My field is propped up by various governments. My paycheck is a combination of sales, bailouts, and loan forgiveness. I also make lots of money.

Should I be in favor of cronyism?

I actually take the other side despite getting paid by them. These companies/Management made terrible decisions and continue to make terrible decisions. Instead of selling and replacing managers we are burdened with zombie companies.

>large numbers of N95 masks

Certifications take time, masks are simple, testing takes time.

This is a government problem, not a manufacturing problem.

I think consumers and companies should go their best to shift to them too.

Most of our digital world is built on free code not proprietary crap.

...and open-standards

After Google screwed up my music transfer from Google Play to YouTube Music, I'm not using any new Google services.

And it's not like there is any customer service to fix their own problems.

I'm a believer that these kind of issues should be solved at the consumers end.

I haven't built a web browser, but I built a bot and it's somewhat doable to avoid getting tracked.

A browser could feed a fake user agent and format the browser to be the correct size. After that I believe it's only IP address and cookies which are easy enough to be blocked.

It even defeats the CSS tracking mentioned. "Oh someone downloaded image 6374tracker.png, but they were from UAE and are using Firefox" and are never seen again.

My only weakness on this subject is the low level headers, anyone familiar?

It has been best practice for some time now to detect not based on user agent, but by features. (plenty still use the UA approach of course)

What low level headers are you thinking of here?

I'm going to name drop things I don't know about and might be irrelevant

Data/network/transport/session layer can be detected through TCP?

So you need to fudge a few digits somehow at your router.

I agree, but if you are a fortune 500 company, you don't quite get to say "no".

You need to provide it to users anyway.

I wonder if this is the end goal.

If they are regulated, they can expect permanent life at the expense of taxpayers subsidizing the company.

Be extremely anti consumer and anti developer, advertise to make up for the negative behavior and loss of users.

Wait until you download all the same apps and get 0 privacy benefits.

The problem is barely Google. The problem are the Apps you download and giving full permissions.

In terms of privacy you should be mostly fine if you stick to F-Droid and use microG instead of Gapps.

>Apple uses a lot of customer hostile behaviors nowadays

Nowadays? Apple has been doing anti-consumer behavior for multiple decades. I remember only allowing purchased itunes music being exported in their specific format.

You'd have to burn them to a CD and rip it back to a useable format.

This isn't new, any educated consumer is well aware of how Apple plays.

AAC is just a different format, and a superior one at that. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding)

Maybe you're thinking of the DRM'd files that couldn't be played back by other players, and even iTunes on other computers without your iTunes store account. In that case indeed burning a CD and ripping it would be one solution. They stopped selling DRM'd files completely by 2009, though.

Ahh that was it.

But yep that's how we bypassed it.

I think I bought 6 songs before I found a better alternative. Reminds me how I had 1 iphone (6) and would never get one again.

The DRM was not a whim by Apple, it was demanded by the labels, though. At the time that was the only way they'd even permit an online music store. I don't think there were alternatives that weren't just as locked down, unless you're talking about sailing the high seas.

This is exactly it. Songs were 99¢ with DRM. In 2009, Apple managed to convince enough labels to sell DRM-free copies, but at $1.29. You could, at the time, “upgrade” your DRM copy to be DRM-free for 30¢ a song.