circuscritic

This answer is very different depending upon your life circumstances.

A single person with fixed income, is different than a two income household with children. I'm not saying they can't both reach the same conclusion, just at their circumstances justify different choices being valid.

There's also your technical proficiency, and pain tolerance for saving money.

For example, you could eliminate all external services, self-host everything, and then configure an S3 object storage provider for critical cold storage backups. That might also require you spending a bit more upfront to expand your NAS storage capacity.

While that may save you a bunch of money in the long term, it will definitely cost you a lot of time and effort.

What's convenient for you? What can you not afford to lose access to? What's your budget? How much time do you have to manage different solutions?

Those aren't questions for you to provide me answers for, just some of the considerations that will impact different people's answer to this question.

Fusion reactors are incredibly complicated.... This is a research reactor, with the goal of figuring out how to create sustainable fusion for real world uses by 2050.

This is not a performative action for a determinative outcome, this is aspirational and has no guarantee of achieving its goals, which is good. This type of research and science needs to be funded, even when it may fail.

Maybe this will spurn competition between powers to accelerate their own fusion reactor research, and create a virtuous cycle that accelerates this technology becoming a major source of green energy in the near, or medium-term, future.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but OnStar is a 3rd party service, so it makes sense they would have a bolt-on device that can be removed without too much concern for the rest of the car's functionality.

Also, isn't a TCU something that controls a car's drivetrain and transmission?

Edit: nevermind, just searched and found telematic control unit. Interesting, thanks for the info, I might look into this more if I have more time later.

The Seattle Times is really not a good online paper, it's honestly pretty bad. Maybe it was good back in the heyday of print when they had good streams advertiser funding, but nowadays their front page is mostly taken up by local sports related journalism. It's frankly, kind of disturbing.

They did/do have a really good aerospace reporter who covered the most recent round of Boeing scandals, and broke a lot of the stories, but he's not the author of this article.

I think I might even prefer the Baltimore Sun's broke ass website just based on their exponentially lower ratio of local sports stories on the front page.

I unintentionally fibbed, because one thing I do have a bit of experience with is aftermarket car stereos, including double-DIN android units.

Granted, I haven't tried to install one in a 2024 car, but a lot of modern infotainment systems can't just be ripped out and replaced with aftermarket unit and retain the car's original functionality, if it can be removed at all without breaking, or removing your access to core functions, like climate control, etc.

Here's a picture of the interior of one of the cars in question, a 2024 Mazda CX-90

You're not popping a double DIN in there, and even if you did remove the screen, I'm betting the actual infotainment system boards are inside the dash somewhere installed in a mounted panel box, and they aren't just going to pop out and be replaceable like your standard head unit.

Another photo, this one from the linked article:

I might regret not searching about this before running my mouth here, but I would assume most automotive manufacturers, in 2024, are soldering the wwan modules onto the main board of the infotainment system for cost, and to prevent user removal of their subscription vector.

I would also assume most manufacturers who are converting standard automotive features into paid subscription services that dubiously rely on SaaS backends, are NOT also designing isolated architectures that separate the IoT infotainment system from the car's critical systems like drive control, transmission, brakes, etc. I'm guessing most at least have CAN bus connections linking them together.

But I don't know enough about cars and automotive systems to even pretend being knowledgeable. So, if anyone here is actually well versed on this subject (and not just searching forums before replying to me), please tell me I'm wrong, and how so.

Seriously, I want to be wrong about this.

You should enable it anyways. A lot apps, especially from big companies like banks, use DNS based telemetry and tracking services. Many of which will then be blocked by netshield, if it's enabled.

Check your proton VPN app, and look for the netshield setting. If it's enabled, you are using VPN based ad blockers, but if it's not enabled, you should turn it on.

Regardless, most of those VPN-based ad blockers are just using their own flavor and combination of block lists. I'm sure some get a little fancier, but that's gist of it. Which is something, that ProtonVPN also offers I think they call it netshield or something like that.

The paid brave VPN service? If so, I can't speak to it because I have never used it, but I assume it functions much like a normal VPN provider where they're running their own ad block lists on the exit node, but I have no idea what those lists are or their effectiveness. And yes, that would prevent your from concurrently running another systemwide VPN tunnel.

Firefox with uBo is good and not trying to convince you to abandon Firefox on Android, certainly not for your desktop OS.

The issue that thought is OP is referring to is about security, and while privacy and security aren't mutually exclusive, sometimes you trade off one for the other.

Personally, I prefer Chromium forks because I already take other privacy measures that I'm content with, and I would prefer the security advantages those browsers provide on Android.

But sometimes, if there's a website that I trust is not malicious, but there is an extension I prefer to view it with, I use Mull or Ice Raven. Both being Firefox on android forks, the former being a security/privacy hardened variant.

I want to reiterate, that this is only in regards to Android browsers and I'm definitely not saying to install Google Chrome, or even Google's own Chromium. I'm talking about hardened forks of their open source chromium project, such as Mulch and Cromite.

You're talking about ad blockers that leverage a VPN connection, but Cromite is a hardened Chromium fork with built in ad blocking, including adding custom lists.

Other Chromium forks, including Mulch, also support browser level custom DNS configs.

What if I told you I work in information security, and your not impressing me, or tripping me up, by using terms like defense in depth and attack chains, nor am I confused and unable see through your misrepresenting Graphene's threat model to imply it only matters for high threat risk individuals.

Just because I said I don't have enough low level understanding of Android development to refute those devs write-ups on Android browser security, doesn't mean I'm coming here without a professionally informed understanding of security, and all the terms you keep throwing out to muddy the issue.

So, I'll leave it there. I will take my professional knowledge and experiences, along with my judgment on which sources I incorporate into my broader understanding of this situation, and agree to disagree with your analysis and conclusions.