I tried it out but TBH it’s not a good UI, at least on a desktop browser. There’s a sidebar that takes up 20% of the screen that you can’t close or collapse, if you click on a business or something, it appears in the left sidebar but then you can’t get rid of it, and there are several pop-up floating tiles that you can’t close covering the lower part of the map.

More importantly, I can’t find a Layers icon or any way to turn on this Surveillance layer or any other layer. No help button to find out how to use it. I searched for their help page separately and there’s nothing on it about layers at all. So maybe this only applies to their phone app, which seems like a weird choice.

I think it’s great what they’re doing with this surveillance layer (if I could find it) and the not renaming stuff, but for now Open Street Map has a much better interface.

Why not both? Yikes.

Oh I see, thanks. I didn’t understand what OP meant by Wi-fi Direct, I was thinking it just meant going over the LAN via the router. So I guess this means a device making itself into a wi-fi hotspot with is own local IP address that can be connected to directly, right?

Try KDEConnect (or GSConnect for gnome). Clients for Linux, BSD, Android, Sailfish, iOS, macOS and Windows.

Another option (maybe better, depending on your distro) is Warpinator. Linux, Windows, and Android.

Instead of separate dedicated shape tools, in gimp you use the appropriate shape of Selection tool to create the shape(s), then you either add the fill and/or border of the style you want, or use ‘Stroke selection’ to choose from various draw/paint tools/styles. So for a circle you use the Ellipse Selection tool.

You can use any of the transformation tools, including Rotate, on the selection vs the image contents --you choose the tool option for which thing you want it to apply to. You can drag or enter a specific number.

(this is just information for anyone who wants to know how to do the things you mentioned. I’m not interested in talking about how good or shitty the programs are or comparing them)

Not just no but Hell No.

As I understand it, you can’t just real a url from the code and enter it into your browser. You have to have their app installed on your phone to read it with, which then somehow sends to google to unlock the page. So obviously the code contains the IP address/fingerprint of your desktop and/or a code linked to that instance of the captcha page. The purpose is so they can link your desktop browser to your phone = to your identity, for the giant database. Linking all the devices you use to your ID has long been a goal.

There’s a looooong thread on mobileread forums about how to do this. Amazon changed their ebook format a year or two ago to make it harder to remove the DRM, but someone usually comes up with a new way to do it every time Amazon tries to foil them.

This is the thread I have bookmarked – I haven’t kept up with it all since I quit Kindle back when they removed the “download & transfer” option to let us save our own purchased property. But I think their newest format has been figured out now, so if it’s possible to do, the instructions should be in that thread.

This latest problem wasn’t with playing videos on FT, it was with finding and fetching the feed/list of videos for your subscribed channels. IOW if you directly pasted in the url for a video it would play just fine, you just couldn’t fetch the list of available videos directly from FT.

My car is a 2012. It doesn’t have any of the stuff you mentioned, though I wouldn’t mind having a backup camera. I’m also fine with any safety features required by law since those aren’t surveillance–it’s the privacy-invasive stuff that will keep me driving this car until it’s no longer repairable. I put very few miles on it per year now that I’m retired, so it should last a long time.

I’m still interested to see if any replies here have alternatives for bypassing all the surveillance stuff. I saw an article on how to disable/remove the phone-home modem in a particular brand of car, and it was very complicated. You had to disassemble and remove a whole bunch of stuff just to get to it.

Oh thanks, I guess I should have read the title a little more closely!

OK dumb question but I don’t have a smartphone, so: You’re browsing the web on your phone and this pops up. It says “Use your phone’s camera app to scan this QR code”. So obviously a phone’s camera can’t scan its own screen. And if you switch to the camera app the QR code is no longer on the screen anyway. So how does your phone’s camera app read the QR code? Does it have a button to click and give you 5 seconds to go to the screen that’s showing the code or what?

So those humans will go buy the cheapest they can find

Hell no I won’t.

Same! Except mine does do SMS text and has the other flip phone stuff like alarms, timer, calendar.

How does that even work?

Very true.

They’re kind of vague about it but it sounds to me like you’d have to have some stuff posted online under your real name for it to find and match to. So if you’ve only ever posted things under various pseudonyms in social media, etc. it could match those up to each other, but not to your real identity.

Wish Mastodon had like a default “what’s hot” or “Discover” feed. Really helps find people to follow as well.

You mean like Mastodon’s “Trending” and “Discover” feeds?

Well I would be one of those noobs, not having used signal or the like before. :) Camera app–are invites done via a QR code then? And we don’t use FB or any of that poison. I doubt I can get anyone to try it out anyway, but good to know about it just in case. Use case would be either an old no-sim phone or android tablet connecting to wifi or wifi hotspot, and/or a laptop/desktop from home.

Thanks! They also have a desktop and a terminal version, nice.