oh yeah this definitely counts against the good things about christmas :D I live in a relatively rich part of Italy where shoplifting is very rare, and if you're not wearing "suspicious" clothes (eg. clothes that might suggest that you're poor), if the store is crowded and the staff is busy and you make the anti-theft sensors ring while crossing them, they likely won't even question why they are ringing and just assume an anti-theft tag wasn't properly removed during checkout. when I was a kid I've stolen sooo many videogames this way during christmas season, my parents where just too good looking to the staff that nobody ever suspected a thing lol
riccardo
joined 5 years ago
The NYE party/vacation, and the xmas dinner with the extended family. Basically the only two things I like about december. Everything else is just a giant advertising ploy or an excuse to cover up how alienated, cynical and out of touch the western world is during the rest of the year. It's very frustrating for me because I cannot overlook the very evident consumerist and narcisist side of Christmas
It still requires a phone number to sign up, but you don't need to share it to chat with someone
if you need a consent-or-pay example, just open La Repubblica's homepage. You will be prompted with the "accept all cookies or pay" prompt as soon as you open the site. Pretty standard practice for most Italian online newspapers, sadly
I'm still trying to figure it out, but I guess not. The only thing I'm sure about is that you will know whether the OTP code has been sent by Telegram or a P2PL relay
You can decide to send sms codes only within your country. You decide whether the tradeoff between costs, privacy and features is worth it. Sending 150 sms a month (or a magnitude more) would cost me 0 €. I find some of the premium features worth paying for. But I would never relay OTP codes for telegram
Especially since they are aiming the service to improve sign-up reliability in countries that block telegram
It's mainly to offload the cost of sending verification codes via sms to users, which is one of the costs that Telegram wants to cut. As far as I remember, it amounts to, like, 7% of all their annual expenses (I will source this later). A couple of years ago they decided not to send sms verification codes when you sign in from a third-party app, and just send the code to active session. This sounds like recipe for moderation headaches and privacy disasters, but also good way to boost their premium metrics :)
It's opt-in, of course
I've just tried to sign up from Firefox 122 and it worked. No captcha or other kinds of anti-bot puzzle to solve
So it begins
Tried to open that webpage but godaddy asks me if I want to buy the domain. Typo?
Videogames 10 years ago. I was spending time on videogames basically every day. I didn't see it as something harmful, but during one christmas break I dared myself not to play videogames during the 10 days school break. Lost all interest in gaming in a matter of days, never picked it up since then. I sold my PS4 six months later. A few years ago I built myself a gaming PC with the intention to use it for gaming but I've actually never bought or downloaded any game
I still play local multiplayer games every once in a while with I'm over at some friends' place (eg. party games as Stickbold, Smash Bros, Mario Kart, Fifa), or online tabletop games such as hangman, gartic phone, geoguesser or boardgamesarena.com