I wonder if they also plan this for their game engine and “online services” library that are included in many other developers’ games.

deleted by creator

Cloudflare is one of the largest surveillance operations in the world. They might not directly sell your data, but they are absolutely in a position to exploit your data and track your behavior. They should be avoided if privacy is a concern.

you can accept the free trial

In my experience, accepting a “free trial” usually requires accepting a long list of some company’s terms and conditions.

You might find that an acceptable imposition in an interface upon which you depend, and on the expensive device that you bought. Many of us do not.

For the sake of other readers, let’s state this clearly: A custom domain with only one user can be used to track you just as a personal email address can, and Cloudflare itself is a massive surveillance operation. So I guess this might be helpful for some threat models, but it won’t do much for others.

license plate readers

This is a bit like referring to thermonuclear bombs as firecrackers. It’s very misleading.

Devuan, AntiX, and MX Linux all seem worth a look for people wanting to avoid systemd. More are listed here:

https://itsfoss.com/systemd-free-distros/

https://systemdfree.com/#distros

(FWIW, I think systemd’s age data collection is optional, at least for now. It’s not clear which Linux distros will implement/adopt it by default.)

Matrix isn’t a drop-in replacement yet, but it’s slowly improving. Here’s a relevant post from early this year:

https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/welcome-discord/

Are you implying that Spice Hoarder is a camel?

Let’s be careful how we phrase things here. JavaScript form submission and navigation are choices, not needs.

Also, progressive enhancement / graceful degradation exists. When competent developers (or bosses) want script effects on our sites, we can include them and make the sites continue to function with scripts disabled. It might require more work, but it is absolutely possible.

Framing the script-based approaches to these things as if they were needs contributes to the problem, IMHO.

(I am referring to the vast majority of web sites, of course, not special-purpose web applications like games.)

Web developers are complicit in browser fingerprinting, by insisting that sites require JavaScript (or WASM).

All of us are complicit in browser fingerprinting, because we tolerate this script dependence.

IMHO, a web site being allowed to execute arbitrary code on visitors’ hardware should be an anomaly. The vast majority of them could be built to deliver the same information without requiring that inherently dangerous permission.