TACO.

You might have a point if those people had no choice, but there are several good or at least better alternatives to TeamViewer and at least one of them is free. Nobody has any excuse for being negatively impacted by this change. Hopefully this is a wakeup call to those people that have been either too lazy or too incompetent to replace TeamViewer to finally do so. TeamViewer is a shit company making a shit product that has just made yet another shit anti-consumer decision (and potentially illegal but I’m sure there’s some sneaky license clause they claim makes this legal).

If they’re not using it, why does it matter what happens to the license? There’s a “it’s the principle of the thing” argument sure, but practically speaking this is irrelevant. Shitty company does shitty thing that should have no practical impact on anyone because nobody should be using their product. What exactly would change for people not using TeamViewer if they hadn’t revoked those licences? The argument is that anyone still using TeamViewer deserves this, and anyone who isn’t isn’t actually impacted by this change so it’s irrelevant.

And you missed my actual point. It doesn’t matter when they purchased the license because the fact they’re still using it means they deserve it. Nobody should be using Teamviewer today because they’re a terrible company, and if you aren’t then this license change doesn’t impact you at all.

It’s not really about the data breaches themselves but rather the way the company responded to them. The fact they tried to cover it up and gaslight their customers about it shows how terrible they are, and remote access is a highly sensitive thing that should be treated the same as handing the keys to your house over to someone. Anyone that isn’t deeply investigating the company or individual making a remote access product prior to using it does deserve what they get in the same way someone handing the keys to their house to a complete stranger they know nothing about would deserve whatever happened to them.

At the end of the day Teamviewer has a history of screwing over their customers for their own profit and in that regard this move is very much on brand for them and entirely predictable. Nobody that has looked into the company’s history should be surprised that they’ve done this at all.

You’re technically right but only because Taiwan (despite what China fervently wants) is a separate country from China. If you follow the official Chinese party line that they aren’t then yes you could make a modern phone entirely from parts made in “China”. It would at a minimum be more “made in China” than anything Trump is peddling as “made in USA”.

Yes, very much so. Each party has their candidate. Some states might let multiple members of the same party run, and there have certainly been instances where people have run unopposed for certain offices, but generally most elected positions in the US are partisan.

It has been a key Republican strategy for several decades now to control as many states governorship as they can manage because it allows them to do things like gerrymandering and to pass state policies that favor Republicans.

That’s certainly part of it, but I’d use any mobile payment app, not just Googles one, but there’s basically zero competition there. Some banks apparently had their own mobile payment support briefly, but it seems like just about every single one of them has removed that feature and replaced it with a wrapper around Google Pay.

This is nice for Europe I guess, and I want to like the fairphone, but unfortunately it’s not viable for me.

Besides basic phone features and the ability to run Android apps I have 3 requirements, 2 of which the fairphone fails at. I need it to be usable in the US on my phone carrier. I need to be able to use Google Pay or another mobile payment alternative (that’s accepted in most stores). Finally it needs to have at least a 48 hour battery life.

Fairphone unfortunately doesn’t work in the US with most carriers, and the one that kills not only it but all the de-googled phones, it doesn’t support mobile payment of any kind. I’ve done a ton of research trying to find some kind of fix for that second point because I’d gladly use something like GrapheneOS if I could, but every time the answer I come to is it’s just not possible.

That is not even remotely why they added a tax on EVs. The reason they added the extra tax is because they make a ton of money by taxing gas and as EVs are gaining popularity they’re starting to see their tax revenues plummet. There is a nugget of truth in that some of those tax revenues are used to pay for maintaining the roads and that EVs do still put wear and tear on the roads, but it’s not that they’re destroying roads any more than any other car does.

If you’re seeing a drop in road quality it’s because your government isn’t paying to have the roads maintained like they have in the past, not because there are more EVs driving around.

… bot screwing up its post and responding to the wrong place? No idea, doesn’t seem to be responding to either the article or any comment in here. There is a slim chance it’s some weird artifact of the federation process.

Safe and private? Nope absolutely impossible. If you don’t care about privacy at all pretty much the only way to do it is to have your government issue you a unique hardware token and require that to access the internet and it shares your unique ID with the website. It’s not 100% impossible to spoof an identity as you could borrow/steal someone elses token, but if they were secured with a pin/password or basic biometric it would become significantly harder.

Less depressing example. A country (I think it was India but my memory is hazy and I’m too lazy to go google it right now) had a problem with a certain venomous snake. They decided to offer a bounty for every snake corpse brought to them. The goal was to incentivise people to hunt snakes. What actually happened was people started breeding the snakes to turn in for the bounties. They realized the program wasn’t working and cancelled it at which point the breeders dumped their snakes into the wild making the whole situation even worse.

So CAP theorem says you can have a distributed system with at most two of Consistent, Available, or Partition tolerant. I haven’t looked too closely into the federation implementation of Mastodon but I suspect they opted for Available and Partition tolerant (as Consistent and Partition tolerant would mean the entire network goes down when one node does, while Consistent and Available would mean once any node lost contact with the network it could never again rejoin). Since consistency is not guaranteed (and provably can’t be) there is absolutely no way to guarantee that deleting something from one instance will remove it from all instances even allowing for a very generous time span.

TL;DR: You’re not just right, you’re mathematically right.

Kind of both. The modern way of brute forcing is to just hash the 100,000 or so most common passwords, previously leaked passwords, and minor permutations of all of the above. It’s computationally and space intensive, but for a determined attacker entirely doable on modern hardware. That’s why complexity matters, because it’s not a simple iteration through every possible permutation, but a targeted search through a known password list.

Hashes can be brute forced, it’s just normally too expensive to do so for any reasonably complex password. If you’re using “password123” as your password even a hashed password is easily cracked (salting and peppering can help make this more difficult, although still not impossible).

Next time I need to explain what bikeshedding is I’m just going to point to this article.

TL;DR: of that whole thing boils down to “the problem is too hard to solve and all the solutions are worse than the problem so don’t even try”. I don’t agree with the premise because if we accept it, then democracy is doomed.

We can not have a functioning society when we can’t even get a majority of the citizens to agree on basic aspects of reality and half the people are convinced the other half are lizard people that are putting mind control drugs in the water supply. A functioning democracy requires an informed and educated populace, and unchecked propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories lead to the opposite of that, particularly when you have a wealthy group that profits from spreading it.

You’re both right which is the real conundrum. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that conspiracy theories and propaganda in our hyperconnected social media fueled internet are incredibly dangerous and rot the foundations of democracy. Democracy can not survive if these kinds of things are left unchecked. By the same token however any mechanism that immediately springs to mind to combat them is ripe for abuse and easily subverted by fascists and totalitarians. I honestly don’t know what the solution is, only that we desperately need one.

Musk bought Twitter for $50B, in comparison the price tag for repairing any of these schools seems like half a peanut in cost. There is money.

The top 0.1% of the US population controls the vast majority of US wealth, and they use it exclusively for pursuing more wealth for themselves. Improving education does not make the 0.1% or even the significantly less wealthy but still filthy stinking rich 1% more money so they will never pay for it. This is why the US needs 200%+ taxes on the 1% not on imports, not that our bought and paid for government would ever do such a thing.

The communities actually paying for these things couldn’t afford $50M never mind something insane like $50B. So no, there is not money, at least not without solving our completely out of control wealth inequality, but that’s an entirely different problem.