ahtaarra

Well, yes. But then again the 'Take Back Control' campaign had those UKIP buses saying "We send the EU £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead". An average person is a bit too removed from the GDP/investments conversations anyway.

This is such a shame. As a Pixel 6a user, I was always bothered by the battery situation of the phone but happily ran GrapheneOS on the device since buying. Recently the model had a battery combustion incident and now this. And there I was thinking of getting another Pixel phone down the line.

>TikTok also lied under oath about where US data is stored [1]. So I’m not sure why anyone should trust anything about them even if they are sold

Whether you trust a company that has been caught lying under oath is not the same as whether a company should be allowed to operate in a country.

>Even a code and security audit would leave a lot of room for things like AI driven feeds conducting propaganda campaigns. It’s not just code or infrastructure as a point in time but also data

Perhaps so, but that does not mean that those reviews should not be conducted before taking a step as big as forcing a sale. US govt could have given Tiktok US an ultimatum to go through one before coming to this conclusion.

>In the end it comes down to trust.

Yes, absolutely. The US does not trust Tiktok because it is Chinese owned, or is it because of privacy concerns, or is it both? And in any case, would determining the extent of control not help it understand the level of exposure? Grilling people at senate or select committee hearings can be revealing and is politically exciting but there was and still is more to be done to safeguard interests of people already on the platform.

Not the US govt. but independent audits of TikTok US from e.g. Oracle which never fully went through.

I find the Tiktok ban more of a geopolitics thing, less of a national security reponse.

You cannot just make assertions about something, and without substantiating them _adequately_, say 'they just told a lie, so everything that they said are lies'.

This is rooted in an anti-China rhetoric and only undermines the US position since for more than a decade many western companies' complaints against Chinese partners were about forced technology transfers.

Edit: correct wording and grammar

That is grossly inaccurate to say that. It was the US' concern that led Tiktok US to store US user data 'primarily' at US Oracle servers and work within the jurisdiction (with backups in Singapore) and many of the main concerns could have been dispelled by Tiktok getting a source code and security audit which did start but was paused because US govt never actually bothered to see whether the system in place with Oracle reviewing was enough.

By the same logic with the Israel-Palestine issue, the US is currently the only state visibly blocking calls for immediate ceasefires and establishing a Palestinian state (which is essential for a two-state solution) at the UN and it can therefore be called the enemy of the most of the world.

Edit: improve grammar and wording

I think the biggest deal-breaker for me is that they chose to go with /e/OS which is not something I enjoyed after trying it briefly since the skin over AOSP to me seemed ugly and bloated and change for the sake of it.

I would like to try out the recent Zefones and the nothing phone also seems good. But at the moment I have my Pixel 6a which is serving me well enough.

This article was written as a response: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/07/19/warner-bro...

>As with any college course, there are some required materials. Prospective students will need to have access to Age of Empires IV on Steam, the Microsoft Store, or with subscriptions to Xbox Game Pass for PC or Ultimate.

But also:

>All players will need to be signed into the game using an Xbox Live account, available for free.

Kmnnlm

Now I am not sure what exactly the issue is but this seems to be applicable to all results, at least on my particular setup.

On LibreWolf browser,

On mouse hover, the correct result urls show but then I right-click one, it shows something like:

https://duckduckgo.com/l/?uddg=<destination_url_here>&notrut...

But this same behaviour cannot be observed on Google/Searx on the same browser. It also even isn't observable with DDG on a FF nightly build on the same system and a FF stable build on a separate one.

Edit: url formatting

EDIT2: this behaviour seems to be limited to my particular setup and even a clean LibreWolf profile seems not to suffer from this issue. I apologise for the misunderstanding.

I recently made the swtich from DDG from Searx simply bevause right-clicking on a search result to copy the url resulted in a referrer link to be copied rather than the link of the result destination.

I think the danger of such a shift is that people will no longer have the same level of incentive to make 'good' videos but rather clickbait-y ones that go viral

Their patches can be found here: https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/browser/common/-/tree...

As a user concerned with the influence Google has over the web, forcing WebKit is something I can accept on iOS even though popular browsers on iOS, in my view, don't seem to be as feature-rich as their Android counterparts.

A worse offence is having a platform so locked down that clearing opened apps from the recents menu has to be done one by one instead of having a simple single "clear all" solution the alternative to which is using a 'tweak' which would necessitate having a jailbroken phone which would, in turn, involve connecting the phone to a computer to get jailbroken on each restart or a more convoluted method.

Another widely-known issue: when using apps with an alternative store like AltStore without jailbreak, you either need to connect to a Windows/MacOS or use some tweak to have on-device signing enabled within every seven days unless you have a Apple Developer subscription.

Moreover, iOS has "slide to poweroff" but there is no convenient way to restart[1]: Xiaomi copied the UX and even made it better by needing less steps. Even simple changes requiring steps so radical (perhaps not as radical as flashing a 'custom ROM' but is IMO less rewarding than the latter) and regular maintenance is telling.

