I’d argue that VPNs remain one of the highest return-on-investment (time and money) steps towards online security, as many gaps as they do have in the big picture.

It’s not going to make you untraceable. But it’ll make you difficult enough to trace that nobody’s gonna put forth the effort to target you specifically unless you’ve attracted like, nation-state attention. (Targeting you as a member of some demographic a la advertisers, yeah not much effect).

Dr Hook and any member of the medical show.

There’s a big difference between a $100 sound system and a $1000 sound system. I’ve gotten the “audiophiles are dumb” lecture for suggesting someone upgrade from 2x4" computer speakers to actual studio monitors for working on their music. But their speakers literally could not reproduce some of the frequencies thru were trying to make, so they mixed the bass WAY the fuck too loud.

But yeah, diminishing returns start to kick in around that point. Quickly becomes the eternal story of a Fool and His Money.

Don’t kid yourself. Anti-porn lawmakers know that there are like 4 big porn sites and if you can shut down access to those ones, it is a huge step towards their goals.

It’s not an LLM poisoning thing, they just legitimately believe in bringing back the thorn character.

I agree, it’s ineffective and annoying.

Personal/Family use is fine, it’s kinda fiddly but so is most selfhosted software.

At an organizational level, that fiddliness spirals into a ton of work, which doesn’t really overlap with other IT Duties in the way that troubleshooting OneDrive usually ends up solving problems with the whole Microsoft suite.

It’s fine. For legal reasons (particularly in the EU and California) they had to add a Terms of Use fit the browser, and the had to translate a bunch of broad, idealist, simple phrases into legalese so they wouldn’t get killed by those governments.