As some people poined out, I was talking about VK. A Russian social network that ended up in the claws of Russian government, which in turn ended up in massive political repressions of it’s userbase for posting “wrong” things.

He then made Telegram and used Russian government’s attempts to block it as a PR campaign. I guess that’s what made it so appealing at first, but now French government stepped in and we are going all over again.

The guy has a history of making something that looks good and then selling it to governments. I’m surprised people took the bait for the second time.

That’s some good data! I’m mostly interested in filtering by Linux support and latency/accuracy measurements. Some of them are very helpful, thank you!

I meant a pretty well-known case, not hashing in general. Thought that was obvious.

It’s not really about something specific. There are just a lot of examples of Apple doing weird shit with your data and only stopping when they got caught. Most people conserned with privacy just don’t trust Apple in general.

I mean, they where hashing any lauched programs and sending the hashes unencryped to their servers to compare against their database. So, they literally knew every program you launched, when you did it, but also your ISP knew it and anyone smart enough to MITM your connection. Sounds like a privacy violation to me.

Apple isn’t any good for privacy. Just as Google, it’s a single big company that gets full control over your device. There are many examples of them exploiting it, by hashing your launched apps on Mac to check for malware, for example. Their systems are also known for being a lot more locked down than the rest, meaning getting rid of telemetry is not an easy task. Big companies are not interested in your privacy, they are interested in profit. And the profit they can get by building your profile is a lot more valuable for them than you as a user. That being said, the guy is right, but he is out of line.

Some people have to use their stuff for a variety of reasons, don’t be a dick about it.

You can add mpv to FreeTube as an external player. With yt-dlp, it supports playing YouTube videos directly and in any quality. It also has a plugin for SponsorBlock integration.

Usually the methods are not shared because streaming services would go out of their way to break them. Just like Youtube breaks yt-dlp every now and then. But Youtube is too big to implement any serious protection, so, downloaders usually win. I heard Crunchyroll is ripped via their mobile app, albeit modified. But specifics are better left in the dark.

It’s just a domain name, it has nothing to do with sites being safe. Just as any other site, they may be malicious, may be not, depends on who runs the site.

Why not use a proper downloader for that sort of stuff like yt-dlp? You can get it running on Android via Termux.