Do you use the VPN on your ipad or the graphenos phone with the Hotspot? Hotspot is pretty much never routed through any VPN since no app on your phone is allowed to intercept the traffic.
Afaik it's possible to set up with root permissions, but you will need third party software to do so.
It works as advertised, I'd say. The Email service works fine, no issue to date.
The VPN has the same issues as others, meaning some sites block some servers entirely, and others force captcha after captcha at you. There also was the problem with missing portforwarding options in the app (at least on Linux), but that is fixed now. Overall it works fine, never had too much of a problem with it, at most had to switch servers if my connection got blocked from the site.
The calendar is a calendar, end of sentence.
Proton pass is a bit weird. They don't offer any desktop app, you can only use the website or the browser plugin. There is no benefit I could think of over bitwarden and I'd even recommend bitwarden more than proton for password management. But it does work without problems.
No idea about proton drive. Last time I used it you had to manually upload each item into the online safe. But from a quick look it seems like there is a desktop app now that offers automatic backups/uploads.
For me it's worth it since even the recent news articles show that they keep their privacy promises. But I also got the money to spare for it. You could get all functionalities for less money and to about the same level of privacy, but it takes more effort and time. It's for you to decide if the convenience is worth it.
Yeah, but it lies.
No it doesn't, at least not if the update isn't already a month overdue
But a future Windows update will reset them without informing the user.
I've done 3 years worth of updates in one day cause I needed too. Pretty much everything was reset including registry edits, but the privacy toggles were one of the few things that stayed persistent. Maybe it's a EU special feature (wouldn't be the first), but at least here they won't change back silently.
I've spent ways less time editing the windows registry than I've spent trying to fix all the dual monitor bugs with linux.
Windows issues/changes are a 30 second google search away, linux issues often enough require a 1 hour deep dive into multiple forums.
Proton upheld their claim of privacy, no Emails were disclosed. But they never promised anonymity cause that's something they simply can't do under the Swiss law. If you willingly give them your other mail addresses or contact details, they have to comply. Sure they could have denied the Spanish authorities, but it takes less than a week to get a court order for things like this.
I'd be somewhat ok with Kernel anticheat if they would work, but the simple truth is that they do nothing of value. COD has Kernel anticheat with Riccochet and is flooded with cheaters. Valorant has only slightly less cause riot updates Vanguard more often.
But guess what, it usually takes 1-2 days for new cheats to reach the relevant forums, maybe a few days more until they are more widely aviable. At most cheaters have to spend another 5€ every 6 months, but that's it. They don't care, the amount of money spent on accounts every other month is already way higher.
The only two things anticheat like vanguard protects you from is script kiddies that google "valorant cheat .exe" and Linux only players. And the former could just as well be filtered out without Kernel level.
This is not a ban and it was never meant to be. They just force tiktok to sell the US market to a US company. Said US company will continue the platform just like it is at the moment, just with a bit more of that sweet American propaganda mixed into it. Tiktok won't be gone, all that data will just go to the NSA instead of the CCP, that's all they wanted.
Live service and always online are two entirely different things, and the former isn't inherently malicious, unlike the latter.
I'd, for example, consider all Paradox grand strategy games as live service with major updates dropping once or twice a year (followed by like twenty bugfix patches cause they fuck up every time, but that's besides the point). Sure, every major update comes with a new dlc that isn't exactly cheap, but you also get a lot of free content with each release. All their major titles are entirely different games now than they were at the 1.0 release.
What ubisoft does is just a tacked on battle pass that gets a few worthless items/skins so they can call it live service and have a justification for their always online verification model. That's purely an anti piracy measure that fucks legitimate players more than pirates.
No, it's not. You paying them money won't stop them from collecting data about you. It only stops them from selling it to show targeted ads.
Don't get me wrong, I despise meta for it and think they should be prosecuted for that immediately, but that has nothing to do with the article or what the EU is saying.
Mixing these two things just cause you hate meta will get us nowhere. Their data collection of non-users is straight up illegal, but the pay with money or data model is something that especially news sites have been using for a long time now.
Their goal isn't to completely shut this down, Google is fully aware that that's impossible to achieve. They just want to annoy enough people and make it complicated enough so that the userbase doesn't grow any further.
That's just your bubble. Most VPN users just want to circumvent geo restrictions.
Besides that, the general VPN "propaganda" is that it encrypts your traffic and no-one can see it. The average user gets baited by that and doesn't care to look further into it.
Have they really managed to make an app now? I'll have to look it up if so.