Exactly, and it is very likely that the Federal government has already set reasonable limits. After all, they have set limits. One state, the State of Washington, demands stricter limits, and apparently there are toothpaste manufacturers that fail Washington's stricter limits.

So if you were truly paranoid you could potentially buy your toothpaste from a store in the state of Washington. We live in a world where such a thing probably isn't even that expensive.

Microsoft announced in January that they would be building $80 billion in new datacenters for 2025. By the end of February they were already announcing that that this was no longer the case and that they would actually be pulling back from that target and were actually canceling leases.

Of all of the technology companies Microsoft is absolutely the worst at actually designing and building products. But they are very good at business.

Yeah, but what is really going to happen is that Trump is going to fully Jimmy Carter the economy. It was 16 years after Jimmy Carter before the Democrats even had a chance at a presidential election. I am a life long conservative who has always voted against Trump, mostly because I oppose his views on immigration, and it is discouraging to me that the party that used to stand for small government and free trade now has fallen to this.

Trump was able to carry enough of the fiscal conservatives in the last election to win, mostly because these conservatives mistakenly thought that Harris would be worse. Now they know the difference, but it is too late. Whoever gets elected to try and repair the inevitable damage that these police will incur will almost certainly not be Republican. Even the dimmest of dim bulbs is going to be able to draw a line between Trump's tariffs and the economic fallout they are going to cause.

You can keep X applications alive when the link goes down, although, obviously you can't see what they are doing. I think that the tradeoff is better than losing access to all of your desktop when the network goes down. I tend to move my state local, meaning that I have what I need locally if something goes awry. I can usually get meaningful stuff done without any network access at all. However, if what you want is to have an always ready desktop that you can connect to from anywhere then RDP is the solution. I have to use Windows every once in a while, and everything about using it is uncomfortable to me, but RDP is very nice. I actually get why you might set up your work flow in that manner.

RDP is actually a reaction to VNC, and it fixes many of VNC's problems. For emergency graphical remote control of a computer VNC is adequate, but it is definitely not a replacement for RDP.

You should take a look to see if X over ssh does what you would like. Although if you really want the the entire remote desktop running on your local multi-monitor system then maybe not. if I am sitting at a local workstation with multiple monitors and a nice setup I usually want my environment on that box (an easy thing to do with Linux) and then I run most of my applications locally. If I need a specific application (or set of applications) from another machine I use X Windows to display those applications on my local desktop. They run on the home machine, but the display is on the machine where I am working. This sort of thing has run surprisingly well for decades. Generally speaking I don't bother installing an X Server on the machine where the applications actually run, but that's because I am too cheap to have two sets of nice displays.

I suspect someone realized that the conversation that they were having was both legally and morally wrong. I can certainly imagine a world in which someone might be a Trump supporter, but find this sort of thing farther than they were willing to go. What better way to whistleblow than to invite the editor of a newspaper into a ultra top secret conversation? I consider myself fairly security conscious, but I don't hand verify the keys of everyone that I talk to in a group in Signal.

Of course, I also don't discuss top secret military actions, and if I did, I wouldn't use unauthorized channels. Playing with that sort of fire can quickly add up to charges of crimes like "treason" or "espionage," where if you are lucky you end up a prisoner at Gitmo.

I suspect that including a journalist was done on purpose. What better way for a whistleblower to blow the whistle than to include the editor of an important news paper in the group list. What? You aren't manually verifying the keys of everyone you talk to on Signal? Shame on you!

Signal is good tech, but it isn't magical. Hopefully, for whoever did this, Signal doesn't actually keep track of who added people to a group, because, if I am correct, then this could easily be full treason.

This not only encourages risky behavior, but it guarantees that the price of that risky behavior gets paid for by everyone else.

Yes, it is very convenient to be able to do all of your banking from your phone, but it is essentially the equivalent of carrying around all of your cash in a backpack. Most people have their phone unlock easily with their face or their fingerprint. If this became the accepted norm then everyone with a bank account would soon find that banking was far more expensive.

Not only that, but it would encourage criminals to steal phones. Part of the reason that mugging has never been that popular is that people didn't carry around that much cash, and cash and jewelry were the only valuables that were feasible to take. I know that the few times in my life where I had to carry around more than a few hundred dollars I have been extra careful. As criminals realize that, under the right circumstances, they can steal not just the cash that the person has on their person, but can also drain their bank accounts, then criminals are going to target more people. The same crime will become at least an order of magnitude more rewarding. The last thing that we want to do, as a society, is encourage people to take more risk with their finances. This is especially true in the case where the criminals are seriously harming or even murdering their victims.

