enachtry

A few years ago I realized that getting older (40+) means having to slowly see almost every symbol you've grown up with becoming completely obsolete and/or dying. It filled me with dread thinking about Chuck Norris, Arnold, Stallone, etc.

Seeing the memory of Friends taking hits, first with James Michael Tyler and now with Matthew, is very hard.

Even sadder is his fate was probably sealed because he was alone. It was probably a cardiac event that disabled him in the hot tub / pool and he drowned. Could've been unrecoverable anyway but being alone is making pretty sure it is.

Am opinion so naive it's harmful.

Google will NEVER harm itself by supporting fake data feeds. The only reason G exists at all is because they can exploit the data they harvest from you. If you're given the power to poison that data Google implodes and the whole Android platform becomes extremely unattractive to other massive companies that live off of leeching your private data one way or another.

Yes, an OS built first & foremost for its users/customers would have LOTS of options like that. A mobile web browser built the same would support plugins from day 1. Etc. Etc.

But Android, Chrome, Windows 10+, iOS are ABSOLUTELY not built for their users. They're built as vehicles that enable other services from a slew of big names and it's essential for these platforms to ensure users are NOT given the power to fight against those services.

I'm not a mechanical engineer but I imagine there's not much recognizable left out of their bodies. The carbon fiber hull is said to have failed catastrophically in an instant shattering to pieces. Water hammered in from all sides with ~400 kg of force applied on every square cm of their bodies + extreme shearing effects. This means they were turned into organic goo in an instant as if passed through a blender. I don't think there's much left of them except for small pieces of bones with a little organic tissue barely hanging on.

Not like that. There's a much simpler solution. Make it mandatory to have written on box just like any other tech spec, the minimum date until when security updates will be provided, the cadence of updates and their nature (e.g. for Android could be upstream updates).

There is already legislative warranty framework around compliance to promised specs. This means if the date is not honored, customers can turn against stores and return the products. Stores can then return against distributors/manufacturers, etc.

Also forbid sales of any network connected devices (phones, tablets, TVs, routers, etc) past that date because it's a wide security risk, particularly for people who are IT analphabets.

You'll then see how spectacularly quickly everyone lines up to security update schedules and standards. They will also find a way to prolong the date for devices that sell well.

It will be. Supporting USB PD over USB-C is mandatory if they want to keep selling in EU. Nintendo is more than welcome to subvert EU's requirements and find out how that goes.

I wonder. Following the latest advancements afforded to total surveillance as well as never before possible profiling-depth of people based on everything they've ever done since their teens, how will this change gov-level secretive organisations? Would someone like Ellsberg be weeded out even before his first interview or would he be detected and neutralized at the very first step outside the lines?

Gov can now scrutinize candidates for secretive organisations en masse for even the lowest positions and effectively weed out anyone who's ever shown even a hint of dissent, morality or adherence to principles who've proven to be any kind of risk against total obedience.

Gov can now also monitor employees' every heartbeat, every step, sleep patterns, stress levels and every spoken word (literally true for all of these), let alone their actions.

The risk of getting someone like Ellsberg past the door, let alone at any meaningful level, can now be crushed at previously unthinkable values.

How would these improved, airtight, secretive organisations operate and what would be the consequences? It feels like all these advancements in tech placed us on a one way superhighway towards returning to empires, aristocracies, eternal ruling classes & eternal commoners.

How many of Twitter's employees were convinced their company fights some righteous, on-the-right-side-of-history global battle? (Mind you: Global! It wasn't just US.) And then investors cashed out, Musk came in and discarded said employees like they were (less than) nothing.

It's the same story here, maybe a bit sadder since these mods are not even employees. They lost their time for nothing. They don't even have human connections with most anyone else since they are all anonymous and physically removed from each other. If Reddit pulls the plug all they are left with is a belief they did the right thing by wasting years to push the agenda of a corporation that showed them in absolute terms they mean nothing.

Moderation on Reddit became increasingly extremist after Trump took office in 2016. Sleazy tactics, heavy (shadow)banning of users, obscene mod & admin power trips, all perpetrated away from the public eye. There is no reliable evidence of just how much speech suppression and censorship Reddit does in practice. As someone who's been there for ~15 years, I promise you, if your regular, wide eyed, naive redditor who thinks the "communities" (a feel good word that means next to nothing in context) are all ponies and rainbows, would actually see how much abuse Reddit does day to day, the site would collapse in a week.

So now Reddit wipes its feet on some mods to make them toe the line even better than before. So what? If this gigantic Stanford experiment is killed off the world will be a better place without the shadow of a doubt.

I'm really sorry so many people take these companies at face value and gladly participate in clobbering the people who've been abused and tell their story. It's utterly disgusting and I'm heavily pro legislation to force social media companies with more than X users to keep public logs of censorship (with ids for both who applied suppression and to whom). This way the situation can be examined by any 3rd party and legal action can be taken more easily against these companies that exert immense influence on societies with zero oversight. If no social company can exist while enduring legal consequences for their actions then none should.

Phew. I hope this means Signal gets back to normal soon.

Also, Signal should introduce some kind of paid subscription with a few critically important qualities:

1. Anonymous payment that binds subscriptions to users without retaining anything about who paid. Like a prepaid GSM SIM. All Signal needs to know is that the current terminal uses a paid subscription.

2. Ability to buy a cheaper bulk/family bundle. I use Signal to talk to family and close friends and would like to pay for myself and my parents, at the very least.

3. Price it differently in different countries. $1 in India is as heavy as $10 in US. This is super mega important.

4. Setup dedicated servers for subscription users with a much better service level. The service collapse that happened today should not happen again. There should also be an option for a fully encrypted backup that Signal cannot decrypt just on the server side to store personal conversation logs.

I have to use Whatsapp to talk to people in a certain group. I use an old Android 6 phone with a prepaid SIM bought just for this single purpose, setup with a burner Google account. I only turn this phone on when I need to catch up or talk to them. It's really REALLY cheap and it works.

You can do the same for Signal.

If your freedom cannot exist without the state spying on people's conversations then your freedom does not exist.

The only store that can sell your product telling you it doesn’t want to sell your product without some modification is not a monopoly... wait...

Holly @W$%! This is exactly what I was looking for :) THANK YOU!

It is abusive and largely illegal but that's irrelevant. Once you sign something like this, even a small company has enough resources to harass you with lawsuits that you might win after a few years but by then your life is mutilated.

What they gain with such threats is control over you with an installment of fear to ask for a raise or do anything that separates you from the company because that clause makes you unemployable for X years while it's active. The former employer (O) just needs to check your LinkedIn profile and send a notice to the new employer (N) that everything you write for N must be submitted to O so it can unilaterally decide if it actually belongs to them. It's absurd but I can believe companies try this because they have nothing to lose.

He refused the offer but I would like to know how common such a clause is, this is why I ask. Until now, I haven't thought about how careful you have to be when signing what one could assume is an absolutely benign and common work contract.