I often want to share selective contacts and not the whole book. I'm glad one company, at least, is making this easier. I hope others will follow.

Don't like the sensationalized title on this story. One person's "Killing Social Apps" is another person's "Restoring Privacy and Control".

I was one of the Sonos users affected by this. I used wireless sonos speakers to play music from my personal music (yes, legit) library. I used it daily for years.

One day in May, this just stopped working. It was not clear at first what was wrong. I had to debug it myself. After working through many appalling, mysterious error screens I eventually concluded it was the Sonos app itself. Sonos's help was no help at all, it had me checking my media library configuration instead of recognizing the app release had major broken functionality.

Sonos's app release broke my single most used, major use case -- playing music from my personal library via mobile devices. And they were very slow to own up to it, and very slow to eventually getting around to fixing it. (Issues were resolved without very awkward workarounds in Aug.) Instead, their new app boasted working support for a wide variety of niche monthly music services I have never heard of and have no interest in using. I drew the obvious conclusion that my use case is not very important to Sonos, and apparently wasn't even in their test plan.

Apologies from the CEO and waving a flag of quality control isn't enough to restore my trust. I wanted (and still want) to see some rollback mechanism for app updates, even if it would be implemented as a separate app download. There should have been a rollback option instead of these endless do-nothing apologies and 3+ months of broken functionality. Please do no use Sonos (or any other product) whose actions do not show reasonable commitment to their existing customers.

To end this on a positive note -- I was playing the "Baldur's Gate" game with a group of friends recently and one of their updates broke our ability to play as a group. However, in this case, Baldur's Gate's publisher (Larian) DOES allow a fairly straightforward rollback option to their updates. We were able to use it and get the group back together. I realize that game updates are not exactly the same as mobile app updates, but I wanted to point out that someone is doing it well, and it won't be the last time this issue of pushed updates-that-break-major-functionality comes up.

Subject says it all. These deepfakes are closer to impersonating a police officer, or forging documents/money than they are to parody and satire.

As someone who has played a fair amount of online games --- I welcome this. Occasional, unpredictable honeypot traps + waves of permanent bans is a good way to go for some types of games, PvP style especially.

If there's one thing that turns me off to a game faster than spoiled haggis, it's the presence of blatant cheaters/exploiters in a PvP game. Cheaters mess with atmosphere and can make the product look rough around the edges or unfinished, and make you question whether it's worth a time investment to explore further. Most of the time I'm much more attracted to the immersive genre of a game, and not some other, very different meta-game of exploit arms-racing.

I also strongly prefer games with active mod communities. I'm in favor of moddable games, both offline and live. This isn't a contradiction. You can have great mod communities around a game and also be intolerant to exploits that disrupt the gameplay experience within it. If you like finding exploits/glitches/easter eggs/creative hacking, there's ways to do this and show off your skillz and creativity without becoming an asshat to everyone around you. Know where that line is, stay on the classy side.

I don't like that you accuse some vendors of anti-privacy behavior without very specific citations. If we're going to hand-wave circumstantial/theoretical arguments around we quickly end up in tinfoil-hat town. It can't just be your guess or opinion.

That said, I'd be curious to see if there's any indie/open/niche options out there as there have been at various times in the past, or even good up-to-date guides for privacy-hardening specific models.

I am a fan of the scifi genre, and started watching it with modest expectations. I was able to finish season 1 but towards the end I found it increasingly unenjoyable and difficult to watch.

There's so many parts of this show that feel grating to me. Whether it is the overall casting, the android voices and inflections, or the less-than-nuanced religious lore, or the way you feel like you're being lead around by your nose through the plot by bunch of predictably dramatic actions worthy of a laugh-track sitcom.. the story did not appear to flow naturally... There were many rough edges and I could have overlooked any one of them with the usual suspension of disbelief for the sake of the story, but in this case it was too high of a hill to climb with not enough reward. It wasn't for me. It was everything that the Expanse is not.

I was one of the people that cancelled netflix recently, after subscribing for years. For me the reasons were:

1. Not many high quality shows, compared to other streaming services.
2. User Interface annoyances.
3. Found I wasn't using it enough to justify the cost.

What I would really like is to NOT manage n-number of separate streaming all-access catalogs. I'd really like a place to go and get a show or a film a la carte. I feel like we've somehow found ourselves trapped in the whole "cable bundling" horrible mess that I cut my cable cord to avoid in the first place.

