Alien meaning “external”.

Electrical interference can come from all kinds of places, near and far. I guess technically you might get interference from other planets but I don’t think that’s what they meant. :) Solar flares are a possibility, though.

I think all it does is install the virt-manager Flatpak and then set a bunch of kernel arguments with rpm-ostree kargs ... depending on various hardware detections.

Gotcha. Yeah, that’s been a pain point for me on previous distros. On Bazzite they make it easy with ujust setup-virtualization. I’m not sure if that’s a one-size-fits-all solution but it suits my needs, at least.

I’m running Bazzite on my “everything” PC. Do you feel like Aurora has notable advantages? Seems to me that “gaming” distros like Bazzite are just ordinary distros with correct GPU drivers and a couple other niceties. I don’t see anything that detracts from productivity.

Still good if you want ROM support or are willing to wait a few months to pick one up for dirt cheap.

GrapheneOS only supports pixels, and LineageOS only officially supports a few more models. If you filter the official LineageOS devices list to 2024/2025 models, you’ll see Pixels, Moto G 5G, and OnePlus 12R. That’s it. Options are similarly limited for Calyx, e/OS, and others. So with most other recent phones, you’re stuck with all the stock bloat and spyware, or unofficial community builds.

Also, they’re dirt cheap in practice in the US. MSRP is a joke. For most of the year, you could get an unlocked, brand new Pixel 9 for less than the MSRP of the low-end 9a. If memory serves, it dropped under $400 at times.

Aside from that, they kind of suck. I wouldn’t even compare them to high-end phones. They are mid-range phones masquerading as high-end. Credit to Google’s marketing department, I guess.

Yeah, I’d rather come at it from the opposite direction. “Everyone censors, so this exactly the kind of shit your government is going to try to force on you in the future.” Everyone should care about this, if only out of self-interest.

China’s writing the playbook. Other countries will follow it sooner than you might think. This is everybody’s problem.

I actually did this a lot on classic Mac OS. Intentionally.

The reason was that you could put a carriage return as the first character of a file, and it would sort above everything else by name while otherwise being invisible. You just had to copy the carriage return from a text editor and then paste it into the rename field in the Finder.

Since OS X / macOS can still read classic Mac HFS+ volumes, you can indeed still have carriage returns in file names on modern Macs. I don’t think you can create them on modern macOS, though. At least not in the Finder or with common Terminal commands.

Yeah, antennas are connected with cables, so that should be possible.

I don’t know how effective it would be, though. I wonder if it would still get a very weak signal even without the external antenna.

The camera/mic kill switch sounds legit.

The radio “kill switch” is just airplane mode. (Or rather, airplane mode as it used to be, since now it doesn’t actually turn off wi-fi or bluetooth by default in AOSP. But it’s still possible to turn off all the radios on any phone, so it’s weird to promote this as a special feature.)

I suspect it is not possible to implement a physical kill switch on radios with off-the-shelf SOCs since the radios are integrated (I think).

LOL. Smaller battery, too. What exactly is an upgrade from the previous version? They went from a SD 7+ Gen 3 to an 8s Gen 3, which is barely an upgrade at all.

I’m sure the price comparisons will vary based on country, but I’ve seen the OnePlus 13R below $500 pretty routinely on oneplus.com this year. Right now it’s $550 but if I remember right, it was cheaper at launch and a few times since.

I was about to say this.

If they can’t give me a callback number that is publicly listed on their web site, then they’re most likely a scammer.

With Google, however, this is a scarier proposition than with most companies. If someone from my phone company, or my bank, or my insurance company called me, I could very easily call the actual company and talk to a human to confirm. I have no idea how I could ever talk to a human at Google. I’m not sure they even have a public phone line.

And malicious actors all over the world. Don’t forget that they are also sharing exploits with malicious actors all over the world, several months before deploying fixes for those exploits.

What could possibly go wrong?!

Unfortunately, you still need a level of trust with Proton. Even aside from trusting that they will not bend to pressure to terminate your service, you’re also trusting them with your network of contacts, because metadata (including the sender, recipient, and subject line) are not end-to-end encrypted in Proton.

Just wear disposable faces.

You humans wear the same face your entire life and then get upset when people recognize it?! Get over yourself! Aside from the obvious privacy issue, let’s be real: it’s also gross.

Good to hear. For context, I made the switch late last year, so my experience may be outdated.

I use Koreader on Android (available on F-Droid or Google Play).

It works. Configuring fonts is a bit confusing — every time I start a new book that uses custom fonts, I need to remind myself how to override it so it uses my prefs. But aside from that, it does what I need. Displaying text is not rocket science, after all.

I used to like Librera, but I had to ditch it because its memory usage was out of control with very large files. Some of my epubs are hundreds of megabytes (insane, yes, but that’s reality) and Librera would lag for several seconds with every page turn. Android would kill it if I ever switched apps because it used so much memory. I had a great experience with it with “normal” ebooks though. It was just the big 'uns that caused issues.

Apple owns the entire 17.0.0.0/8 block (they made out like bandits on that one back in the 80s!).

Amazon publishes the IP ranges of AWS here: https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json . That doesn’t include other Amazon services or inactive IPs, though.

This Github tracks Amazon’s IP blocks: https://gist.github.com/atoonk/0ee3f5bebcea874f6032215f16c3c30a . Not sure how up to date or accurate it is. Interestingly, they say Amazon owns the entire 3.0.0.0/8 block, which is news to me. If true, someone should update Wikipedia’s List of assigned /8 IPv4 address blocks.

Not sure about the others. There are some well-maintained block lists for Google and Meta/Facebook domains, and I suppose you could dig through those like /u/Dataprolet@discuss.tchncs.de suggested. e.g. for Google, there’s this one: https://github.com/nickspaargaren/no-google. This will be difficult since domains are rapidly moving targets. They can come and go at a moment’s notice, and the IPs can be reassigned just as easily. IP addresses are also moving targets but since there’s a limited supply there’s less turnover.

I think it’s the opposite. It takes work to implement restrictions. And they they’re presumably going to need ongoing work to patch workarounds. The restrictions would be on top of the standard functionality. They can’t remove or simplify anything by restricting app installations.

So Branch reneged on their agreement? Super scummy.

I’ve been using Lawnchair ever since the buyout was announced. It’s a downgrade from Nova tbh but it’s good enough.

That can’t be good. But I guess it was inevitable. It never seemed like Arc had a sustainable business model.

It was obvious from the get-go that their ChatGPT integration was a money pit that would eventually need to be monetized, and…I just don’t see end users paying money for it. They’ve been giving it away for free hoping to get people hooked, I guess, but I know what the ChatGPT API costs and it’s never going to be viable. If they built a local-only backend then maybe. I mean, at least then they wouldn’t have costs that scale with usage.

For Atlassian, though? Maybe. Their enterprise customers are already paying out the nose. Usage-based pricing is a much easier sell. And they’re entrenched deeply enough to enshittify successfully.