My Galaxy Note 8 is a backup phone. It was a flagship when it launched, yeah. But even so, it’s 7 years old, the last update for it was over 2.5 years ago, and it’s still chugging along like a champion.

Smartphone design is mostly a solved problem. Take today’s screens and processors and throw in a few features from the past (removable storage, IR blaster, and headphone jack) and you have a 10-year phone.

I used to get a new phone every year because phone got way better each generation.

My phone is top-tier from 2021 (Z Fold 3), and I have had zero temptation from the newer versions. All they really have is faster processing, but since all apps are designed to run well on budget phones from 5 years ago, there’s no reason to upgrade.

I’ve run across a few sites that allow me to check out entirely through Google Pay or PayPal, but not many. I still don’t love the info going through Google, but at this point they already have all my information, so it doesn’t really make much of a difference at this point.

And of course for anything that needs to be shipped they are going to need a name and shipping address.

I would like to seeegally mandatory “guest checkout” options with protections on data use. They’ll need to keep some kind of invoice/receipt of the transaction, but it should be illegal to use it for any other purposes than order/purchase tracking for guest accounts.

Aren’t cellphone NFC payment essentially a long-form version of this? As far as the machine is concerned they’re getting your CC info, but Google/Samsung/Apple Pay are acting as a middleman and your actual credit card information is never actually shared.

My main has an invisible ring of mind shielding, and is (still unbeknownst to the rest of the party) actually the possessed body of the person who killed me and stole my ring.

I just now realized I built my impostor syndrome into my DnD character.

Twitch is bad about this. It’s not a fucking ballistic missile installation - just tell me what you want.

I swear password restrictions are getting to the point where there’s eventually going to only be one usable password.

Advertisements should be explicit. You’ll often see sponsored segments of videos when a YouTuber is talking about a product, where they explicitly say it’s sponsored. These influences are being asked to treat the product preferential to other devices without being a sponsor.

Advertising is one thing. Asking people to advertise your product without revealing that it’s an ad is something else.

Roll strength (acrobatics).

Anonymous data collection at scale is a myth.

Anonymous data collection on me when assembled will say that I’m a 40-49yo unmarried college-educated male working in one area in a certain industry and living in another area.

Only one person meets all those criteria, and it’s me.

Or for hearing a silent art form.

But below-average eyesight should work.

I’ve been using aCar for over a decade. It’s owned by Fuelly now, but all the cloud stuff is optional.

I keep track of my mileage, fuel, maintenance, etc. I can take pictures of receipts, make notes, etc. It’s pretty easy, and I can save local backups of the data or have it sync to Dropbox or onedrive.

This is why everyone should go into their phone settings and enable the lockdown mode option if it’s avaialbe. When I get pulled over I hold the power button and choose lockdown mode and then the only thing that will unlock the phone is my password. But my camera still works.

If your phone doesn’t have the option, just restart your phone. There’s a reason phones require the password and not biometrics on startup.

Their counter-argument isn’t a legal argument. They’re saying they did it because they think the publishers aren’t being fair.

And they’re talking mostly about format-conversion, which isn’t the problem here.

You can absolutely make format conversions to digital for archival purposes. What you cannot do is them make a bunch of copies and give them away for free simultaneous use. That is not fair use. That’s 100% piracy.

The CDL was built specifically to ensure that only one digital copy was on loan for each owned copy of the material because the IA absolutely knew that was the law.

In this case, they absolutely did. They had a CDL in place specifically to comply with copyright law, and they willfully and intentionally disabled it.

The publishers also had arrangements with local libraries to expand their ebook selections. Most libraries have ebook and audiobook deals worked out with the publishers, and those were expanded during the lockdowns. Many of the partner libraries preferred those systems to the CDL because they served their citizens directly. A small town in Nebraska didn’t have to worry about having a wait list of 3000 people ahead of the local citizen whose taxes had actually bought the license the Internet Archive wanted to borrow.

The Internet Archive held a press conference right before the ruling comparing the National Emergency Library to winter-library lands, but that’s simply not accurate. The CDL they had in place before and after was inter-library loaning. The CDL was like setting up printing presses in the library and copying books for free and handing them out to anyone.

Under the existing CDL, they could have verified that partner libraries had stopped lending their phycical copies of the books and made more copies of the ebooks available for checkout instead of just making it unlimited and they’d have legally been fine, but they did not, and the publishers had every right to sue.

The publishes also waited until June to file suit: well-after most places had been re-opened for weeks.

IA does important work, but they absolutely broke the law here, and since they did it by intentionally removing the systems designed to ensure legitimate archival status and fair-use of copywritten works, they have pretty much zero defense. It wasn’t a mistake or an oversight. And after reopening they kept doing it for weeks until they were sued and were able to magically restore the legal system the same day the lawsuit was filed.

I still use bat h files and the system scheduler to automate a shocking amount of my job.

Data-mine the information you intentionally did not put on the cloud.

I work in an enclave city for the ultra-rich. We have lots of celebrities and billionaires. There are fewer than 1000 homes and the taxable value of residences in town is nearly 4 billion.

Anyway: it’s hard to know who owns what because most of them put their property under an LLC named after the address to protect their privacy.

Considering that Edge makes itself the default browser and even PDF reader on its own every few weeks, I don’t trust Microsoft to keep Edge from taking over as default without user input.

Most of them the second button down on the right is mute, though I’ve been running into some recently that disabled the mute.

Anyway, I sharpie a “mute” next to the button on stations where it isn’t labeled for other people. It’s one bit of graffiti that I’m not at all conflicted about.