Dark pattern abuse at its finest. You find this on all third party webstores that have decided to affiliate themselves with Shop. This has been spreading like the plague and infected a lot of webstores I used to use. If you don't notice or forget to click on the "not now" at the bottom of the page they will create a Shop account that contains your email, phone number and credit card information without further warning. Whoever hacks into their database is going to hit a goldmine. You might have a Shop account without even realizing it right now.

And of course there is a 30 day delay for account deletion for purely made up reasons.

It's always the same story. You order something from a website, had your guard down, miss the purposefully easy-to miss button to refuse sharing your information with Shop.app and then BAM. On the next screen thanking you for your purchase you see a notification that says "We've saved your payment information with shop.app" and realized that you've been dark patterned into doing the online shopping equivalent of catching herpes.

Now they have your e-mail, your phone number, your address and your credit card information saved and easily accessible to anyone who hacks your e-mail or their databanks. You have to go to their website, log in with the credentials they stole from you and request for your account to be deleted. But if it took seconds to create the account, somehow it takes them 30 DAYS to delete the account. The dumb thing too is that there is no real way to tell if they truly deleted your account because if you try to log in they'll ask you for your e-mail and phone number, which they will use to create a new account without your permission if didn't exist before.

Those are blatant predatory practices and if it isn't illegal, it absolutely should be. I really hope they get hit by a giant crippling class action lawsuit. Or a train, whichever happens first.

For those who want to know:

Nobody's Boy: Remi is a depressingly dark late 70's kid's show where a orphaned boy gets absolutely pummeled by an extremely harsh life episode after episode, carried forward solely by his hope of one day being reunited with his unknown parents. Poverty, parental abandonment, death... No bleak theme is spared from this show intended for a child audience. If you have seen this show as a child and don't remember crying, you're a psychopath.

Macrodroid has been a favourite of mine for automating things on my phone. This is no longer the case.

It has been silently updated at some point to become a data mining and leaking nightmare. At the time of writing these lines, this app contains 30 trackers from various third party telemetry services according to the latest Exodus report. This is an extremely high number of trackers and there definitely weren’t that many a few years back. Even most junk free mobile games can’t manage to contain this many. It appears that the owner of the app has sold out and turned it into spyware to sell your data to as many companies as possible.

This is particularly worrying considering the level of access and permissions the app requires to function. If you are using the app still, I’m urging you to reconsider.

Spread the word.

Exodus report

Macrodroid has been a favourite of mine for automating things on my phone. This is no longer the case.

It has been silently updated at some point to become a data mining and leaking nightmare. At the time of writing these lines, this app contains 30 trackers from various third party telemetry services according to the latest Exodus report. This is an extremely high number of trackers and there definitely weren't that many a few years back. Even most junk free mobile games can’t manage to contain this many. It appears that the owner of the app has sold out and turned it into spyware to sell your data to as many companies as possible.

This is particularly worrying considering the level of access and permissions the app requires to function. If you are using the app still, I’m urging you to reconsider.

Spread the word.

Exodus report

Macrodroid has been a favourite of mine for automating things on my phone. This is no longer the case.

It has been silently updated at some point to become a data mining and leaking nightmare. At the time of writing these lines, this app contains 30 trackers from various third party telemetry services according to the latest Exodus report. This is an extremely high number of trackers. Even most junk mobile games can't manage to contain this many. The owner of the app has sold out and turned it into spyware to sell your data to as many companies as possible.

This is particularly worrying considering the level of access and permissions the app requires to work. If you are using the app still, I'm urging you to reconsider.

Spread the word.

In many RPG games, when you level up, it feels good. You see your stats increase, your damage output and damage resistance go up, all the numbers get bigger. It gives you a sense of accomplishment. But then, you are made to face tougher enemies which completely cancel out the progress you've made. As a player you're locked into a gameplay loop that acts like a treadmill that keeps you struggling all the time while providing an illusion of progress.

Inflation and "pay raises" are doing exactly the same thing. When you get a pay raise, you feel like you've progressed because you make more money than you used to when you first started. But if you take inflation into account, you've never really progressed at all. For most, their struggle only got even harder even.

I have an old Laptop (MSI MS1721) that I want to repurpose as a media player on my TV. I have installed an old SSD on with Linux Mint XFCE.

Almost everything works well, with only one exception. The laptop's graphics card (ATI HD3850) requires proprietary drivers that haven't been supported since Kernel 3.4. The replacement open-source drivers cause stuttering while playing videos, which makes it useless for my purposes.

Are there Linux distribution options out there that would fit my needs?

Edit After trying a wide array of distros including Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Lite, Linux MX, Bohdi, Linux Mint Debian Edition, Nobara, Debian XFCE and CachyOS, I was pleasantly surprised to see that CachyOS performed very well and still feels like a modern OS and runs surprisingly smoothly with KDE. It looks like the open source drivers do work decently after all depending on the distro you're running and how well optimized they are for your CPU.