refalo

well yea, if it's free you're the product

oracle has perpetual free tier VMs, just selfhost it

You don't control any VPN services hosted on someone else's (e.g. a cloud provider's) infrastructure

We must have very different definitions of "control".

They have full access and can technically do anything.

You could say the same for anyone with physical access to a machine. But the people who have to worry about that likely aren't reading this.

And they see your incoming and outgoing connections.

So does any bandwidth provider you pay money to.

This is stupid, and doesn't give you any privacy benefit.

Highly debatable and subjective IMO

There are good and trustworthy VPN providers

Depends on your definition of trustworthy... some say it's impossible to trust any company.

I think there's mainly two usecases:

• the "weird" people who don't visit any mainstream sites and live under a rock

• people who disable JS by default but are always adding exceptions for sites that need it

not sure but I heard they recently caught the FGC-9 designer

EDIT found the story: https://news.sky.com/story/jacob-duygu-incel-who-mysteriously-died-unmasked-as-creator-of-worlds-most-popular-3d-printed-gun-12997178

it's not hard

yes

Not using javascript is like a huge beacon of light screaming just how unique you really are. There are several methods for fingerprinting you without JS, or even without CSS/HTML.

And the number of people not using JS being very small, it doesn't take as many bits of information to uniquely identify you.

I don't trust any VPN service I don't personally control myself.

Agreed, and it is a tragedy that this requires snapd.

I was not refuting that, yes drivers can control the LED since forever. The original comment was "the link light is powered by the switch", which I'm saying is not possible. An ethernet switch (assuming it's not PoE) cannot directly power an LED on a network adapter in your PC let alone the rest of it, that's all I'm saying.

sure it depends on the design, but no standards-compliant non-PoE Ethernet design is going to light up an LED, it barely uses 1 volt.