KeepFlying

I noticed a similar thing being done for Bird scooters a while back. I forget the suffix but they did the same and I noticed because I was still authed on my phone after requesting deletion. My token has expired since then though so for all I know they have fully deleted the account since.

Reasonable considering the situation , sure. But the situation shouldn't be happening in the first place. I could understand closing off the API even. What I don't accept is shuttering the Android app.

I wish they would keep that alive in even a limited way and keep all the fanciness to Apple at the very least.

I think you make some valid points for some people, but I think you may be overlooking the fact that for some, the social connections made at work can be very valuable. Especially for people who recently move to a new area, "work friends" can be as valuable as other social groups.

I go to the office to socialize. Its not my primary reason of course, but I value the conversations I have over lunch, and we often take time to play games after work or get involved in sports as a bonding experience. To dismiss the social aspects of office work is going a bit too far.

I accept though that many people feel like you do in this case. I just want to point out that many people may value the things that you do not.

There is no broadcast, but when you are scrolling your feed you will see a selection of friends who have liked each post.

Also if you view the activity feed (in a different corner of the app) you can see what your friends have been up to. This is where you will see more explicitly "Sally, Sue, John and Dave liked a post by Mr. Famous" (and similar activity).

My issue with my TCL is that with Roku built in to the TV it is able to track what I watch even outside of Roku "channels". If I plug in a Roku over HDMI it can only track how I use the Roku, not the rest of the TV.

Last time I checked their privacy policy they admit to using content ID systems on their TVs, but I'm on mobile and don't have a citation on that at the moment.

I'm the most cynical interpretation possible:

You need to listen to them in order to be able to refute them. So if you want to change their minds you need to listen to understand what their belief is founded on so you know what you need to convince them of.

But in a more open way of seeing it:

It's important to understand where their beliefs are coming from to understand why they believe what they do. Maybe their belief is based on a fear of government and government influence on their lives. So maybe there is merit in talking about where that fear comes from.

The flat Earth portion of their beliefs is not valid. But their reasoning for it might include some interesting points to discuss that can help everyone be able to work together better.

Not a bad thought. Though I think it had some problems that they already considered.

They mention not wanting to overstate the danger ("touch this and you die") in case someone touches the rock and does NOT die, putting doubt on the whole message. I think that poisoning the area creates a similar risk.

If you poison the area then you run the risk of a future civilization cleaning up the obvious poison at the surface, thinking that the message refers to only that poison. This would leave them thinking that the area is safe after their cleanup.

PiHole has the option to have blackholed domains show a "This was blocked by PiHole, click here to whitelist this domain". It doesnt work perfectly (ex. Hulu just craps out for me with PiHole because of some domain under the hood being blocked), but it is something.

And for guests you can disable PiHole for any time period with a click of the button on its web page.

Or kick your guests/roomates/gf onto a different subnet.

That said though, it is clearly not perfect and could use some work and TLC to take care of. But in case you (or the nest person reading this) wanted some ideas, I thought I'd offer.

Very much this. I have made a point to give somewhat legitimate answers to these questions out of fear that a phone agent would ask them someday and that I could fall victim to exactly what you describe.

Phone agents don't always have to actually enter the security questions to access your account. sometimes they can simply see the answers on their screen and are able to make a judgement call. Don't trust humans, especially not humans who are incentivized to help you as quickly as possible.

Also its easier to say a word over the phone than it is to say a random string of letters numbers and symbols.

All that an Apple signature proves is that the developer is paying Apple for the privilege. And, theoretically, apple has vetted the app to some minimal extent.

But there is little stopping a signed app from becoming malicious, so from a security standpoint, being signed doesn't ALWAYS mean being "safe".

Take all advice on this with a grain of salt please. And never directly trust someone who says "use this specific VPN because it is good". Their threat model may not match yours, so good for them may not be good for you.

If you would like to learn a good VPN using the data yourself, consider using these tools:

This site has a detailed list of all VPN providers and properties of their services.

https://thatoneprivacysite.net/vpn-section/

And this site talks about some of the concerns you may want to have when picking a VPN service.

https://www.privacytools.io/#vpn

If you like OP's site, you may also like this one. I keep returning to it whenever I need to mess with pathfinding. It gives a great step by step of the efficiency of each when it comes to specific paths:

https://qiao.github.io/PathFinding.js/visual/

I think the concern is the breadth of information that the NSA has been known to gather.

This is all speculation (though informed by the Snowden revelations), but if the NSA asks DDG for data for some legitimate reason, it is likely that the NSA would just demand "all" the data, and not a scoped version of it. Meaning your information could get caught up in it.

I agree that for most people this may not be a concern, but if you would like to learn more, privacytools.io has some more information about the "14 Eyes" and other nation state information gathering efforts.

