It is more general than that, Signal does everything it can to get people in contact. In particular, it will notify you when one of your contacts join Signal. You can disable this, but it is not the default. It is significant, as it can reveal information you may not want to reveal. You may not want to tell your contact that you have joined signal. Of course, there is also the massive issue that you are using a phone number to join.

I understand why they do this, they want as many people as they can on their platform, and there are good reasons for that. But it is still a convenience/security tradeoff, one that is fine for everyday use, but probably inappropriate for classified conversation. Technically, Signal do the best they can, but they are still targeting the general public, there is no gatekeeping, quite the opposite in fact.

A modified version of Signal on a private server not using phone numbers would work, but not the actual Signal app. Or maybe Matrix.

I don't understand why Americans have a problem with PDOs (i.e. the rule that says that Champagne can only be made in one part of France). It is exactly like a trademark, but for a region instead of a company. If anyone can make Champagne, anyone should be able to make Coca-Cola too.

PDOs absolutely don't prevent you from making similar products, you just can't use the name. Again, just like trademarks. you can make your own cola, you just can't call it "Coca-Cola".

In the case of Champagne, the generic name is "sparkling wine", and there are many other "brands". For example, Italian Prosecco and Champagne can be interchanged in many cases. This will probably enrage oenophiles, but really, the main difference between Prosecco and Champagne is about branding, and brands need to be protected in some way so that consumers know what to expect. Champagne is just the brand of the Champagne region in France, which, in addition to the origin, sets standards of quality.

And yet, people make money with email. Many email providers have ads, including the most popular: Gmail and Outlook. Many others use paid subscriptions and profitable. And they all have to comply with local regulations. There is no real content moderation because it is direct messaging, but there are spam filters.

Email is a very open protocol, too open actually. Along the years, development made the barrier to entry a little higher to combat spam, but it is still accessible.

That we discover that the asteroid would miss the Earth is expected, it was a 97% chance after all.

However, I would have expected the news to come in much later, possibly years, as more data is collected.

I know it is a troll, and I hate Elon Musk as a (supposedly) human being, but I think you are kind of right here.

Electric cars existed way before Tesla, and Elon Musk wasn't even a founder. However the marketing was genius, and that's the kind of thing Elon Musk was really good at. While other EV manufacturers focused on the zero-emission, "green" aspect, Tesla focused on making what is essentially a toy for big boys. Fun to drive, plenty of gadgets, geeky names, etc... It was enough for people to want an electric car. A smart and well executed move, because let's be honest, for most people, being "green" isn't worth the high price EVs sold for at the time.

Tesla or not, what happened was inevitable given the technological progress, but Tesla with Elon Musk marketing made it happen first.

On the scale of Google, it matters. Attackers won't try 10000 codes on the same account, they will be kicked out well before that. But they can try 10000 different accounts though a botnet and statistically, one of them will work, then, maybe retry every few hours. It will give the attackers a steady stream of accounts, and statically, every account attacked this way will be hacked after a few years. You can't block logins for too long either because it would make for an easy denial-of-service attack.

6 digits makes it go from 1/10000 to 1/1000000 which significantly limits the effectiveness of brute force attacks. Mobilizing a botnet for a 1/10000 chance can be worth it, but maybe not for a 1/1000000 chance.

Use TOTP.

It is called "Google Authenticator" in your Google account settings because it is the app they are recommending, but any app or device supporting the TOTP standard will work. It is a free standard, completely offline, and doesn't require any personal information. You can register any number of devices, you can also print out the QR code or passkey they give you and store it somewhere save if you want to add devices at a later time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I am curious about this. Do you have a link? Most, if not all studies I have seen indicate that those who use MFA see a big improvement in security compared to those who don't.
Of course, cyber-criminals adapt, and they find workarounds, but everything seem to indicate that those who don't use MFA are much easier targets.

The D in BDFL is "dictator", it means that what Linus decides is how it will go, full stop.

So if Linus wants Rust in his kernel, complain all you want but there will be Rust in his kernel. I am not particularly pleased by this decision but for now, I am a bit concerned by tooling and slow compile times, though I didn't give much thought to it. But saying that Linux has done well under Linus rule is an understatement. So I trust him. And if Linux loses its way because of that, which I think is unlikely, then it is an open source project, it can be forked.

Some have raised concerned about the Rust community, and I guess the anti-Rust community too, often on subjects tangential to software development, but for me, Linus does a good job at keeping things technical and focus on what's important for the project. Again I trust him on this part.

Musk offered to buy OpenAI recently, why would he want to buy a company that does worse?

And assuming he really wanted to buy OpenAI despite having a better product already, it would have made more sense to wait as a successful release would have increased xAI value compared to that of its competitors.

Except it is not about trans people in particular. It is just that robbers found that these bar patrons, who may or may not be trans or gay would make good victims.

I don't know about Hell's Kitchen in particular but sometimes, straight people sometimes go there too, gays tend to be good at partying, and many straight people with an open mind recognize this. Unfortunately, it also means lots of drugs and people wasted, making these places particularly attractive to these criminals.

From the start, it was clear that there is no real scientific breakthrough with DeepSeek. It was described as using several known optimization techniques, and it worked as expected, which, by the way, is a significant advance by itself.

The real breakthrough is that DeepSeek has shown that the state of the art in AI is not that expensive, not that complicated, and that OpenAI and friends do not really have a moat. They have burst a bubble.

As for DeepMind, how can they be so good scientifically and so bad at production? What is Google doing? They essentially invented modern AI, and continue doing so, and yet, get beaten to market by everyone else.

You would probably be better off with Debian then.

Debian is a stable, reliable and conservative distro, often lagging behind in terms of updates, but if you are the kind who doesn't like to change things that work, then it may be your best option.

The idea is not that $5 is too affordable.

The idea is that with the cost of materials, transport, energy, machines and labor taken to the lowest while still maintaining a decent standard of quality, it may be difficult to make a dress that sells for $5 retail. You can easily find $5 dresses, but *quality* $5 dresses are much harder to find, even in countries where the cost of living is cheap, excluding clearance and secondhand.

Also $5 is not high even for someone who makes that much per day. That would be maybe equivalent to $100 for a middle class person in a first world country, which many are ready to pay for a dress. In the pre-industrial times, clothing used to cost way more than the value a single day of work, maybe by 10x.

$5 is a bit low for a dress, but it is not inconceivable to have good enough quality for a $5 simple, light dress.
The fashion industry wants you to think that quality is expensive, but what you are really paying for is marketing. Also a $5 dress won't be "made in the USA", but this is a political statement that is not necessary for quality.

Cotton is cheap, that's what $1 t-shirts are made of. And synthetic fiber (yes, plastic) can be expensive, a lot of high quality clothes are made of it for its desirable material properties.