Matrix is essentially secure XMPP.
For fast and secure communications, I’d expect Fediverse mods and admins to be using it, as it doesn’t take much more to set up and use than less secure XMPP variants, and lines up with the ActivityPub worldview.
But I guess people go with what they know, and some people know standard XMPP or Discord.
I remember when the rise in anxiety was blamed on the cold war.
True… I still regularly use my 2008 17” MBP and it’s always the RAM that’s the limiting factor.
This is fine to me… 2026 is the year I start looking to replace my M1. I usually go 5-7 years between refreshes.
The problem is, once the middlemen gain power, they’re never gonna give you up. Music producers are a great example of this, as are telecoms companies.
All the current SaaS stuff is similar; the offerings LOOK similar, but they’re explicitly designed not to be a 1:1 match, so you can’t just take your business elsewhere, just like the mattress companies of old.
We’re even seeing this play out in the streaming video market, where each player has its own differentiator, moreso than we ever saw with traditional cable TV.
Standards are great, but middlemen have no incentives to not subvert them.
So… doomed?
Yeah; my reaction to the headline was “…and good riddance?”
I never signed up for Facebook in the first place because I knew some of the people involved in the original Facebook. I didn’t want them getting their hands on my personal info because I knew what they’d do with it… and they did.
The phone isn’t going to end up in China from people passing them hand to hand; they’re going to be collected somewhere and bundled for shipping in an EM-protected covering of some sort. The record of the route they took right up until they go silent will be available for every phone. Looking at an aggregate map of this data should give the police a pretty good idea of what’s going on.
I suspect the difficulty is that the police need to get a data release from each individual involved and then get Google/Apple and/or the owners to voluntarily share the historical location data with the police… which most people aren’t willing to do out of an abundance of caution.
I get 4 weeks, plus sick days, plus parental leave, various types of training days and charitable days, plus a 2 week carry-over and I’m neither American nor European.
…one step at a time.
Wait… Star Wars has feet?
Let’s re-title that to “Owners are losing access to smartphone app updates and product features when companies go bust”
It’s exactly how Cloud SaaS is designed. It was a bad idea to do it with your smoke detector and smart lock, and it’s still a bad idea with automobiles.
That last bit is correct. The privacy commissioners are under-resourced and a large number of businesses are not actually compliant with the GDPR. Only a few highly visible infractions get addressed, and even with those the final result is not fixing the infractions and paying the fine; usually a small payment is made along with an agreement that the party will behave better in the future.
Ah, so you went for a phone battery in the end.
I just imagined what would happen to their GPUs if bricks were used :D
I’d also highly recommend reading https://endsoftwarepatents.org/2023/04/googles-decision-to-deprecate-jpeg-xl-emphasizes-the-need-for-browser-choice-and-free-formats/ — more than features and future proofing, the big issue here is patents. Google controls the patents for AVIF.
Then again, I use HEIF, which is alternately patent encumbered, and default to PNG and SVG for web-facing graphics.
Big question is: who’s storing the email, you or them? Your mail clients handle POP3 and IMAP as well as SMIME and GPG so the server doesn’t have to have any special features itself.
Since you want something your wife can manage, stay away from the forwarders. Whatever you choose, check Spamhaus and SURBL to see if the provider has a history of getting on their lists.
Make sure you select one that can stay in business providing email service, so you don’t have to worry about the company collapsing/being bought out/pushing ads/selling PII/bundling mail with some more lucrative service.
I’ve been using vim/GVim for over 30 years; with only minimal tweaks I’ve used it with maybe 15 different programming languages/compilers, a few of which needed custom configurations written to do anything useful.
While everyone else is struggling to get on with the IDE du jour, I just get stuff done without having to learn anything new other than a new syntax and library set.
GVim is available pretty much everywhere? And it’s infinitely customizable.
It does have a learning curve, but then you get to use that knowledge for the rest of your life.
Color blindness perpetuates structural racism. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a goldfish.
There’s the cultural issues, but those aren’t limited to African Americans vs White Americans on the Internet.
Your rules should apply to everyone, including those two groups. The trickier part is dealing with privilege.
Completion suggestions have been a complete fail. 18 has forgotten my earlier usage patterns and refuses to suggest contractions when I miss an apostrophe — and text entry STILL can’t do quote completion correctly, always leaving a space before the quote.