I’m guessing his/her point involves the location of its incorporation. Any company in the “five eyes” zone can be forced to release details about its users to any member state. One must evaluate whether NordVPN keeps anything more than a few hours - days tops - to decide if it is “safe enough”. I was worried enough about this particular point that I chose a VPN that is not in any way beholden to five eyes or the fourteen eyes, which is a similar agreement.

Proton caught heat because of its release of information to the local law enforcement recently. While Switzerland is not part of the five eyes, it does have its own laws requiring a reveal in certain circumstances. I forgot the details, but I think they had an IP address that had not yet been wiped from cache, and that was enough to pinpoint the hackers being sought.

In truth, there’s no sure way to be sure. One still must trust the organization is both honest and competent enough to properly wipe any residual information. No matter who it is, some amount of information has to be in cache for some time in order to be able to deliver the service, and there also needs something tracking the workings of the system to ensure it isn’t overloaded or to find opportunities to improve it.

Je suis desolee - Je ne comprends pas l’espagnol. Parlez-vous francais ou l’anglais ? ;)

I’ll pick them up in the tax-free section of the airport! :)

Both. Sure, the actual exchange might be made-up. The problem is that it’s entirely plausible it is real. I’ve seen this kind of exchange happen on video (which of course could also be made up). It’s common for television shows to do stories on what the “person on the street” knows about some topic. For local news stories, it’s usually to showcase how poorly educated “the youths” are today.

Periodically a reporter will go to a public place and showcase how people answer questions that arguably should be fairly easy to answer with an elementary school education or if they check in with some news source regularly and actually understand the topic. The worst ones are where they are “confidently incorrect”.

Jimmy Kimmel does this regularly for laughs. I’ve seen several examples going back decades from various local news programs. In all cases, I’m confident they are showing the 10% of interviewees that were the most clueless, and not showing the other 90%. Still, the level of cluelessness on the ones they do show is often truly frightening.

That is what i was referencing with my comment.

Yeah, i know. See my other reply from moments ago. I’ve never heard the term “ugly Canadian” or railing against their imperialist culture abroad. I’ve seen some latent sense of superiority over them (especially wrt frankophones) but not outright hatred. They aren’t treated like a threat, from my limited experience, and that was before our government went Fascist.

I didn’t intend to do that. I realize you also have a growing right-wing that is on the same page as ours, and there are other excesses, along with insane housing issues.

I also feel like the ire of the world is not as strongly directed at you. We have decadea of negative stereotypes. It comes from being “in your face” for so long and having such outsize influence in the world.

I remember encountering several negative ideas during my term abroad in Europe during college and was very careful to avoid reinforcing any of them.

Well, California was a Spanish colony, sfter all.

This stuff is embarassimg. I swear, next time i travel I’m gonna have to claim I am Canadian.

The stupid - it burns!

I left the pc gaming scene about 20 years ago and only came bacj this year. I found my steam credentials from when they were initially seeking players and revived my account (I closed my email on the account back in 2009, so i couldn’t recover).

I’ve mostly been playing vSkyrim, BG 3, and a few emulated Zelda games. I finally ordered a new gaming laptop because Cyberpunk 2077 is hard to rrad on the Deck, even on a 50" tv on hi-res.

All that is just so you all know where I’m coming from, i am both a newb and a veteran!

From a business standpoint, looking ant it form the non-gaming financial point of view, the move to online-only makes very compelling sense.

It fully implements the licensing model, gives them total control over the property, enables them to generate reports that accurately identify trndsvin user populations, pinpoint steady revenue figures, and they can kill the game as soon as it isn’t valuable to them anymore, and they don’t have to worry about losing revenue from sharing, passing the copy to an otherwise paying customer for free, or a significant pirtiin of piracy loss.

Itvis the end state of the “we are mearly licensing it to you until such time as we decide ee want it back” model.

It sucks, and if i can know it is online only before buying, i will pass. All of us should. Revenue is king to them, and if they lose even a little, they will try something else.

Well, i haven’t neen much of a gamer for years (got too adicted to WoW), but just started again this year. I am amazed by Skyrim, and am now modding it up.

I also just got Cyberpunk 2077, and will get into it soon.