38, great at masking. I work in a highly social enviornment (hospo) and have been for ~20 years.
Makes me feel like a sociopath but, people are relatively basic. A few quirky comments or general niceties go a long way for directing interactions the way you want them to transpire.
Its not been without its issues / hardships, lots of socially exhausted days, awkward interactions and one complete breakdown for 6 months. Saying so I'm well ontop of interacting with the humans and knowing my social limits / when I'm going overboard in a conversation but man it's taken me a while.
Microsoft Windows be like
Clear cookies and site data (Firefox) then refresh the page.
You can continue to download until you hit the limit again, rinse and repeat.
Ladybird in a few years, forks of Firefox for now.
The term paper launch has been kicking around for a while now.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=paper+launch
Who calls it that - if it's a spade, it's a spade.
From memory a paper launch used to mean something that only existed on paper / a press launch; where no consumer could purchase the product. Considering stock quantities that GN has sourced for the US it's near enough a paper launch.
Don't make excuses for the rat, he's born into privilege and wants to keep it that way.
The bloke parades around expecting people to believe he's a top tier gamer, being able to put in 16+ hours a day grinding at POE2 whilst being a CEO of multiple companies. All the while not being able to comprehend one of the most used interfaces on that platform.
But yeah nah, he's a good bloke. I'm sure he's done something good in he's lifetime.
Discord is trash, had issues with a KBDFans product, something as simple as a search of a forum would have given me the solution. I had to talk to a human to get the required information. They sent me a link to a firmware to download and all was good.
If I was able to search a forum it would have been a 2 minute job, but I wasted someone else's time, on the other side of the globe.
I've used PayPal in 4 a couple of times.
Budgeting pretty hard, sometimes it's easier to spread the load out over 4 weeks for something that would eat my whole weekly personal spendings in one swoop.
My takeaway from that article is they don't, and haven't.
The splash screen for installing a package not from the play store is there to protect the end user. Without it there would probably be a much worse unwanted software issue on android.
I've been "side loading" or just "installing" applications on my android devices since the nexus one, without the help of the play store.
Plenty of nix'd config, nix-colors theming for most applications. I've only been using linux for around 6 months, NixOS has really clicked with me.
My config might be sub-optimal in areas, but its gone through some heavy changes since its inception.
My pixel had issues with the screen (p7p) contacted google, within a couple of days I had an advance replacement device in my hands and a return label for the faulty device.
My watch is giving me issues currently so I'm planning on hitting up support about that too, as it's not within what I expected from the watch (won't connect via bt after a month or so, requiring a factory reset).
In AUS we have great consumer protections, if my watch continues on the way it is currently I'll be returning it for a full refund.
Article without the paywall / x article per y limit:
www.wired.com
A New Anonymous Phone Carrier Lets You Sign Up With Nothing but a Zip Code
Andy Greenberg
19 - 23 minutes
Nicholas Merrill has spent his career fighting government surveillance. But he would really rather you didn’t call what he’s selling now a “burner phone.”
Yes, he dreams of a future where anyone in the US can get a working smartphone—complete with cellular coverage and data—without revealing their identity, even to the phone company. But to call such anonymous phones “burners” suggests that they’re for something illegal, shady, or at least subversive. The term calls to mind drug dealers or deep-throat confidential sources in parking garages.
With his new startup, Merrill says he instead wants to offer cellular service for your existing phone that makes near-total mobile privacy the permanent, boring default of daily life in the US. “We're not looking to cater to people doing bad things,” says Merrill. “We're trying to help people feel more comfortable living their normal lives, where they're not doing anything wrong, and not feel watched and exploited by giant surveillance and data mining operations. I think it’s not controversial to say the vast majority of people want that.”
