You’re not surprised. I’m not surprised. People who end up with this feature enabled without having fully understood it or intending to turn it on are surprised.

I’m not sure how much of this is people not thinking things through and how much is Meta being scumbags. There’s probably a little of both.

There was a time Facebook chat would share precise locations with every message by default. None of the people who sent me their location along with a message knew they were doing that when I told them.

This is an ass-covering response to school shootings, because some of the shooters have expressed their intent before.

A strip search obviously isn’t necessary even if it’s a credible threat; a metal detector wand and basic pat down is more than enough to ensure someone doesn’t have a gun. This wasn’t a credible threat though, and a chat with the school counselor would have been the right way to handle this.

Snapchat’s automated detection software picked up the comment, the company alerted the FBI, and the girl was arrested on school grounds within hours.

Someone should tell the kids about Signal.

As for monitoring on school computers, that seems OK to me if it’s disclosed to the students and parents in advance. What’s problematic is the responses, which seem much more focused on ass-covering than student welfare. I imagine most 13 year olds have made jokes about killing people once or twice and any adult with common sense would be able to tell they’re jokes.

Not Lemmy, unless the post tags a community.

And they learned that the left is bad rather than that authoritarianism is bad. Wrong lesson.

There’s an argument for labeling so people can make an informed choice; I would actively seek it put for ethical reasons while som might avoid it.

I can only think of bad reasons for an outright ban.

No. States can ban local sales of products that are legal in other states. A common example is that some states ban guns with certain features.

a lot of them are falling for the privately educated ex city trader Farages nonsense that he’s a “man of the people”

This parallels Trump, but I think it’s mostly not that people are really fooled into believing these wealthy politicians are just like them. I think the attraction is more that the current system isn’t working for a lot of people and hasn’t been for a long time. Someone who offers to tear it down can attract a large following even if they don’t have a good proposal for what to replace it with.

It took a while for me to see that because I find the racist and nationalist beliefs of the likes of Trump, Farage, and the AFD so appalling it’s hard to see anything else.

Yes, but Musk makes inappropriate offers to impregnate women regularly, so this isn’t surprising.

A flashlight is literally one of the simplest electronic devices there is

You might be surprised at everything going on inside a modern flashlight. I’ll grant that it’s probably easier to find room for extra seals around the port than in a smartwatch though.

If you mean a USB-C port in general, they can be made waterproof. If you mean something specific to putting one in the most compact form factor possible, that might be true.

They don’t have to offer backroom incentives to the sort of organizations that want to use attestation. That would be a good future target for antitrust courts, as I’m pretty sure Google’s primary motivation to add it was Amazon launching a phone in 2014 without Google services. Amazon didn’t need Google’s help to fail at that, but perhaps the next company to try was dissuaded.

As Apple recently discovered, willful noncompliance with the antitrust court is a bad plan. Google will probably be wary of backroom deals in the short term.

If you’re a citizen of an EU country, you should contact your politicians to tell them not to, maybe they won’t.

It only has to pass once, and they keep trying.

Oh, no doubt they would if they could. I’m not saying they’re more ethical than Google; I’m saying they’re less powerful than Google.

Still ironic though that Epic games is the main proponent, but yet they do the exact same thing on their store paying for exclusives.

The tactic only becomes illegal when it confers the ability to exclude competitors from the market.

Google has successfully excluded all meaningful competitors from the Android app distribution market. Even big companies like Samsung and Amazon have been unable to operate a profitable app store. Epic is not likely to exclude competitors from the game store market in the near future.

From the article:

developers can opt out if they don’t want their apps to be available more widely

So it won’t affect that.

This is typical of forum software. Some have access controls, but they’re at the admin/moderator level.

Matrix is commonly used for public, discoverable rooms, much like IRC or Discord. Perhaps it’s not good for that use case, but the author seems to wish it was.

An effective spam prevention approach is a basic feature of any public communication service that reaches a certain size. Perhaps keyword filtering as the author suggests isn’t the right approach, but some rate limits would help:

• Private messages from a new contact could notify just once until approved instead of once per message.
• Servers could limit the number of outstanding message requests, with a low limit for new accounts.

That’s interesting given the office he’s seeking has very little power to do something about it.