Original WhatsApp was XMPP with phone number for your username. Pretty much what https://quicksy.im/ does now.

WhatsApp today is completely different beast.

It’s been a year or two, but last time I tried it their app worked fine on x86 Android in qemu. Not the most efficient way to run it, but at least it’s isolated from the rest of the system.

Only when requested via special form I believe.

I should prepare a guide on how to take your data with you when quitting Reddit.

For instance when you want to be able to prove that it’s your account without disclosing your legal name publicly on Reddit you may use keyoxide.org for cryptographic proof. I think I’ll talk to keyoxide folks about a method of obfuscating those proofs so they are harder for Reddit to systematically delete.

I understand not everyone will be willing to go to court for this, but at this point I want enough of us to be able to to get them fined enough for every platform to notice.

I call BS on that. Large-scale content scraping was already against the TOS to begin with. And you can’t kill off slow stealth scraping without also blocking search engine crawlers. Or at least not without hurting the searchability.

State authorities aren’t bound by GDPR. That’s something that’s explicitly stated in it.

Oh wow, this is great news. I expect there will still be uncomfortably many dubious black boxes left there. But it’s certainly a step in the right direction. For me the sticking point with AMD was always shoddy SW/FW/drivers shipped with superior (compared to their biggest competitor anyway) hardware design. It’s good to see them conceding that and outsourcing to open source community rather than some dubious third party.

Though for the time being if you want truly open firmware get a POWER chip instead. If you can afford it.

I feel like both of these are extremely location dependent. From my friends across North America I know that network connectivity can be very very poor if you aren’t living close to a big city.

And as far your example with school goes, I’ve seen the polar opposite happen where all kids got a mandatory Teams or Google account (depending on school) fairly early into the lockdowns.

Maybe subcontinents are still too big to generalize about from one person’s experience. :-)

Enter https://yourinstance.example.com/c/somecommunity@otherinstance.example.com into your URL bar and it should come up after a bit and let you subscribe. Some instances have blacklists you can find under the “Instances” link down bottom, but usually this should do the trick.

If you submit a request under GDPR “right to be forgotten” they are mandated to comply. (As long you are EU citizen)

Not that GDPR violations are uncommon, but at least it seems the regulators are capable of slapping companies with hefty fines.

While not backed by syncthing I’d recommend you look into https://www.etesync.com/ which provides end to end encrypted ical and vcard synchronization - that is standard formats for calendars, tasks, notes and contacts.

It has plenty of adapters so if backups/snapshots are what you want automating something like https://github.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer to pull all your calendars and commit them to, say, private git repo should be fairly easy task.