If only that were true! Unfortunately there's nothing to stop a manufacturer putting a USB-C port on a laptop, and having it only support (say) USB-3.1 downwards. And so some of them do this - because it's cheaper. Maybe there's one USB C port that also supports TB/DisplayPort, with a tiny little logo next to it to let you know which one it is. If you're lucky...

We don't have a problem with teens viewing porn in the UK. It just doesn't happen any more. In fact, we've been remarkably effective at stopping it compared to half the other countries in Europe, which have seen a recent surge in porn viewing for reasons no-one can identify.

Me too, though of course in our day, the world was much less connected and much less reliant on the technology. The worst we could have done after getting root access to the entire IT infrastructure at my school would have been look at what our classmates had been drawing in Paint or something. Today these systems host much more important and sensitive information and security breaches would be a much bigger deal.

And on that note, am I the only one less concerned by the behaviour of an impressively curious seven-year-old and more concerned by an official, professionally-managed system holding potentially sensitive data that is so insecure that even a seven-year-old could hack it?!

Yes, the one you run yourself.

That doesn't work, even if nominally email still works across providers and is all standard and everything you have nearly no chance to escape being blacklisted, no matter if you're coming from your ISP, or some hosted server basically anywhere.

Plus, given that nearly nobody does it it's a chicken and egg problem, even if there is free software for everything it's absolutely daunting to have a complete working system. One would think these days you'd have a simple package running on a Raspberry Pi, heck even your router and give you all services with some minimal configuration like the DNS and similar. Nope, just the opposite, it's tricky and a big headache even for people that did it from scratch more than 25 years ago. Never mind for some journalist that doesn't even understand how email works beside being able to use some webmail from a provider.

Yeah it doesn't work well! But last time I checked (admittedly some years ago now) most of those roundabouts were being replaced with standard traffic-on-roundabout-has-priority ones.

"In August 2022, a Plex data breach exposed users' emails, usernames, and encrypted passwords after a cybercriminal gained access to a database. Plex responded by requiring all users to reset their passwords and assured that no payment or credit card data was compromised."

A fair chuck of the crypto space is "pie in the sky bullshit" with a few rare exceptions where the coin itself has been established as a critical consumable for some other service which delivers real value. But the rest? Memecoins are basically a casino with the added twist of being able to bluff other idiots into doubling down on your bet to your own benefit.

Trump Coin, on the other hand, is not a meme coin. It looks like a meme coin and you're supposed to think of it as a meme coin but it's the first kind: a coin which enables some other service that delivers real value. That value is bribing government officials.

Large purchases of Trump Coin necessarily drive the price of the coin up, allowing Trump or his chosen acolytes to sell their horded coins at a tidy profit. Everyone who holds the coins has a commonly held interest. Everyone who buys them to inflate the price and enrich the holders expects to get something for their trouble and then becomes part of the cabal of holders.

Trump Coin is basically an anti-dollar: it is backed, not by the full faith and credit of the United States but by the political corruption and dominance of the MAGA movement.

How about we stop with all of the meaningless UI changes, whether phone, browser, app, whatever. Pointless changes just to be changing something to show the UI people are still alive.

THIS. I've seen the post yesterday, checked if there is some update, then go it overnight. OMFG!!!! What's the point to tweak the shape of boxes, fonts, and so on?! The only real result is that for a week or a month or so everything will be "different". Random stuff pulling at your attention for no good reason.

We've got to the point where EVERYTHING Microsoft does, from Secure Boot, TPM, Bitlocker, apps signing, Admin acces, EVERYTHING they do in these controversial directions are way, way, WAY better (in the sense of preserving customer's freedoms and everything) than what the supposed partly open source Linux kernel based Android does. This is dystopian beyond belief.

These are meant for humans, who would give up taking a car there if they need to re-park it every 3h, while it does nothing for self-driving cars (if anything it creates even more congestion from the cars re-shuffling all the time and is pissing away some energy too).

Next step (if not done already) is to play musical chairs between Waymos intentionally.

I wouldn't be fine with that. Someone would probably "buy" something because they wanted to have it available indefinitely. If they later found that their "permanent" purchase was revoked, they might no longer have the option to buy it elsewhere because it was no longer available, even if they did have that option available when they first "bought" the product from the other vendor. It's still a scam in the lying vendor's favour.

Of course you want off-site backups. And everyone has been doing that for decades so I don't see the problem with that.

Streaming replication of databases and the like is pretty much ubiquitous as well.

What exactly did you think all those big cloud services were doing for their managed database offerings?

Have you... heard of backups at all?

If the kind of site that would host this kind of system internally at an organisation like a police service has been catastrophically damaged then you probably have bigger problems than the time it takes to restore a backup.

The British government has some excellent IT people. It's a meme really that Civil Service staff are only there for the jobs for life because they couldn't make it in the private sector. The GDS team in particular have successfully automated a huge variety of government interactions with tens of millions of people and for example are widely regarded as having some of the best UX design and accessibility experts anywhere. Building on that to support other government activity, including internal functions not normally seen by the public, would have made a lot of sense. In the longer term we're going to want people like that dealing with the astronomical challenge of modernising NHS IT.

It's wild to imagine Echostar/Dish being worth anything close to that amount of money. From my own experience working inside the company everything always seemed like it was held together with bailing wire and bubble-gum.

I assume there was a highly competitive bidding process for this because there's no way Dish's board of directors would have had the stones to set the price at "three times the company's market cap" on their own.