Cybercriminals are creaming their jorts at the potential exploits this might open up.

Now, if we were talking about one Nokia…

Doctor Ignaz Semmelweiss in the mid-1800s suggested that obstetricians should wash and sterilize their hands before attending their patients to reduce the chance of postpartum infection. He was rejected by the medical community, ridiculed by colleagues, and eventually locked in an asylum where he was killed.

We’re sliding back in time.

That’s pretty much how he kept the public image of “eccentric genius” for so many years. I once read an article (can’t remember where, don’t care enough to search) that said that SpaceX had/has a team whose entire purpose was to babysit Musk when he had a temper tantrum. The team formed organically, like a cyst around a foreign object, and minimized damage to PR.

When Twitter was infested, it didn’t have this immunity and now the world (or those of us who care) knows how much of a shithead he is.

Evil is evil, Stregobor. Mozilla is still a company that does company things. The current CEO has worked for AirBNB, Ebay, and Paypal, so not an inspiring history there either.

Good ol’ ScunthorpeM181. I was once banned from a school project on historical fiction and sent to the principal for writing “'ass” in one of the files. It was about Assassin’s Creed. I was very close to calling that system removed, especially because it wasn’t even English.

The Unity desktop’s search would display Amazon ads based on the query. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Conformity_with_European_data_privacy_law

It’s like the “nazi bar” anecdote. It always starts small. You let in a bit of ads, a bit of self-promotion, then the revenue reaches a plateau. You let in a little more ads, maybe a pop-up saying that you could be more secure. Then a few years later you have a Recall situation. If you let one nazi drink at your bar, he’ll bring his friends, and you’ll be running a nazi bar.

I don’t trust Canonical to act with integrity.

It’s Debian-based, but Canonical has been really Microsofty about its development. They now have Snap as a universal packaging format, and have mandated that all official Ubuntu flavors (so X/K/Lubuntu and others, but not derivatives like Mint) must include Snap, and must not include Flatpak in the default installation. They’ve also fucked with APT where installing certain packages, like Firefox, would first install Snap and then the application’s Snap package, without even telling the user. They’ve had some controversy with Amazon ads in the search results, and advertising Ubuntu Pro in the fucking terminal. The default GNOME desktop also has a ton of issues.

I, and many others, recommend against Ubuntu. Linux Mint is the most commonly recommended “just works” distro. That being said, switching to Ubuntu, if able, is still preferable to staying on Windows.

My dad is now pissed at both Microsoft and Adobe, and curious about Linux. If I can find a Lightroom alternative, he might actually switch.

Skullcandy has been a good experience. Cheap and durable. I’ve had two, a pair of Smokin’ Buds 2 (died from a broken cable, now discontinued), and a pair of Jib True (my current earbuds).

I bought the Jib True five years ago for about $40 and so far they’ve survived a dog, getting dropped in the toilet, and multiple drops onto a hard surface. I haven’t noticed any battery degradation. The audio quality is kinda mid (I used them in a factory at my previous job) and I can’t speak for the microphone, but they’ve served me well. My biggest issue has been some oxidation on the charging pins and contacts.

I hope they enjoy analzying my once-a-month subscription to FFXIV and nothing else.

For many years now, Apple has been sustaining its quasi-monopoly in the smartphone ecosystem by drip-feeding features that have been part of the baseline for other brands, and having the most hard-core blinkered Apple cultists proselytize about what innovations they (supposedly) represent. This advantage doesn’t exist in the silicon or VR markets. They’ve managed to keep their CPU successful because it’s built on existing technology and because of vendor lock-in, but the Vision Pro didn’t have the same training wheels and ate shit right at launch.

In case it isn’t obvious, I don’t have many positive feelings towards Apple.

Does Tidal have a lightweight Linux client that’s kept up-to-date?

Unfriendly reminder that Bitlocker can encrypt your entire system drive and leave it in an unrecoverable state even if you have the correct recovery key. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIRNpDvGF4w&t=528s The solution? Wipe. Your files? Fucked. Hotel? I’m too enraged to even make that joke.

Friends don’t let friends fall victim to Microsoft’s ineptitude.

Less content on the whole. There are many “the world is sliding back into fascism”-type posts, but I don’t feel compelled to scroll on the front page infinitely.

Doomscrolling on reddit, imgur, and twatter destroyed my mental health over a ~4-year period. I went cold turkey on all three about a year ago and there is a remarkable difference. They caused a great deal of anxiety, I just didn’t realise it at the time.

It was also a near-addiction when I could just flick the mouse wheel and more content would show up, and oh my, suddenly it’s 4am and I have work in 4 hours. r/ouchmyballs and r/watchpeopledieinside were particularly problematic.

The same question was asked a million times during the crypto boom. “They’re insisting that [some-crypto-project] is a safe passive income when people have proven that it’s a ponzi scheme. Who do they expect to believe them?” And the answer is, zealots who made crypto (or in this case, AI) the basis of their entire personality.

HANS! Bring the Flammenwoofer!

https://archive.ph/I9Wdo

corporations like this would give you free Internet if they could collect and sell all your data

Facebook Zero is more or less what you described.