Yes. That. It’s certainly not that my brain is perfectly smooth and completely hollow. That would just be ridiculous.

Good grief did I seriously misread June as July when I read about it? … Hoooly shit I did… wow.

If you mean the browser extension, my recommended setup would probably be:

• uBlock Origin as your foundation
• NoScript to fill some fine-tuning JS-blocking gaps that uBO lacks (and vice-versa. Neither is a one-stop-solution in this regard… I miss uMatrix)
• CookieAutoDelete to do some useful while-browsing automatic cookie clearing

That combo covers the extension side of things. Something like DecentralEyes may also be useful, but I’ve had mixed results when I tried it years back. EFF’s Privacy Badger also does some interesting stuff and gives you the ability to fully block cookies/etc. but it’s a weird one to deal with so I’m not sure how much I’d actually recommend it.

Ideally all used on a hardened browser like LibreWolf, with a custom DNS like one of Mullvad’s various options, and a VPN. Beyond that, using TOR?.. but that’s not really designed for ad/tracker blocking and is a whole different privacy concept.

Agreed. The chaos is just for kicks and PR so the pundits and politicians can claim with a straight face that he said he wouldn’t. No doubt on my end that he ultimately intends to do it.

So I guess they nixed the plan to delay it? Obviously not a complaint, but surprised nonetheless. edit: I got pulled into a timewarp I swear

CNBC changed the title and article contents. Version prior to the change: https://web.archive.org/web/20250716153251/https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/16/trump-powell-fed-fire.html

Though if you read through either version it’s a chaotic bag of both denying and confirming. Ultimately seems like he told a room of Republicans he would, then denied he would after? So who knows.

It’s also implemented as an actual feature rather than purely marketing fluff though, so the deception/ineptness goes further than just being an ad in my opinion. It clearly works for certain use-cases (e.g. disconnect the VPN and try to connect somewhere via browser or ping), but definitely not in the absolute way it (and particularly the “Advanced” setting) implies.

May I add a post-shoutout shoutout for the ones that have >1KB worth of custom encoded data in the URL when the actual tracking number is only ~10 digits (cough8bitdocough)? 'Cause those aren’t shady at all.

And if it does then you just didn’t worry enough, or the right way, or it was the worry’s divine plan. Have you accepted worry into your heart? If you have a moment I have some worrying literature here…

Good to know! I’ve avoided docker for years, but if there was a time to learn now would be it.

Had either of us known about it beforehand we certainly would have. The lack of binding was definitely not an intentional choice.

Though as I’ve mentioned in a few other replies the biggest shock was how worthless the killswitch feature was. The presumption was that this screw-up is the exact kind situation that feature was designed to prevent, but clearly it’s either broken, total nonsense, or poorly/misleadingly described.

Yeah it was a useful find! No idea about how trustworthy ipleak is though so do use with caution. There were a few other similar services I found while going through this, but I’m not having luck finding my notes on it at the moment… ipleak was just an easy one to remember the name of.

That’d explain it then. I know at one point I’d had that thought and hovered over some of the items, but I guess I didn’t look seriously enough.

Iduno how we both managed to miss that part over all these years. Neither of us are new to any of this and we’re both privacy fanatics… but somehow it slipped through the cracks. Enough tech-shame for a lifetime, condensed and consumed in a singular moment.

Most of our shock was from how useless the so-called killswitch turned out to be since the assumption was that any potential mistakes or bad configurations in an application would at the very least be outright blocked from connecting to anything.

I think it was also a massive gut-punch for them because they’d been heavily torrenting both privately and publicly for decades without ever hearing about this particular step of the process, so to realize their ass had been waving in the wind this whole time… oofph. Kinda surprised this is the first letter they’ve received, considering.

Definitely learned a lot, just wish it had been “on the tin”, so to speak.

TIL! Good to know on all fronts, though I’m not sure why his stuff isn’t showing up in the wardrobe menu. Unless they don’t use the unique “iconic” background so I glossed over them without realizing? Hmm… guess it’s time for me to double-check the list, disassemble the absurd amount of clothes I have cluttering my stash, and further tinker to see how to allow mix-and-matching…

Don’t know how you managed it. His items are flagged as quest items so you can’t deposit them in the stash (which seems to be what the wardrobe menu populates its list from), and I tried everything I could think of the get a mix of properly equipped + cosmetic and it has never worked. My original assumption was that left/right/middle clicking the little hangar icon on each slot would let me toggle that particular cosmetic (since that’s what it indicates), but no dice. Neither did just leaving particular cosmetic slots empty, or equipping actual items after applying a wardrobe preset.

Would love to find out there’s a solution I just didn’t discover, but I certainly tinkered to the point of giving up.

Yep, it was a Linux setup. I don’t know if they ever used Proton when they were still using Windows though so I’m not sure if the issue was happening on there as well.

For the record the “Advanced” killswitch mode is what was used, so their assumption was that nothing would be able to leak and would, in worst case scenarios, just not connect at all. Which was definitely not the case.

The vanity/cosmetic aspect is all-or-nothing. As far as I can figure you can’t mix and match properly equipped items with a wardrobe outfit (i.e. by leaving those slots empty on the wardrobe side of things). It’s doubly annoying with Johnny’s stuff because they can’t be cosmetic, so you are forced to properly equip them and any other cosmetic choices instead of creating a vanity setup.

It’s a nitpick, but it has been an annoying barrier for me more than I would have expected throughout my playthrough.