Caligatio

Should power companies be allowed to disconnect power (i.e. moderate) to entities that disagree with their ideals?

I'm not necessarily arguing X/Twitter is in the same league as a power company but this line of thought has many precedents.

This appears to exclude work done by the private sector under contract which is almost certainly how this app was developed.

Tom Scott did a video on the National Helium Reserve a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOy8Xjaa_o8

I've never seen it used in this context; it usually is used in reference to a social program (i.e. you benefitted from something and then advocate for it to be abolished).

I'm not claiming to be an earplug engineer but I feel like it shouldn't be hard to ensure your product literally does the one thing it's supposed to do: block sound. Particularly if you know that your earplugs are going to be extensively used in very loud environments, i.e. combat.

I hope the $5.5B is well in excess of the military contract's price tag.

> What's your strategy for dealing with jquery not getting loaded?

Host it on your own infrastructure so that it's the same reliability as your site itself?

I've been binge watching Tom Scott videos after finding out he's quasi-retiring soon and just happened to have watched his video of the exact same project last night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoy_WJ3mE50

It's contained in a single home which, presumably, the owners still live in. In terms of traffic, you're looking at an extra ~32 cars/day which is likely a rounding error in terms of total traffic.

I have no idea what the current parking situation looks like but daycares definitely aren't known for drawing continuous traffic.

As an American who has lived in Europe (UK and now Germany) for the last 6 years, this sort of thing now blows my mind. Mixed residential and light commercial zoning? Who cares! I have a modest grocery store just up my thoroughly residential neighborhood and it's great. My kids large-ish daycare is a 10 minute walk away and it's wonderful. We have single family homes and small apartment buildings intermixed and you wouldn't even know.

We seriously need to get over this NIMBY problem.

I really, really don't understand the obsession with the server source code. The client verifiably performs E2E encryption so who cares what the server does. Moreover, there is basically no way for external parties to verify what code is running on the servers. In the era of practically every free service selling out their users to the lowest bidder, it literally blows my mind the amount of hate Signal gets because of an old complaint about their server source (repo looks quite lively now).

The tech community is seriously guilty of letting perfect be the enemy of good.

For the record, I'm not a huge fan of the crypto wallet thing at all but I just don't use it.

The direction people refer to is the company making a few decisions that deviate from being 100% idealistic. Forget the fact that the client is open source, the parent company being a non-profit, and the app being ad-free. Instead, focus on delayed server source code releases, a weird US crypto currency thing, and the company not supporting private/standalone Signal networks. Oh, also, super concentrate on the client using phone numbers as if it's a fatal flaw rather than a design choice. Instead, keep using WhatsApp or Telegram which have way more problems (like being owned by Meta or having completely closed source server code).

Companies generally trying to do the right thing (e.g. Signal and Mozilla) are held to impossible standards. They are by no means perfect but they're leagues better than the alternatives.

Strictly true but settling for $1.2B certainly certainly points to there being a problem.

Well, these problems do publicly rear their ugly head in cars intermittently. Telsa pushes out recall-worthy software updates, Toyota had its infamous stuck accelerator pedal issue in 2009, etc.

The airline industry gets such a weird amount of public attention across the board ranging from passenger safety to massive investigations if a plane goes down. It's not necessarily a bad thing but you certainly do not hear federal regulation stopping people from driving a model of car (recalls yes, but nothing akin to grounding) if there's one unexplained crash.

It actually is hard to carry a Yubikey and, more importantly, use a Yubikey. Some employers don't allow personal USB-like devices in the building nor plugging them into company owned computers.

I say this as someone that has several that are used at home but needs to use personal TOTP codes at work.

Without any data, I suspect the incidence rate of PPD is unaffected by social factors but having a support system definitely helps mitigate the effects on the family (i.e. more hands to help with the baby). Fortunately my family has never had to deal with it but it's definitely not some minor illness for people.

