I’m old enough to remember the web being primarily text, and turning off automatic image loading being a good way to see fewer ads. I’m old enough to remember popup windows and popup blocking.
I suppose the underlying issue is that if something I don’t like happens on my computer, my first thought is to look for a way to change it, and most people don’t think about computers that way. I’m sad that most people don’t think about computers that way.
Right, I do understand that’s a limitation. I think I’m more puzzled that many people find the presence of ads in a device they paid for to be a minor issue rather than intolerable.
I haven’t moved to a privacy OS on Android yet because of money.
That’s entirely reasonable. You can still block most ads if you want to:
“But personalised ads are really convenient!”
Not seeing ads is really convenient, and I have trouble understanding why anyone wouldn’t block ads aggressively on every device they spend much time using in 2025.
To cover a couple common objections:
It’s a corporate/institutional device and I can’t
Then it’s the institution’s IT department I’m puzzled by. If I was running corporate IT, ad blocking would be part of the standard install. The FBI recommends it for security.
The device is too locked down for that
Why would you buy such a device, or continue using it now that you know better?
She says on social media.
I think it’s important to draw a distinction between places people go to talk to each other and places people go for a quick fix of content just entertaining enough they don’t need to do something harder.
The former is healthy, at least in moderation. The latter is probably harmful for most people most of the time.
Someone logging timestamps for messages received on both ends of a conversation would be able to determine that two people are probably talking to each other given enough data. Signal is probably not doing that, but Signal’s other security guarantees provided by an open source client that encrypts communications end to end hold even if the organization was infiltrated or taken over by a bad actor. The anonymity of participants in a conversation is not protected as strongly as the contents of messages.
Whenever The Verge interviews people from companies that have something to do with photography or image processing, they ask “what is a photograph?”. There doesn’t seem to be a consensus.
As a photographer, I’ve thought a fair amount about it. Many of the most famous pre-digital photographers did a lot of adjustment in the darkroom, and all digital photographs involve decisions about how photoreceptor data gets transformed into a viewable image, even if the photographer didn’t make them intentionally. Most of the time, most people still consider it photography and “real” with significant editing.
Where it becomes something else in my mind, or “fake” is if the image doesn’t reasonably represent light that reached the lens in the moment being depicted. There’s a whole lot of wiggle room there of course - photography is art, not math. Adding fire to something that wasn’t burning using editing software, however clearly crosses the line into “fake” for me if presented as a photograph, or digital art if it’s not.
I think the distinction is that in a fake photo, something you can see in the photo wasn’t really there. In a staged photo, the story the photo tells isn’t true to life.
The headline is unfair; the photo is staged, not fake.
Correct, though the car in question here is electric and will almost certainly use the motors to slow the car to reuse that energy. The motors should be able to stop the car even if the hydraulic brakes fail, and probably more effectively than a mechanical parking brake.
He’s clearly not an alien lizard like a Clinton.
Trump was friends with the Clintons before he ran for president against Hillary Clinton.
Trump also became friendly with Kim Jong Un after they met, having previously threatened him with nuclear war.
It is like paying to unlock satellite TV reception (even though we are receiving the signals the whole time).
It’s reasonable to charge for this because the value is in copyrighted content and a service that costs the provider money to operate. The same would apply for satellite radio in a car or an internet-based streaming service. It is not reasonable to charge for access to the adaptive suspension or seat warmers that are already in a car a customer bought. That breaks the traditional model of ownership.
An interesting middle ground might be to allow the owner to install arbitrary software on the car, and charge for the OEM adaptive suspension app. I think I would like a world where things work like that; OEMs would whine about security to no end.
I think it should be legal to attempt to decrypt satellite signals without paying; if the satellite service is designed well, it won’t be possible. All the anticircumvention laws should be repealed.
It’s an electronic parking brake. Those are common now because a small switch takes up less interior space than a lever for a cable-actuated parking brake, and the computer can disengage the parking brake if it detects that the driver is attempting to drive with it activated. The computer is involved in brake pad replacement to tell the parking brake motor to open to its widest position to accept new pads, and calibrate itself to their thickness.
This requires a special adapter and software subscription rather than a button on the infotainment screen because Hyundai is engaging in rent-seeking and perhaps trying to direct business to its dealers.
Beating animals to death is a crime most places, but calling the police about it would likely worsen OP’s situation.
not likely to affect users who can count to 20 without taking off their shoes
There are a surprising number of people who aren’t stupid, but never learned basic computer admin skills before getting a smartphone. There’s some debate going on over whether the onus is on the user to learn those skills or the OS vendor to make devices so appliance-like they’re not needed. I’m firmly in the former camp.
Can you? The blog post says it only works with Pixel 10 devices, which GrapheneOS doesn’t support yet. There’s no explanation for why it might need a specific model of phone.
A couple of them.
One, I met when we were both five years old, and I knew then he would end up in prison. He helped beat someone to death when he was 19 and went to prison.
Another I met when I was a child and he was an adult. I knew he wasn’t quite right, but I had no idea how bad it was. As a teenager, I had an encounter with him that almost turned violent. He later raped both his daughters and went to prison.
They have been for years. I had a 2016 Sony that definitely wasn’t a good value on paper. I accepted that because it was small.
I notice the page does have Google Analytics, which is the only thing that did get blocked.
This option is Windows-specific.