So the site has a Unicode whitelist of supported characters - basically the printable ASCII set, and as a protection against hacks, it also strips off the high bit.

So knowing very little about unicode but putting my PHB hat on - does this mean that all that needs to happen is some junior developer identifies the top 80% of unicode characters used in comments in the past year (looking at comments rated 4 or 5 to avoid the spam), do a quick manual review and then add them to the whitelist?

That sounds like a job which would take no more than about half a day - followed by whatever time it takes for the usual testing and deployment process.

This doesn't need to violate anyone's privacy to work. All they need is a database of image hashes, provided by the police. Then if someone tries to post an image that matches the hash, the software simply declines. No need to even log it.

I've got some experience of working with CSAM scanning and what you've described is exactly how it works.

You get a free licence to use Microsoft's PhotoDNA algorithm (they also provide source code in common languages). PhotoDNA is like other common hashing methods, except that it can survive small amounts of photo manipulation (such as recolouring, rotating, cropping and so on).

You then subscribe to a hash list from the Internet Watch Foundation in the UK (or NCEMC in the US), hash the photo and compare to the list. If you have a match, then you need to come up with some process to investigate and, if necessary, report it.

All major organisations that allow someone the ability to upload an image (including all the social networks, Google and Amazon) scan images using this method.

They're bluetooth. Android has supported this for years. Is there something special about the Joycon that makes it not work with standard drivers? Is iOS just now getting support for bluetooth controllers?

I can't answer your first question but, for the second, iOS 13 (released September 2019) was the first to support bluetooth game controllers.

You honestly expect people to replace a $2 outlet with an USB equipped one at $30? It's cheaper, more convenient and probably safer to stick with a usb wall wart.

The OP picked a pretty expensive one as an example. Twin switched sockets without any USB sockets are going for about £4 on Amazon, whereas those with USB-A go for about £15 - meaning that the premium is 3.75x.

As USB-C becomes more ubiquitous, I'd expect twin switched USB-C sockets to eventually get down to the same price as the USB-A ones today. At that point a 3.75x premium doesn't seem too bad to get 2 USB-C sockets and 2 free plug sockets vs 1 free plug socket with the other permanently taken up by a wall wart.

Can't speak for everyone but I work with a lot of teams spread across the globe. As such, a widget that shows clocks for the 6 key office locations would be extremely useful.

The best I can currently do is have three different times displayed when I hover my mouse over the time in the system tray.

As of 2021 Amex was accepted at 99% of merchants that also accepted Visa/MasterCard in the US, but does lag behind in the rest of the world.

Ahh yes, sorry, I was talking about UK and Europe, rather than the US.

To be honest, I'm not remotely surprised that Amex is accepted at 99% of merchants in the US - the clue is probably in the name :)

Yes and no.

As someone who voted remain, I agree with your general premise - however Amazon weren't objecting to moving to a cross-border interchange fee structure. They'd been on that fee structure since the beginning of 2021.

Amazon's objection was the significant price increase that Visa decided to apply to cross-border interchange in October 2021 - which was far higher than the price increased for domestic interchange.

This was written before the current fee change but, back then, Amex was 100 bps higher than both Visa and Mastercard.

Interchange was originally set up to encourage card issuers. This was because there was a lot more money to be made by banks offering payment acceptance to merchants than there were issuing cards to customers. You can't charge customers for having and using a debit card, but you can charge a merchant for accepting one - so the interchange attempted to address that imbalance.

As you rightly said, it's also been used to fund card loyalty schemes and Apple Pay also takes a small cut of that if they are involved in the purchase.

The biggest issue I know of relating to interchange fees is those of Amex which are typically larger than the rest of the market and used to fund their more generous rewards scheme. As a result, a lot of merchants (here in the UK at least) refuse to accept Amex.

Visa's largest fee increase was for cross-border interchange payments and Amazon UK were stung by it because they process their payments in Luxembourg to reduce the amount of UK tax they pay.

The vast majority of merchants in the UK process their payments in the UK. Whilst their own domestic interchange fees did also rise, they were not affected in any way by the cross-border interchange increase.

There is no "good guy" here. On one hand you have Visa taking advantage of Brexit to hike their fees and on the other hand you have Amazon having a strop because it hurt their their tax avoidance strategy.

Go into Settings, then Accounts and Import and click on Add another email address. Pop in your email address, leave Treat as an alias checked and click on Next. You'll now get a screen asking for SMTP details, remove what Google have put and replace with smtp.gmail.com, port 465, your full Gmail address (including @gmail.com) as the username, your password and secure using SSL.

You may find that the first time you send an email it'll be blocked with an error. You need to enable "allow insecure connections" and will need to authorise Gmail to connect to the Gmail SMTP server to send your email. If you've done all that and it's still blocking you sending your email then use the Unlock Captcha page and it should be good to go.

Shout if you get stuck!

So you don't get the "on behalf of x" with this SMTP trick/hack?

That's correct, Outlook will display the address simply as yourname@yourdomain.com and replies will go back to that address (as you would expect).

There is one very small caveat and that is that people can still find your Gmail address by delving into the headers and looking at Return-Path, however I doubt many people will go to that effort.

Fair enough.

Personally I'm not particularly bothered about the three minutes of one-time configuration effort that it takes to set up SMTP. I also only receive about 1 or 2 actual calendar invitations a year - most people just send an email or IM with details for me to manually add to my calendar.

However I fully appreciate that people might prefer to pay and have it work out of the box.

Unfortunately the email you send (and calendar replies) will be displayed with the gmail account rather than your custom domain. Something like "On behalf of x" displays in the recipient email client.

That can be fixed by configuring Gmail to send email through an external SMTP server and then putting in Google's own SMTP settings. You'll have to allow insecure connections and also authenticate Google to access their own servers. It's completely nuts (especially as Google will nag you a couple of times a year to turn off insecure connections) but will remove "on behalf of".

Calendar acceptances always come from your Gmail address. I've found no way to avoid that.

Many domain registrars offer email forwarding/alias capability. Create a new Gmail account, create an alias to point to the Gmail address and then following these instructions to set up Gmail to send from your address.

(Rumour has it that Google may be offering a migration tool at some point, which makes moving to a standard Gmail account extremely easy)

There are a couple of things you should be aware of, which I wrote about here. However it works well enough that I don't feel the need to pay for anything else.