Even the most professional of officers would be tempted if he was was cheating on him or if someone delivered a credible threat to the safety of his children.

The best way to prevent this kind of abuse is to make it impossible.

LK

Edward Snowden showed that this is not as true as you seem to think it is.

LK

Then, let them serve the warrant.

What is different is that for the first time in human history, it's not only possible but it's practical to have encrypted communications that no one can access except for the intended recipient.

All of "the most heinous of crimes" take place in the real world, there is some physical action that can be detected and punished. I don't care if this makes the job of law enforcement harder. I want law enforcement to be a difficult and time consuming job. Idle and bored cops tend to find ways to fill their time and it's never good.

LK

I've been thinking about adding solar panels to my house. I would love if I could get a federal subsidy to do it. However, just like with my student loan forgiveness, I'm NOT giving Biden my vote in exchange.

LK

People who waste their life away with worries and panic are not part of the solution. Buy solar panels, switch to higher efficiency machines, get a bicycle, use the train. See if your power company has a plan based on renewables. Plant trees, vines, bushes, buy flower pots or even a cactus. Do something OTHER than sitting on your ass with your armchair activism and annoying the silent but hard-working people who invest their whole lives into becoming greener.

You donâ(TM)t need an Apple ID to login to a Mac.

Great question... and the best answer I can give is that it does, but possibly because they've been using it for so long that they accept its shortcomings as compared to the shortcomings they experience on linux.

Do you want to teach my 76 year mother how to use Linux and provide tech support? I certainly can't be arsed with that, meanwhile she uses Windows without any help.

You've triggered my PTSD. Well done.

I've tried linux on my spouse's machine. It is not a desktop OS that my family can use. Either Windows or MacOS are the only thing that works reliably and intuitively enough to perform the common tasks my family uses their computers for.

Windows was my go-to desktop on their machines as MacOS has the Apple Tax on hardware and they very much own the machine due to the need for appleID. But now Microsoft has basically done the same.

At this point, on slashdot, this will sound like I'm trolling, but I truly am not... I want to know what distros of Linux ACTUALLY are stable enough, and intuitive enough to have the non-technical-savvy (aka normal/average) person use it without being frustrated? So far, every attempt to switch to linux has resulted in violent rage from one or more of my family members because something just doesn't work.

I don't know about real Macs, but I have a Hackintosh that's ... um, OSX 10.8, on a midrange i7 with 8GB RAM and a fast SSD, and even doing nothing much (file manager, system settings and the like, no browser) it was sluggish to occasionally painful. Gave the system 32GB and suddenly it was much better.

If a version of OSX however-many-years-old is that bad with 8GB, I can't imagine current-OSX being pleasant.

If China wants these removed then that means there's no backdoor they have access to. I was always a bit suspicious of Telegram because Russia gave up on its attempts to ban it.

I'm surprised Threads and WhatsApp were still allowed given that Facebook was banned in about 2009 in China.

I still run a late 2007 15" MBP with 6GB of memory and OS X 10.11. Itâ(TM)s ok for web browsing, email and Office 2011 (yep, Office 365 donâ(TM)t really offer anything new). I used Lightroom 3 - 5 on it back in the day and VMWare Fusion running Windows 7.

Chrome is definitely a pig though. I havenâ(TM)t touched it with a barge pole for years, but my wife uses it on this Mac.

What I've noticed more than that... over the past year or so, a vast uptick in the number of auto-generated videos. These drag together a lot of readily-available text and images on the nominal topic, so pass for "real" -- but the giveaway is that the narrator is text-to-speech, not a human. (It'll make mistakes like saying "one, six hundred" for "1,600".)

All such channels I've encountered have MILLIONS of subscribers, MILLIONS of rapidly-acquired views, but very few comments. (Like, 12M views in a week, but only 30 comments.)

I've concluded that these videos exist so that the channel owner can use another bot to generate millions of views and a whole lot of the shared ad revenue.

Which is probably starting to bleed Youtube beyond what they're used to.

And yes, probably because of the high view counts, those channels occasionally dominate my recommends (which are otherwise pretty good).

We're now one step closer (at least in the UK) to thought crimes. "The creation of a deepfake image will be an offence regardless of whether the creator intended to share it" So what's the difference between an artist drawing/painting something based on a person, but clearly imagined, and a computer doing it? We call one a deepfake, and the other art? This is a terrible slippery slope, well on our way to punishing artists' with thought crimes.