There was a recent related discussion on Hacker News and the top comment discusses why this sort of solution is not likely to be the best fit for smaller organizations. In short, doing it well requires time and effort from someone technically sophisticated, who must do more than the bare minimum for good results, as you just learned.

Even then, it's likely to be less reliable than solutions hosted by big corporations and when there's a problem, it's your problem. I don't want to discourage you, but understand what you're committing to and make sure you have adequate buy-in in your organization.

I think after XMPP, Google Talk, Wave, Hangouts, Allo, etc... people should know better than to adopt a messaging service from Google.

Yes, I know RCS is theoretically an open standard, but if Google can keep me from using it, it effectively belongs to Google.

Minority leader Tim Knopp said:

we are deeply disturbed by the chilling impact this decision will have to crush dissent

Give me a fucking break. As a legislator, you have no shortage of ways to dissent including access to media, the ability to speak on the floor of the legislature, and the ability to vote on legislation. What you can't do, if you want to keep your job is not show up for work every time you know you're going to lose a vote so that the legislature can't do business.

Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

• I have enough toilet paper
• There are no refrigerator trucks full of corpses
• Nobody has made a serious attempt to overthrow the government this year

Yes, I think I'm better off than I was four years ago.

Signal should change this, but it's typical of the traditional desktop OS security model in which applications running under the user's account are considered trustworthy. Security-oriented software like Signal should take a more hardened approach, but this is not some glaring security hole.

Wired headphones... could be used while charging

Sure is a shame nobody ever came up with a way to do that before.

Forfeiture of revenue and a slap on the wrist civil penalty doesn't seem like enough for selling fake PPE during a deadly pandemic.

The public should not care what Kyle Rittenhouse thinks and we should not amplify a stupid thing he said.

SMS/MMS has really low file size limits, and iPhones may downscale a little more aggressively than required.

Just pick an internet based messaging service. I like Signal, but they all work.

Are you surprised by teenage boys making fake nudes of girls in their school? I'm surprised by how few of these cases have made the news.

I don't think there's any way to put this cat back in the bag. We should probably work on teaching boys not to be horrible.

The headline is a little misleading. The actual ruling is that police can obtain warrants to install surveillance malware on phones when they have evidence the owner is using it to communicate about crimes.

Musk: starts allowing Nazi shit on Xitter

Advertiisers: Hey, we don't like Nazi shit. We might stop advertising if that keeps happening.

Musk: Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.

Advertisers: stop doing business with the guy who told them to go fuck themselves

A quick search on Amazon for "spy camera" finds a bunch of devices small enough to easily conceal inside clothing, built in to pens, and built in to watches. A search for "spy camera glasses" finds exactly that, and most of them are well under $300. We're already well into the era of being able to film everyone without them knowing.

Apple is very good at spinning things like this and anti-repair measures that benefit their bottom line as being in the interests of users. They're so good at it they don't even have to lie; using hardware IDs as part of their anti-spam strategy probably works, and locking down repair probably does reduce device theft.

That's not the world I want to live in though.

uBlock Origin is reliably blocking the blocker blocker for me at this time, though a few popups got through a couple weeks ago.

The 14th amendment says:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States...

Sobhani's father had diplomatic immunity when Sobhani was born, meaning that he and his family were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,so Sobhani did not become a citizen by being born there. Unfortunately, there's no equivalent of adverse possession for citizenship, so he must be naturalized to be a citizen. There probably should be, but these cases are rare.

migrating everything - including podcasts - to YouTube

If only there were other apps for podcasts on Android, it would be a viable operating system.

Google is kind of crap, but Android has a lot more built-in escape hatches than iOS does. People don't seem to use them as much as I'd hoped, but they're available.

It appears that the Github user GalacticHypernova is not a contributor to the 7c/fakefilter project - just someone asking for some domains to be added. The current list does not contain proton.me or protonmail.com.

I suppose this might be a reasonable litmus test for the reliability of that list.

The terms would make something like F-Droid impossible. The fundamental problem is that Apple believes it is owed a fee when people distribute apps for the iPhone, but no legal mechanism entitles them to such a fee; I'm fairly sure it's possible to make an iPhone app without copying any of Apple's copyrighted code or using any of their patents.

The only mechanism that allows them to collect one is their technical control over the platform, and that's what the DMA was intended to remove.

Assuming USA, sue them. They owe you $500 per call after your number has been on the do-not-call registry for 31 days or after you told them not to call you again. If the violation was willful, they owe $1500 per call.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_Consumer_Protection_Act_of_1991

It's bizarre the Republican base is so firmly behind Trump. A normal Republican would probably win given Biden's unpopularity, but the prospect of another Trump presidency is enough to get people to vote for anything with a D on it.

For Android, there are a multitude of apps, such as Wattz that will tell you the actual voltage of the battery. Full may be 4.2V or 4.35V depending on the chemistry used. ACCA (root required) will let you limit charge rates and stop charging at a certain percentage.

Staying under 4 volts (around 60% for most phone batteries) will vastly extend battery service life. 80% is a bit less extension, but still far better than charging to 100%.