That’s the thinking behind Phreeli, the phone carrier startup Merrill launched today, designed to be the most privacy-focused cellular provider available to Americans. Phreeli, as in, “speak freely,” aims to give its user a different sort of privacy from the kind that can be had with end-to-end encrypted texting and calling tools like Signal or WhatsApp. Those apps hide the content of conversations, or even, in Signal’s case, metadata like the identities of who is talking to whom. Phreeli instead wants to offer actual anonymity. It can’t help government agencies or data brokers obtain users’ identifying information because it has almost none to share. The only piece of information the company records about its users when they sign up for a Phreeli phone number is, in fact, a mere ZIP code. That’s the minimum personal data Merrill has determined his company is legally required to keep about its customers for tax purposes.
By asking users for almost no identifiable information, Merrill wants to protect them from one of the most intractable privacy problems in modern technology: Despite whatever surveillance-resistant communications apps you might use, phone carriers will always know which of their customers’ phones are connecting to which cell towers and when. Carriers have frequently handed that information over to data brokers willing to pay for it—or any FBI or ICE agent that demands it with a court order
Merrill has some firsthand experience with those demands. Starting in 2004, he fought a landmark, decade-plus legal battle against the FBI and the Department of Justice. As the owner of an internet service provider in the post-9/11 era, Merrill had received a secret order from the bureau to hand over data on a particular user—and he refused. After that, he spent another 15 years building and managing the Calyx Institute, a nonprofit that offers privacy tools like a snooping-resistant version of Android and a free VPN that collects no logs of its users’ activities. “Nick is somebody who is extremely principled and willing to take a stand for his principles,” says Cindy Cohn, who as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has led the group’s own decades-long fight against government surveillance. “He's careful and thoughtful, but also, at a certain level, kind of fearless.”
Nicholas Merrill with a copy of the National Security Letter he received from the FBI in 2004 ordering him to give up...
Nicholas Merrill with a copy of the National Security Letter he received from the FBI in 2004, ordering him to give up data on one of his customers. He refused, fought a decade-plus court battle—and won.
Photograph: Yael Malka
More recently, Merrill began to realize he had a chance to achieve a win against surveillance at a more fundamental level: by becoming the phone company. “I started to realize that if I controlled the mobile provider, there would be even more opportunities to create privacy for people,” Merrill says. “If we were able to set up our own network of cell towers globally, we can set the privacy policies of what those towers see and collect.”
Building or buying cell towers across the US for billions of dollars, of course, was not within the budget of Merrill’s dozen-person startup. So he’s created the next best thing: a so-called mobile virtual network operator, or MVNO, a kind of virtual phone carrier that pays one of the big, established ones—in Phreeli’s case, T-Mobile—to use its infrastructure.
The result is something like a cellular prophylactic. The towers are T-Mobile’s, but the contracts with users—and the decisions about what private data to require from them—are Phreeli’s. “You can't control the towers. But what can you do?” he says. “You can separate the personally identifiable information of a person from their activities on the phone system.”
Signing up a customer for phone service without knowing their name is, surprisingly, legal in all 50 states, Merrill says. Anonymously accepting money from users—with payment options other than envelopes of cash—presents more technical challenges. To that end, Phreeli has implemented a new encryption system it calls Double-Blind Armadillo, based on cutting-edge cryptographic protocols known as zero-knowledge proofs. Through a kind of mathematical sleight of hand, those crypto functions are capable of tasks like confirming that a certain phone has had its monthly service paid for, but without keeping any record that links a specific credit card number to that phone. Phreeli users can also pay their bills (or rather, prepay them, since Phreeli has no way to track down anonymous users who owe them money) with tough-to-trace cryptocurrency like Zcash or Monero.
Phreeli users can, however, choose to set their own dials for secrecy versus convenience. If they offer an email address at signup, they can more easily recover their account if their phone is lost. To get a SIM card, they can give their mailing address—which Merrill says Phreeli will promptly delete after the SIM ships—or they can download the digital equivalent known as an eSIM, even, if they choose, from a site Phreeli will host on the Tor anonymity network.
Phreeli’s “armadillo” analogy—the animal also serves as the mascot in its logo—is meant to capture this sliding scale of privacy that Phreeli offers its users: Armadillos always have a layer of armor, but they can choose whether to expose their vulnerable underbelly or curl into a fully protected ball.
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