Sure, these devices listen all the time - for a wake word. The idea that they're always listening to your conversation and always recording are patently false.

...until you become a "person of interest" in which case they remotely switch the microphone on all the time.

Although it should be obvious that these devices can and will be used for eavesdropping, it's not necessary. College students post their entire private lives onto social media anyway.

Where do you live? I've been saying for decades that this should be the case everywhere. Separate the companies that provide last-mile wiring from the companies that provide services over those wires, and it will end up being the only regulation the entire industry would ever need. By the way, greetings from one four-digit user to another :)

Really wish I had mod points today. You nailed it.

It should be obvious that everyone should configure their email systems to block all email from all f*c*book domains. (On my network the entire service is blocked, but sometimes you have a f*c*book user in the household)

Amiga was a 32-bit computer.

At this time we may begin to wonder whether we have passed Peak Google. Now that the company is large enough to get itself tangled up in politics, people from all political persuasions are watching its every move and looking for things to get upset about. The privacy issue could also be Google's biggest systemic problem, raising distrust in the company similar to IBM and Microsoft before it. We know how this ends -- a long, slow decline.

Personally, I'm very happy with DuckDuckGo. In just a few years it went from completely-unusable to a perfectly fine Google alternative. And I certainly wouldn't trust my email to any server other than my own.

In other news, Tesla Motors has announced that they won't sell their best cars to anyone who doesn't also own a horse and buggy.

Those were the good old days, when there were lots of different web sites and if you didn't like one, you could go to another. Many of us remember "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Somehow we got to a point where Facebook and Google interpret the free Internet as damage and route around it.

No one should be surprised. We saw this happen with computers and now we're seeing it happen with smartphones. The market is saturated, the existing installed base is more than capable of handling most workloads, and therefore fewer people are motivated to upgrade every year. You want us to buy new phones? Build them with longer battery life and less crapware/spyware. The screens are already good enough. The cameras are already good enough. The operating systems are already good enough. Gee-whiz bells and whistles aren't going to motivate us to upgrade anymore. And stop building phones with notches.

We'd take you more seriously if you didn't imply that Donald Trump is Hitler. But you did, so your post is disqualified.

Too late. After the Goolag made clear their utter contempt for free speech, I switched back to Firefox. And I think a lot of other people did too.

That's the problem. Microsoft couldn't have come out with a design like that before the iPhone, because Apple and Google had to show Microsoft what a usable smartphone should actually look like. Come on guys, this is Slashdot, we've known for decades that Microsoft isn't capable of coming up with good ideas by itself, they have to copy someone else. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the market was already saturated, so even if the product was better, it never stood a chance. It's the same problem the desktop Linux people have.

The bottom line is that President Trump won the election because he was, simply, the very best candidate any party has run in decades. And he's doing a great job.

Unmanned ships carrying valuable cargo? All I can say is: ARRRRRR! (There will be a global renaissance of piracy on the high seas! Why pirate some crappy movies or songs when you can take control of hundreds of tons of actual merchandise!)