I’m not sure when they added it and it might only be some phones (I have a pixel 9 pro), but you can just plug your phone in via USB and use the USB mode notification to switch it to webcam mode

Oh no, don’t get me wrong, I work from home just fine.

If I’m working from a cafe, restaurant or bar, I’m spending the whole time there distracted

Which I guess is indeed a personal issue, so far play

Any time I’ve gone to “work” from home somewhere fun, no actual work is getting done, no matter how genuinely I try

I’m not sure if they’ve degraded, but I’ve got one of those CD-R spindles with a few disks left on it somewhere

I could burn a mix CD this afternoon if I felt like it?

Thing is if I gave half of the people I know a mix CD I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t actually have a means of listening to it

Funnily enough, people running in Ubuntu do get Firefox in a container by default IIRC as it’s delivered as a snap

Don’t people have to actually buy their consumer CPUs for this to actually mean anything?

It’s still never been proven despite countless very smart people looking for this exact behaviour for well over a decade now. The first person to actually prove this whole mass spying via microphone to sell ads thing is actually happening, would be world-famous overnight.

For instance on an android phone, it’s not really possible for an app to do something that a determined enough security researcher couldn’t ultimately detect if they were looking for it. When you can build your own version of the operating system and decompile the application easily, there’s not really any other places to hide that won’t give something away.

If you feel like your phone is acting off of a conversation you had without interacting with it, it’s nearly always one of these three:

• The vast majority of people are super predictable most of the time.
• You are not accounting for other people in the conversation, who may well have just googled the thing. These companies know who you spend time with, they don’t need a microphone for that.
• Baader meinhof phenomenon

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve thought surely something fishy was going on plenty of times, but the reality is, until someone can actually prove it (which is entirely possible to do if it’s happening), it’s gotta just be the above. We’re being tracked a crazy amount, but it’s not passively by microphones in our pockets

Note: none of this applies if you’re actually being specifically individually targeted (i.e. by a hostile government). All bets are off in that instance

I feel like this one is relatively uncontroversial

URL pronounced as “earl” however? I’ll spend all of my remaining energy in life ensuring the person saying it is stapled to the bottom of the Mariana trench with rebar

I love the theatre of providing Pro plans the option to opt-in

I’d bet literally zero people go for that

Big up the anarcho syndicalist commune

I see you’re new here

What in the hell, this is the first time I’ve been able to actually see it as blue and black

Glocktor

Yes of course

But every single scrap of information in Wikipedia exists somewhere else

Its value is twofold and exclusively these two when you boil everything down:

• It is enough information to answer any question that has an empirically known answer
• It is available to anyone on the planet with ease and without cost

There’s very little else we’ve created that hits both of those, but the second is by far the most important.

Already got a copy on my NAS, I update it every year or two when I remember to.

But you’ve missed the point, my personal access to a Wikipedia text snapshot is not equivalent to the free access of information to everyone. The information just existing somewhere isn’t enough.

And anyway a person can’t practically keep their own copy of the Internet Archive. It takes up something like a quarter of an exabyte

I often assume this kind of thing is part of an effort to filter for idiots

If you know that’s an invalid IP address, you’re probably less likely to fall for the scam after the scammer has put the setup work in. So if they filter you out before a scammer has to spend any actual effort on you, that means more time they can spend scamming people who might be more likely to fall for it

That’s why these things often have egregious spelling errors and other seemingly obvious red flags

Now harness that addiction and turn it into a hobby!

To the uninitiated, coffee is a surprisingly deep rabbit hole

I feel like this has been one of my soapbox things for a while now, but

Americans, the Internet Archive and Wikipedia stand as two of the biggest contributions to human knowledge preservation in all of history. To lose either would be a huge backslide for us as a civilization, and it never really seemed like a genuine threat until recent events over there.

I know there’s a lot of other shit going on right now, but you must do what you can to ensure both are able to continue their work.

Reminded me what an absolute mess recordable disc media was during the early-to-mid-00s.

Oh you want to write a disc?

Which type of media do you want? A CD or DVD? R, RW or RAM? Plus or minus?

Which do you choose? Well it depends on your drive but also kinda the drives you want to read from it too in some cases… Here I’ve got a chart

Wasn’t this chud killed by another fascist?

Reckon his supporters are gonna go anti-fascist now?