Does anyone know if the EU protects against this? I am in Europe (well Switzerland, so technically not EU, but GDPR etc. nonetheless) and using windows 11 as my daily driver on two machines (one with beta) I have never seen ads.

EDIT: except for the ‘finish setting up’ stuff after bigger updates, those I do get.

SPORE - I miss that game

Ah really? I am out of the loop on Mozilla, can you elaborate on why they are also not acceptable?

Yes! I used to live there for most of my childhood, and thus have always considered those power lines to be a normal part of any city as a kid. Growing older and starting to visit other cities (without either trams or trolleys) I was surprised to see them missing and thought it looked strange, like a crucial piece of infrastructure was missing.

Oh no! 🙃

While I understand everyone’s belief that the admin, @pyarra@vlemmy.net, abandoned the instance, I do not believe so for a few key reasons:

1. They asked for additional admins no less than 24h before the first connection issues. This indicates their willingness to put in work for the instance and expand.
2. They raised a legal issue with having to defederate from an instance just a few hours prior to the connection issues. The instance in question was hosting content that can be seen as child pornography in Irish law - which is where vlemm.net is hosted. @pyarra@vlemmy.net was incredibly transparent with this issue. This level of transparency makes me doubt they would suddenly disappear purposefully. Speculatively I can guess that the legal issues may be connected to the going-dark.
3. The site is still occasionally loading, but extremely slow and not correctly. In addition to this, it shows a logged in user (PrinceHabib72) - which is not me. There was a known security vulnerability in lemmy (see here ). The vulnerability includes cookie / token immitation and stealing. Having a logged in user (that is not me) when loading the site thus rings alarm bells to me. Apart from the logged in user, the inability to properly load the site most times but sometimes parts of it load (and the remaining requests time out, like getting icons and content etc.), screams denial-of-service to me.

Just like the other people in this thread, these are speculations. However, I have a weird feeling in screaming ‘abandon’ here. Given everything observed, that does not feel right to me.