I don’t think my disinterest in most of the things that fall out of Trumps mouthhole is a sign of denial. Most of these are outright lies, baseless accusations, exaggerations, narcissism, and pure hatred. I’m not obliged to let this affect my life. I’m also an EU citizen and as such I have a natural distance to US politics. (I know that the orange turd’s actions have grave consequences for EU citizens too, to be clear, and this is something I can’t ignore)

The difference for me personally is if news articles start with “Trump says“ or with "USA does“. I am very much done with the former, just to keep my mental health intact.

Could you elaborate on that?

Welcome to HA :) freeing all of the devices from the cloud can be quite a rabbit hole, but at the same time it’s very satisfying. If you’re concerned about privacy or devices still phoning home you could consider installing pihole or disallowing specific wifi-connected devices to communicate on the internet via your router settings

I just checked the original video. It works a little bit differently than plain URL replacement. They open another tab in the background and then send a manipulated URL to get the affiliate cookie set to their own. Guess it’s for the courts to decide if that is a legal practice or not. But to me it seems that the malicious extension sends a manipulated URL to the server pretending to do that on user’s behalf, without his knowledge. That is classic malware behavior.

https://youtu.be/vc4yL3YTwWk?t=281

Potato chips and chocolate. It was difficult but necessary to have them both at the same time

It’s more than that, at least from a EU perspective. Don’t know what is legal in the US, but manipulating URLs in an obviously malicious way and without the user’s explicit knowledge and consent would be highly illegal here.

I don’t know. Maybe Google is actively limiting results for Startpage. When I don’t find what I’m looking for in Startpage I switch to Google and boom, adequate search result. I refuse to permanently go back to Google though.

I’m using Startpage too, but I have a feeling that the search result quality had a massive drop lately.