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While I have no doubt Meta is doing the absolute minimum it can to comply, they’re not allowed to pick and choose arbitrarily. They can have technical and security requirements, but we’re not hearing from major players about how WhatsApp is refusing them access when they’ve asked. I’m inclined to think most of them either don’t want to (Signal doesn’t) or aren’t in a position to make it work.

A quick look suggests the UAE has stronger worker protections than are typical for the region. The government strongly encouraged employers to allow work from home last week, but I didn’t find whether that has been continued into this week. It doesn’t look like that recommendation is mandatory for employers. Someone who reads Arabic will probably be able to find more recent statements from the government with relative ease.

You haven’t said what country or line of work you’re in, so nobody knows what’s normal. Countries in the middle east are not known for their strong commitments to worker rights, so it’s a good guess that having to do whatever management wants or get fired is normal there. During an air raid, it’s probably safer to travel a short distance to a bomb shelter rather than a longer distance to your home, if that accurately describes the options.

A useful video would be a bunch of people beating on stuff (off-screen or in an extended cut) to figure out what’s actually easy and reliable for beginners, then presenting that information. It would get approximately 237 views, which is roughly a million fewer than the linked video has at this time. What succeeds on Youtube is entertainment first and information a distant second. A video where everyone sat down in a quiet environment with no pressure, installed a reasonable Linux distribution, and had a smooth experience wouldn’t be very entertaining.

I used Jetpac last time I needed an esim for travel. I did not install their app, but activated the esim manually with the facilities built in to the OS.

However, there are no limits to political donations in the US afaik, which I guess means the rich and powerful ones can invest as much as they can to denigrate the other side, usually a democrat (correct me if wrong). Almost right. There are limits on contributing to candidates, but not on political action committees advertising anything they want, including a candidate. PACs aren’t allowed to coordinate closely with a candidate’s campaign, but that hardly matters in practice. Is it possible for local candidates to run against their own party and actually win? Like a republican that lost his party’s nomination for a district, then becomes an independent and actually wins against his former party? Yes, but it’s extremely rare for it to succeed due to the voting system in use and in some states, ballot access rules biased against new parties. The governor of Alaska was elected that way in 1990. Do candidates have to give back the money that was given as a donation that wasn’t actually used to try to win an election? No. They can, but they can also donate it to charity, make (relatively small) contributions to other candidates, hold it for future campaigns, transfer it to a party committee, or give it to a PAC. Can a politician actually pretend to raise money for a campaign and then simply pocket it? That’s illegal, which doesn’t always stop them from doing it.

As I understand it, the practice remains common in the USA. Verizon, the carrier in the article agreed to limitations, but other carriers routinely finance phones and lock them until they’re paid off.

You could get a €2000 euro phone for €500, pay that up front, and walk to the local guy with a serial cable who unlocked your phone for €20. A world in which telecoms can’t use SIM locking to offer financing on ultra-expensive phones to people who would otherwise be bad credit risks sounds like an improvement to me. Most people would be better off financially if they didn’t buy a 2000€ phone.

people like this make phone deals worse for the rest of us. Verizon can get exactly the same amount out of most customers by either: Charging more for the phone and less for the service Unbundling the phone financing from the phone service

People… don’t care about being able to switch phone carriers while keeping their phone? I think you’re quite mistaken. Even if few people actually do that, they certainly care about the effect of the resulting competitive pressure on the market.

That is a separate issue. This is a lock to prevent use with other service providers,

That sounds like a very negative experience, pretty much opposite to my experience with the same model. She got 50 USD back. Not worth it at all. 50 USD was one of the compensation options Google offered; a battery replacement was another. The latter might have been wise if she wanted to keep using the phone.

Be sure to give it a one-star review. So far, Magisk and Play Integrity Fix have been sufficient for apps that don’t like it.

Messaging, web browser, podcasts, navigation, a couple services that require a phone to access. I tend to not install apps that could be websites. Hardware drivers are surely dated. Android, on the other hand is 15, and I assume getting updated to 16 soon. I think I’m pretty good with regard to the sort of zero-click exploits I’ve heard of used for targeted attacks. If somebody slipped a trojan into a software update, I could have a problem, especially if it was a privileged app like AccA or Adaway.

The entire smartphone industry. I use five year old smartphone (Pixel 4a). I can afford a new one, but I don’t need a new one, and it would be worse in ways I care about (bigger, probably without a headphone jack), without being better in any way that really matters to me, so I don’t want a new one. Official software updates ended a couple years ago, but I’m running LineageOS and I got an update this week. Google has intentionally made it hard for most people to use LineageOS or any other Android distribution not blessed by Google as their primary phone by allowing app developers to check whether it’s Google-approved. For now, I can usually work around that, but it would be too big a hurdle for most people. The kernel is getting pretty old though; it’s 4.14 when I’m up to 6.17 on my laptop. This is because SOC vendors don’t release open source drivers, nor maintain the proprietary ones for very long. Finally, there’s the battery. Mine is in great shape because I use AccA to limit charge to 60% most of the time, but charging to 100% as most people do would have greatly reduced its capacity by this point. Replacing it requires melting glue and some risk of damage. Most phones are like that now (though that’s changing due to EU regulation).

I tend to favor dark colored clothes all the time, but I carry a flashlight and I use it if there’s a potential for close proximity to moving cars. I’ve noticed in some parts of the USA, people often walk in the street even where a sidewalk is available. I have to wonder about their survival instincts.

The article doesn’t talk about the fact that the increase is far greater in dark conditions, which is not readily explained by the changes to car design the article discusses. This article talks more about that, and the linked report suggests population trends have contributed to more people walking at night along arterial roads with poor pedestrian infrastructure.

Do you see ads you don’t want to see? If not, it’s good enough.

I don’t especially want to be in the position of defending either spez or r/jailbait, but I was on Reddit at the time and I do think I should explain how 2008 was a different time on the web. There had been a number of attempts to censor and age-gate the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s. People involved in creating internet tech and building its culture were almost universally against anything that even smelled like censorship. Much of the early userbase migrated from Digg in response to Digg censoring a leaked DRM key. The only sitewide rule on Reddit was “don’t break Reddit”. When r/jailbait finally did get banned in 2011 and Reddit’s first content policy was imposed, that decision was unpopular among Redditors even though most thought sexualizing young teenagers was disgusting. It signaled a change it what Reddit was, and people rightly feared that it would lead to significantly more restrictions. Now I have to enforce a rule on r/flashlight that people can’t sell flashlights designed to be attached to guns, and I don’t want to make or enforce such a rule.

spez implicitly supported the jailbait subreddit when he left it up for several years spez did not work at reddit between 2009 and 2015.

I normally dislike self censorship of profanity, but replacing fuck with fsck (filesystem check) is a Unix joke, and I can appreciate that.

I’m sure I hit numbers like that on my DSL.