redwards510

In lieu of an actual Googler, how about some educated speculation? It blows my mind that Google can even have problems like this. Aren't their apps highly distributed across tons of CDNs? Don't they have world class Devops people that roll out changes in a piecemeal fashion to check for bugs? How exactly can they have an issue that can affect a huge swath of their customers across countries? Insight appreciated.

Agreed. it drives me absolutely berserk that Reddit forces you to "Click to view more comments" just to see like 3 more comments.

Then why does it say this:

    we also settled on the number, and the implementation of, privacy switches on the phone – there will be 4 switches in total: for the i) BT/Wifi module, ii) the modem, iii) cameras (front/back) and iv) lastly for the microphone.

and right on the pinephone page it says it has this chip:

https://www.quectel.com/product/eg25g.htm

    Key Benefits

    ● LTE Cat 4 module optimized for M2M and IoT applications
    ● Worldwide LTE, UMTS/HSPA+ and GSM/GPRS/EDGE coverage
    ● Multi-constellation GNSS receiver available for applications requiring fast and accurate fixes in any environment
    ● Feature refinements: supports DFOTA*, eCall and DTMF*
    ● MIMO technology meets demands for data rate and link reliability in modem wireless communication systems

Sounds like a cell radio to me.

You aren't buying a phone, you are buying an Experience.

Without a browser, it kind of ceases to be a smartphone. It's just a flipphone. So I don't see how that is really something you need to note.

For me it's Google Maps. There is just no comparison. I don't want to imagine trying to drive around finding places without it. It's not just the navigation and traffic, it's the business hours lookup feature and all that.

I hadn't thought about TOTP stores (Authy), but that's certainly way up there. Unless they can read a NFC yubikey.

I can't find the info for the price, but I remember seeing it before and it was very low, like $200, which would make this a very exciting entry into the notAndroidOrIOS market. The Librem 5 was cool at first, until they started delaying it indefinitely and the price is too high for mass adoption. By having a very low price on the Pinephone they are courting a lot more tinkerers to get one and help develop the OS versus the Librem which people would kind of (rightly) expect to be fully-formed at launch.

    As things stand today, we expect a fully functional prototype in August

https://www.pine64.org/2019/06/06/june-2019-news-pinephone-p...

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Project_Don't_be_evil

Really want to pull the trigger on this, the Privacy Switches to disable camera, mic, wifi at the firmware level appealed to me. If you search around you'll find a video the creator made demo'ing skipless 1080p/4k video playback. However, it's probably prudent to wait for some of the initial bugs to get ironed out first.

They also claim to be making no profit off of these.

Well said. In addition to simply being naive, I think there is also the self-delusion that everyone subscribes to when they convince themselves that their job (no matter what it is) is somehow helping contribute something good to the world. I had a relative that worked as a telemarketer selling predatory debt consolidation packages to people on the verge of bankruptcy and when he described what he was doing, he enthusiastically framed it like he was helping the people from going bankrupt, even though he was just helping them dig a bigger hole.

If your company is a public corporation, your only purpose is to maximize shareholder value.

Why do you say "HN" is falling for it? Hacker News did not write the article. Buzzfeed did. We're simply commenting on it.

Even if you avoid providing your DOB, you almost always have to put the year you graduated college, and that makes it pretty easy to ballpark age.

demonstrate technical prowess = be able to regurgitate your last Data Structures and Algorithms college course. This is how they get away with their blatant ageism, ask questions only young, recent grads would know. Why don't they just require candidates to list five mumble rap artists or Instagram influencers?

You can claim anything with a survey these days. This one says 40% of couples meet online, and 60% of same-sex couples. And that is from 2017. Anecdotally I think you are out of touch, probably because you've been out of the dating game for a decade. Less than 10%? No way. Everyone has migrated to dating apps.

https://qz.com/1546677/around-40-of-us-couples-now-first-mee...

LOL I do not envy the weird emails you are going to get from psychotics and ghost-hunters around this thing..

I can't think of a single subscription service that does not auto-renew. Can you? Companies consider that a "feature" because it provides uninterrupted service.

Is your beef with them because they didn't email you to let you know they were going to bill you for renewal?

Do what I do. Never trust a company. Whenever you sign up for a recurring service or a free trial, add an event to your personal calendar that reminds you to cancel. Or use a gift card with a limited balance.

Cool fan but it says "not heatsink compatible", so if you are like me and attached the heatsinks that came free with your Pi case, you will be out of luck.

This review is very disappointing. He's simply parroting all the marketing hype from the manufacturer and adding very little original thought. He doesn't even have a 4k monitor to test the Pi 4. That's one of the biggest new features and he just glosses over it.

I'd love to see a VS Code extension that does this. Anyone heard of one?

Custom ROMs are rarely developed for Samsung devices these days because Samsung locks the bootloader and makes everything extremely difficult. Buy a device that is more developer-friendly like a Nexus, Pixel or OnePlus and you'll see a much larger selection of custom ROMs.

If the US started doing this (scanning phones for islamic terrorism files) to foreigners at the border, would you care? If it was just a scan and no data was harvested?

I believe strongly in the right to privacy, but I have to admit, I do not want anyone coming into my country who has beheading videos on their phone. Unless they are a journalist or something, obviously.

What I don't understand is why they leave the app installed on the person's phone after the scan if it does not do any further scanning in the background.

Not denied access, they just keep serving up challenges to you until you give up, WAY worse than saying "You appear to be a bot, sorry".

This sounds pretty good, but you still have to pass a captcha in order to get a pass, and sometimes that is impossible (or at least I just give up because I lost interest after 20 puzzles).

If it was developed in conjunction with Tor, how come it doesn't come bundled with the Tor browser or Tails?

Running Start alumni here. It's an amazing program, but I often wonder if it was the right decision. Leaving high school at 10th (of 12) grade had a major impact on my life. I lost out on those long term friendships, prom, senior year, graduation, and the collective preparation for college, as well as missing out on freshman year OF university, etc. I don't have high school reunions to attend. In the end, it didn't catapult me to anything special, just saved my parents a lot of money on tuition.

Didn't I just read a story about the Amazon retail stores in SF being forced to accept cash, not just credit cards linked to someone's amazon account?

Don't forget there is a Firefox Developer version that includes additional devtools.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

  Google is essentially saying that Chrome will still have the   
  capability to block unwanted content, but this will be 
  restricted to only paid, enterprise users of Chrome.

Never heard of a paid version of Chrome before! Can anyone elaborate on this?

I gotta say I'm kind of glad Google is doing this. It will force me to finally abandon Chrome, something I should have done awhile ago.

Don't forget killer bees!

Wow, it's always funny when articles written for laymen dance around simple technical terms with fluffy language ("device", really?).

I'm really curious if this would have been considered an issue if it was just a visible header image like a logo. Does making it a single pixel make it more illegal than a image in plain sight? Both perform exactly the same function and both must be explicitly loaded by most email clients.

As much as everyone wants to believe this is because all the applicants are suddenly taking strong ethical stances, I bet it has more to do with Facebook simply not being considering cool or exciting anymore.

> made the photos

uh, the pictures of a tiny rice-sized chip from the story were just photo illustrations. They were not supposed to be evidence of anything. It said so in the margins.