The US embassy in Bangkok announced on Monday that all US visa applicants must set their social media accounts to public for screening.

The requirement is effective immediately and aims to enable screening to confirm applicants’ identity and legal admissibility, the embassy posted on its Facebook account.

Looking for games for my friend. She's mostly looking for a casual timewaster for a bit of enjoyable escapism. She historically liked some of the "merge games" where it's about merging icons on a grid, and a couple of the more traditional idle games but its so hard to find any without summy practices like dark patterns and abusive monitization.

So, what are some good casual mobile games? Ideally, the sort of thing your grandma could enjoy, but without the scummy practices that are widespread.

Edit: I'm looking for more "pure" casual games, rather than ones that are primarily puzzle or arcade games. Something more akin to Cookie Clicker, those old shovelware hidden object games, or Bejeweled's zen mode rather than Tetris or Brickbreaker.

Google confirms its latest update can scan all your photos to “use actual images of you and your loved ones” in AI image generation. That means Gemini seeing who you know and what you do. You likely have tens or hundreds of thousands of photos. They’re all exposed if you update.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/41532552

Coldbrew is a "brew" style package manager for Linux distributions that offers the full power of the Alpine Linux aports repository with no root access required

Coldbrew is a bit of a mix of flatpak and homebrew. It uses a very lightweight sandbox (bubblewrap) mainly as a means of isolating dependencies. It aims to server a similar goal as homebrew, but without the PATH issues homebrew brings (see: https://invent.kde.org/kde-linux/kde-linux/-/merge_requests/408)

Example Usage:

coldbrew install neovim # install the package
coldbrew run nvim       # run nvim
coldbrew wrap nvim      # create a wrapper to type less
nvim                    # run nvim

https://archive.ph/gNEW2

https://archive.ph/gNEW2

Hi everyone, I'm only interested in hearing from comrades so that's why I thought this could be a good community to post, but if you think this is the wrong community please direct me somewhere else!

Today I was talking to someone somewhat close to me, he mentioned countries like Germany have an aging population and a falling birth rate and I pointed out that I believe it's connected to the cost of living crisis (especially with the expensive energy imports and with governments happily destroying the welfare state) and my friend said that he doesn't buy it and that in his opinion it's hedonism (?).

I find that kind of argument unprovable and moralistic, but it caught me off guard and I figured I'd take this as a learning opportunity. Have you heard this kind of argumentation? Am I right to assume it's just a reactionary thing? Is this worth engaging with, even if it's just for criticism, and if so how? Or should I just move on? I can't cut contact with him but I can just change the topic again if it comes to that lol.

I know nothing about boats but I learn fast and never forget.

I’m willing to do the jobs no one else wants.

My kids are grown, I’m divorced, retired at 35. I’m not quite forty yet.

I need to get away and I need to work impossibly hard like I’m used. I need to get away from the gun in my safe calling me.

I’ll work myself to death at any shipping job.

There’s got to be a captain looking for a newbie like that.

So I need some kind of cloud storage for work, however I want to move away from Google Drive (obviously). While I started my deGoogling journey by switching to Proton Unlimited, I am now looking to decentralize services from Proton, especially Proton Drive.

I have already tried the "put it on a hard drive and carry it around" route and unfortunately, it is just not working.

So the two Drive alternatives I have found are NextCloud and Filen. I would love to hear people's opinions on each (good and bad), and I am also open to any other suggestions.

Currently, we already have some companies that offer us privacy-focused products, such as Proton, Tutanota, Mullvad, and others, but a short while ago I found one that I've never seen anyone talk about called Ice Privacy. From what I've researched, they've been on this path since 2019 and currently have two services. The first is Ice Drive, a cloud drive that gives out 10GB for free (although I heard they reduced it to 3GB) and focuses on privacy, with features like end-to-end encryption and two-factor authentication. They store your files with zero-knowledge encryption, and they also offer lifetime plans. The other product is Ice VPN. I admit I haven't researched this one as much, but from what I've seen, it's a VPN that promises to keep as little user data as possible (something like MullvadVPN), and the data they do obtain is stored with 256-bit encryption. Their company is located in Gibraltar (a British Overseas Territory located in Europe), which has good privacy laws. The point of this post is to ask you guys if you've ever heard of Ice Privacy? I understand that when it comes to privacy, it's good to choose companies that have been on the market for a long time and have the trust of their customers, but for a company to grow, someone needs to take the first step and use their products. I'm not saying we should just go out and use all their products and join the company's ecosystem, but rather that we should add it to our arsenal of defense weapons regarding privacy. The only thing I didn't find interesting is the fact that they don't have Mastodon accounts or a community on Lemmy, and although they have subreddits for IceDrive and IceVPN, they aren't mentioned on the company's website (that is, if they are actually official).

Knowing this information, will you give them a chance? If you've ever used any of their products, what did you think?

Links for those who want to know more about the company:

Company page: https://ice.gi/

IceDrive privacy policy: https://icedrive.net/legal/privacy-policy

IceVPN privacy policy: https://icevpn.com/legal/privacy-policy

Currently, we already have some companies that offer us privacy-focused products, such as Proton, Tutanota, Mullvad, and others, but a short while ago I found one that I've never seen anyone talk about called Ice Privacy. From what I've researched, they've been on this path since 2019 and currently have two services. The first is Ice Drive, a cloud drive that gives out 10GB for free (although I heard they reduced it to 3GB) and focuses on privacy, with features like end-to-end encryption and two-factor authentication. They store your files with zero-knowledge encryption, and they also offer lifetime plans. The other product is Ice VPN. I admit I haven't researched this one as much, but from what I've seen, it's a VPN that promises to keep as little user data as possible (something like MullvadVPN), and the data they do obtain is stored with 256-bit encryption. Their company is located in Gibraltar (a British Overseas Territory located in Europe), which has good privacy laws. The point of this post is to ask you guys if you've ever heard of Ice Privacy? I understand that when it comes to privacy, it's good to choose companies that have been on the market for a long time and have the trust of their customers, but for a company to grow, someone needs to take the first step and use their products. I'm not saying we should just go out and use all their products and join the company's ecosystem, but rather that we should add it to our arsenal of defense weapons regarding privacy. The only thing I didn't find interesting is the fact that they don't have Mastodon accounts or a community on Lemmy, and although they have subreddits for IceDrive and IceVPN, they aren't mentioned on the company's website (that is, if they are actually official).

Knowing this information, will you give them a chance? If you've ever used any of their products, what did you think?

Links for those who want to know more about the company:

Company page: https://ice.gi/

IceDrive privacy policy: https://icedrive.net/legal/privacy-policy

IceVPN privacy policy: https://icevpn.com/legal/privacy-policy

Coldbrew is a "brew" style package manager for Linux distributions that offers the full power of the Alpine Linux aports repository with no root access required

Coldbrew is a bit of a mix of flatpak and homebrew. It uses a very lightweight sandbox (bubblewrap) mainly as a means of isolating dependencies. It aims to server a similar goal as homebrew, but without the PATH issues homebrew brings (see: https://invent.kde.org/kde-linux/kde-linux/-/merge_requests/408)

Example Usage:

coldbrew install neovim # install the package
coldbrew run nvim       # run nvim
coldbrew wrap nvim      # create a wrapper to type less
nvim                    # run nvim