Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.
It literally was though. Not a military intelligence tool, but a big business intelligence one.
Niantic was founded by Google and their first product, Field Trip, and their first game, Ingress (a much better-designed game than Pokémon Go, btw) were pretty obviously about gaining geolocation data for Google to improve their products like Maps and Shopping.
Honestly I’m a light hobbyist myself. My exposure to history is primarily via YouTube channels like the excellent Historia Civilis (their series on Julius Caesar and the downfall of the Roman Republic is stunning) and via games like Age of Empires.
I just don’t understand how someone interested in antiquity can possibly fall for Trumpism. The fall of the Roman Republic was presaged by a guy literally trying to get elected to office so that he could escape prosecution for illegal abuses of power, and the legal system standing aside and saying “yeah, we’ll let you do that in order to maintain the peace” and then falling into civil war anyway.
How much of that sounds familiar…?
They’ve got options.
And maybe others. It’s about making sure that a product you have paid for actually works as it was sold to you. It’s honestly a really basic consumer protection concept. You sell me a television and it stops working within a reasonable lifetime due to your own failure, and you’re obligated to repair or replace it. The same should be true of software.
CCTV produced an article asking “six shocking questions” about “US doping scandals.”
Hilarious, considering they had a known doper on their swimming team at the Olympics who was banned in 2014 and then banned again after destroying testing samples in 2018. Not sus at all…
Overshadowed? What was it overshadowed by?
To me, the word sexting implies very explicitly sexual content. If it’s with a minor, far more mild content could still be inappropriate.
Part of being a monopoly is being anticompetitive
No it’s not. Being hit with antitrust laws requires first being a monopoly, but the monopoly state exists merely by virtue of size within the industry.
Edit: to be clear the only point I am making here is in relation to that definition you provided. Nothing more.
Apple tried this with the EU usb c but eventually backed down
Umm, what? Apple was always going to move to USB-C. The EU regulations at most hastened that by a couple of years. Their tablets and even laptop computers were using USB-C before the EU even enacted that legislation. It was only a matter of time.
But back on the subject at hand, this is nothing like that sort of bullying. This is a company being asked to build more infrastructure at their own expense, and then use that infrastructure to place its own users at risk. They’ve made a simple calculation that it’s better for their bottom line and their reputation to choose not to comply, and instead pull out of a few small markets.
There isn’t even a way to trust a 3rd party to verify someone’s age.
It depends what you mean by this. If you mean in terms of a way to trust that the third party is doing its job correctly, that’s as simple as using the government itself to do the verification after seeing some proof of age.
If you mean in terms of privacy, you can’t protect the privacy of the fact that someone got verified, but you can protect the privacy of their browsing after the fact. It’s a neat cryptographic trick called blind signatures. The end result is a token that the user holds which they can hand over to websites that tells the website “a trusted third party has verified I’m over 18” but would not have to reveal any more information about them than that. But even if the government was that trusted third party, and they asked the websites to hand over all their logs, the government would still not be able to trace your views back to you, because the token you hold is one they never saw.
This is, in my opinion, still a bad idea. I am in no way advocating for this policy. There’s still the mere fact that you have to go up to someone and basically register yourself as a porn viewer, which is fucked up. Maybe if these tokens were used in other ways, like instead of showing your licence at bars, it could be less bad (though there are other practical reasons I don’t think that would work) because the tokens could be less directly associated with porn. But it’s still an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Not to mention the cost that adding all this would put on the government—or, if they charge for these tokens, the people using it—for what actual gain, exactly?
I’m merely pointing out that from a purely technical perspective, this is quite different from when governments request back doors into chat encryption. This actually can be done. It just shouldn’t, for non-technical reasons.
Oh yeah I know it’s theoretically possible. I’ve just never heard of it actually being done, for payments specifically, by banks. Using Google Pay doesn’t restrict you from also using any of those other use cases: you’re not giving anything up in terms of flexibility of functionality.
Yeah Garmin Pay is the equivalent on Garmin smartwatches. Unfortunately it’s not as widely supported by banks (at least where I live) as Google and Apple Pay are.
If you go over the limit they ask you to confirm in a way that requires the phone anyway
Oh interesting. Where I am if you go over the limit (usually $100), you just have to input your PIN. But $100 is enough to get up to some serious trouble, considering it’s a per-purchase limit.
And I’ve both never heard of banks using the NFC directly (as opposed to using Google, Apple, Garmin etc. Pay), and wouldn’t trust them in the slightest with it even if they did offer it, because they’re not exactly known for great security. (And I’ll take security over privacy any day.)
It’s still safer. They can steal your wallet and pay for anything trivially. If they steal your phone, they have to be able to unlock it to pay with it.
Are you thinking of “content-aware fill”? Generative fill is, as far as I’m aware, much, much newer and uses newer generative AI. Content-aware fill is basically clever automatic clone stamping.
If you’re using it professionally, you need your Photoshop to be properly licensed.
If you’re not using it professionally, there’s no need for proper licenses. And thus you can…acquire Photoshop in a way that doesn’t involve it calling back to Adobe’s systems.
Why begrudgingly, may I ask?
They could require the app to connect once every 30 days or similar in order to keep functioning.
Wait, is this just projects stored in your online Adobe cloud account, or are they even stealing your content if you’re just using their desktop software? Because one of these is way, way worse than the other, even if neither is exactly good…
This page lists and compares a bunch of different options. Just quickly eyeballing it, Nextcloud Photos/Memories (not sure if they’re separate apps from the main Nextcloud you mention), LibrePhotos, Immich, and PiwiGo seem the best options.
True, and that’s important context if you’re trying to get a deeper understanding of how Julius Caesar came to have the power he held before his assassination.
But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.