I once had a phone reboot upon connecting to a specific hotel wifi network, then bootloop until I took it out of range. Sometimes things just break. Military interference seems unlikely; a phone carrier, and by proxy a government with jurisdiction over one can track any phone connected to the network regardless of the software running on it.

It’s useful to immediately save the logs from logcat when something like that happens. There’s often enough information in there to find out why a crash or reboot occurred, or at least what part of the OS was responsible for it.

I had hoped that as most younger adults now were kids who grew up with computers, the average person would have a pretty good understanding of how they work. I never expected everyone to be a programmer or sysadmin of course, but to have a general sense of things like whether data is stored on their device or remotely, how to find out if an app install is risky, and whether a prompt requesting permissions, a password, etc… is reasonable.

For the most part, I don’t think that has happened. The average person doesn’t know how to use a computer and isn’t going to learn.

Perhaps they aren’t lying, but claims about security often involve theoretical weaknesses that aren’t practical to exploit in the real world. Apple is very skilled at making sure those claims align with their business interests.

Four years ago there were refrigerator trucks full of corpses and a mob was storming the capitol to overthrow the government on behalf of a would-be dictator.

Nothing resembling either of those things has happened yet this year, so I think in a lot of ways we’re all better off regardless of our individual circumstances. Only the second one has much to do with who’s president though.

The user can toggle their operating system’s setting. During development, the developer can do it in their browser’s dev tools.

It doesn’t work so well in that direction. Lemmy doesn’t have a concept of content that isn’t posted to a community. If a Mastodon post tags a Lemmy community, it’s available as a normal Lemmy post, but otherwise it doesn’t exist.

I’m about 99% sure Threads uses automated spam/abuse filtering based on uncommon words present in posts that have recently been flagged as abusive. Somebody, perhaps several somebodies probably posted “follow my porn account on Pixelfed” or similar that Threads doesn’t like. I’d use something like that if I was making a huge social media thing because you can’t not at that scale.

And now I’m commenting from a lemmy.world account because Lemmy from Mastodon has some rough edges like the need to tag the community in my comment above to ensure it actually reaches the lemmy.world server.

Tumblr and Flickr are also talking about ActivityPub support, but it’s not clear if or when that will actually happen. It would make more sense to me for those services since they’re fairly small and it’s a way to substantially increase the possible audience. It’s not clear what Meta’s motivations are here, though a motivation some have proposed is that they’re trying to get in front of potential regulation. The EU Digital Markets Act, for example requires some services to interoperate with competitors, and having one of its new products join an established standard protocol is a way to say “you don’t need to regulate us, we already do the thing”.

I don’t think their blocking of comments mentioning Pixelfed is intentional. Pixelfed is not popular enough for Meta to care about as a competitor, and blocking mentions of competitors has never been among their tactics.

People make more complex decisions when they have multiple roles:

• As admin of pixelfed.social, dansup may have decided it is best for that community not to federate with Threads, at least at first
• As the lead developer of the Pixelfed software, he probably doesn’t like anyone censoring discussion of his software
• As an individual with an interest in social media, he has a Threads account and is participating in conversations there; he would probably like to be able to talk about the projects he’s working on

Mullvad offers a free, anonymous service.

I’m always surprised when people don’t use some level of adblocking. DNS-based on mobile and a browser extension on desktop seem like the bare minimum.

I think the design of media products around maximally addictive individually targeted algorithms in combination with content the platform does not control and isn’t responsible for is dangerous. Such an algorithm will find the people most susceptible to everything from racist conspiracy theories to eating disorder content and show them more of that. Attempts to moderate away the worst examples of it just result in people making variations that don’t technically violate the rules.

With that said, laws made and legal precedents set in response to tragedies are often ill-considered, and I don’t like this case. I especially don’t like that it includes Reddit, which was not using that type of individualized algorithm to my knowledge.

“Crime is down” isn’t a very engaging news story so it doesn’t get talked about enough.

No, we’re not all fucked. It’s actually a pretty good time to be alive.

• War and the threat of escalation are in the news, but so far this century has had far less warfare than the last.
• Crime is in the news, but crime rates are falling, and the 2020-21 peak did not reach the levels of the 1990s.
• Global warming is likely to cause significant harms, but if you’re in a relatively wealthy country, you’ll almost certainly be OK. Most people who aren’t will also be OK, but their risk exposure is higher.
• I’m genuinely concerned about rising far-right extremism, but structural protections against fascist dictatorship have held up pretty well in democratic countries.

“Things are mostly OK, but we should work on a few problems” doesn’t drive engagement. Nobody’s going to click your headline, vote on your post, or watch your video if you say that, so people saying it don’t get much visibility.

I assume the fact that the crystals are bigger means you require more.

OP seems to be using it to sweeten a drink, so the crystal size should only affect how long it takes to dissolve, not how sweet it tastes. The additional flavor from the molasses might make it seem a little less sweet than white sugar, but only a little.

States that didn’t change their drug policies are also experiencing an opioid crisis.

Here’s a video of a TED talk from 2018 talking about manually-generated brain-melting videos for kids. Teens and adults are watching variants of this crap now too.

Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

• I have enough toilet paper
• There are no refrigerator trucks full of corpses
• Nobody has made a serious attempt to overthrow the government this year

Yes, I think I’m better off than I was four years ago.

I just checked that old.reddit.com does work from a mobile browser without being logged in.

Reddit, and the early 2000s Internet culture that spawned it had a more absolute view of free speech than the modern consensus. Reddit’s rules were pretty much limited to:

• Don’t post things that are actually illegal to post
• Don’t break Reddit

The introduction of any other sitewide rules was controversial with the userbase at the time, and not because the average user was a creep who wanted to see teenagers in bikinis. People predicted (correctly) that other topics like piracy and darknet markets would eventually end up banned as Reddit tried to become more palatable to advertisers. People remain concerned that pornography will be banned or severely limited.

Its not that he loved the subreddit, his (and by extension reddit corp) sociopathic ass simply views all that stuff as page views

Let’s be fair to spez; there’s plenty to criticize him for, but he did not work at Reddit between roughly 2008 and 2016 when the jailbait controversy came up.