Depends on your local laws and such, but in most European countries you can get a prepaid SIM card for a couple of euros/pounds/whatever at any supermarket, making them practically free. If you need a temporary number for a scammy special offer or any situation where your number is publicly visible (Gumtree, etc) it’s a no-brainer IMHO.

If your phone suppprts running two SIMs at once, it has two IMEIs so as far as the network(s) are concerned it’s two distinct handsets unless they deduce otherwise.

A fun aside: years ago I did some work for a small phone company (the company was small, not the phone) and they gave me a SIM with 100 numbers in a block and access to a portal I could manage them with. Sadly, I forgot to pay the annual £10 renewal fee.

IIRC that rule applies to debit cards only, which most businesses pay a flat monthly fee to handle, as opposed to credit cards which charge a percentage. Also, fuck AMEX.

A lot of the convenience of the modern UK high street baking sector is because of Girobank, the 1960s Government’s successful attempt to force modernisation on the banking industry. When I hear about the ass-backwardsness of other country’s banking arrangements (especially the US) I give a little thankyou to Girobank.

Edit: Also, yes, tourist ATMs are predatory bullshit.

I maintain that it’s cheaper to buy better and keep longer, but, yeah, Vimes’ Boots strike again.

So I was about to say “I love my Fairphone 5 and recommend it wholeheartedly but it’s not supported by Lineage is yet, which is really frustrating, especially after its been out nearly a whole year”, but then I checked and - well, I’ll be damned - LineageOS does support the FP5 now so I know what I’ll be doing later on: eating chicken wings. But after that, upgrading my FP5 to LineageOS.

No. Yes. Kind of.

My home setup is three ProLiant towers in a ProxMox cluster. One box handles all-the-time stuff like OpenWRT, file server, email, backups, and - crucially - Home Assistant and is UPS protected because of how important it’s jobs are. The other two are powered up based on energy costs; Home Assistant turns them on for the cheapest six hours of the day or when energy costs are negative and they perform intensive things like sailing the high seas, preemptive video transcoding, BOINC workloads and such. The other boxes in the photo are also on all the time basically being used as disk enclosures for the file server and they are full of mismatched hard disks that spend virtually all their time asleep. At rest the whole setup pulls about 35-40W.

It’s plaintext all the way down.

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And your email, identity document, photo, payment method… lots of fun data points to boil it down to a demographic of one person.

Hey. Heyhey. Heyheyhey. Have you ever noticed that your warships have giant barcodes on them? It’s so that when they return to port they can scan the navy in.

*Whomstnt’ve

Without wishing to give too much away, I know a group of people who work at a public transport agency in the UK. They recently had a meeting with Google about “opening up our data” which amounted to Google wanting the agency to sign a contract that would give Google exclusive rights to realtime and scheduling data in perpetuity, then Google would decide if/when/how it would be made public. The agency didn’t say “fuck off”, but something to that effect.

Now, instead, they’re working with a group of students to create a public API with a permissable licence and a framework for other agencies to do the same.

So… maybe do hold your breath? Transit is one of those areas that attracts nerds and nerds love open source.

I don’t know who NetZero are/were, but a number of UK ISPs were selling email and browser keywords to advertisers in the early aughts, including big players like BT and FreeServe. Some even tried to launch a project that would use DPI to inspect all web and email traffic and dynamically inject ads into email and webpages.

Even then, Hotmail, Y! Mail and your shitty ISP’s shitty POP mailbox were reading the contents of your emails and selling adverts based on the contents. At least with GMail they gave us the dignity of a nice UI and adequate storage.

Internet things.

IIRC he’s given a big thumbs up to IKEA chargers in the past.

That’s some excrepioncal capaaacity right there.

Yeah, there’s still plenty of places where AirBnB is competitive. When I’m in cities in France and Germany an apartment tends to cost about the same as a hotel room. Outside of cities hotels tend to cost a lot more.

I used Kodi with a Jellyfin plugin for media center duties.

The UK government is still trying and has been very open about their contempt for objective oversight foreigners.