1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201559

I think a part of it could be explained by the way things have been in recent times.

As of July 2021 (according to the linked metrics), ~25% of the displays used are 1366x768px while ~40% of them are 1080p. Yet when the "Proton" refresh aimed to promote usability and while certain level of cross-platform was reached, the increase of padding simply made the experiences of people using displays with "less than optimal" resolutions worse. While the proton's hidden and "unsupported" compact mode had a decent height for a 14" FHD display, the same did not look as good on my 15.6" display with the same resolution. When I complained on reddit like many others about the increase in whitespace, I don't think it was given what I believe to be a proper consideration. Why would the main menu be bigger despite having fewer items? And where are the icons? It was a concern back when it was in nightly and many of the concerns remain now even though it has had a stable release.

Another thing that is problematic is the colour-scheme. The newer style incorporates less contrasted colours and does away with what made the preceding Photon design better in certain ways: look at how the tabs on FF used to have a markedly different colour than their backdrop and how there used to be separators between tabs. The fact that the newer design is a bad one somehow eluded those in charge of it and the fact that the contrast between the active tab and its surrounding elements being low being an important issue is an afterthought is telling.

Moreover, the dropdown for the megabar suggestions used to have full-window width but now it is limited to the megabar width for no apparent reason other than looking "cool" (which it does not btw; especially when you compare it to Chromium's counterpart). They introduced the megabar-expansion-on-focus behaviour, kept a config to disable it for a major release or two and then dumped the old one. Also, when you selected multiple tabs, upon a right-click, it used to tell you the count of selected tabs - which no longer seems to be the case. Needless to say, looking at userChrome.css to be _the_ solution for undesirable changes would not work well for anyone in the long run.

Firefox, unlike Chromium-based browsers, does not support XDG base dir spec. It does not bother me very much and neither does FF flickering every once in a while on my main system. What bothers me is that with each new release I feel like FF is losing bits of its magic. Back when FF Quantum was released and was stripped of what many considered the level of flexibility which appealed to them, I was concerned but ultimately accepted it. But this time around the changes feel like marketing speak. Mozilla already has a discourse instance but post-Proton-release they also have a crowdicity instance...

The way things have been going is genuinely upsetting and many users are just reacting to that.

Scroll probably would have worked well with Pocket because the former could have increased user engagement (and, in turn, help better/newer stories end up in the top posts/popular category) while in the latter support for some paywalled content-providers could be added under a single subscription system.

There is a Firefox addon called 'Google container' on AMO.

I would get rid of Stocks, TV and Home apps but for that you apparently need to disable System Integrity Protection from Recovery. Also, I'd rather enable applications from all sources permitted to be run because you already get prompted when running those for the first time (using `sudo spctl --master-disable` which is reversible). I do not download apps from random sources or use pirated stuff so I'm less willing to put up with that sort of restrictions. Also `AppCleaner` is something I think is a must-have on a system because of files being left over when an app is deleted.

>Mozilla doesn't owe you anything. You think you can do better? Go build a better browser that's free yourself.

So criticising an entity that claims to be creating a freer internet somehow requires us to do better than it has have?

Of course we have the right to challenge a public claim that is not accurately made. I can't use FF to group call using FB and Google Meet but I don't seem to mind that but when you remove choices (e.g. Requiring the user to change profile-specific about:config flags and subsequently forcing users to resort to a custom userCSS file which requires not only having a legacy feature manually enabled but also a bit of know-how to remove the new behaviour after introducing a new megabar that seemingly adds absolutely nothing useful to the UX and trying to prematurely push a complete redesign of the Android browser to the masses without even considering the number of things it is going to break) without a proportionate incentive to do so, I draw the line there. I'm still using FF (both on my PC and my Phone) but I'm nonetheless saddened by what seems to be happening there.

but you have to close that login dialog every single time you use that App store to download apps which, for me, is infuriating

A guy I know bought the base iPhone 11 Pro model for $1400 in my country because he needed it for the 'ecosystem' and because the cheaper iPhone 11 wasn't 'good enough' for him while not even having an iPhone-specific use case

My Windows 10 Home Single Language license cost the OEM $50 AFAIK and despite that MS decided to put placeholder tiles on the start menu which are replaced with apps (e.g. Candy Crush) once you connect to the internet after setting up the OS and those are finished being downloaded.

Xbox app can be uninstalled, but not Xbox Game Bar? Bing on the Start menu search which for some reason I can't disable because there isn't any straightforward option for that.

When I try to download an app from Windows Store, the instant I press 'GET' button a dialogue window asking me to log into my MS account is opened upon closing which I can proceed to download the app.

Using Windows only for gaming means there is not a lot to gain from having work things opened while having the game running.

If you are going to use Windows for work alongside gaming, wouldn't game launching being so convenient affect your focus?

Also, if you even think about compilation/rendering, if those are supposed to take long enough to complete so as to let you game long enough, wouldn't the game also use some of the system resources, maybe just enough to make the work even longer to complete?