sakisv

Ctrl-t is a game changer, thank you for sharing this, I only knew the <star><star><TAB> notation.

It's kind of disheartening to read things like this on one hand and on the other hand read news that Austria "increased the flexibility" of the working pattern by bumping up the limit of what is considered legal to 12 hours: http://www.mondaq.com/Austria/x/733020/employee+rights+labou...

Given that this is a country which is in the EU I'm very much worried about this being adopted by more countries and becoming the norm, all in the spirit of maintaining our "competitiveness"

They did have a major outage for a few minutes on 2013: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/17/google_outage/

I don't think they are losing any kind of customer trust.

Unless something is really fucked (like both GCP and AWS being down for us-east) incidents like these are not going to impact them at all.

The cost of either migrating to the other provider or, even worse, migrating to more traditional hosting companies is enormous and will require much more than "service was down for 2 hours in 2019". The contracts also cover cases like this and even if they don't, Google and Amazon can and will throw in some free treat as an apology.

On one hand I find this quite sad, but from a pragmatic point of view it makes sense.

> Was it really just to become the world's most comprehensive search engine? Hell no, it was to get people into the ecosystem and to stay there, and be content with doing so.

>Chrome is the same thing. Why would a for-profit company develop a web browser more or less unprompted and give it away for free? To draw people into the system and get them comfortable with staying there.

I think you're giving them too much credit, bordering on a conspiracy theory. There's no way they knew all of this would happen and that they would now be in the position to dictate the plug-ins we use.

I'm not saying they didn't want that and they are not happy to be in this position.

What I'm saying is that their initial plan with Gmail/maps/chrome was to gather more data and give themselves the competitive advantage in the ad selling business. If you remember, when most of these products started they looked nothing like each other, quite telling that there was no central plan to create an ecosystem.

The ecosystem idea started much later, with the failed attempts to make social network and with the not-so-failed Google Now which is when they finally started bringing all the data they had together.

Surely they took advantage of their position eventually and managed both to create an ecosystem and to successfully lock people in, but that doesn't mean that they planned it since 2003.

Is it possible to use keyboard shortcuts with the basic view? Or, does anyone know of any addons/extensions to bring them in?

I like the idea behind it in principle, since it will simplify 2FA for the masses and may lead more people to adopt it.

But, apart from that: 1. It's only on Chrome (for now(?)) 2. It's only for Google products (for now (?)) 3. It's only on Android that Google fully controls remotely (and probably it will stay there).

All these give even more power to Google at the expense of convenience and allows a single company to define "how things should be done".

And I should clarify that I am not against this tech specifically. If anything, I think Google has some of the brightest minds, so technically I'm sure that the product will be great.

The problem is that with great power comes something that Google (as a company) seems to be lacking lately.

I think the idea of UBI as it is, makes it an easy target for comments that characterize people as "freeloaders" or trading "something" for "nothing".

The problem is that the UBI seems to be coming from the taxes that other people, which may be a good first iteration to try something out, but it will fail in scale.

I will assume that the aim of these experiments is to find a way to provide for an ever increasing number of people at a time that the number and the quality of jobs is dropping, largely being replaced by automated systems. Last year the governor of bank of England voiced concerns about the automation stripping out jobs which could "lead to a rise of marxism"[1].

I find the idea of a UB Dividend[2], or social dividend[3] instead something which would have more chances to succeed. The main idea behind it is that everyone will be entitled to a dividend which will be funded by private companies. So instead of having the Apples and Googles of the world sitting on a pile of cash, they could put a portion of their earnings in a fund which would then be given back to everyone to allow them to continue to purchase their products and services.

1: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mark-carney-...

2: https://medium.com/dark-mountain/universal-dividend-a988c31c...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dividend

Unfortunately the prevailing ideology dictates that if you're not working you are worthless and you should not feel happy.

Because both basic income and robocars and going to Mars are either directly or indirectly targeting to increase the profits of tech company X.

This combined with the lobbying power that the said company X has, takes away any incentive someone might have to do something.

Limiting the lobbying should probably be the first step.

Haven't seen this page before (although admittedly I only have a mac, I don't use any of Apple's other services/devices) but I like how it feels... "Apple".

First of all they convert the time automatically as someone already posted, which is a very welcome surprise.

The second (and most surprising for me) thing was that they only have 2 statuses: "Available" and "Issue". And while most status pages have trained us to expect that the antithetical of green is red that it immediately catches your eye, in this case it is a simple yellow diamond which is much less alarming. I sense the PR department had its saying in how to present service availability issues.

The problem is not with the pop-ups, but with how many dark patterns are involved in getting your consent.

They could have made a simple pop-up, in simple language with two clear options and an optional dropdown showing all the "providers" but then again that would have been too user friendly.

Maybe GDPR should be revised to address these things, maybe even provide a template with 5 different color schemes that everyone should be forced to use.

Well, look at the bright side: People will (hopefully) remember that there's an open source browser from a non-advertiser company (and therefore with not many incentives to break your adblocks)

Do you have an app that does that or are you using a Pixel device? (I think this feature was restricted to Pixels only)

Indeed I know it and it's how I knew for some time that the password in question had been leaked.

