If the online ad industry was just about serving ads you could say that I guess. Early Internet ads were usually placed pretty intrusively on websites, and very soon went from annoyance to security risk as ads became a disturbingly common vehicle for malware delivery. Today malware via ads is far less common but an ad isn’t just an ad – now ads are powered by, and an agent of, a surveillance network.

If an ad could just be an ad it would actually be safe to roll without an ad blocker; I would infact do so as well unless a site was really egregious with their ad placement, I want to support websites doing good work. The Internet ad industry forced us into blocking their ads. My adblock never turns off, even for sites I’d very much like to support, because ads are just a pile of malicious code. Ad blockers would have stayed niche techy things if the ad industry wasn’t scummy as hell.

So anyways, I feel I got a little rant-y. My point is that the ad industry themselves fed the demand for ad blockers. Ads themselves and website placement didn’t get egregious because of ad blockers, ad blockers became common because ads and ad placement got egregious.

As others have mentioned, video downloaders works. Personally, I would either use a VPN or proxy. I don’t have this problem in my state but when I traveled through Oklahoma I just used a VPN and it worked just fine.

The problem with downloading porn, I learned many moons ago before “tube” websites made it so accessible, is that unless you constantly hunt for new stuff it’s a waste of space as porn doesn’t have a ton of rewatch value (for me at least). So you amass a collection and then the collection gets boring after some watches/views.

If you happen to use a DNS-based ad blocking/security service such as NextDNS, ControlD, or whatever you can also often just have your DNS queries route out of another region. Doing that can get you around some regional stuff because you’ll get service URL’s and IP’s back from DNS for that other region, so you can skip the VPN and still get what you’re looking for. But that’s most useful for things like getting UK shows in your Netflix TV app. For your use case I would just VPN.

That said, if you’re set on downloading your porn, yt-dlp is the gold standard for ripping video off of the Internet. I haven’t tried it myself, but a cursory search seems to confirm that it’ll work with sites like PornHub (it’s apparently hit or miss depending on the site). You might still need a VPN for the content to not be blocked though.

I’m obviously not OP but the first thing that comes to mind are attacks like the one that targeted xz. Open source developers are generally overloaded between demands from the community and their regular lives, and they also lack the means and ability to check the background of everyone contributing code or vying for maintainer status. This creates the risk that somebody with bad intentions works their way into a position of some power over the code that gets merged. Bigger projects with strict governance and an active community of contributors (or funding for dedicated developers to maintain control and check outside contributions) have much smaller risk in this regard.

Likewise married into a Latino family. They acknowledge that “Latine” is a thing, but not a single one of them has heard another Latino use it in real conversation, let alone use it themselves. And they all roll their eyes extra hard, young and old, at “LatinX”. The family that speaks English all poke fun at it by pronouncing it “Latinks”.

I’m sure that some population of Latinos somewhere in the world cares about such things, but white people on the whole seem to be care a whole heck of a lot more.

Most of such scanning would typically happen at the time of upload before it gets encrypted.

They have their own index on top of using Google’s. As such they do some of their own ranking like promoting the “small web” and surfacing more Internet blogs, for example. You can also customize results rankings by domain – for example, when I search for an image I’ve personalized it to block social media results, Pinterest, and AI-generated images (they tag AI images and they’re reasonably good at it).

The end really is that I can have confidence that my results will be relevant from the first result – no sponsored content, no ads, no unwanted AI slop (you need to purposely invoke AI summaries, for instance, by ending your query with a question mark), and no domains that I find give low quality results. There are even more customizations you can do and I could wax poetic about Kagi, but at the end of the day a good search engine helps you find useful information and gets out of your way, and I haven’t seen a search engine do that better than Kagi yet.

Google Authenticator is merely a generic TOTP token storage app. The person you’re replying to was pointing out that Google Authenticator, specifically, isn’t necessary. There are alternatives, and unless you’re using a company-owned device that restricts the apps you can use there is no way for work to dictate which app you use for TOTP tokens.

Duo, Okta Verify, and other 2FA apps that use push notifications and such, are a different beast altogether.

I don’t think it’s a normal expectation for services with variable labor and materials to have a flat price associated. Certainly not for businesses buying said services. But there isn’t a single “charge per seat” software company that has a valid excuse for obfuscating pricing. Every software company I’ve worked with (and I’ve worked with hundreds over my career buying software for corps) has a “list price” for their product even if they hide it.

Jimmy Kimmel made a comment about how the MAGA gang was spinning the shooting of Charlie Kirk as a politically-motivated assassination by “Democrats”, when the shooter themselves was part of said MAGA gang and was not, in actual fact, a Democrat.

In response, the FCC threatened ABC and encouraged TV broadcast stations to exclude their programming, and so ABC indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s show in response.

That just about sums it up briefly.

Holy shit I would take this over an open floor plan any day. I dream of having my own quasi-isolated space.

They work just fine with real-debrid.

I’m in IT too. My experience is that if you use Linux at home and Windows at work you just end up skilled at both. At one point I was even using a Macbook at work (wouldn’t have even been a consideration if WSL was just a little better), using a Windows jump server or a VM for my Windows-y ops, and I became skilled at all 3 OS’s.

All of that is to say that your skill won’t decrease if Windows is still being used, especially if you’re using it in a professional context.

LinkedIn and Indeed mostly, though I do check my resume against the listing using stuff like jobscan.co to play the stupid match-the-keywords game to rank myself as high as possible. The response rate sucks but I do get responses, and I think shitty response rates for applications via job boards is kinda common in general. In my area (both geographically and career-wise I suppose) there are also plenty of recruiters looking for people to get in the door, which gets you past the AI gatekeeper. Though recruiter activity has slowed down in the past year and it’s not a time of plenty anymore they’re still around.

As with anything YMMV. So many variables, and surely some luck has played a part in my experience.

That’s entirely dependent on experience. Low to no experience? Get certs. In today’s age of AI powered resume screens, even with experience if what you’re pursuing is a position lower on the totem poll then you will still need them to get through the AI. Probably want a higher-value cert than CompTIA if you wanna work in IT but don’t want to stay trapped in the help desk (I’m talking a networking cert, a cloud cert, ITIL, etc). The most common career path is through the help desk but one doesn’t need to stay there.

Once one gets a decent amount of experience certs don’t really matter. In fact, I climbed up the early rungs of the IT ladder by selling my experience with stuff in my home lab and selling my ability to learn. I don’t have a single cert and never have. I misrepresented nothing about myself, but I did need to eat some below-market-pay jobs at first to rack up real experience to sell. Nobody really cares about the cert, it’s a knowledge industry and what matters is what you know and what you’ve done.