I've had this stuff before. It's comparable in spice level to what you'd get from a good Indian or Thai restaurant if the staff actually believe you when you say you want extra-spicy.

The sauce packet itself contains "decolorized chili extract", which is better known as oleoresin capsicum in some non-food products. Eating the sauce without mixing it into the soup as intended would be unpleasant for almost anyone, but only dangerous to people with allergies or certain pre-existing life-threatening health conditions.

The US Federal Trade Commission puts it this way:

a firm with market power cannot act to maintain or acquire a dominant position by excluding competitors or preventing new entry

It further explains that "market power" means:

the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors

Emphasis added. What the government might argue in this case is that Apple has market power in the online message space because it preloads its own messaging app on its smartphones, which I believe enjoy a majority market share in the USA. One remedy the government could seek is requiring Apple to allow third parties to develop clients for its messaging service.

The always-on nature of phones and tablets is incredibly convenient. Wouldn’t it be great if your (non-ARM) laptop or desktop could do this too?

No, it would not.

My laptop is not a phone. I do not want it to notify me about things when it's inactive. All I want from suspend to RAM is for it to quickly[0] return to its previous state[1].

[0] Compared to suspend to disk, even with an SSD

[1] This isn't an excuse not to save work before suspending

I think the design of media products around maximally addictive individually targeted algorithms in combination with content the platform does not control and isn't responsible for is dangerous. Such an algorithm will find the people most susceptible to everything from racist conspiracy theories to eating disorder content and show them more of that. Attempts to moderate away the worst examples of it just result in people making variations that don't technically violate the rules.

With that said, laws made and legal precedents set in response to tragedies are often ill-considered, and I don't like this case. I especially don't like that it includes Reddit, which was not using that type of individualized algorithm to my knowledge.

There has also been a cultural and legal shift such that family and community members are less likely to cover it up and more likely to report it than a few decades ago.

So many people asking me to have my wife do something different on her end. Beloved, she is on iPhone because she doesn’t want to do anything “weird.”

Assuming using a third-party messaging app is "weird", then she can't send you video with acceptable quality. That's how it is.

She can't fix that. You can't fix that. None of the readers here can fix that unless they work at Apple. This may improve in the future when Apple adopts RCS, but there's a lot that real-world implementations of RCS do that isn't in the standard, so the full details of interoperability are uncertain until we see it in the wild.

Now, why can’t I get iMessage on my android phone?

Because Apple doesn't want you to. Apple wants situations like this one to pressure people to buy iPhones because that's apparently easier for some people than agreeing on a messaging app.

Somebody put up a site saying

It Has Been X Days Since a Techbro Asshole Released a Fedi Scraper/Indexer.

There is an extreme amount of hostility from a certain segment of the (mostly Mastodon-using) Fediverse community toward anything that does anything with Fediverse content "without consent". Trouble is, there's no machine-readable mechanism for determining what people have consented to in most cases, and certainly no standard for it.

If your computer sends my computer an image and some text via ActivityPub, without any further communication, may I...

• Put it on a website visible to the public?
• Send it to other peoples' computers to do the same with?
• Search for it later?
• Display it next to advertisements?
• Display it on a service I charge people a fee to use?
• Keep it after your computer asks mine to delete it?

Some of those things are what Mastodon does normally, but could be understood as copyright violations because the protocol doesn't transmit any licensing information. Others, like search indexing are almost certainly legal, and the protocol is silent about them, but a few people will get very angry at anyone who visibly handles them differently from Mastodon. Meanwhile, how many people are quietly running servers with search indexes that aren't even aware of Mastodon's new opt-in/out search features?

Pixelfed has started attaching licenses to content, but I think we might need more sophisticated, machine-readable licenses.

When approached for comment by Newsweek, Rittenhouse simply replied: "That Newsweek is gay."

Can we stop giving this little shit attention now?

Having been a teenage boy myself, I wouldn't dream of trying.

But I knew it wasn't OK to climb a tree with binoculars to try to catch a glimpse of the girl next door changing clothes, and I knew it wasn't OK to touch people without their consent. I knew people who did things like that were peeping toms and rapists. I believed peeping toms and rapists would be socially ostracized and legally punished more harshly than they often are in reality.

Making and sharing deepfakes of real people without their consent belongs on the same spectrum.

States that didn't change their drug policies are also experiencing an opioid crisis.

Usually people with fuck-you money don't literally, publicly say "fuck you" to their revenue streams. Usually.

Fedibird, a Mastodon fork I'm surprised they're counting separately.

The claim here seems to be that the product has an unusual failure rate, the manufacturer has acknowledged the original problem and released a fix, and it does not appear to be fixed. I don't read it as a sob story about some reporter's lost data.

The relevant section of the DMA imposes restrictions on designated gatekeepers. It does not apply to websites that are not designated as gatekeepers.

That behavior might be questionable under the GDPR though.

Locked bootloaders should be illegal. Manufacturers should have to provide enough specs that third parties can write code that runs on the hardware.

Locked bootloaders

"Crime is down" isn't a very engaging news story so it doesn't get talked about enough.

Smoking cigarettes