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26 votes
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Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp are all down
47 votes -
Company that routes SMS for all major US carriers was hacked for five years
27 votes -
Take a look inside Steam Deck
33 votes -
Twitter testing prompts on Android and iOS for 'intense' conversations
@Twitter Support: Ever want to know the vibe of a conversation before you join in? We're testing prompts on Android and iOS that give you a heads up if the convo you're about to enter could get heated or intense.This is a work in progress as we learn how to better support healthy conversation.
4 votes -
More details about Facebook's October 4th outage
10 votes -
Telegram founder says over seventy million new users joined during Facebook outage
15 votes -
Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet
11 votes -
What's your smart home setup?
Does anyone else here have a smart home setup? I've been building mine over the 7 or 8 years now in fits and starts. At first, it was smart lights in an apartment and then grew to include smart...
Does anyone else here have a smart home setup?
I've been building mine over the 7 or 8 years now in fits and starts. At first, it was smart lights in an apartment and then grew to include smart door locks. I bought a house and it now remotes, motion/door sensors, light switches, and more.
After trying all of the platforms you can think of (Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Homekit, Homekit + Homebridge, Home Assistant, and more), I settled on Home Assistant earlier this year. As I've bought stuff over the years, I've tried to get things that support more than just one platform to avoid being too locked in to one ecosystem. Apple's Home platform is nice, but I can't use it if I want to switch to an Android phone.
Like many of us, I've had some free time during the pandemic, so I put some work into getting Home Assistant up and running. It's definitely not for the average consumer. It requires quite a bit of manual editing of code to get it working perfectly but I've spent the past few months learning how to customize it and get things working just how I want them.
I've also been working toward replacing the few components that rely on cloud services with equivalents that can work locally, so I'm not beholden to a cloud service that could disappear eventually.
I also started automating more and more things:
- I added a Zigbee controller and a bunch of motion sensors to automatically turn lights on and off as people enter/leave rooms.
- Turn on the lights for my dogs if no one is home at dusk.
- A very nice bedtime routine that turns off all the lights in the house, turns on the bedroom TV, arms the security system and then turns on the bedroom lights and slowly fades them out over the next half hour. That last one has been great for helping me get to sleep.
- My favorite is an NFC tag hidden under the living room coffee table that I can scan. It turns on the TV and receiver, switches to the correct inputs and turns on the light strips I have around the living room. If my wife isn't home, it also turns off all the other lights in the house.
I'd love to hear what other people have been doing.
10 votes -
Is it me or are "news" articles on the web getting more and more irritating to read
I've recently experienced something multiple times and wanted to see if others are seeing this. I'm seeing various news articles where the first few paragraphs basically say the exact some...
I've recently experienced something multiple times and wanted to see if others are seeing this. I'm seeing various news articles where the first few paragraphs basically say the exact some information over and over again 3 or 4 times in slightly different ways. My most recent experience was this article about some hackers selling information on billions of Facebook users.
The article starts off with the title "Personal Information of More Than 1.5 Billion Facebook Users Sold on Hacker Forum". Straightforward and to the point. Next we get this paragraph in bold:
The private and personal information of over 1.5 billion Facebook users is being sold on a popular hacking-related forum, potentially enabling cybercriminals and unscrupulous advertisers to target Internet users globally.
Next is a bullet list of the highlights of the incident:
Highlights:
- Data scrapers are selling sensitive personal data on 1.5 billion Facebook users.
- Data contains users’: name, email, phone number, location, gender, and user ID.
- Data appears to be authentic.
- Personal data obtained through web scraping.
- Data can be utilized for phishing and account takeover attacks.
- Sold data claimed to be new from 2021.
This rehashes the number (1.5 billion) and place (Facebook), but does contain new information like what was leaked, and some unsubstantiated claims about whether it's authentic and how it was obtained.
The next paragraph repeats the 1.5 billion number a fourth time, and repeats that the data is available on a hacker forum. Two paragraphs later, we get another list of bullet points which are identical to the 2nd bullet point above; namely that the info contains:
According to the forum poster, the data provided contains the following personal information of Facebook users:
- Name
- Location
- Gender
- Phone number
- User ID
At this point I stop reading because I mistakenly think that I'm re-reading the same paragraph over and over again. It's an incredibly unpleasant experience.
Is anyone else seeing this? I've been seeing this not just on smaller sites like the one linked here, but on major news sites like CNBC and CNN, too. I know that news sites are having their budgets slashed, etc., but I literally can't read articles like this. I mean my brain just won't let me complete them because it thinks it's caught in a loop or something. It's hard to describe.
