I do agree that they are very close; maybe I’m an Apple apologist, but I put ICEBlocker in the same class as Tea. They both claimed to be to protect their target audience; Tea was exposed as having been Vibe Coded by someone who knew SFA about user data security and ICEBlocker had a huge honeypot of user data that the government would love to subpoena.

That is exactly right. But the demographic of Pixel owners likely to install GrapheneOS (or Sailfish or Ubuntu Touch or whatever) and the demographic of GrapheneOS users likely to buy a Pixel probably has a fair overlap.

Long-term support is never something that Normies (that don’t want iPhones) contemplate. They would rather buy the cheapest phone; they don’t see the value in a software vendor supported phone. That is why Samsung is more of a household name than Pixel.

Google have also shown that their long-term support is pointless when they pivot and implement their own version of Apples “walled garden” on the Play Store and the Android ecosystem.

Their implied guarantee of openness is just as facetious as Apples implied guarantee of privacy.

A gold or yellow wash should salvage them.

A mottled tan “filter” at the other end will also make them more cigarette-like.

I’m surprised it isn’t more.

Pixels are the reference platform for a lot of open-source phone operating systems. A disproportionate number of people who purchased Pixels are the type of person who did believe Googles motto of “Don’t be Evil”, even after Google abandoned the motto.

Now that Google is inarguably Evil (not Musk Evil, but definitely more Evil than Apple), these people are searching for solutions. They are gun-shy and are not likely to get an Evil iPhone, have a large investment in the Android ecosystem so are unlikely to pivot to Linux Phone, and the niche Android variants are more likely to be assassinated by Google.

GrapheneOS is the obvious choice. I’m surprised it isn’t a higher percentage.

One thing (only good thing) about Vista was that it rationalised Printer (and Scanner) Drivers.

The UI was consistent between printer manufacturers and everything could be accessed through one interface.

Then the Printer manufacturers complained to MS because they couldn’t have infinite branding all over the interface and the feature was dumbed down in 7.

Meanwhile Apple used the same UI for all Printers (based on CUPS) and didn’t even let a company logo appear in the interface.

Not all the Apple CUPS drivers were available for Linux CUPS so unfortunately Linux (at the time) still had their device compatibility issues.

The thing is that these reports (and training material and industry analysis) is Deloitte’s bread-and-butter.

If they have begun outsourcing their product to an LLM, and believe that the new is comparable to the product they previously provided, they are admitting that everything they have ever produced is garage and no one should be paying them anything.

Advanced Data Protection does require all iCloud Ecosystem devices to be current.

Not every person can afford the latest and greatest.

I’m gonna play devils advocate here (and probably be monstrously downvoted);

ICEBlock stored the location data of all its users on Apples iCloud Servers. This the perfect target for ICE; a complete database of locations of every person who doesn’t want ICE to know where they are.

One assumption is that that Apple realised how tempting this data is to the current demonstrative administration and purged it before ICE could get their civil-liberty-abusing mitts on it.

Insert “2025 year of Linux Desktop” meme.

Honestly though, the only thing keeping gamers on Windows are the requirement of these Rootkits and inertia.

I let my Phone (and CarPlay) map my route for me; but I do like throwing a spanner in its workings by deliberately taking a wrong turn to explore.

Previously, I would do the same, but then I would have to pull over and spend 15 minutes browsing the Street Directly trying to figure out where I was before I was able to continue my journey.

Having a frictionless (and relatively) safe way of exploring has empowered me.

There were rumours that our two local Street Directories had been made Out-Of-Print. (Melway and UBD)

They are both still active, and a great resource for historians, but their distribution has been seriously curtailed.

We also have a collection of Adventure maps called Rooftops which still have great circulation despite the proliferation of Off-Road mapping apps.

Having offline-paper maps are invaluable when in certain conditions. I have been told that Rooftops are generated by one Cartographer who uses a Pushbike as his exclusive surveying vehicle. (Citation needed)

They were also semi structured. All my school-friends started with the same first area code and first chunk. I just had to know where they lived and remember the last 4 digits.

Mobile Phone numbers were randomly generated, and unless a social group deliberately got sequential numbers because we all got our phones at the same time, there would be no way to associate numbers.

I just checked my Cell Provider, they no longer offer Sony Xperia 10 phones!

They do offer a “Sonim XP10” which I find absolutely hilarious! It is the most blatant case of Trade Dress abuse since the Samsung Blackjack!

—— Edit: Turns out that none of my regions Cell Providers sell Sony phones any more.

That sounds like you can be replaced with a LLM. Let’s do that and save the company millions of dollars a year while us Plebeians got on with doing the real work and making money.

Glorified Lorem Ipsum.

90% of non-functional code, maybe.

These are all very good questions, which will all need to be answered eventually, and need to be considered at the platforms move forward.

A lot of these problems could be solved if Governments and business entities started running their own Mastodon servers, and other platforms (as appropriate).

Unfortunately government and businesses are increasingly outsourcing their IT infrastructure to commercial cloud services, rather than keeping them in-house.

ActivityPub is a major threat to the commercial social networks.

These laws are purely a way to regulate communication, but they are effectively a way to prevent new social networks from becoming established.

This is why the really big social networks are welcoming them with open arms. Even the criminal social networks are secretly pleased with them.

Laws only affect people too poor to manipulate them and too honest to disobey them.

That would explain why he had to check in with his FSB handler in Alaska last week.