Jul

I have all of my email clients set to not load internet content. Probably why one of my banks, Navy Federal, keeps saying my email address is invalid despite the fact I get their emails.

OK I see why you call yourself TrollAccount, guess I should have take a hint and not engaged. All of this is so off topic from why using a VPN is not going to be secure on an insecure device or one that the manufacturer can get the keys from the device directly or from a backup of those keys loaded on the Apple or google servers.

I guess when you say backdoor you’re implying something nefarious to capture data in motion on the internet. There’s no need to backdoor the encryption of data in motion if you have access to all data at rest on both device and server side for a majority of users. Plus the fact that their services can directly interact with other apps, even commercial apps have some limits. Then combine that with the data they do capture mentioned in this and many other research articles and there’s a lot they can access and compile about you that GrapheneOS users (with default settings) no one can.

From the top result of searching online, but it’s just one of many you can find easily enough: https://pwn-all.com/blog/2026/07/28/iphone-telemetry-in-2026-what-apple-knows-about-you.html

And that doesn’t cover the data that gets processed and stored by servers rather than on device. Just like Google and most others, Apple holds all the encryption keys for the data at rest for “convenience”. And this includes app backup data which would include encryption keys for any true end-tp-end encrypted services if you choose to backup that data to your account. Not going to speculate on whether or not they regularly use or sell that data, but they definitely give it to any government agencies or copyright enforcement agencies that properly request it.

Definitely no surprises there except that they even bothered to add that plastic camera plateau and move the flash a tiny bit. Wouldn’t have been surprised if they were just overstock or refurbished phones that were just painted. I bet they spent an extra $.01 per phone to have a Chinese factory make that change.

Definitely agree on that part, if only the tools themselves weren’t so unethically created and a continual heavy drain on so many aspects of society I might consider using them for small, tedious tasks outside of work where I’m forced to.

Also, they don’t do much to aid my work and actively slow me down quite often since I don’t think in words, so I have to translate my logic into a conversational essay for the AI to understand and then debug code someone else wrote. It’s so much faster for me to translate my logic into programming languages directly which follow logic, not conversational norms. I see how it’s useful for people who can’t think in logical steps, though.

Nah, the only thing the old analog 625-line resolutions looked OK on were things like my small bedroom TV in the 90s (though the refresh rates are major improvements in some media). The smaller living room TVs look way better with 720p and regular sized modern living room TVs are significantly better at 1080p. (Note that 4:3 ratio TVs had smaller advertised inch sizes than similarly sized 16:9 ratio TVs since they’re measured diagonally so I’ll avoid using actual sizes since they aren’t comparable.)

Depends on the physical size of the screen. Which is why mostly only wealthy people with 90-inch+ screens really have ever cared about 8K. 4K is a noticeable improvement on a 60 or 70 inch screen, but the extra cost of content isn’t anywhere near being worth it for most people.

Because the random alterations create variations that allow survival of the species, not the individual, in changing conditions. For an example of what happens without that, just look at bananas. Without any evolution through DNA alteration during procreation, a single disease van wipe them out across the globe. Happened once and the current strain is being wiped out by disease, though more slowly due to human intervention, as we speak.

Sounds like a good way to impersonate and use the reputation of someone who’s active on other platforms. Just like the “verified” stuff mostly just means you paid, not that your identity was verified which is always confusing people who aren’t careful, often used/confused by right-wing “news”.

It’s nice to have a GUI for those things sometimes rather than a command line for everything. If you’re doing things right, your daily login shouldn’t have access to modify system settings or read sensitive logs. But troubleshooting requires that often and ls, vim, cat, tail, etc., can become cumbersome compared to a GUI file manager and proper GUI text editor like Kate or Gedit.

That future might not be far off considering what Trump did today. Balance of power is seriously about to shift.

Yeah, but this will make it much easier and using much better algorithms to make it more realistic because OpenAI will start profiting off of it and devoting resources to it which they have way more of than the existing systems.

That’s going to be a disaster. It’s going to overly reinforce toxic sex understanding due to lack of sexual education. Most porn already does that, but is limited by what a human body can actually perform. AI will be able to make what is essentially sexual torture look like it’s what someone should normally expect sex to be like and make it look like the recipient is enjoying it…among many other issues.

Despite living with one arm, Jess doesn’t see herself as disabled, saying the barriers she faces are societal.

Actually, this is what disability is all about. It’s not that people can’t complete tasks or take care of themselves, it’s that society doesn’t provide the same tools to disabled people that they provide to so called “able bodied” people to allow them to complete those tasks.

It’s the trope of the single grocery store that everyone goes to, but the person in a wheelchair, but otherwise able, can’t use because there’s a curb. So, suddenly they can’t feed themselves. It’s not that they are unable to feed themselves, it’s that they can’t access the food without assistance and thus are “disabled”. As soon as a ramp is installed they are no longer “disabled”, just differently abled.

On the way to the world of “Carole and Tuesday” where all music is composed by AI and owned by big corporations, so it becomes nearly impossible for a small artist to enter the market. And that show didn’t even really cover how now literally every chord that is pleasant to human ears can be not only copyrighted, but they’ll know exactly what songs and how to sue every single independent artist for copyright infringement and it will be totally legal if not very ethical. There will be no legal songs outside of one or two corporations.

It was promising for a while, better quality streams, better payments to artists, etc. But they never ended up implementing stuff they promised like better integration with devices or improving their catalog.

It would reduce their short term revenue, but would improve their long-term revenue. Netflix used to have a great product, but they fiddled with it to make people watch only certain content that brings them more revenue. Same with Spotify. This then reduces the number of people willing to pay for the service and since there are few competitors that are better and/or have as much content they “piracy” is the only way to get the content you want for a reasonable price, with a good user experience.

So short term these things improve revenue, but not as much as the revenue lost in the long term as people start to dislike the the poor experience or are unable to afford the higher prices. And people don’t want multiple services to have to check for new content all the time all with different poor Ux.

All valuable data should be backed up off site in “cold storage” type places. It’s not that expensive compared to the production storage.

It’s been used as an excuse to lay off people, but not the real reason. They were looking at ways to short term boost stock prices since stock buy backs caused their stock prices to increase, but that boost is fading, they needed another artificial boost to profit to maintain those stock prices.