USB-A, FireWire and that video output converged to Thunderbolt, which also means I can connect several displays to e.g. a 2021 MacBook Pro. The separate headphones and microphone jacks got merged as well. After the whole Touch Bar brouhaha, the card reader and HDMI also made their return.
So the one connector we did lose is Ethernet. Which, to be fair, is a bummer indeed. Luckily, we can easily push 1 Gbps over Wi-Fi nowadays.
I don’t deny that Old Prey was an innovative game. But stating that everything that wasn’t Doom was stripped out while implying that nothing else was added in feels a bit disingenuous.
What aspects of the newer Prey make it more like Doom than the older Prey? To me, that’s kinda like saying, “System Shock was just Wolfenstein 3D 🎶 in space 🎶”
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. No ethical consumption under capitalism, amirite?
People wanna buy phones though.
It depends on whether you’re using apps that require Play Integrity attestation, like some banking apps do.
If that’s the case, consider the humble iPhone!
It really looks like Microsoft made the worst call with their Series S compatibility mandate. Now games come out so late that as an Xbox owner, you’re automatically a Patient Gamer, without the upsides. That is, if a port is released at all.
These days you can play games like Death Stranding more than half a year earlier on your iPhone.
I went to the HSBC Main Building, rode up the escalator to the retail banking department, and, after some waiting time, asked one exceptionally well dressed clerk for a simple checking account. Mostly, I wanted one because it makes paying for things easier in some specific corner cases. (Fortunately, 95% of the time you’ll be fine with just your Octopus card and any old contactless credit or debit card from wherever you’re from.)
After clarifying I wouldn’t be drawing a HK salary or taking profits from investments in HK securities, the very polite agent let me know that her company wasn’t terribly interested in accommodating me.
I think that’s fair, because there’s like at least half a dozen reasons this business relationship could go bad, and not a lot of upside for the bank. I wasn’t devastated or anything; I was pretty much just curious if it was possible at all, and under which circumstances.
When I went to ICBC in China a week later, I walked out of there with an account and a debit card in my name. Chinese banks just have a lot less abuse to deal with, I’d imagine.
This was me at HSBC in Hong Kong.
Granted, I neither live nor pay taxes there, so… fair
Utilization of models begets training of more models.
Kinda like CSAM.
I open new browser tabs and type into a pastebin.
Pastery going login-only majorly screwed me over; now I use GitHub gists.
It kind of has to be, if you’re trying to be persistent about the whole thing. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and burn out over all of the different threats we’re trying to defend against. I don’t see how you can keep at it for months or years if you feel no joy over it. But maybe being deathly, relentlessly afraid of the dangers around us is enough after all.
If you don’t even like doing this stuff, wouldn’t it be better to focus on measures that require little upkeep? This is what my example suggestion was getting at, something that’s as close to set-and-forget as possible, while getting you 90% of the way there. (Depending on your threat model, sure. If yours says that the sky is falling if Tim Apple gets your iCloud data, it certainly doesn’t apply.)
I’d sure hope so! Many of the things that privacy nuts like us do are not efficient uses of one’s time.
They might require constant vigilance. They might need recurring work for continued effectiveness. They might necessitate exposure to intrusive negative emotions (“what is Google doing this week?!”).
If you’re not having fun, focus on measures that you implement once and then never have to think about again.
For example, I wouldn’t recommend GrapheneOS to a journalist in an authoritarian regime. It might be “more secure”, but they have a job to do and can’t keep dicking around with obscure pointer authentication settings or whatnot. They should just get a current iPhone, enable Lockdown Mode if its tradeoffs are acceptable to them, and continue doing their best job, which isn’t “phone administration”.
LARPing as Jason Bourne, or prepping for the Rokobasiliskocalypse, is a hobby. It’s okay, I do it too. However, it’s not approachable or understandable to people who don’t share that hobby, or are not as alarmed at the general state of things as we are.
I used to run unbound on my laptop just so I could configure stuff like forwarding zones with more precision than what a stub resolver normally gives you.
It can also be your validating DNSSEC resolver, which also satisfied that sort of morbid curiosity in me.
In the age of DoT and DoH, with endpoints hardcoded in browser binaries, that sort of thing has a lot less punch than it used to. Even back then Go binaries would start ignoring your nsswitch.conf…
As long as everyone is having fun, I see no problem.
If you’re not having fun switching mail providers, researching Gecko forks, or being a part-time sysadmin for your Fairphone, you should probably stop doing those things.
There’s no easy answer to your questions. It depends on what threats you’re trying to defend against. If your primary concern is adversarial law enforcement with Cellebrite et al., a current iPhone, especially with Lockdown Mode enabled, is certainly the next best thing to Graphene that we have.
Personally, I have access to Private Relay, but never use it. That’s not because I don’t trust it, but because I only ever use VPNs to spoof my GeoIP. And you can’t do that with Private Relay.
A mask ROM is a kind of read-only memory where the desired data is directly etched into a semiconductor during the same photolithographic process that actually makes a circuit out of a planar sheet of silicon. It’s pretty much hard-wired data storage, with an indefinite lifespan.
As far as I remember, Game Cards are not mask ROM. In other words, they’ll eventually lose their data and become e-waste anyhow.
Even with Game Key Cards, an actual, physical object has to be produced, at drastically higher marginal cost than what a purely digital license costs in production (basically nothing). And there is a secondary market, which doesn’t exist in the digital realm.
Essentially, I don’t see the reasoning behind counting them as digital. All the aspects that seem relevant to any publisher (and, to a first approximation, any user that isn’t a conservationist) make them identical to physical sales.
Just “encrypted”? Probably iMessage.
I don’t know, since I didn’t have to specifically buy anything to get that throughput. So, in my case, it cost me nothing.
It was just an ISP-provided router and an older Mac Studio. I didn’t check but there’s a good chance the wireless link actually supports even higher bandwidth; at the time, I was bottlenecked by the 1 Gbps connection to my ISP.