading your messages against Zuckerberg reading your messages.

Yea, knowing another Slavic language definitely makes it easier, with Polish, at least you don’t have to learn how to pronounce Ы from scratch. But one being west language and the other being east can also screw you over, because many things are similar, but not quite.

Be careful not to speak only with Ukranians, they, of course, have their quirks in speaking, like using soft Г which is prevalent in Ukranian, but never used in Russian and using за instead of про in some places, for “to speak about Russian language” they would say “говорить за русский язык” instead of “говорить про русский язык”. Of course, unless you are ok with picking up these quirks.

Props for trying your hand at Russian. Being a native speaker, only about a year ago did I realize how ridiculously complex the language is. From phonetics, to high context dependence, to word building and conjugation, I commend people who are tackling this abomination.

People who promote crypto are usually scammers (they also usually promote their own currency), but in general it’s a very useful tool. Considering you have to give up an arm and a leg to use SWIFT nowadays, crypto offers a fast and cheap way to pay someone across the border. The price is that you need to know a thing or two about the technology, else you’ll pay the same or even more than with traditional methods.

They are probably just using your IP address to determine the location. That will show the location of your ISP, not your location. That’s not much more info than any other server gets when you are connecting to it. Also does not require Mozilla to send any geolocation data.

I’m using Freetube, too. While it fails to play 2160p reliably, you can always use a button to send the video to an external player like MPV. And MPV works without any issues.

Yea, I know. Fucked up my wording a bit while trying to explain why I’m using the app.

Offline capabilities is the killer feature for me. I don’t have much bandwidth on my mobile data plan, being able to access maps without internet connection is incredibly good.

You can just share links to maps, OpenStreetMaps has a bunch of different mobile apps, for example, Organic Maps is a good one. Links to OSM look like this: https://osm.org/go/zrfyVQn8--?node=164979149

Because it’s based on OSM that anyone can commit changes to, it sometimes has areas mapped that Google maps don’t. On my last skiing trip made everyone install it, because Google maps just didn’t have a proper map of the resort we were staying in. Also works offline, very convenient when you only have broadband internet in the hotel.

“Convenience” as in there is no need to host anything? May be, but, yet again, I would like to know the exact physical location of my passwords, otherwise I’m not saving them there. Apart from that, I don’t think there are any more “benefits”.