Not quite, but close enough to the mark that it should count. To run it is one thing, to *trust* it is another entirely, and we generally engage it quite a bit of data security, isolation, and threat mitigation on the basis that no, we don't trust it. Sure, run it, but accordingly, regard it as a threat and take whatever measures you can to mitigate that threat. And from a security standpoint, the same is true of Linux as well. Protect your data, because you can't "trust" code from anywhere. (Sidenote: obviously, we always have to balance trust risk vs mitigation cost, and they're both high in the case of Windows, and both low in the case of Linux, which is why I admit, the point you're making should effectively count as correct anyhow.)

You can't "trust" code from anywhere, ever. At least with open source, however, you're given the opportunity to review the code yourself. But no responsible organization should ever be trusting code from a third party.

It's not about the apps specifically. The "not for thee" is due to the fact that the exploited backdoors put in place in communications infrastructure were at the requirement of the government. They could remove these backdoors but won't for wish to continue to use them to surveil the citizenry. They're not advising everyone to stop using phones or text messages; they want everyone else to keep using them so they can keep monitoring them. Just not senior government officials.

Sure, you can use the apps too, it's just that they're just not telling you you should. This was the point OP was raising - that everyone would benefit from more secure communications. The government could either remove the backdoors which caused their telecommunications infrastructure to become compromised in the first place, or recommend everyone use secure apps. But they're not doing either of these. Hence OP's "for me, but not for thee" - it's not claimed to be an absolute.

And besides, in regards to apps, the federal government keeps raising concerns with the level of encryption present in consumer products. Nobody is claiming the public is yet being prevented from using these apps, but unfortunately the "yet" there could at any time be only a serious incident or "public mandate" away.

Intentionally ambiguous season pass descriptions are a significant frustration with some titles. For example, some games teasing future season passes which happen to include DLC already released, but not telling you that in the description so that one ends up double-dipping. Or games with multiple useless single-player cosmetic DLCs and a handful of content DLCs, dropping a season pass priced *slightly less* than those combined, but not telling you which of the content DLCs are included, so that you go for the "cheaper" option of buying the season pass, only be stuck with one content DLC and a bunch of cosmetics. And so forth and so on.

Sure - sometimes reading comments/reviews can help get around these and similar traps. And always, simply not buying from publishers who engage such scummy practices would always avoid it. But not everybody is an as perfectly refined and wondrously logical being as you are, and for those individuals, it's certainly a step in the right direction to have the storefront require publishers to actually tell purchases what they're buying. I mean, it seems obvious that should have always been a thing, but it hasn't been, and its a fix better late rather than never.

Right, so if you're travelling to the US for example where border security can require access to your phone and/or computer, you just have to decide beforehand if you're willing to abandon transit to avoid your phone being searched. If your answer to that is No, then there's no point powering it off to avoid search, since you already know you won't abandon transit in order to do so. That's all I was saying - the advice is useless for most people. Only useful for people who know ahead of time they *will* abandon transit if a search of their devices is requested.

Not much point for most folk, since border control can generally require you to turn on and unlock your phone. The only reason to take the extra step of turning off your phone is if it actually has something illegal on it, and you're willing to sacrifice your transit if you're asked to unlock it and refuse to. For everyone else who's *not* willing to sacrifice their transit and will comply with any lawful order, turning it off just takes up more of your time.

"But what if I have nothing illegal on it and don't want to unlock it on principal". Like I said - it's useless advice for people who *aren't* willing to sacrifice their transit. If you're willing to sacrifice your transit for that principal, that's fine. But there's exceedingly few people this applies to.

To be clear, nobody is making this claim, but what data do you have on the heart health of primitive humans in order to use them as a rebuttal argument against the story? For all you know, they had terrible heart health, and since as best we can tell they had fairly short, violent lives with mostly young deaths, it bewilders me that you'd bring primitive humans up as a rebuttal.

It sounds like you're making the same non-sequitur argument folks make when they say "eating paleo must be the best diet for us because it's what our ancestors ate" - as if the availability or lack thereof of a thing within a specific period in time is what makes it best. Which is not to say the average modern adult's diet isn't terrible, but in no way implies a paleo diet is the best thing for us either.

Rather than making up nonsense rebuttals, just find the science which shows standing still for more than 2 hours a day is beneficial for our health, and the science which debunks and explains the findings of this study with a better hypothesis.