18 votes -
Bangle.js 2 is a hackable, open source smartwatch that runs JavaScript
12 votes -
Facebook thrives on criticism of “disinformation”
11 votes -
DeepMind worked with UK weather forecasters to create a model that was better at making short term predictions than existing systems
9 votes -
US phone companies must now block carriers that didn’t meet FCC robocall deadline
18 votes -
The unbelievable grimness of /r/HermanCainAward, the subreddit that catalogs anti-vaxxer COVID deaths
30 votes -
BlueStacks X is a new and free way to play Android games in your browser
8 votes -
The value of in-house expertise
8 votes -
Imgur has been acquired by MediaLab (owner of Whisper, Kik, WorldStarHipHop, Amino, Genius, etc.)
26 votes -
Spaces launch in Element
9 votes -
In 2030, you won't own any gadgets
13 votes -
Rolling with the Holmies
1 vote -
Manufacturers will be forced to create a universal charging solution for phones and small electronic devices, under a new rule proposed by the European Commission
42 votes -
Microsoft, Google, Facebook and other tech firms are pressing lawmakers to stop prosecutors from secretly snooping on private accounts
3 votes -
Why Telegram had to follow Apple and Google when they suspended a voting app
9 votes -
Facebook paid FTC $4.9B more than required to shield Mark Zuckerberg, lawsuit alleges
11 votes -
Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, detained in China almost three years, now on plane home. Chinese tech executive Meng Wangzhou left Canada earlier Friday evening.
15 votes -
DuckDuckGo goes carbon negative
24 votes -
Twitter rolls out tipping with bitcoin, explores verifying NFT profile pics
7 votes -
Apple will not reinstate Epic’s Fortnite developer account
11 votes -
Adam Savage's "A Tour of Grant Imahara's Shop" left untouched since his passing
11 votes -
Apple must allow other forms of in-app purchases, rules judge in Epic v. Apple
28 votes -
What is this Gemini thing anyway, and why am I excited about it?
13 votes -
Lithuania says throw away Chinese phones due to censorship concerns
15 votes -
iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 review: Foundational fixes
6 votes -
Peter Thiel's origin story: His ideology dominates Silicon Valley. It began to form when he was an angry young man.
11 votes -
Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord
46 votes -
What is Freenet?
10 votes -
Yelling at your computer can reduce its performance (2008)
9 votes -
Stockfish developers sue chessbase over GPL violations
9 votes -
A deeper look into how YouTube’s recommendation system works
14 votes -
Google, Apple remove Alexei Navalny app from stores as Russian elections begin
13 votes -
Spot at Kidd Creek Mine
3 votes -
Anonymous leaks gigabytes of data from alt-right web host Epik
31 votes -
The rise and ruin of Couchsurfing.com
10 votes -
Backpage founders' trial begins
6 votes -
Mozilla has defeated Microsoft’s default browser protections in Windows
18 votes -
Illinois officer claims Sheriff's office told him to play copyrighted music to shut down citizens' recordings
22 votes -
Billed as the most secure phone on the planet, An0m became a viral sensation in the underworld. There was just one problem for anyone using it for criminal means: it was run by the police
14 votes -
Apple / iOS rant
Having been on Android since day 1, I've had to pick up an iphone for work purposes recently. It's a great, high end one. The hardware is clearly fantastic. But the software. How do people put up...
Having been on Android since day 1, I've had to pick up an iphone for work purposes recently. It's a great, high end one. The hardware is clearly fantastic.
But the software. How do people put up with this? I've been trying to get accustomed to it, but it's so clearly lackluster.
Aside from a plethora of minor issues I've been encountering, what's most unbelievable to me is how clear the lock-in is all over the place.
Things like the story about all browsers having to use the Safari view really seep out, for example I can't change the launcher/home screen to something that doesn't suck (lets me position things around and doesn't have the display density of a toddler's typewriter).
And then it was a chore to even figure out how to disable iMessage (unpopular in Europe) so I'm only sending sms via the .. sms app.
Incompatibilities all over the place. Hotspot sharing doesn't work across my 6T and iPhone, it looks like iOS hotspots are again some kind of proprietary crap. Pictures and videos being in not quite standard formats. AirPods sound quality only being decent in the Apple ecosystem as well; couldn't release an Android app to support whatever Bluetooth enhancements they're doing?
And of course, the Lightning connectors which only exist in the apple ecosystem. I agree they feel better than usb-c even, but, more of those same incompatibilities.
It almost feels like a parallel universe where everything works slightly differently, and doesn't quite have as many freedoms.
I can't deny there's some nice things in there. I actually like Safari's hold-preview for example. I also appreciate the very fine grained permission system and warnings such as "such and such app has been accessing location in the background a lot". And FaceID is really well built. But, whew, i do not know how so many people swear by it.
Some things are just different and that's okay, but some things are shockingly inferior and incompatible Just Because, and that feels super insulting 🙃
Thanks for hearing my rant.
21 votes -
There is no algorithm for truth (presentation by Tom Scott)
7 votes