No. As a user of both Amazon and Google devices (with screens/sticks), Amazon is far more aggressive in their advertising practices. As the other guy said, neither is ad-free out of the box, but Amazon devices will literally make your screensaver/lock screen a full screen ad (even on your TV). Google just has a home screen ad about something that’s going to play on streaming, usually.

If you want NO ads, set up DNS ad blocking or get an Apple TV and use that for streaming. But again, Amazon’s devices are FAR more aggressive about advertising as much as possible. My father has one of those Echo Show things that’s a speaker with a rotating screen attached to it. It’s playing ads almost all the time.

In Germany you’re paying to access the bathroom, not the “privilege” of wiping your ass

They’re going to try every medium/platform possible. The only way to tackle this is to teach critical thinking. Easier said than done, I know. Otherwise we board up the internet “for the children” (which is currently happening).

Came here to say the same. It’s an empty threat. After all this is famously the company who made dual physical SIM iPhones for China and other Asian regions because eSIM isn’t/wasn’t legal.

I use Seal. It works fine. It has trouble downloading from “official” pages though (e.g. Vevo or Universal or whatever). It’s like those pages, since they’re owned by corporate entities, have some extra protection on them or something. It’s been like this for years, across Android, Windows, Mac, etc – doesn’t matter what I try to use to download, it’ll fail on those pages/accounts.

I cancelled YT Premium after paying pretty much since Google Music was a thing. The price keeps going up ($14/month now here in the US), and Lite is meh even for the discounted price (e.g. no background play I think?).

They just keep building the wall higher and higher, while they survive only because creators keep filling it with content. Nobody is watching “YouTube Originals” or their first party content. YouTube exists solely because of third party creators.

Not only that but I can survive with Brave or Firefox with UBO or whatever. It’s not that hard to avoid the ads, even if it’s a little inconvenient vs being able to use the app.

Ding ding ding. Anyone who’s been paying attention since the beginning should know this.

You can flash the US Unlocked firmware. I use a US Unlocked S22 Ultra. Works on all carriers. No bloatware like what you described. I know what you’re talking about – it’s called Carrier something. It’s a system app. You can disable it but updates might re-enable it.

Good explanation. Thank you.

In a fucked up way, yes. As in I think it’s intentional/logical on their part. The culture of reddit has been changing for a while. I think they would want the “old heads” to leave, but also leave behind their posts/comments for others (and Reddit) to benefit off of.

That’s why people use those web apps that overwrite their comments with garbage. But I always think about how Reddit controls the servers, data, and backups.

The answer:

The device local name string is specified to be encoded in UTF-8. However, the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 reports its name as Microsoft⟪AE⟫ Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000, encoding the registered trademark symbol ® not as UTF-8 as required by the specification but in code page 1252. What’s even worse is that a bare ⟪AE⟫ is not a legal UTF-8 sequence, so the string wouldn’t even show up as corrupted; it would get rejected as invalid.

Thanks, Legal Department, for sticking a ® in the descriptor and messing up the whole thing.

There is a special table inside the Bluetooth drivers of “Devices that report their names wrong (and the correct name to use)”. If the Bluetooth stack sees one of these devices, and it presents the wrong name, then the correct name is substituted.

That table currently has only one entry.

I mean, I don’t get how it’s legal’s fault when they’re not the one’s creating the firmware/programming, but sure let’s blame them. It’s the dev who verbatim copied and pasted the name from legal for whatever reason (even though a normal person wasn’t going to check the firmware to see it).

“Well don’t look at me like I’m frickin’ Frankenstein or something. Give your father a hug.”

I’ve done this. I have a Google TV Stick. If Netflix starts preventing people from opening their app when it detects a VPN (in Android), then you can do what I did and run the VPN on the routers themselves. In my case it’s ASUS routers on both ends, and they support Wireguard natively (GliNet are also really good for this as they support and run OpenWrt)

The benefit to doing it this way is that neither Netflix nor the Google TV itself are aware they’re on a VPN. The ASUS routers I use have a feature called VPN Fusion, where you can put different clients on or off of different VPN connections.

Edit: To clarify, I share with family. I’m not the account owner, but I’m one of the profiles in the account.

Yes! For Spotify I’ve been using stats.fm (app/site). Iirc it’s paid (one time in app, but cheap). And they walk you through emailing Spotify support to get ALL of your listening history from day 1 to import into the app. After that it will just continue via connection to your Spotify.

They don’t care about whether they live with you or not. It’s about providing less service than what you’re paying for. Like how mobile carriers say, “unlimited data*” – *after 25GB, we [may] slow your connection speed to 256kbps. So this way, it’s “5 accounts*” – *they must physically live with you. So now you’re paying for 5 accounts, where 3 or 4 of them technically are unusable.

Why? Money. Those other people who you would have shared with now need to get their own account(s). Suddenly, “profits are through the roof!” – until the next big squeeze. At this point, Google is squeezing its customers like a dry tube of toothpaste.

Thank you for the new knowledge; I thought this whole time that Opera was renamed Vivaldi after the sale. That explains my original comment.

You can also go on eBay and look for older mini PCs. I got an HP Elite desk Mini G5 for like $70. Didn’t come with storage (usually the case), but an NVME/2.5 SATA drive is cheap.

It has an Intel 9500T and 16GB DDR4 RAM. The N series chips are more efficient (I have one of those N100 mini PCs, too), but the full chips offer more power (if you need it). Of course both of them will be significantly lower in power usage to an old desktop/server, by far.

Whatever you end up using, you can install Proxmox and call it a day. From there, install whatever you want, running side by side.

Opera was bought by a Chinese firm years ago. I’m not saying to use it or not based solely on that; it’s just something to keep in mind. That being said, they do have some legitimately useful features, like being able to cap the amount of RAM used with a slider. But yeah, I remember the sale raising some eyebrows.

And 16GB storage (because everything is being saved to OneDrive anyway).

Genuinely both, but the latter is the #1 reason. Seriously though, it’s like every Tesla accident I hear about is FSD related. I get that people are dumb (in general), but it’s not entirely their fault when Elon keeps/kept talking about how FSD is really “full” self driving.