Cryptography. As in, using encryption and encryption keys to authenticate me, rather than just a password.

Last week or two I’ve been learning more about passkeys, and it makes threads like this seem ridiculously out of date. Given the choice between emojis and passwords and hard crypto, I’ll take the crypto.

Yeah that was also just a shitty phone- big heavy phone that’s a mediocre phone but only needs charging once every few days.

I’m saying make a GOOD phone, maybe 10-12mm thick, and you can get a phone that lasts at least two full days.

For the batteries your outta luck for now due to a SOB called physics.

How so? Give the battery more volume. Bigger battery = more mAh = lasts longer.

Yeah but if you make the battery 3-4mm thicker you double its volume and then you have a phone with 5000-10000+ mAh.

You don’t think ‘this phone battery lasts a week’ is a selling point? Trust me, it is.

Then get yourself a basic black & white laser printer. Brother is usually pretty good for that. The cartridges don’t expire and it’ll be ready instantly when you need it, whether that’s tomorrow or next year.

Here’s one for $120

What bugs me about this is THEY ARE ALL THE SAME! Flat rectangular phones with no buttons and few ports. Where is the innovation? Where is the experimentation? Where are the different form factors?

Go back to like 2003 and you had all kinds of variety in the market. Some phones had slide out keyboards, some had physical keyboards like blackberries, they were all kinds of different expansion ports and slots and interfaces, and occasionally something totally different like Compaq had a gadget that took different backpacks that bolted on the back to give it extra capability.

Skip 20 years ahead to today, and every phone is the exact same fucking form factor. And so we obsess over millimeters and megapixels and software. There’s no innovation here. There’s no variety here.

The only even slightly interesting development I see is the new flip and book phones, but that technology is being used in the most boring way possible. I want to phone the size of a Snickers bar where I pull the screen out of it from the side and it unrolls as far as I want it to. I want a phone that flips open like a laptop to reveal a keyboard. Or even simpler, I want a phone that’s 4 mm thicker and has a battery that lasts all week. Give that phone a headphone jack and wireless charging, put a little rubber around it to make it indestructible, then you’ll have something interesting.

Until that happens, you have like six manufacturers that are basically building the exact same product. Boring.

And that’s exactly why Ukraine is kicking ass. Paying $20k or $30k for a single enemy casualty is a pretty good deal in warfare. But these drones aren’t going through some huge defense contractor, they’re being 3D printed and assembled from off-the-shelf parts. Basically a little army of logistics people building hobby drones out of consumer level equipment, just with an improvised explosive like a grenade or some similar impact explosive strapped to the bottom.
They aren’t even paying $20k for a casualty, they are paying $1-2k for a hobby drone and a grenade and many of them create multiple casualties.

The more expensive ones cost more, but those are the ones you see that are reusable and can drop several grenades in one flight. Those are more like $5k-$20k. Still an insane bargain even if each one only creates one casualty before it is destroyed.

IT person here. Avoiding HP is a good idea. But a better idea is don’t buy shitty cheap consumer level inkjet printers from any brand. Most of them have this sort of bullshit, although not usually as bad as HP does. Instead I suggest buy it for life. Get a nice color laser machine, spend a few hundred bucks, and you will have a printer that lasts until you die. I like the Canon MF743CDw, it’s a little on the pricier side but it scans both sides of the paper in one pass. Also does color duplex printing.

If you don’t want the extra size or weight of a color laser, get a black and white laser. How often do you really need color? And if you must get something cheaper, get one of the newer inkjet printers that use refillable ink bottles rather than cartridges, like there is an actual ink tank on the printer and you refill it with a squeeze bottle rather than replacing the cartridge.

Gas stoves rock. Rather than banning gas stoves, just require that they be installed safely.

The answer here is simple- mandate a range hood with real outside exhaust (not the cheap ones that blow air back into the room). And require a make-up air vent with equivalent capacity.

Maybe require the stove to automatically engage the vent at low speed (near-silent) so when you start a burner the vent runs at like 10CFM or something automatically.

Much has been said about the idea of ‘signal leaving UK or EU’. Little has been said about how exactly that would happen.