I'm a huge Firefox fan (both on PC and Android) and I think Firefox for Android on ChromeOS is terrible, practically unusable. I know my Chromebook is cheap but Firefox runs ultra slow. It also randomly flickers to a black screen and crashes occasionally.

I don't know if it's just me or this is just how it runs.

Don't forget about the new still-draft-but-already-used HTTPS DNS record type (no, that's not a typo)! I'm still fuzzy on its IP hint value(s) but it can potentially bypass A and AAAA records completely.

Beyond mDNS "snooping", has there been reporting of non-compromised IoT inappropriately listening on networks?

To be clear, I agree that putting IoT devices on a separate VLAN is a good idea but I do that because they're black boxes, not because they're malicious.

I was actually able to visit the annual Rhubarb festival down in Wetherby and it was much more interesting than expected. In addition to learning about the unusual growing method, it was also surprising the number of rhubarb products for sale (like enough to fill an entire market).

My biggest take-away was that Slingbys Rhubarb Gin is delicious!

I am unfortunately aware. To make matters worse, the preferred install mechanism is a .exe that adds all of the opaquely named DOD CAs to your machine.

Regardless, this puts you back at a US Government controlled CA being on your machine.

This sounds like a decent idea until you realize that means one of two options:

- A US Government controlled CA root preinstalled on computers. Privacy advocates would be in arms. - Constant untrusted CA warnings when trying to access any government site.

Or Pence? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Pence_classified_document...

It's apparently a problem for many high ranking government officials. The differentiator is what one does when it's discovered.

I thought this was going to be some quasi-hyperbolic claim about forced monkey labor (which is also not great) but nope, straight up sadistic monkey torture.

At some point messaging platforms (in this case, Telegram) will have to start banning accounts/groups that are blatantly disgusting. It's not some perfect strategy but it adds friction to these activities.

I use uBlock Origin on Firefox on Android with "Actually Legitimate URL Shortener Tool" added but am weirdly conflicted on this news. If a user opts to kneecap advertising, that is soundly within their rights. If a company does the same against another company's advertising as a part of their normal business, I feel like the user becomes a pawn in some corporate warfare strategy.

Maybe it's because I think Apple is slowly building a parallel advertising ecosystem that is slightly less intrusive for users but massively more lucrative for themselves.

A friend of a friend - who was actually an infectious disease doctor - picked up TB while working in Africa. They had to do a video call with the local health department every morning for the health department to witness them taking their meds. If anyone was going to follow the treatment regime it would be the infectious disease doctor.

TB isn't a joke.

I feel like lock-in is an understatement. If Relay shuts down or you opt to stop paying, your online presence is basically halted without a LOT of work to change your email everywhere.

I have no information to back up this claim but my guess is that nearly all of the users of Mozilla's non-Firefox products also use Firefox (e.g. all Relay users are Firefox users). If this is true, they still need a best-in-class browser to attract users to their paid services.

Moreover, if a majority of their income is from Google from being their default search engine, then it behooves Mozilla to increase their browser's market share.

Current headcount of 1,070 and they really only have one product on the market that they're developing: Firefox. Their VPN is just a rebranded Mullvad and Pocket is barely more than an extension. I've lost track of whether Thunderbird is Mozilla supported or not at this point.

I have been a loyal Firefox user since the early 2000s and am just disappointed that this is where Mozilla ended up. I feel like there is some business development path where certain businesses de-emphasize their product in favor of caring more about their internal culture.

The trend that is more troubling is the effective tax rate for the 1% of earners is falling (34.47% in 1980 vs 25.99% in 2020) yet their share of total taxes paid is rising (19.05% in 1980 vs 42.31% in 2020). This just highlights the growing income gap between the 1% and everyone else.

I had to buy a Wickelfisch after seeing them in Basel!

I think the floating commute is a massive testament to the cleanliness of the river. I can't imagine swimming in a major city's river without feeling the need to decontaminate before heading into the office.