We are talking about smart home things here though, which usually depend on their own services anyway.

This is more of a problem with things like Windows reaching out to msftconnecttest.com or some other generic internet service. But in the case of a smart home device it's needs are usually more well defined.

This becomes harder with a consumer router trying to determine if it is online though unfortunately because of exactly what you describe.

Horrifying. I hope she ends up winning a case on this. Even if it is just to get to move out early for free at least it's something.

But wow. I'd be doing the same as her if this were forced on me. I love IoT things. But I draw the line at door locks. Physical security is already difficult enough. I'm not adding more attack vectors to that.

Not to mention the data exfil that will most definitely happen with that system. I'm confident that even if the lock itself ends up being secure that the data that gets given to the landlord won't be protected at all.

:(

Get well soon Simone.

Agreed. This really just sounded like a "Look at this new tool I found" type of article. Which is great, but I was disappointed that he didn't go over bugs that he found with this method and more specific value-adds that this helps provide.

I do think there is merit to looking at code outside of an IDE (for the sake of keeping yourself focused on the task at hand), but that's what a typical code review provides.

Maybe a process like this is good for looking at "bad" code and theorizing how to improve it. But even then a lot of my problems span multiple files and multiple modules (and I don't suspect I am alone in this) so it seems inefficient to print all of that out.

I hate that the government is shut down. It's stupid that people's livelihoods are a bargaining chip, especially when every administration talks about increasing jobs.

But it hasn't personally affected me yet. I am not a government employee and at the moment I am not in need of any of the government services that are shut down.

As for if they will get paid afterward, well legally the government cannot promise that. Legally it's possible that the new budget may even disband something like the TSA and all of the workers who have been working for free would be even more screwed. But historically every shutdown ended with giving back pay to the workers who had to work for free. They just can't guarantee it.

Overall I agree with you. And I'm pretty disappointed with this experiment page. The previous ones were better for sure.

But to your Amazon example, doodles might be the new best way to find "that thing with the stick out the top and the bell looking thing at the bottom. I forget what it's called"

I'm glad Google is playing around with this. This one though just feels flat compared to the others.

We have a similar pattern in my product (large Win32 app). We have "Assert" which throws a dialog in Debug then continue execution, but is removed in Prod. and then we have "IfFailedCrash" type asserts that immediately crash the app so that our crash reporting systems can kick in and report back with state information. (Though these can independently be turned off in prod, reverting them to a no-op.)

We end up with a lot of issues where developers ignore the dialogs, so we are slowly moving to more "crash" checks to catch issues more quickly.

This is correct, but you must list your full legal name as the store listing, which isnt very ideal in my opinion. In order to list it as a business name you need an LLC or more. No Sol Proprietors allowed.

Dumb question, but is this something that a dev would expect the compiler to do for us automatically depending on what is deemed most efficient or is this something that a developer can write directly into the code to make it work this way?

I want to be sure I understand what is going on here to be sure.

Can someone offer an example of where this ability would be particularly useful?

Nice. I have to admit though I was hoping you would collect a list of email addresses or domains in the script and tag it that way as well.

I'd love to take back control of my inbox from the google automatic filters. I rarely check my mail because it ends up taking forever to parse through all of those additional folders and filters.

My work email is all full of auto sorting rules. But my personal gmail lags behind too much.

Defeatest of realist?

You can and should work to reduce your footprint if that concerns you, but there are still systematic issues that make it hard to stay completely outside of there services. Mainly what OP mentioned with contact uploads.

You feel comfortable blocking entire TLDs like that? I understand they send a lot of spam, but what about valid emails from those TLDs?

The products are very nice. And to a point I have started to trust Google innately. Not that that is necessarily a good thing.

I understand their need for data. It makes business and technical sense. I just wish they made more of an effort to anonymous it. (but that won't happen as long as ads are the primary market of the web)

I love that you suggested YNAB here but I have one significant problem with it that doesn't have a consistently good workaround.

Reimbursements.

When I m out with friends and the restaurant doesn't split the bill I'll often cover it then get paid back with cash or PayPal. YNAB doesn't seem to handle this very well.

Then wirh longer term reimbursements it gets worse. Either you forget that you are owed or you float the debt.

I still recommend YNAB. but that specific problem means it's not on my "reliable" list.

I don't like this at all. As makecheck said, not all users are the same. Me for example, I am 100% willing to disable my ad blocker for two reasons:

1) if support the website

2) if the ads that I see do not interfere with using the site.

There are way too mane websites that allow (or don't disallow) ads with fake download buttons, or banner videos, popups, and other content that slows down the site and makes it incredibly difficult to use.

Don't block content because of ad blocks, how about improving ads instead?