This is why countries are banning use of their tech being anywhere near government communications.

No, that's also racism and xenophobia. They spread propaganda about supposed backdoors in network hardware, but can never actually point to any. If there's no exfiltration, you aren't "giving them access to your data".

I have zero trust with a nation that actively steals from any nation it can get away with.

Considering a lot of Chinese network hardware, specifically Huawei, is at the literal forefront of technological development, continually developing and producing the fastest devices with the highest throughput, etc., it is false to say they're just stealing their tech. They're beating out all the countries you could posit that they're stealing tech from. Moreover, if you're basing your supposed trust in a tech manufacturing company/country based on whether or not they steal tech secrets, what countries could you possible trust? The USA steals tech through (government enacted) corporate espionage against firms competing with firms in the USA[^1][^2]. You'd be hard pressed to find any country with tech manufacturing that isn't engaging in corporate espionage.

[^1]: Edward Snowden says NSA engages in industrial espionage [^2]: NSA is also said to have spied on the French economy

From the rest of your comment history? Yes, it's entirely believable. It's more surprising that you're walking it back, really.

Do you not see the chicken-or-egg situation here? They're more unhealthy because of bad healthcare. That (bad) healthcare is more expensive because they're more unhealthy.

Moreover, much of the reason the healthcare is so expensive is because of insurance overhead, for-profit middlemen (including hospitals, private equity owning doctors offices, etc), massive prescription medication markups because people can't go without medication, and other inefficiencies in the system. Even with an unhealthy population, it doesn't need to be nearly as expensive as it is.

I'm not sure why people use anything other than Windows Defender. It literally shares signature databases with most of the large AVs, it doesn't have any anti-features or isn't itself malware/adware/spyware like commercial AVs, it's tightly integrated but also easy to turn on or off (ever tried to uninstall an AV?), and no commercial AV is going to catch anything Windows Defender won't. It's also free and has no need to make money as a product in itself, and so there's no motivation for bad behavior.

The only features some commercial AVs have that Windows Defender doesn't are things like DNS blocking or browser addons (which there are plenty of non-commercial/profit-motive-driven options for: uBlock origin, pi-hole/adguard home, etc).

Not quite.

For Biggs and Crane, unless I'm misinterpreting, the presence of "culture war issues" in the bill was itself a detractor,

Biggs and Crane posted a joint, 10-minute video explaining their “no” votes, citing U.S. support for the war in Ukraine, financial accountability at the Pentagon and culture war issues.

For Buck, the size of the budget was the stated concern,

Buck’s opposition to the measure rested in its price tag. The legislation sets an $866 billion budget for the country’s armed forces in fiscal year 2024. He said he could not “in good conscience” support the legislation.

I can't find anything from Massie specifically, but given his history of voting against any and all aid to Ukraine, it seems reasonable to assume that the provisions for military aid to Ukraine were enough of a reason to vote against it.

Edit: My comment below was originally based on a faulty understanding of how EDDM mailers worked and a faulty assumption I based on that ignorance. What they did in reality is little more than sending out spam mail, it was not a privacy violation. I've removed the mention of the EDDM mailers since they aren't relevant given this.

I'd take a peek at the wikipedia entry about their business model, which mentions some stuff that isn't the most savory:

... Brave earns revenue from ads by taking a 15% cut of publisher ads and a 30% cut of user ads. User ads are notification-style pop-ups, while publisher ads are viewed on or in association with publisher content.

On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance

With regards to the CEO, he made a donation to an anti-LGBT cause when he was CEO of Mozilla in 2008. He lost his job at Mozilla due to his anti-LGBT stance. He also spreads COVID misinformation.

As others have pointed out, it's also Chromium based, and so it is just helping Google destroy the web more than they already have.

Snowden doesn’t make any public statements any more without express permission from the Russian government.

Can you provide sources for this?

It might make sense for him to self-censor to avoid angering one of the few places that are allowing him to stay but even that's not a given: if he felt something needed to be said badly enough, he's shown to be the type of person who would rather something be said and take the repercussions on the nose than to leave something unsaid.

Al-Jazeera is an "actual news source". It's also just a visualization of data directly from the UN HRC vote.

This should have been a link to the Al-Jazeera article itself instead of just the image that came from it though.

Why not? If the phone is physically still functional, and receives software updates, why does it matter if its 7 years old?

Almost anything can be carcinogenic with a high enough exposure. You can pump a rat full of water until it dies and declare that water kills people.

It would lead to death, but not to cancer. Not everything is carcinogenic, even with high exposure. Causing death by a method other than cancer doesn't make it carcinogenic.

Xenophobic fearmongering serves nobody.

Should we also avoid the Linux kernel, since it's Finnish, and Finland participates in the largest global surveillance apparatus with the USA? There's absolutely no reason to assume the distribution is any less secure or any more likely to be malicious simply due to it being developed in China or by Chinese.

Moreover, it's open-source. Use the same logic you should apply to open-source software before you accuse it of being malicious: look at the code and prove it.

And more importantly, ignoring the validity of the claims. It's not a court, you can't get it thrown out on a technicality; either the claim is valid or it's not and, although the way the claim is conveyed can be worth mentioning, ignoring the claim itself and only assessing the conveyance method is just useless. @mykhaylo@fosstodon.org