Maybe in Canada? In the U.S. they’re just as common as they’ve always been.

True, but you can just run a reverse proxy on the VPS and not use funnels.

Yes?

Because the initial assault was news. Generally speaking, news stories with unresolved conclusions tend to release updates when they happen.

It is very much still a thing and the contracts still exist in some form, specifically phone financing and locking. If you finance a cellphone from Tmobile, it will be locked to Tmobile until you’ve paid for the phone in full, which is usually over two years of payments. This is why carriers offer deals on phones purchased through them, and have those upgrade-every-year type plans. The contract has just switched from the phone service, to the phone itself. This is also why if you walk into any carrier’s store, they’ll try and convince you to trade in your perfectly good paid-for device for the next years model with a decent trade in value, but only if you finance the new phone.

Ok

Ublock is not network level ad blocking.

That will only go so far unfortunately. And network level ad blocking won’t protect you from their ads if they’re served from the same servers the content is.

No, it’s not. The problem with bad AI in strategy games is that ultimately, what ends up happening is the AI doesn’t follow the same rules as the player and gets a ton of unfair advantages. If you were to play a total war game on the easiest difficulty, it’s just CA’s brain dead AI on equal footing with the player, which allows the player to stomp them out of existence with ease. But when you scale the difficulty up to normal or higher, the AI doesn’t get smarter, because it’s limited. So instead the AI gets a ton of money and resources for free even though it would be otherwise impossible for it to given its position.

For example, if a player was limited to one province, it would put the player on the back foot and is very tough to recover from. If you beat an AI back to one province however, the AI will be able to field an otherwise impossible two full stack armies in an alarming amount of time.

This hurts the experience beyond just “difficulty”. Strategy games are often intended to be deeper than just being about military power. There are often economic and diplomatic mechanics you can use to defeat enemies with, but those often break in these cases because unlike a player, even if you deprive an AI opponent of all of one resource, they’ll probably still have it anyway because it just cheats.

I have a similar setup and I just have the reverse proxy on the VPS. It then proxies back to the home server on whatever port the service is on. And yes you can forward the original client IP if you wish.

And the best possible outcome is they contact you and buy it for some much larger amount than you paid for it.

I wouldn’t touch this with a 10 foot pole. Squatting on domains that contain a trademark with the purpose of forcing a company to pay you out for it is illegal. There would need to be intent, but just going to court over something like that would NOT be worth it.

I had a similar thing happen where my last name was also part of a trademark for a huge institution. As soon as I registered a domain with the name in it, I got an email from their legal department demanding I forfeit the domain to them or they would take legal action.

I replied that the domain was my surname, and that it wasn’t being used commercially at all, much less in the industry they’re in, and I actually got an email back saying they’d back off as long as I didn’t try to pull any funny business.

If you get yourself into a private community gym instead of Planet Fitness, you’ll realize how real this is.

You don’t think a “former” agent of the U.S. government agency with the explicit purpose of information gathering having a position of control in a private company with the explicit purpose of information gathering, might have a vested interest in that position beyond paying the bills? I suppose you think the corporate telco/isp lobbyists getting jobs at the FCC is all on the up and up as well.

Geez talk about naive. What is it that you think can’t happen?

I love the ongoing illogical downplaying you keep doing too. “Dead drop microfilm” lmao. How overdramatic.

“Help is on the way, dear!”

Nope, most people do have unlimited data plans. And unless you live in some tiny, mountainous, Eastern European backwater, the plans aren’t actually that expensive either. And even if you truly are a time traveler from the year 2002 like you appear to be, and you have an incredibly limited 5GB data plan, you’ll be happy to know that even if you reach your data cap, you will still have data connectivity enough to use RCS without issue. All that happens when you “run out” of data on phone plans is you’re throttled down to a slower speed that is still more than sufficient to sent text messages over RCS.

It’s not worse than SMS in any fashion. Just like SMS, RCS will tell you when your text is actually delivered. You will never assume somebody received something that they didn’t. Furthermore RCS offers read receipt functionality which will additionally let you know your message was read. SMS is not capable of that.

RCS also lets you actually send media to your contacts, like photos and videos without horribly mangling them with compression.

And as for having no data connection, your phone will fall back to SMS same as iMessages do. Which shouldn’t be at all necessary as most people have unlimited data plans and even when throttled RCS has such a small footprint you shouldn’t have any trouble.

Or not have the website listen on port 80, or redirect connections from http to https on connect. Lots of very simple ways to correct this problem.

Not a “high up employee”, the director of the NSA. The United States premier agency for gathering information on American Citizens. And he’s not “going to work for” OpenAI he’s joining as a board member of a company that’s one of the United States premier private companies for gathering information from American citizens.

That’s a whole hell of a lot of overlap, especially considering your suspicious attempt to downplay not only this connection, but the role of the man himself.

That’s what it’s called. Linode is gone my friend. It’s time to say goodbye.