24,568 karma · joined July 19, 2012
The new and very interesting problem with their business model is that drive prices have doubled - and in some cases, more than doubled - in the last 12 months.
Backblaze has a lot of debt and at some point the numbers don't make sense anymore.
Just to clarify - there are discounted plans that don't have free ZFS snapshots but you can still have them ... they just count towards your quota.
If your files don't change much - you don't have much "churn" - they might not take up any real space anyway.
Even worse, whatever critical settings you may set as a sophisticated user will frequently be reset, or changed, or re-organized under different settings… And of course, set back to insecure defaults… With subsequent software updates.
This is a regular occurrence with Firefox and privacy settings.
Whatever the actual impetus is, we should act as if this is intentional.
You can just enter a fake prefix+number with plausible NPA.
You should use a fake prefix because you don’t want some poor random person getting your delivery updates…
"Currently undergoing some sort of 60 days appeals process, but who knows."
.. and the op said:
"I have tried to contact Microsoft through various channels but I have only received automated replies and bots. I was unable to reach a human."
... which is a roundabout way of saying you did not spend lawyer hours and you did not contact them through channels that they cannot ignore: registered, physical mail, from a lawyer.
I'm sorry for these difficulties, truly, but don't tell me you can't reach a human when you most definitely can reach a human. From my own experience with an organization at least as calloused and indifferent as MS[1], as soon as I sent a real, legal communication I had real live humans lining up to talk to me.
[1] Pacific Gas and Electric
This is not a given.
Many people have many different kinds of investments inside a 401k. Your 401k can own a rental property. Or gold. Or, in a more mundane scenario, the Russell 2000.
If it weren't for the glacial pace of plan administrators and plan holding companies there would be an opportunity for a fund provider to offer "S&P500exSpaceX". It's just another index, after all ...
What is the ios equivalent?
We installed 120 LED ceiling lights in our home circa 2020, all of which were run with high voltage (romex) and accompanied by 120 little transformer boxes that mount inside the ceiling next to them.
Later ...
We installed outdoor lighting with low voltage, outdoor rated wiring and powered by a 12V transformer[1] and I felt the same way you did: why did we use a mile of romex and install all of those little mini transformers when we could have powered the same lights with 12V and low voltage wire ?
I then learned that the energy draw of running the low-volt transformer all the time - especially one large enough to supply an entire house of lighting - would more than cancel out energy savings from powering lower voltage fixtures.
You don't have this problem with outdoor lighting because the entire transformer is on a switch leg and is off most of the time.
So ... I like the idea of removing a lot of unnecessary high voltage wire but it's not as simple as "just put all of your lights behind a transformer".
[1] https://residential.vistapro.com/lex-cms/product/262396-es-s...
Denver does, however, so I wonder why there is no wait at DEN and hundreds of minutes at Houston/Atlanta/JFK ?
_The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ [1]
... and, in this case, to pay special attention to the multiple chapters describing in painful detail just what is involved in refining and extracting Uranium. As in, cubic acres of land mechanically and chemically processed to extract ounces of material ... which is then sent to enormous production facilities, at tremendous cost, only to begin the refinement process.
It is an incredibly long, dirty and energy intensive journey and I am not sure if the ledger of carbon expenses properly accounts for these steps.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb
Laura ingalls wilder said it best, in Farmer Boy:
“never bet your money on another man’s game”
This is a solution you build and run for yourself.
Consider a SMS firewall that:
- flattens text to ascii-256
- recompresses, noises and slightly resizes images and video
... and only then passes the message onto your real (SIM card) phone number.
This, of course, requires that you host your phone number somewhere like Twilio which has other added benefits like additional protection from SIM-jacking and being invulnerable to theft or loss of your handset, etc.
Recommended.
It’s free, it’s transparent, you can read the profile… And it takes two minutes.
Highly recommended.
You don't need to wonder about this because FreeBSD has an official, documented position on this topic[1]:
"... include work in progress, experimental changes and transitional mechanisms that may or may not be present in the next official release ..."
"... whether or not FreeBSD-CURRENT sources bring disaster or greatly desired functionality can literally be a matter of which part of any given 24 hour period you grabbed them in!"
"(is not) In any way ``officially supported'' by us."
[1] https://docs-archive.freebsd.org/doc/4.4-RELEASE/usr/share/d...
Translation: whatever investments in time, tooling, training and documentation you made for 14.x, they were useful for about 18 months.
x.0 shouldn't be deployed in production because it is brand new ...
... but x.4 is too old to be deployed because the cool kids stopped working on the 'x' branch 6 months ago.
In the United States, you are one small piece of sheet metal[1] away from any number of interesting power set ups on your side of the utility.
This means a combination of two circuit breakers is now your transfer switch. This is legal with all utilities and NEC compliant, etc.
If you are willing to sacrifice perfectly uninterrupted power, you can dramatically simplify your grid tie - and open up many other possibilities on your side of the physical interlock.
[1] https://www.daierswitches.com/products/sd-200vl-generator-in...
When my children were younger I used configurator to adopt, and configure, their ipod touch devices. It was a bit of a pain but not too bad.
Anyone can do this - configurator is free and runs on any old macbook ...
When we created the account we shared essentially zero personal information and used a purpose-specific email, etc. No ID scans, no passports, no robust ID verification. It is a company account, after all, so it would make no sense to tie it to a particular person ...
All of this to ask:
In 2026, if I choose to boycott openAI on behalf of my firm, and perhaps sign up for Claude with the intention of using either the web interface or a terminal CLI ... what will be demanded in terms of identity and personal information ?
However, if you're walking down the street and need to quickly generate and apply a message, how will you pass along a QR code to an unknown future viewer ?
Can you draw a QR code with chalk or freehand with a pen, etc. ?
I will admit that the use-cases for "oh by codes" are weird and infrequent but I am convinced they will emerge ...
This way you could establish communication with an unknown future party, totally offline.
[1] https://0x.co
If we treat the carrier as adversarial, dumb pipes we can move the security and all of the capabilities into the cloud platform. A personal comms stack like this should be carrier-agnostic, phone-agnostic, sim-agnostic.
See my other post in this HN topic - I have done this since 2016 ...
Your “phone number “that people interact with cannot be hijacked with SS7 because it’s not a real number… you’re immune to sim swaps … And you can Jettison your physical phone and SIM card at any time with no penalty.
As a bonus, because your actual phone number is now programmable you can do interesting things like set up a SMS firewall. You can, for instance, collapse all incoming text messages to ascii-256. Or truncate their overall length. Or CC your incoming SMS to a dedicated mailbox.
I have operated like this since 2016. I have no idea what my physical SIM phone number is and neither does anybody else.
You can sign up for US mobile service, which is a Verizon MVNO, right this moment with no personally identifiable information at all.
Remember: neither the visa nor MasterCard payment networks have any support for customer name. Everyone pretends that they do, but they do not. In the absence of an additional security layer like “verified by visa “there is no way to verify cardholder name.
Seeing a warrant canary would be encouraging…