In the US, checks are much worse than paying with a credit or debit card. It is much cheaper for a merchant to take checks than either type of card, so that is why they’re usually used.

Also, the person in question might be very poor / bad with money and unable to get a credit or debit card.

Hey, I’d just use VPN anyways. I sure as shit didn’t trust spectrum not to sell my data.

Because Facebook is the posterchild for anticompetitive evil corporations.

They’re doing this because it will help them monopolize more content or more users. By nature, that will be harmful to the fediverse.

I don’t know about the underlying technology, but every client I’ve used for the past couple decades supported groups.

However, they absolutely sucked. There was no way to leave. Unless someone made a new group without you and everyone used that, you’d keep getting messages.

I don’t think any human has sent an SMS message deliberately for about 12 years!

sweats nervously in American

If you’re anti-zionist in 2023, you’re calling for the destruction or deportation of 40% of the jews on this planet.

Failure to support one ethnic cleansing does not mean that you support another. It is possible to support no ethnic cleansing.

Unfortunately, no, you don’t. However, you can buy computers with Linux preinstalled. I haven’t looked in a long time, but they were only marginally more expensive when I looked last.

Also, installing Linux isn’t difficult at all, provided that your motherboard isnt weird about booting it (really just luck of the draw, but usually not a problem), and that you’re willing to nuke all your files. Dual boot installations are where things get precarious.

In most apps, there’s several settings you can change to try and fix that. If you ever want to try it again, try using qksms (or another good alternative at the time), and playing with the settings.

I had the exact same issue with signal on my last phone.

Ugh, stuff like this is why I bought a pixel. I got an s23 for “free” from T-Mobile, and it was so infested with spyware and bloat that even android debloater couldn’t get it all.

GrapheneOS has basically made it all worthwhile. I do with I could have multiple (more than 2) profiles though.

Iirc you can just install a VPN app in the work profile to accomplish this.

Many do, or at least did a few years ago.

You can use android deblaoter or ADB to disable many of those packages, but not all of them. Be warned, that you can easily cause instability this way.

If there’s a custom ROM without gapps and touchwiz or sense or whatever they call it these days, that would be a much preferable solution. Unfortunately, Samsung is determined to be difficult about custom roms, so very few are available on their devices.

When you have the means, I recommend a pixel with graphene or a Linux phone, depending on how serious you are.

I’m a Linux user, so I keep steam (and by extension, proton and my steam games) sandboxes via flatpak. While I’m sure many anti cheat solutions can install rootkits (or ARE rootkits), I doubt it’s profitable for them to design that particular type of malware.