Is your phone AI capable? I bought a new one a year ago (the old one was out of OS support) and made sure that mine was not.
My second line in the sand is to use DuckDuckDo as the search engine, although I'm preparing to experiment with Brave's. Replacing the messaging app could be more difficult, especially if I want to keep my history.

I don't have a TV at all, but I have Cable and use it for Internet access at around 350 Mbps. It is far cheaper than any of the prices I've seen mentioned here (as in around $60 a month), no reason to change.

China is taking the long-term view here, building up goodwill in Cuba and in other countries where they see themselves potentially in the same situation. I hope they realise that military action with Taiwan would do a lot of damage to that goodwill.
Why is the US still bullying Cuba in the first place? It is not as though Cuba is a threat.

Well, looking at an earlier story from today, they have good reason to look for alternatives.

That appears to be a problem with the summary - the original articles (I must admit I did not read all of the first one) seem to be written by people who have a better idea of what they are talking about.

Well, DT's the investor Milton needs. It's called "giving something back".

That raises a question: Was that post composed by an LLM or has it subsequently been used as input to something like Grok?
As to "lack of respect", respect can be earned but so can its lack.

There is a public transport app called Öffi which I consider essential when in Germany. It is free, does not gather data on its users and covers the entire country, the alternatives are regional and many really want to know all about their users.
That link is to the Google Play Store, but it has twice been removed from there.
The first time it was because the app encourages donations, but that request was hidden from users installing via the Play Store. I think Google looked at the app and noticed that request for donations but could not see that it was functionally inactive. It took them a few months to accept the truth and permit the app again.
The second time was mid July 2025, they banned it again and refused to say why. I was in Germany and travelling at the time, the app ceased working with a database error and I was screwed, it took me a day or three to download Fdroid and get it working but now I get it from there. It's back in the Play Store (I don't know when that happened) but I have to assume this idiocy is going to happen again.

I use another App where the developer(s) announced that they were going to stop updating their Play Store version because the overhead was just too much, and that the preferred migration path was to Fdroid. It is a security product, one which resolves QR codes to text and requires the user to confirm that they really want to visit that site. Works for me.

I'd have thought there are other problems which are more important. A day or so ago in Wiesbaden (Germany) Google Maps decided a section of an Autobahn was closed, even though traffic was running normally there, at that point a number of misguided souls left the Autobahn and drove through the city to avoid the non-closed section. It took them a few hours to fix the error.

IF traffic-running-normally THEN ignore announcements that a road is closed.

If the road is really blocked then I'd expect barriers and signs detailing the detour. Google Maps can't read those signs but it should be able to notice that traffic has ceased to flow there.

Which nation? Israel decided to pre-emptively attack Iran and the Lebanon, Trump and friends decided "that sounds cool, let's join in". How is "the nation" being defended there?

You can prove anything with the right statistics.

I'm wondering what effect this is going to have on people trying to enter the U.S.
We've already seen social media posts being a ground to deny admittance, how is it doing to look with installed AI clients? Anthropic - BAD, ChatGPT or Grok - GOOD. As for me, I don't think my phone supports any of them and have no interest finding out anyway.

The EU is spread over three timezones, plus a few more for the distant French (and Dutch) territories.
- the Baltic states and Greece, probably Cyprus, maybe Finland
- pretty much all of the rest
- Portugal, Ireland
That's from memory and I may have got some of those wrong.
The reason Spain is in the "all of the rest" block rather than Portugal, Ireland (and the UK) is that General Franco owed and admired Hitler and he decided to have his country on the same time zone as the German Reich. The Spanish adapted (they get up an hour later) so the country stayed there once Franco was safely dead.

Since the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. hasn't collected comprehensive statistics on the number of citizens leaving.

It is difficult to come up with exact figures under those circumstances.

How much of this is down to "snowbirds"?
I've seen reports that Canadians are turning their backs on Florida - and selling their properties there - and heading elsewhere, and that Lisbon (along with the rest of that country) was actively trying to attract them, but their primary reasons (ICE, and a state legislature going out of their way to drive them elsewhere) don't really apply to US snowbirds. Bali, Colombia and Thailand would also fit. If this effect is down to that then 2025 is probably a one-off - they will have spent winter 2024/25 in Florida, Arizona or whatever, winter 2025/26 outside the US but only their departures will have been registered because they have not returned yet.
Of course Ireland is less of a destination for that kind of tourism.

They are going down that road (the second part at least, the "starting from scratch" part) with their "New Outlook".
News Flash: It is worse, much worse.

disclaimer, it's possible that they have mothballed that product, I don't use Microsoft's products nowadays.