Why is the 'just let me buy the content I want' concept so clear, easy, and obvious with books, but with video content it is so elusive? Instead we see endless bundling and 'plans' without a simple pay for what you want (and nothing else)?

I've been in this exact situation recently. I regularly go back and forth between macbook pros, microsoft-oriented work laptops, and microsoft-oriented gaming laptops, and hacking-project chromebooks.

I am sure there are exceptions anyone can point to but as a general observation data point from someone who has "been there":

Apple laptops are a known, very high quality, quantity. They don't always have the features you want-- top-of-the-market GPU capability and larger screens is mine, but what Apple does have, they do very well. If apple laptops do deliver everything you really need, then get one, even if you put VMware/Parallels/Other/Bootcamp of it to get solid MS compatibility for everything but high end games. Even if you have to put up with silly dongles.

High-end PC laptops have very good specs but, in general, come with more risks. The more cutting edge features you buy the less likely it is you're going to get good, long term support, and the more likely that you're going to develop some issue a few years out that never showed up in the manufacturer's time-limited testing. The one exception to this may be the MS Surface Pros.

In the midrange prices from reputable manufacturers, support is more predictable, but there's often some performance compromise being made-- you can discover too late that your great price came at the cost of a certain component that's dragging the rest of the system down. Could be wrong CPU for your workload, poor cooling, sub-par screen, KB placement, loud fans, slow HD, inadequate GPU cooling, etc.. It's hard to know what compromise may affect you without doing a lot of review research, and the best, most reliable reviews will be for product that has been out 6+ months, and you may be tempted to get "the latest new model" instead. It's a balancing act.

At the low end you can find some really great values in PCs laptop. If these fit your performance envelope you can get something that's cheap and looks good too.

The above is just on the hardware side. On the software side it goes without saying that there will be a learning curve and a host of annoyances, particularly around driver behavior coming out of sleep mode & hibernation, privacy, and possibly juggling multiple possible audio inputs and outputs.

Great comment, at least in the sense that it resonates with me.

I want to like KDE, because when you get under the hood the Qt framework and many related components are truly well designed, mature software.

But on the visuals side, there's something off. It's not in the tech, it's in the visual polish and consistency, color pallet, icon set, styling. Yes, I know it's customizable but so far, the out of the distro kde-styling seems off to me personally once you open a few different apps and settings panels and see them together; it's hard to pin down.

Despite this unease, I have been generally put off in the design decisions of the GNOME camp in recent years, in particular the intentional removal of optional functionality compared to previous versions, and getting away from a traditional desktop metaphor in favor or something that's more like a smartphone. I don't want a smart phone interface on a high resolution, multi-monitor setup with KB and mouse at the ready.

Cinnamon / XFCE is working for me as a compromise, but I'd love it KDE is able to storm back in with great style, to rescue us from desktop redsign madness.

I've been running crouton on a toshiba chromebook for a couple years now and I use it with surprising frequency.

I spend most of my time on the linux side, running terminals, vpns, and some custom chat and web apps. It's not my main system but I frequently use it as a supplement.

The downside of the config is the annoying/slow "developer mode" bios warning on reboot that you get from unlocking the chromebook bios, and the 3-4 commands you have to run after each reboot to get crouton up and running and happy. Luckily you don't need to reboot often. My average is about once every two months because I've let the battery run down too far. I'm very happy with it especially for the price.

If your passwords are randomly generated and long, it doesn't matter how many attempts to guess them are tried. The likelyhood of a random guess getting through are lower than your chances of winning the lottery. Let people waste their time on futile attempts.

To further decrease your chances, use public keys authentication instead of passwords, or two factor authentication, or limit connections by IP address.

Changing the post does fool most SSH scanners as well.

I don't like fail2ban because it can lead to DoS vectors.

Bottom line is that logged attacks that have no hope of getting through shouldn't cause a panic.

I have an Apple laptop (more like, portable workstation) and I bought it after numerous computer-generations of all kinds of PC laptops, some quite expensive and focused on gaming/performance. I've had it for a year now and I can say that it is the *only* laptop I've ever owned where I've been completely satisfied with the build and service quality. Having a top-flight desktop with an uncompromising unix shell is quite nice too. For gaming I dual boot.

BTW, for a more mainstream data point, the Apple laptops swept Consumer Reports "most recommended buy" in multiple categories recently.

Despite being from a "closed" company, it gives me a platform that lets me natively run Linux, Windows, and MacOSX. It offers more choices. Development tools are much easier to come by as well.