Shouldn’t that be a “oh well, sucks. but a sale is a sale” problem?

“A sale is a sale” works fine when both sides to the transaction are well-informed and acting for themselves. When you are selling assets for someone else’s benefit, you generally have extra obligations to them, because otherwise you don’t really have an incentive to achieve a good price. So courts do generally have some oversight over sale of the assets of a bankrupt estate, to ensure that the trustee is not short-changing creditors just to get the job done quickly.

A complicating factor here is that the Sandy Hook families (who as far as I know are the large majority of the creditors) also supported the sale.

I’m well aware, I just meant that it costs a lot more than other phones of similar quality. Not saying there aren’t good reasons for that.

I don’t think I need more power. The charging and headphone ports don’t work (so need to use wireless charging) and battery life is quite poor. I don’t feel like the phone is too slow or anything so I imagine the FP5 would be plenty of power.

Anyone know how well the Fairphone 5 compares against the Samsung Galaxy S10? I know the specs are pretty public but I don’t follow this stuff that closely so find it difficult to draw comparisons between different chips etc.

My S10 is on its last legs so I think a bit about what I will buy to replace it. I really like the idea of the Fairphone but of course you pay a lot (relatively speaking) for the ethics. One of the worries is that the phone will become unusable in a few years anyway, either because parts are unavailable or because software has become too heavy. The other option I am leaving towards is a second hand Pixel.

I use a lot of free and open source software, and some of the stuff I use a lot I support with donations. Python, Mozilla, FairEmail are examples of software I have donated to. Wikipedia also.

Honestly… I can understand being disappointed with the decision to remove it. But it blows my mind just how worked up people get over it.

This is the publicly owned and funded NHS, not a business.

Coffee, particularly espresso.

I tend to use floating or fullscreen for general browsing but often you have to type something while frequently referring back to something else - for example when programming I will be looking at the documentation. Or maybe debugging something on the command line while looking at your code to see what’s going on. In those circumstances tilling is perfect.

It’s possible there’s a regional or generational gap there. If you’re pushing 110 you probably haven’t worked in 40 years. You could even argue that the ones literally working themselves to death are the very ones paying for the older generation’s happy carefree lifestyle.

The man with the gun to his head doesn’t have much of a choice if he wants to live. You, though, have a choice between criticising and defending the man with the gun, and you’re choosing to defend him.

Proton and Tutanota are the most privacy-focused ones, offering zero-access encryption. The flipside is that they are a bit more expensive and less easy to use with third party email clients.

There are a number of alternatives like mailbox.org, Posteo and Fastmail which are cheaper, and less private than the above two but arguably still better for privacy than Gmail (in that their whole business model isn’t built off capturing and monetising your data).

Personally I use mailbox.org and have no complaints. I use it with third party clients like Thunderbird for desktop and FairEmail for Android so can’t speak to how good their web UI is.

I also strongly recommend getting your own domain name to use with your email. It means if you ever want to switch providers in future you won’t need to change your email address.

It helps if you can treat it as a hobby. My partner’s hobby is music, which is a perfectly sensible thing to do in one’s spare time. I always feel a bit weird when people ask me what I do in my own spare time and my answer is basically fixing my shit, then pushing it just hard enough that it breaks again.

To your question, the unfortunate reality is that those of us who care about privacy and software freedom are a small minority. Why overhaul your business model to suit us when they can continue to milk every other consumer out there who frankly doesn’t give a shit?

Phones are, of course, the worst of all for this. People do great work developing FOSS solutions but it is an uphill struggle and I worry that the hill is getting steeper.

They have since announced that it will be capped at 0.1% of a bank’s assets: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/09/business/italy-bank-windfall-tax-change/index.html

Nobody’s sending you to jail for using WhatsApp.

Link, because unbelievably this article about a website does not contain any link to the website: https://sanctions.nazk.gov.ua/en/art/

I feel like half of London could be listed here. Everyone knows about the American candy shops around Oxford St. I live in South London and every other shop is a vape shop or mobile phone accessory/repair shop. Not saying they are all fronts but they feel like it.

Google Maps is the last Google thing I rely really heavily on. I would love to be able to replace it with OSM but searching for places is far better on Google (admittedly, probably because they have more context for your search due to all the spying). I also rely a lot on Google reviews when I’m in a new place and just want to grab a coffee or a drink or something. Could probably use TripAdvisor for that though.

Repost bots (which repost contents from other sites) might be to blame for a lot of this. Or the fact that, because there are loads of (for example) World News communities, people will post the same links on multiple communities, but most people will only comment on one of the submissions. Which pushes the link-to-comment ratio up.

Beyond that, it really depends on the community I think. I see far more of that when browsing All than when browsing Subscribed.

MSN Messenger, Angelfire, Geocities, marquee tags, flame gifs.

And forums, of course. Music forums, mostly. The dopamine hit when you posted enough to achieve the next “rank”. Scrolling flame text in your signature.

I was 9 and had a cringy fan website for my favourite band. I used it to practice HTML and JavaScript (which blew my mind). HTML frames were the subject of a holy war at the time, so I had separate versions of the homepage, one using frames and one without. I would spam the (very few) visitors to my site with alerts and prompts.

Every now and again I would get random emails from (real) people around the world asking me to check out their band or their website etc. And most of the time they were actually good (by my standards at the time).

There was also, of course, the dreaded click which indicated your connection had been lost, most probably because someone had picked up the phone. So you’d have to reconnect and listen to that screechy dial-up sound.