Banks love to sell you cards. Don't fall into the trap: paying by card comes with a lot of dangers and extra costs.

Keep reading Why you should never pay by card

Many complain that they are censored on the Internet, that they can't speak openly about certain topics for fear of losing reach and revenue, and so on. They depend on platforms over which they have no control, they are like tenants that can be kicked out at any time. When you post on platforms like X, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, you are using someone else's platform (someone else's home). The moment you stop being profitable and the advertisers or the owners of the company don't like you, they censor you, they kick you out.... And you can't do anything about it. Or can you?

The cheapest way to protect yourself against the whims of one platform is to use more than one. If one platform fails you, you still have the others. In my opinion, it's best is to use a free platform that is part of a decentralized network. If you are not convinced by any platform, you can set up your own. Is this expensive? No. Thanks to the ActivityPub protocol, it is very cheap to create a node within the Fediverse. The Fediverse is a large decentralized network with which you can reach millions of users. You can choose PeerTube to upload videos, Mastodon to create and share short written posts, Lemmy to discuss with other people...

You can also buy a domain name for very little money and set up a website on a server that you rent or set up at home. For further protection against censorship you can also set up a hidden Tor service.

You can also create a mailing list or a group in a messaging program. With this method, your publications reach your recipients directly, without depending on arbitrary algorithms that can limit your reach. If the server from which you send the emails belongs to you, you will have more control, you will be the sovereign.

In short, the trick to avoid censorship and the whims of big owners is to have your own platform or channel. If this is not possible, the best thing to do is to have several accounts spread across different platforms. This way, if you are censored on one, you still have the others.

The videogame industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. However, there are thousands upon thousands of games that can be played for free. I am not only talking about free-as-in-freedom games, but also about old arcade games, console games, etc.

If you use GNU/Linux, you can install many videogames using the package manager of your distro. Other games are distributed in Flatpak, Snap and AppImage formats or must be compiled. To find free games I recommend LibreGameWiki.

However, we don't only have free games, but thousands of old arcade games, which can be played with Keep reading Do you buy video games? I've got more than 6000 for free

You are watching a video you like. The video is interrupted. An annoying ad. Back to the video. A sponsorship. Subscribe. Leave a comment...

Slowness, pollution, consumerism

Digital ads make you buy useless things you don't need and waste precious time. In addition, ads cause pages to load more slowly and create huge CO₂ emissions (both directly and indirectly).

Ads that kill

Advertisements have always been used to manipulate our perceptions using psychology. Advertisers sold tobacco as a symbol of liberation, unhealthy foods as if they were healthy... Then health problems and death followed for people who were convinced by those ads.

You pay for them with your money and time

If you buy a product advertised on the Internet, the part that companies spent to produce and propagate the ad is paid by you: with your time and money (we are talking about a billion-dollar industry).

Censorship

You can't express unconventional political opinions, nudity is not allowed... Advertisers don't like to take risks, everything has to be under control. If they don't like you, your video will be demonetized, it won't appear in the search results. Anything that doesn't contribute to consumerism must be ignored, because it doesn't make them money.

Zero privacy

With the rise of targeted advertising, many companies monitor everything you do on Internet, creating psychological profiles that allow advertisers optimise ways to manipulate you.

A life without ads

For all these reasons, I block ads on websites, videos (including sponsorships), etc. With the time I save, I can find the information I'm looking for more efficiently and read articles or watch videos without waiting. This has allowed me to learn more in less time and to spend more time doing what I really like.

If I buy something, I try to buy it wisely:

• What are the ingredients?
• Are there higher quality options?
• Where was it produced?
• How much does it cost?
• ...

If I like something and I want to support it, I do it directly (without intermediaries) so that they get more money than they would if I gave away my time to abusive advertisers.

Of course, advertising on the Internet will continue to exist, because there will always be sponsored articles, corporate-funded videos or things like that. Luckily, it is possible to avoid many advertisements using programs like uBlock Origin and Piped.

Did it ever happen to you that you copied text from a webpage and when you pasted the text it was modified, or nothing at all appeared? This happens because the page in question executes JavaScript code that modifies the clipboard.

To avoid that, you can disable JavaScript or change your Firefox settings this way:

1. Type about:config in the address bar.
2. Press Enter and then the button Accept the Risk and Continue.
3. Type dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled in the search box.
4. Double-click on that preference, or press its Toggle button to change its value to false.

This way, the web pages you visit will not be able to modify your clipboard. Note that some web applications that modify the clipboard with JavaScript (such as Collabora) will no longer be able to do this, so their paste functionality will no longer work properly.