The reality is that the victims, in this particular instance, took a device that had access to all of their amassed savings, into a very sketchy situation, and then paid for that lack of judgement with their lives. They wouldn't have gone to the club with $10,000 of cash in their backpack, but they thought nothing of doing the same thing with a phone that had access to that amount of money. Who cares if the victims would have been paid that money back? Being able to access that money in the first place got them killed. The last thing that we should do is to encourage other people to make similar choices.

The good news is that what is most likely to happen is that these phone applications will be forced to be less convenient. Limits will be placed on how much they can transfer, additional passwords will be required, and other changes will be made to make these phone apps a less lucrative target. That would certainly fix the problem. Making the banks liable for losses from phone applications would likely be even more dramatic. If the banks are going to be responsible for losses from phone apps then it will become very inconvenient to bank on your phone, because they will want to severely limit their exposure.

I also lived through all of that, and I think that you make a great point. The last three enterprises that I have worked for had standardized on Google's office suite. Yes, they had some people that used Excel, but that was perhaps a dozen licenses out of thousands of desktops. And nothing is stopping Google from bundling Meet with their toolset.

Of course, this is less about Microsoft and bundling and more about the EU and taxation. After all, if you are the EU why not fine Microsoft? They are going to move profits around so that they don't owe taxes in the EU. Why not fine them? Otherwise the money only ends up back in the U.S.

The streaming companies would love this. Disney forces cable and streaming companies to pay ridiculous prices for their other channels so that they can have access to ESPN and ABC Sports. That's the reason that Sling has both and Orange and a Blue package. Sling Orange is basically the cheapest way to get the regular ESPN channels. it is basically a package specifically carved out for Disney. You can either get 9 ESPN packages, or you can get 43 other channels.

i used to work for a streaming service. It is actually the other way around. The part that people actually pay for is sports. If sports fans could just pay for the sports content that they actually want then they would stop subsidizing the entire television industry.

To give you an example. Amazon pays something like $1 billion a year to get access to the Thursday night football games. That probably seems like big money, but it is a quarter of what Apple is spending on content. And Amazon regularly gets more viewers for one of their games than Apple has subscribers. Let's be clear, Thursday night football, is the worst football possible, but even with all of things bundled with Amazon Prime Thursday night football actually moves the needle when it comes to Prime subscriptions.

Believe me, if you like television, but don't like sports, you should be grateful for sports fans. They are absolutely subsidizing your shows.

A few jobs back, not naming the company because I actually liked working for them, I received an email from HR about a new program the company had that allowed you to get paid early. Getting paid early is always a good thing, so I looked into it. Like this Walmart example it was essentially the payroll partner trying to get into the payday loan business. When I mentioned this to some of the people that I worked with they were shocked, but they were also smart people, so as the similarities started to stack up they couldn't help but realize that this was precisely what was happening.

You see, they knew that payday loans were predatory, but they didn't have enough experience with payday loans to know what they actually looked like. Once confronted with the truth they were appalled. It was especially jarring to the HR person that had written the email to everyone extolling the benefits of our new payroll "benefit." A bit of marketing and all of a sudden predatory lending seemed like a great idea.

This was especially problematic, in my mind, because the reality is that these loans were extremely low risk. After all, your payroll company knows how much you get paid, how many hours you work, and how much vacation you have accrued. They are even set up to garnish your wages. They are definitely going to get paid. That didn't stop the payroll company from still charging predatory sized fees.

If your employer is going to offer predatory loans as a so-called benefit, then they should at least give you a deal.

I might get excited about Passkeys when Linux support improves. Right now, when I try and add a passkey for my Google account on my Linux laptop (the machine that I actually trust) it tells me that I need to try a different OS.

No thanks. I only keep secrets to accounts that I care about on a machine where I am root. Unfortunately that doesn't include my phone.

The idea of using public/private keypairs for logging in appeals to me. I have been doing that with machines and accounts that I care about for decades at this point. However, if the implementation requires that I use someone's sooper special vault that doesn't come with source code then I am going to give it a hard pass.

Authy is 2FA, Passkeys are different. If you are looking for a 2FA solution to replace the desktop Authy client i would strongly suggest KeepassXC. it will do what you want, and you can keep your database on the devices that you want it on. Also, it will generate QR codes so that you can export your 2FA secrets to other devices (like Google Authenticator).

Coincidentally KeepassXC will also do passkeys, which makes me think that perhaps I could use them for some sites.

Good for your brother. Apple is one of those lessons that I feel like I learned the hard way. Even when it was clear that Apple was turning things around I was still sure that they would never really be a competitor. Steve Jobs proves that some leaders are literally worth any amount of money. The problem is that it is almost entirely impossible to know which leaders are going to have that sort of impact until they have already worked their magic.