Let me start by saying, I think this is a terrible product and support any efforts to circumvent it. However, in answer to your question, there's no second party here. It's not a GDPR issue nor requires consent. The model is run locally on your PC, by you. Once the model is downloaded, it works offline, and nobody else is making a recording. Whether that data gets to them through some other delineated feature or software is another matter, but on it's own, there is no second party involved in the processing of this data.

That being said, it can be disabled through Group Policy Editor. At least for now. Most OS telemetry (but not all) can be disabled without any third-party software, and this falls well within the most category, especially since at present it requires express consent to install the appropriate model in the first place.

Note, it doesn't say they don't work when taken on their own, you might have jumped to a conclusion there. It's saying that in otherwise healthy adults, multivitamins don't lead to lifespan longevity. The study specifically excludes people who have a deficiency in a given vitamin(s). It's only a look at if there's any point in taking multivitamins if you're healthy. It's not about taking specific vitamins if you have a deficiency, for which there is varied study results for specific circumstances.

Yeah, I had a read of it earlier and unfortunately the individual who made the changes misunderstood appears to have misinterpreted what they were reading, in regards to the change made for Mikhail Gilula:

-[...]Mikhail Gilula was a brilliant innovator who also left
-in a destructive way that erased the value of his contributions, and
-that he was shown much generosity just makes it more painful.

+Mikhail Gilula was a brilliant innovator that has shown much generosity.

The sentiments "was shown" and "has shown" have pretty much opposite meanings. I mean, it's one thing to honor Reiser's request to remove the negative comments. It's another thing altogether to put in potentially unfounded positive comments because one misunderstood the sentence they were reading.

Note for non-native-English speakers, "was shown much generosity" means they've received a lot of generosity from others. "has shown much generosity" means they've given a lot of generosity to others. These are opposite sentiments, and kinda a silly mistake to make when simplifying the sentence, since he literally had to change "was" to "has".

If you're using Chrome or Edge, it may be due to the latest update breaking many TLS connections rather than the MS patch. The latest Chrome update released with their new post-quantum secure TLS encryption mechanism enabled by default, and it simply doesn't work with many configurations of middleware and firewalls, so seeing pages refuse to load would be expected. It can be disabled (details in the article) but the vendors whose routers and servers it's not compatible with will need to be updated in the near future, since quantum-resistant TLS is an essential part of the future.

In this case, we can probably give them the benefit of the doubt they know what they're doing. This isn't their first time launching hardware via Kickstarter. The software is the standout feature of this tablet. The hardware appears to basically be a Doogee T30 Max (although the camera isn't as good as the T30, so perhaps a T20 Ultra, or any of a number of similar devices) so don't expect high overheads for branding on generic hardware.

However, their software goal is the feature that folks would be looking to this for, primarily. If all you want is a good tablet, there are probably better and cheaper options. But if you want a tablet with an entire privacy-focused suite of software, Volla is providing something ready-to-go. No messing about trying to get the right version or build for your specific hardware, and having to jailbreak your device, etc, just to get it working. The tablet is merely a delivery mechanism for the ecosystem of software they're providing.

Further to this, I've tried to look up the protocol handshake to see if a network could actually determine if the device is certified or not, and haven't been able to verify. So consider, it may simply be a matter that it's illegal as a user to use a US SIM in a non-certified device within the US, but it's legal to use a roaming non-US SIM due to the aforementioned required interoperability. It may be that a US SIM would work, but they've had to tell people they need to use roaming international SIMs for legal reasons. Someone with more knowledge of mobile infrastructure would need to chime in and tell you if the lack of certification is a technical restriction requiring foreign SIMs, or merely a legal one.

It's a certification issue. It hasn't yet been through the PTCRB certification process which - especially since it's just been funded - would not have had either the time or funds to do so. Presumably due to interoperability agreements, US networks have to agree to work with roaming devices from abroad even if they haven't been certified for use in the US. Volla do say they're aiming to getting the certification done, so given time this won't likely be an issue, but it's just a heads up for early adopters. Ie, plan on using it on wifi for the time-being, as I imagine paying international roaming charges to another country would be prohibitively expensive.

(paraphrasing) A VPN run by Google is like a woman's refuge run by Ted Bundy.