Recently I was sent a blackmail email that contained a password that I used to use in the past and the sender was claiming that they had also gained to my laptop's camera and had recordings of me watching porn or other "embarrassing" stuff. They threatened to send these recordings to my contacts on email and/or facebook etc, unless I paid them $1082 in bitcoins (apparently they read that if you ask for a non-round number you have more chances of getting it :P).

Covering your camera is supposed to protect you from this kind of things, especially for younger ages or for people less technologically inclined.

Yes, this is why Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 supports DNS over HTTPS (DoH), to avoid exactly this.

You can read more about it here: https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/dns-over-https/

Thanks for sharing!

I'm in my (very) early 30s and I found it very interesting. I don't necessarily agree with the entire mindset, but overall is one of the "I should have read it 7 years ago" articles.

Most of the "lessons" are not groundbreaking, they are rather things that are obvious and most of us know about. The value for me came from having them all written down in an organized way. It's much easier to refer to something more tangible than your memory.

One thing that bugs me and puts me off is the financial literacy that Troy mentions. I try to translate some terms to my mother tongue only to find that, even then, I still don't really understand them.

Does anyone has any pointers on how you can start improving on this like finances 101 or something?

You are right about the synced folder, and that's pretty much the approach that I was using. But I was keeping my DB in one provider and my keyfile in another, which means that I had to remember (or have otherwise access to) a total of 3 passwords to unlock my db. It worked, but when I recently had to change phones two times in a period of a few days it was increasingly annoying. Of course I could have kept my keyfile and the DB in the same provider, but still that's one password too many for me.

Thanks for the recommendation for KeePassDX, I will take a look.

I only found out about Bitwarden a few weeks ago and it got me to change from KeepassXC and I'm overall very happy with the change.

The main selling points for me were that it's open source and they allow you to host it yourself.

Apart from these, I really enjoy the browser addons which don't require any jumping through hoops[1] and that they provide their own Android client and you don't have to play Play Store Columbus to find a decent one. It can also be used as an autofill service which allows it to interact with other apps which is incredibly useful.

But because nothing in this world is perfect, the downsides so far are:

1. Lack of shortcuts to copy only the username or only the password and forcing me to reach for the mouse. That's really annoying.

2. With KeepassXC you could have a keyfile that you was necessary to unlock your database while Bitwarden doesn't have that option. They do provide 2FA[2] but only TOTP and email for the free version (although $10/year for the premium subscription, arguably, is not much).

1: https://keepassxc.org/docs/keepassxc-browser-migration/ 2: https://help.bitwarden.com/article/setup-two-step-login/

At which point should we stop treating these things as bugs and start treating them like features instead?

Not this particular thing per se but, you know, it's Facebook. As the recent history has proven these things kind of come with the package.

FWIW, I use Firefox on High Sierra and I don't think it sucks at all.

About noscript:

Recently I was playing with it, in an attempt to curate which site is allowed to make connections to which domain but I discovered that I cannot do it on a per domain basis and every whitelisted entry was applied everywhere. Apparently that was something that could be configured at noscript's ABE panel which doesn't exist in the latest versions.

If you want per domain rules I would suggest trying umatrix instead.

I think many people, myself included.

For better or worse, Mozilla managed to brand itself as the equivalent of the open internet and an organisation that would put the users first.

This is quite important in today's world that's full of Googles, Facebooks, Microsofts etc.

That doesn't mean that Mozilla has done nothing wrong. I'm just saying that I would feel much better having a VPN service run by Mozilla as opposed to a VPN being run by Facebook.

It's 2018 ffs and internet is everywhere. People should be expected to have better understanding of the internet and of what they see on their address bars.

Maybe instead of masking users from the "complexity" we should be teaching them instead.

It does help them build a better profile for that specific user though.

Facebook was not losing by this. If someone had connected their Twitter account, it meant they cared enough so they would be visiting Facebook, even if it was sporadically to check how their posts were doing and to see the necessary ads.

Maybe I have my nostalgia lenses on, but I think I'd rather have the internet of kazaa era in terms of how things were working.

There were viruses? Yes. 37 IE toolbars? Of course! But consider for a moment what we have today instead: Instead of the simple and (comparatively) mostly harmless viruses we now have ransomware. Instead of kazaa installing spyware we have the OS itself trying to phone home. Instead of having a virus to delete random files, you now have one of the Big 4 delete stuff from your device without asking you.

You say we had crapware we had to avoid back then, I see that today we install the crapware ourselves and consider it a treat. Back then when you bought a piece of software you owned it. You didn't have micro transactions and DLCs and all these "innovations" that drive "engagement". You didn't have to have data connection to sync something with bluetooth.

Sure there were also some crappy things, but things are not all that better today. We just got used to it.

I was visiting Amsterdam (from the UK) about a month ago and I was quite surprised (and annoyed) to find stores, even supermarkets, that have gone cashless while at the same time they would only accept Maestro.

Maybe they're working for facebook, in which case the statement is true in much broader way :D

My home laptop is the last white Macbook (mid 2009 I think?) and I was really looking forward to this announcement, but unfortunately it was a huge disappointment. Higher price, made even higher because of the adapters you will need to buy to keep your stuff working with USB-C, lack of normal USB, lack of HDMI, lack of magsafe, lack of F-row plus the new Macbook keyboard which personally I hate.

So the way I see it, there are two options:

Go to an Apple store and get the previous model with all specs maxed out or find another decent alternative. Ideas?