AFAIK, Signal has no business presence in the UK or EU. IE, no offices, no registered corporate entities. Thus, they (arguably) have no more requirement to comply with UK’s or EU’s regulations than, say, Iran’s or China’s or any other jurisdiction where they do not do business and have no presence.

Signal’s leadership has a record of giving any regional restrictions the middle finger, so I doubt Signal would voluntarily block EU countries. So that means the EU would either pressure Google and Apple to delist Signal (easily worked around, at least on Android, and soon on Apple too as EU is trying to force sideloading) or they’d pressure ISPs to block connections to Signal (more or less impossible).

If EU tried to do that, it’d just create a giant game of whack-a-mole. And people doing real CSAM shit would just move to even more private distributed systems.

Yes exactly. No online platform can catch 100% of prohibited activity. They are punishing the wrong people. What they should do is get a list of all the ones eBay missed, file charges against the seller and start knocking on buyer’s doors. Or maybe send some agents in an undercover Prius to pull them over and issue a fine when they get coal rolled. That would send a pretty clear message that eBay is not a safe place to purchase these items.

This is the answer.

Matrix needs to make it easier to expire or delete messages from the server, but other than that it’s doing a lot of the stuff Signal should’ve been doing years ago. Easy to use multiple devices, easy to get messages on multiple devices, keep chat history in sync, no reliance on phone numbers for identity or single identity servers, good working federation / ability to set up private hosted groups, etc.

It’s a good theory, but why were they shooting at civilian cars then?

I think your theory may make more sense than most (explains the abductions) but it still mostly seems nonsensical.

I think a broad look at Israel’s policies is long overdue in a few areas.
But this action virtually guarantees that won’t happen.

Perhaps nobody overtly wants to ban all guns in the sense of making all guns illegal. There’s always a ‘reasonable’ proposal. But it overall feels like a roll back strategy, like the US tried to roll back communism in the cold war- pick at the edges until there’s none left.

A buyback program IS a ban by the way- it’s just confiscation with compensation. 'You can’t own XYZ anymore so we will confiscate it from you, but we’ll give you some money.

The real issue though is that guns aren’t hard to make and therefore the black market effect will be minimal. Look at illicit marijuana (pre-legalization) as an example. Lots of it was grown in Mexico then smuggled in. Then hydroponic/airponic tech got better and cheaper and instead it was grown in attics and basements closer to where it would be sold. So now the drugs smuggled in are drugs that require lab processing like cocaine or heroin. But if (hypothetically saying there was no legalization) you made home-grow setups illegal, that wouldn’t stop anyone from doing it anyway.

Same is true with guns. For under $500 you can buy a device that turns a half-machined block of metal into the main part of an AR15 rifle. For $5k-$10k you can buy a CNC machine that will turn a solid billet of metal into most parts of a gun. And unlike a drug lab, unlike even a basement marijuana grow op, all these devices can be presented as ‘legitimate use’ with very little prep- just clear the gun CNC file out of the machine and that’s it. Way easier than marijuana (which takes weeks to mature and then must be harvested and packaged). So you could do this in a legitimate front business with a ‘night shift’ crew.

So I argue even if you greatly restrict civilian firearm ownership, the real criminals who commit the majority of gun homicides and gun crimes will have unimpeded access to guns. The same gangs that right now trade in stolen or straw purchased guns, will instead trade in imported or home-machined guns.

Yeah I think indoor farming / vertical farming is going to be the ultimate answer. Much more efficient in every way, including resource use, water, pesticide, etc.

I only know some basics of the whole situation, but I really don’t get this attack. Israel is a modern Westernized nation and enjoys STRONG support, financial and military, from many/most other Western developed nations. They have modern weapons of just about all types.
Israel is accused of some awful shit and stealing peoples homes. From what I can see they’re probably guilty of this.

But I don’t understand how killing a bunch of civilians at a rave is going to overall help the cause. It seems to me like a. it’d give your better-armed adversary an excuse to smack you down once and for all, and b. a good way to make the rest of the world feel like they shouldn’t be stopped in doing so (and if anything, helped in their efforts).

So what is the goal? Is this just an expression of pent up anger? Because it seems a poor strategy to me.

Amen to that. Flying in that game was super fun, especially with the ‘trade lanes’

Pretty sure Halo 1 and 2 were already remastered?