jqubed

jqubed , 5 days ago

I think a perfect example of this is email. We used to pay for email; it came with our Internet service. Then they started offering free email services that would show banner ads in a webpage. Kind of annoying but good for people who didn’t have regular access to email in the dialup days, or eventually we realized it was convenient so we didn’t have to change our email everywhere each time we changed our ISP. Then Google started actually scanning our emails to give more relevant ads. They were less obtrusive, but we were giving up more, but we also got a lot more email storage in return and it seemed okay. Now most people use a free email for their primary. Our ISP (probably) still offers an email address with a small storage option, but who still uses that? People gradually gave it up without realizing what they gave up. Now it seems like you have to pay even more on top of your Internet access to actually get email privacy.

jqubed , 7 days ago

I literally just found out about O&O ShutUp10++ and in the same post other commenters recommended Optimizer and privacy.sexy.

jqubed , 7 days ago

I can’t comment on Linux, but IIRC SMB was best for situations needing both Mac and Windows, so I’d guess that’s the choice. Totally off memory, though.

jqubed , 12 days ago

Maybe someone in the art department keeps a Windows 98 VM setup specifically for these tech obituaries for programs and services people thought were long dead. I don’t think I’ve used AIM/ICQ/MSN Messenger since around 2007/2008, and it was because it had become pretty dead.

jqubed , 12 days ago

Is that a project to bring back AIM?

jqubed , 15 days ago

You got Vista? I got Windows ME!

jqubed , 15 days ago

You’ve never owned your games. You owned the media they came on but legally you only ever had a license to use the software. Depending on the license agreement (the thing where most people click “I agree” without reading) you had more or fewer rights, such as transfer of license, but the way things work legally ownership of software seems to mean the more of the copyright ownership. Maybe like a book: you own your copy of the book but you don’t have the rights to print more books or make a movie based on the book.

jqubed , 15 days ago

Which is why those license agreements generally had a clause that if you disagreed you could return the software with all the media for a full refund.

I’m not saying it’s the right way, just that’s how it’s been structured legally. Of course, in the days of physical media with software that couldn’t phone home it was harder to enforce those licenses if people didn’t strictly adhere to them. The software companies didn’t generally find it worth going after individuals if they found out about violations either. Corporations, on the other hand… I worked once at a media company that Adobe caught running a lot of unlicensed software. The story went that it was so bad at the main office their auditors found a copy of After Effects or something similarly ridiculous on a computer that was used as a cash register in the corporate cafeteria. That was very much worth Adobe’s time and money to get the lawyers involved, and became a very expensive problem for my employer. I wasn’t involved in the problem, but I had to check and clean my local office, where we found about a half-dozen computers with unlicensed software.

jqubed , 14 days ago

I clearly am a heathen because I’ve never even heard of TempleOS

jqubed , 19 days ago

That analyst doesn’t work for Broadcom; it’s a third party. It could say, “they charged as much as they could possibly get away with” but I think “prices just below the pain threshold” is stronger language in a business setting.

jqubed , 22 days ago

I don’t really know if ARM adds benefits I’d really notice as an end user, but it’ll be interesting to see if this really goes through and upends the dominant architecture we’ve seen for really 40+ years.

jqubed , 24 days ago

I may have in the past put lyrics from “Never Gonna You Up” or links to the music video on YouTube in QR codes I printed on blank business cards and left them in public places around town.

jqubed , 25 days ago

The difference being that Sony actually has teams of lawyers who specialize in copyright violations, including unauthorized sampling. If the AI companies are caught using Sony material this won’t go nearly as easily for them as stealing some random blogger’s writings or a small artist’s images.

jqubed , 25 days ago

Does IRC still exist? I remember laughing when I first saw Slack and its early competitors because people were excited about it and when I finally used it I realized it was basically just IRC with a nicer interface. I’m assuming these offer improvements like encryption?

jqubed , 25 days ago

Yeah, now there is, but I don’t think a lot of those features were in when I first used it over a decade ago. It became a lot more useful over the years.

jqubed , 28 days ago

I’d never even heard of this product

jqubed , 1 month ago

This keeps happening and has been happening for several years now; why isn’t more being done to improve security and find the criminals? I can’t walk into a hospital with so much as a pocket knife because of physical security concerns, but cybercriminals keep taking down a new system seemingly every week, and this article says the software used has been seen for years now.

jqubed , 1 month ago

Can I sue a company for inadequate data protections if my data is breached? I assume I would have to prove damages, and maybe that becomes harder if I can’t tie the victimization to a specific breach. And probably the terms of service make it harder, like I might have to use arbitration and can’t join a class action suit.

jqubed , 1 month ago

Is there something like a federated version of Facebook? I liked the premise in the early days, especially the early days of the timeline when it could actually be sorted chronologically. When I joined Facebook instead of the then-competing MySpace back in 2005 one of the things I liked was that it was pretty private; everything I did was only visible to the people I was friends with on the platform. I don’t even know how that would really work with federation since it seems like structurally everything kind of has to be public.

