So you’re telling me the model cannot consistently run at a profit, even through it relies on a massive unpaid labour force.

Vendors will use passkey implementations as vectors for lock-in. Guaranteed. Workplaces need to accept BYO.

The elephant in the room is that parental controls development is a total wasteland, and has been for years. There’s no money in it. FAMAG is actively hostile to it and phone OEMs haven’t got a dog in the race and already contend with razor-thin margins. It’s one dimension of a broader political problem of digitization that smarter legislators and politicians have surely noticed by now, which is that unlike human beings, users increasingly don’t have any rights or agency worth a damn, and are treated with contempt.

I like that a grassroots movement has remembered that parenting should be at the heart of children’s technology access, but I fear such groups’ ‘useful idiot’ value to authoritarian elements up to the same old tricks.

I want to view multiple tabs at once, in a split-page view where I can scroll on one tab, then mouse-over to another and start independently scrolling on that one. It’s probably the key feature I miss from Vivaldi. Is there some insurmountable obstacle in the engine that prevents implementation, or is it stubborn devs?

Simple solution. Kensington lock attached to the gonads. The device can helpfully warn others against theft with an LED projection on the wearer saying Big Cojone Security is active.

Sometimes I wonder whether these ‘piracy back on the menu’ write-ups are entertainment industry plants whose purpose is to manipulate congress critters.

mclovin

The onus isn’t on the environment owner to lock down app space and secure data to the nth degree, it’s on developers not to ship poorly behaved apps. My files don’t exist in a public space like they are rubbish on a residential nature strip, free to be pilfered by randos. They aren’t free game in any way.

I hope red and blue both find success in this segment. Ideally the strengthened APU share of the market exerts pressure on publishers to properly optimize their games instead of cynically offloading the compute cost onto players.

If my hardware is to be used as a public space then I expect it to be provided for free. While I foot the cost, it’s my property solely, and encryption status of the contents remains completely irrelevant. You sound like you’ve drunk the corporate KoolAid.

While Gabe’s famous line still holds true, I find that repeating it without qualification is increasingly glib, because vendors are making the matter a technology issue instead, thanks to years of investment in DRM techniques. In the long term, either side’s ability to enforce its will on the other will come down to availability/control of compute resources, and unit economics.

Keeping corporate at bay is going to require a combination of maintaining the commons, seeing genuine competition in cultural production, improving consumer legal frameworks, and becoming politically conscious of our entitlement to digital rights.

In my day it was a sight of your ID alone, and only on the cashier’s discretion. Which is still the norm today at many retailers. I will never use any POS system that requires ID scanning/PII provision as a default.

It’s probably my inexperience with self-checkout speaking, but I would never enter PII into a corporate terminal for the sake of a six-pack.

I knew I just needed to type my bday on their terminal to get it to sell, so I went n did it lol.

EWW

In EVE Online that’s called ‘getting underneath the guns’. 🎓

Two of my colleagues still use locally stored plaintext for individual work credentials, despite having been shown where the password manager is. Both have accessed their files in front of me. If it’s not in those files it’s saved in the browser (because convenience is a hell of a drug). Now you start to see why discrete managers have a hard time, even amongst technology workers.

Black and white are English words at least a thousand years old. They’ve taken on numerous positive, negative and neutral connotations over time. But all that heritage and utility doesn’t matter, and must be denied, because in 2023 it doesn’t suit some people’s politics to use ‘black’ in any context besides referring to a black person.

I think that’s a very sad and limiting attitude toward language.

Vendors should be entitled to withdraw support on particular hardware, but they shouldn’t be allowed to brick the service as a result ‘just because’. All it needs is a TOS/EULA update prompt advising that viewers with X hardware are on their own as of now. I’d be willing to bet this denial of service practice originates in kickback discussions between TV manufacturers and streamers.

It strikes me as another case where corporate can inculcate learned helplessness in the customer by having him think disallowing and withdrawing support for are indivisible.

In a letter written to X’s head of global government affairs Nick Pickles on April 17, the CBC said their label was “factually incorrect” because the government doesn’t have involvement in CBC’s editorial decisions.

Many public broadcasters are set up so that their governance is done at ‘arms-length’ from the sitting government. The problem is that the mechanisms used to achieve this (usually a government-appointed board of directors, a parliamentary committee, etc.) often intervene in coverage on behalf of an annoyed government, including threats to litigate against the entity, termination threats against the director or other personnel, tabling of targeted legislation designed to make the entity’s life worse, etc. These governance bodies are kind of like car brakes made of balsa wood: rock solid when not in use, then a pile of sawdust during the organization’s time of need.

For that reason I’m happy with X’s label, even though I value public broadcasting, because history has shown executive government tends to issue marching orders to media (no matter their ‘independence’) whenever it feels that getting its way is particularly vital. The motive for the label may be ideological given Musk’s record, but it has some utility to the reader in that it reminds them of a broader, awkward truth about government funding.

(I think the general media’s shunning of X has a certain coordination about it, and that it’s really about sector-felt resentment rather than engagement metrics. The metrics stuff is just noise, and likely explains the refusal to disclose the engagement figures mentioned in the article. Musk to them is a foreign occupier, and they are the underground resistance, withholding their content/advertising dollars, determined to undermine his efforts to reforge Twitter to X and ensure they get ‘their’ platform back.)

Yeah, better to stay on Youtube and Reddit and Xitter, where there’s no propaganda. Odysee’s content range might accommodate the moderate centre better if people started using it. And we can’t have that!