A second backdoor. Windows also uploads your BitLocker keys to Microsoft’s servers by default, just in case somebody needs to get in later.

This looks more comprehensive than Untracker, but maybe it is too complicated for some people?

Why RIP? It’s still alive.

This isn’t new. Even before AI, failing companies would use layoffs as a sort of loan on their quarterly numbers. If you lay off your employees, you’re really profitable for as long as you can continue collecting money for the work the employees had already done.

Phishing campaign authors will love this. It normalizes users scanning barcodes they can’t read to go to unknown locations on a device where it’s harder to see the URL and there’s no IT watching for phishing activity.

I already switched to Immich. It’s pretty good at finding pictures, it doesn’t require a subscription, and it isn’t Google.

Starcraft is from before ubiquitous home internet. You could use your modem to directly dial your friend without an ISP. There’s no way it requires online activation.

My old phone was constantly recommending that I send YouTube videos with spy query parameters to the e-mail address of a dead relative instead of Untracker. It’s like they designed the system to push users towards doing what they want users to do instead of helping users do what users want to do.

I have to use a Mac and I can confidently say that the experience of using a Mac has not gotten better every year. It just doesn’t get worse as quickly as Windows. It may be true that Apple Silicon has gotten better every year, but so has AMD.

Give it a few months and your phone will helpfully install it for you.

The education system has been killing critical thinking for decades. Why start trying to save it now?

Techdirt says 2,456 files as if it’s 2,456 separate things, but it’s actually just the source code for their web frontend and that source code is comprised of 2,456 files. Normally, the source code for the web frontend isn’t a big deal, but apparently the frontend that they’re exposing is for a service that normal people aren’t supposed to be able to see, and the capabilities of the service are made public. There’s still a lot that could be going on behind the scenes and not surfaced through the frontend.

I think this is an important feature for religiously observant Jews. There’s a loophole where you’re not allowed to use appliances or something, but if the appliance just happens to operate itself on a prearranged schedule then apparently that’s okay. In the manual it may be called Shabbat or Sabbath mode. Without a battery backup it adds next to no per-unit hardware cost if the device already has a cooking timer or automatic safety shutoff feature so it’s probably standard on most ovens and microwaves in markets that have Jewish customers. You may also notice this behavior with elevators that automatically travel on a schedule.

In old computers, CD audio worked by physically connecting an audio cable between the optical drive and the sound card. PC emulators can emulate this, but it’s more complicated for CD emulators running on a real computer.

I’m not sure. If non-VPN connections are blocked, any non-VPN IP that is leaked cannot be confirmed to be yours, because a connection cannot be established to that IP. However, if the client can see those unusable addresses, it can still send those addresses over the VPN connection as part of ICE and that may be enough of a problem for you.

WebRTC isn’t magic. WebRTC does not bypass a VPN, nor is it the only–or even most common–way that software on your phone, Android or otherwise, can exfiltrate potentially sensitive information, intentionally or unintentionally. The way WebRTC on your phone might leak an IP is that during ICE, which is used by more than just WebRTC, the phone’s local IP addresses may be sent, and IPv6 addresses on your WiFi or cell connection may be globally unique. IPv4 local addresses will almost certainly be meaningless, private addresses due to IPv4 address space exhaustion, and any non-local address will be from your VPN gateway.

You cannot block ICE per app or system wide because it is not a system facility, and the permissions required to implement it on Android are not very specific.

He’s CEO of a large American company. Whether the company succeeds or fails, he’ll be left with more money than most people see in their life. It’s not make-or-break for him.

Google Search being replaced by Gemini makes it easy for Google to have big AI numbers. Bing never got over its reputation of having bad result quality, and it’s only the default search engine on Windows PCs that don’t have Chrome or Firefox installed. My friend uses Windows and iOS and always sends me links to Gemini results, which normally are only slightly worse than “I’m feeling lucky.”

You’ll still be able to get consoles and cloud stream. The real problem is that the power to create is being taken away from regular people.

Most updates are a waste of time on my phone. Open a streaming media player for a closed streaming service and before it let’s you watch anything it reminds you that you can spend a minute or two updating to a new version indistinguishable from the o/d version. Who knows what they’re changing because the attack surface is basically nonexistent and bugs aren’t being fixed.