I guess what I’d like is something where my friends and family are easily connected, where I can share pictures/videos or links or just thoughts I have about whatever’s going on in the moment, but still have those only visible to the people I choose (including even adjusting that so some things are visible only to close family instead of all my friends, for example). And I want the same coming from my connections. I don’t want to see something else they commented on, I don’t want to see content from some friend-of-a-friend or group a friend follows, I don’t want to see content from total strangers or groups the platform just thinks I’ll like. Basically I just want Facebook like it was in the early days, before it started focusing on increasing engagement to drive ad revenue, when it was actually a kind of useful way to connect.

jqubed , 1 month ago

I don’t even know what icon is on the right

jqubed , 1 month ago

Wait, this app is free, has no ads, and does not give any info to the developer? It seems like it’s basically a hobby, created by a guy who wanted the app and decided to learn how to code so he could write it himself?

jqubed , 1 month ago

Probably the best thing about Verge covering this is simply signal boost, getting the story out to a wider audience.

jqubed , 1 month ago

I feel like Windows 7 was peak Windows. I have an old machine I still turn on sometimes with 7 but it just seems so much better than 10/11.

jqubed , 1 month ago

2000 was a great one; we ran it on most of our home computers at the time. I’d say it was my second favorite.

jqubed , 1 month ago

But usually I’m pausing a video to try to read text that appeared too briefly in the video!

jqubed , 1 month ago

Why that’s a 10% return on investment!

jqubed , 1 month ago

I remember in high school kids practiced writing with Graffiti, even though most of us did not have a Palm Pilot, just in the hope that we’d be ready if we got one.

jqubed , 1 month ago

Did he still throw rock against you? Was he beaten by @june?

jqubed , 1 month ago

It’s an interesting piece and starts in the traditional journalism mold, but moves much more into opinion and blog. Like going from NewsHour to Last Week Tonight. That’s not to say it’s not an interesting read or he’s not supporting his argument, but it is about persuading, not just reporting. Of course, I haven’t actually gone through all his references to see if they’re mischaracterized or taken out of context.

jqubed , 1 month ago

There’s an awful lot of things where if the incentives were to keep paying users happy instead of keeping advertisers happy we would see very different results from the service. Unfortunately, for an awful lot of these services people don’t want to pay for them, or at least don’t want to pay what it costs to make them financially viable.

jqubed , 1 month ago

This is interesting; what do I do with the information?

jqubed , 1 month ago

I can kind of understand VPN and TOR blocking when those are often used by people wanting to post illegal content or engage in illegal activity that could also be harmful to the service that ends up blocking them. Even if it’s an extremely small fraction of the users coming from those services, depending on the action sometimes just one could be enough to make a service decide they’re not worth the potential problems.

The more cynical part of me might suspect at least some of those problematic actions are coming from people working on behalf of privacy-opposed governments to make it harder for people to use VPN/TOR for legitimate purposes. But there are probably plenty of malcontent trolls happy to watch the world burn that governments don’t need to do that.

jqubed , 1 month ago

I’ve figured it’s only a matter of time before this comes. With flagship phones costing US$1,000+ there’s starting to be room for that kind of cost.

jqubed , 1 month ago

Meta seemed to think that was a threat that would get the EU to cave to their demands and the regulators’ response was basically

Willy Wonka sarcastically saying, “Stop. Don’t. Come back.”

jqubed , 1 month ago

This might be the first time the red circle actually helped

jqubed , 1 month ago

It’s interesting to see the author mention BlueSky, I think as a potential positive, alongside Mastodon and other federated protocols. Here in the Fediverse I only ever see negative views of it, largely because it doesn’t use Activity Pub but also because it’s coming from a private company. But it sounds like the author thinks we need that diversity?

jqubed , 2 months ago

I would think something that sends text messages would be hard to implement as self hosted

jqubed , 2 months ago

Yes, IIRC when they rolled this feature out it was an automatic upgrade to On, except if you had devices on your account that were too old to support it.

jqubed , 2 months ago

Years ago I was talking to some engineers at one of the main gas pump manufacturers. They were venting about their company’s partnership with Verifone. While they used to handle credit card reading themselves in the magnetic stripe days, the switch to chip credit cards and readers in the U.S. meant they were going to partner with an established card reader company and Verifone (at least at the time) was the largest and most established in the new chip technology. Verifone was dominating the partnership and making life difficult for the gas pump company, insisting on all sorts of changes to the devices that weren’t necessary for the gas pump but were going to let them do things like run ads at the gas pump. If the pump manufacturer didn’t go along with it, Verifone seemed to have a very credible threat that they were just going to leave and go to the other main gas pump manufacturer. The gas pump companies needed the card reader a lot more than the other way around.

So, these ads have been a long time coming, but it wasn’t the pump manufacturer that had the idea or wanted to do it.

jqubed , 2 months ago

The drain issue might be hard to figure out on your own. Mine has a little notification light that comes on to run a self-clean cycle every x number of washes, but I’m pretty sure I’m the only one in my house who actually runs it.

jqubed , 2 months ago

Ever since it came out that the company they partnered with to remove personal information from data brokers was owned by a guy who’d started and owned numerous data brokers, I’ve become a little skeptical that they’re doing their due diligence on their partners.

jqubed , 2 months ago

Ever since it came out that the company they partnered with to remove personal information from data brokers was owned by a guy who’d started and owned numerous data brokers, I’ve become a little skeptical that they’re doing their due diligence on their partners.

Of course, it’s still probably better than Google at least.

jqubed , 2 months ago

If Musk could reflect for just one moment, it might be nice if he realized how stupidly over confident he was that he would be able to solve it. And also, how wrong he was to insist that the previous management wasn’t taking the issue seriously.

I don’t feel like I’ve seen a lot of instances of him recognizing stupid overconfidence in his own actions.

jqubed , 2 months ago

There are higher upfront costs with a robot, though, so if the volume is low human labor can make more sense.

jqubed , 2 months ago

I think the bot just pulls some of the sentences it thinks are most important. Sometimes it’s useful but more often it clearly omits key sentences and what remains then doesn’t make sense. I appreciate having it mainly for giving me an idea of if the article looks worth reading or not, and also just how long the actual article is.

jqubed , 2 months ago

Oracle sponsors enough sports like this, the least they can do is offer a discounted/free ERP and then turn it around for their marketing use cases

jqubed , 2 months ago

Oh, just for the teams they sponsor. Don’t worry, it still needs to benefit them.

jqubed , 2 months ago

Wow, that really does look familiar!