Most gaming monitors, computer monitors, video projectors, and commercial displays are spyware-free alternatives to smart TVs.
Last time I checked, there were also a few brands that still made dumb TVs, but it has been a few years since I looked.
Tom Kemp, CalPrivacy Executive Director: That data is stored in kind of five separate areas and it's hashed...
As written, that means they are storing personal info, along with a hash of said info. If that is indeed the case, it's bad news for privacy.
It is possible he meant to say that they only store the hashes, which would be a bit better. The surrounding text kind of implies this is the case, but doesn't explicitly say so, making it unclear whether these assurances are honest or just weasel words.
It's also possible that the hashes are calculated in the web browser, with the original data never sent over the network at all. This would much better, although I would be (pleasantly) surprised if this is the case. Even if it is, a hash of low-entropy data with well-known ranges, like a phone number, is trivial to reverse through brute force. I wonder if their system handles phone numbers in some better way.
In any case, California's DROP does seem interesting. I would like to know exactly how it and its adjacent systems handle personal information. If anyone here can link authoritative info, please do.
Tom Kemp, CalPrivacy Executive Director: Brokers who don't comply face fines of $200 per day, per incident.
This seems potentially good, if violations are actually discovered and the fines are quickly and meaningfully enforced. I guess time will tell. Prison time for executives, in addition to the fines, would be better.
Devuan, AntiX, and MX Linux all seem worth a look for people wanting to avoid systemd. More are listed here:
https://itsfoss.com/systemd-free-distros/
https://systemdfree.com/#distros
(FWIW, I think systemd's age data collection is optional, at least for now. It's not clear which Linux distros will implement/adopt it by default.)
OP might be suffering from cache misses. (Or maybe hasn't yet learnt about it.)
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
— Widely attributed to Phil Karlton
There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.
— Leon Bambrick 2010-01-01
This is minor compared to the mass surveillance issue, but I can't resist pointing it out:
the employee said in a 911 call obtained by the local news network.
So it seems they didn't just call the police, but called Emergency Services for this non-emergency.
Matrix isn't a drop-in replacement yet, but it's slowly improving. Here's a relevant post from early this year:
I wonder how well I would manage in a 2e world after years of familiarity with 5e, and how difficult it would be to adjust back to 5e afterward.
Do you mean that survival is hard at those levels? Were you by any chance playing a wizard?
Having implemented parts of the Matrix protocol myself, based on the spec, I can say this without a doubt: This "paper" is a sloppy, misleading, confused mess. Spreading it around does a disservice to the community.
Matrix has plenty of room for improvement, but that doesn't mean it should be avoided. It offers a unique and very useful set of features, and its security model is already good enough for a great many people's day-to-day needs. And it is improving, little by little. I expect improvements would come faster if more organizations donated money to the project.
Thanks for the write-up. I've been pondering Baldur's Gate 1 or 2 in part because I think some of BG3's characters first appeared in the earlier games.
Which edition of D&D rules does the first game follow?
To expand on this: Some distros want a little more setup than others for gaming, but it's generally a one-time thing and not particularly hard. Even my Debian Stable system plays games beautifully with a handful of Backports installed.
Steam can be installed natively or in a Flatpak. The latter can be a little fussy every once in a while, depending on your setup, but has the advantage of somewhat better sandboxing. (For better privacy protection, do your gaming on a dedicated machine or at least in a dedicated user account.)
Proton is great. Steam comes with several versions, allowing you to choose the one best fitting any game that doesn't work with the latest/default version. Some users choose to add third-party Proton builds (like GE-Proton) to Steam alongside the standard ones, but it usually isn't necessary.