Although that's not *nothing*, the question is who exercises admnistrative control of that data. If the Chinese government demands data from ByteDance's management, and ByteDance's management complies, that data is not safe. Of course, even in the US a federal agency can obtain a secret warrant which enables them to help themselves to your private data held by a third party, and because it's *secret* you can't challenge the warrant's legality.

The smart thing is don't put anything sensitive onto any kind of social media. Now some metadata may itself by sensitive for certain persons, like your approximate location at various times. Such persons shouldn't use social media at all, even if the data is hosted in the EU, which generally has the best data privacy protections in the world, because there is *no* country in the world where a company can defy a lawful warrant, whatever "lawful" means in that country.

I assumed the point of that bit was "with cellular turned off to prevent cell tower triangulation or cellular carrier detection," in which case the fix for the additional "Wi-Fi triangulation is still a problem" limitation is to not use that, either.

No need to go to that much trouble. Just turn on Airplane mode, use wired networking (a USB-C Ethernet adapter or Lightning Ethernet adapter), and be in a basement where GPS signals don't reach.

I'm still wondering why they can't just mail phones from Europe back to the U.S., and send them back when the 30-day limit ends and exchange them for new ones. The postage wouldn't be free, but it would still be cheaper than starting up a new development team in a different country. But maybe Apple will only allow existing side-loads to function and not new ones? If so, that probably violates EU laws, because it would also prevent removing and reinstalling while on vacation.

I assume you meant 1 cm.

One-year survival rate is also an objective metric that can be set as a goal and communicated to the public. Unlike thinness, it is a metric that customers actually *do* care about. Improving the former while harming the latter is the quickest way to kill a company.

The iPhone is already too thin. Realistically, no good can come from making it thinner. The best case scenario is that they end up with bend-gate all over again. The worst case is that the case flexing causes battery fires and people get genuinely hurt.

Now if they were making one *narrower*, that would be useful. Going back to the iPhone 5s form factor, where you could realistically use the device with one hand would be a HUGE win. But thinner? I not only would not want to buy one, but also would not want to be around anyone who did, out of fear that they would panic and accidentally injure me when their pants suddenly became ablaze.

If you want a smaller phone for when you don't want to carry around something bulky, buy an Apple Watch.

That said, I can see the joke now. "Are you lying, or is that a new iPhone in your pocket?"

Wow. Probably one out of every ten things I buy online ends up going back because there's something fundamentally wrong with it. So if you've never had to return anything, either your standards are very low or you should seriously buy a lottery ticket, because you're the luckiest person in the world.

Their goal is to ensure that only crappy corporate music companies can create formulaic music that nobody wants to listen to. I don't see the downside here.

Yeah, but how much of that is the "I might not get it or it might be fake" discount?

I stopped shopping on eBay a long time ago, except in situations where it was the only way to buy a particular product, because the risk is so much higher if the product doesn't work or is damaged. Return policies are inconsistent to nonexistent, you're on the hook for the return cost (if it is even possible to return it), and at least historically, you could generally assume that they would side with power sellers over random individuals almost every time, so the company doesn't have your back.

And most sellers would take several days to ship out products in the first place, and then would ship them by the cheapest, slowest shipping possible, which means it takes a week and a half to get anything. It costs money to ship out goods within 24 hours of when an order is placed, and that's factored into the cost of buying things from major vendors instead of from some random person on eBay who happens to be hoarding toilet paper or whatever.

Buying from eBay has always felt a bit like sending your teenager to buy produce at the farmer's market, knowing that there's a 20% chance that the right farmer will even be there that day to provide what you want, and if the kid picks bad produce, you're stuck with it. And your kid doesn't have a car, and thus will have to walk there and back, so the trip will take six days.

The extra protection offered by going through a reputable vendor is worth it to me more often than not, as is timely shipping. When timeliness doesn't matter, I'll buy it for 60% off from AliExpress and wait the extra two to four weeks.

I mean, I used the line input on PowerBook hardware back in the day for that, because I was cheap^H^H^H^H^Ha grad student, and because usable external input hardware was nonexistent. But by the time Apple dropped the line input, I had long ago moved on to external audio input hardware, because the internal input wasn't ever really all that great.

Maybe, maybe not. What I usually find is that for anything that Walmart sells in their brick-and-mortar stores, they are usually cheaper, with only a few exceptions. But otherwise, for high-volume items and expensive items, Amazon is usually about even for the best price, though sometimes other merchants' cards or whatever can provide bigger discounts (e.g. PayBoo from B&H). For things that are only sold by third-party sellers, yeah, the price is marked up by shipping costs.

This is, of course, ignoring the AliExpress "I'm willing to wait a few weeks for it to arrive on the slowest boat from China" discount, which is often a very high double-digit percentage.

Cheaper before or after you factor in the 5% Prime discount that you lose by not having their credit card?

Just to clarify, I'm pretty sure that potentially political terms of service/content moderation is what the two representatives were complaining about. I didn't mean to imply that you were upset by it.

The flip side is that, to misquote Douglas Adams, the Internet is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.

On Facebook alone, there are about 4.75 *billion* things shared every day. If you assume that someone can make a moderation decision in 5 seconds, it would take a team of 1.2 million employees to review the content, and it gets worse if the moderation decision takes longer. That's why most moderation assumes that a human being sees something wrong and reports it. Between the major content sites, you could probably employ every single person in the U.S. as a content moderator and still not have time to do even a cursory manual review of all of the content.

Automated flagging plus user reporting still produces three million reports per day, requiring 30,000 content moderators, many of whom are quickly traumatized by the graphic content and leave for other jobs.

If content moderation were a realistically easy problem to solve, it would have been solved by now. The fact that even very large companies struggle with it is exactly why we have to have laws limiting liability for things slipping through the cracks. No small company could possibly hope to pull it off.

The fact that they are suggesting allowing the largest companies in the field to write the laws that govern them is, frankly, downright terrifying. The coversation shouldn't be limited to big tech companies. Otherwise, you're likely to end up with laws that don't affect big tech companies much at all, but severely undermine smaller sites (the sort of sites that these laws were primarily intended to protect).

Editorial work, at least to me, implies a human being actively deciding what should or should not be published. Algorithmic anti-spam detection and ranking are something else entirely, because no human being is making the decisions, but rather merely setting policies for what is or is not okay. It is one step removed from actual editorial intervention.