I was active online in this era. starting with 300 baud on a C=64, then moving up to C=128, Amiga and finally PC with a 57.6k modem before moving to dual-ISDN and DSL during the shell account / early WWW era. In Silicon Valley we of course had a healthy BBS scene. The one I called the most maxed out at 32 lines and ran the MajorBBS software by GlactiComm. GalactiComm made a 'GalactiBox' ISA serial expansion unit that would allow you to stack 16 internal modems into it. (max 64 modems over four units) So the place I called had two of them. The phone company had a great time getting those lines into a residence in Monte Sereno...

The popular multiplayer games on that system were Quest for Magic (it came stock with the BBS) Legend of Kyrandia (both are multiplayer MUD/Zork-likes, the latter was made into a successful point and click game in the 90s by Westwood) and Infinity Complex, which had a mutable environment you could dig out and expand.

I also occasionally called Spies in the Wire, which was run by Andy Rubin, later the creator of the Android operating system. Andy was a student and hobbyist at the time.

This is all receding so far into the past now it feels very quaint. But it was cool to dial up and see some of this great ANSI art from time to time. I was always impressed with people who could look at that character set and make art of out it.

Also, is there a point, when any app uploaded to one of these app stores would have to basically comply with the same terms and conditions as apps on the Google Play Store, from the looks of it?

Google is trying to claw back some of their precious per-sale revenue loss by charging that $10K, and increasing the barrier to entry to the point where only serious businesses will attempt it. It's obvious that having third party app stores provides no benefit for Google, so they are doing everything they legally can to stem their losses. With monopoly app stores, Google and Apple basically have a license to print money. The incentives are not great for consumer freedom.

It can very occasionally be a pain in the butt, but I use a throwaway google account for my phone, and nothing but my phone. The only data I allow it to back up is my contacts list (even that is a stretch for me, but I got tired of re-entering all the names and numbers each time I bought a new phone or doing a manual local backup process). There are no other google accounts added to my phone. No gmail (I use a third party IMAP client for a non-google email, only two weeks of emails are kept on the server before being downloaded to my local PC and deleted.)

Depends on how much you want to sacrifice convenience for safety in terms of someone potentially having access to your entire digital history / footprint by getting a hold of your phone.

The idea is to keep a reasonable amount of stuff local-only and off the device that is easy to steal / confiscate / hack.

Same here. And I probably expended a lot less energy learning how to play it than AI did. But I was certainly not world champion level. I might be able to beat my cousin once in a while...

That was my first thought. It's a big step towards pointing out how invasive it is.

That last one really chaps my hide. Those mountains of fake drama posts punctuated by the 'negative parallelism' structure (now I have a name for the thing I hate.) It's everywhere and it's infuriating.

All you can do is try to ignore it and focus on your own (AI-free) stuff. Of course anything you post online will then become free AI fodder. It's hard to get away from it.

Yes it makes use of the thumbwheels, but that's missing the point. You have to go to the touch screen first before being able to do ANY of that. Sure, it's fine once you're in that mode for the scrollwheels, but getting there is completely obnoxious when you're also trying to drive.

Go to the screen...menu -> controls -> mirror icon. Adjust one. Fumble with screen to select the other mirror, adjust.

On my Mazda3 and every other car I've owned it's a selector switch and a joystick on the door. Very intuitive and within easy reach without ever looking at it. They've been that way since the 80s when power mirrors came to the masses. My '85 Celica had the same setup.

AC? If it's not in the little controls in the bottom corner you have to flip-up the larger control screen, and do weird pinchy things with your fingers to adjust the vents, looking at the screen while driving. Fumble for the fan speed at the bottom of the screen. Try to slide around to adjust the temperature at the bottom of the screen.

Compare to conventional car with knobs where you can take one glance at where your hand is going and do it by feel.

There are reasons why certain things are the way they are. It's because a company spent a LOT of time doing ergonomic studies and trials. I hate it when people throw out all that work in lieu of something else just because it's different, without a lot of thought and study first. It's putting the cart before the horse.

"OK, what would you do if you couldn't have any buttons, how could you make it suck less?" I feel they're working backwards from 'terrible' to 'only mostly terrible'. Not much of an improvement.

She wanted it, and she actually likes it. I found it ridiculous when I drove it, but she likes all the creature comforts. More power to her, I just avoid it. I think I'm a more of a driver-centric experience sort of person. She likes all the bling and frilly features and does not drive as much as I do.

Everything in this space lately has been a huge turnoff. Modern cars were never so physically capable, safe, and smooth handling, and yet they are absolute garbage in the human interface department. Giant touchscreens and gadgets are the equivalent of chrome and giant tailfins gone amok in the 1950s.

Quite happy with my 2016-era Mazda with a basic infotainment setup, bluetooth to my phone which has everything I need. My truck that I use to haul things occasionally is 26 years old. I have a bluetooth to cassette adapter in that one (a lawful-evil wedding of technology) and yet it works fine.

The wife has a Tesla, and while it has an amazing powertrain, it is just so aggravating to interface with in so many ways. No buttons for the mirrors. No buttons for the wiper. (there's one button on the end of a stalk to activate the wiper+spray automatic thing) If you leave the auto-wiper on it randomly activates and smears the windshield in the driest of weather. The door handles are terrible. The lack of any kind of physical controls for climate and entertainment is terrible. It is super distracting to try to do anything while driving. It calls home to mother and reports on everything you're doing. The auto dimming mirror, like all auto-dimming mirrors, doesn't dim enough nor when you want it to. The adaptive cruise control constantly slams on the brakes on highways with grade level intersections or if you're coming up on a hump on a road that hasn't been graded flat. The insurance is sky high. The tires wear out quickly due to the weight, and are very expensive. Anything saved in gas is made up for in those other things.

You can see where they had all these ideas and just didn't think them through. Whereas traditional auto manufacturers understand a lot of these things and even on their electric offerings still have plenty of physical buttons and not-ridiculous interface peculiarities. I got a ride in a friend's Hyundai Ioniq5 a little ago and it was great. Felt like a regular car with lots of buttons. But they are priced as such that any savings in gas is made up for in the overall cost of ownership of the car. So you're not doing it for that, you're doing it just to have the other features of an electric car or feel better about yourself. I don't feel it's worth it for that. My cars are paid for and the daily driver is absurdly cheap to fuel and maintain, so I'll stick with it until some sanity returns to the modern car market. (unlikely...)

Since invariably, you still need to carry a physical ID for the most serious of applications, according to the article, it's completely pointless.

Another option is to use software like VeraCrypt to encrypt sensitive data into a file on your PC. Make it look like an innocuous system file and put it in the system folder somewhere. Don't leave VeraCrypt installed - it will run installer-free, download it at your destination and remove it before traveling again.

There's a double level of security if you use the option where it has a second dummy decryption container in the same file that you can give away.

But yea, if you can securely download what you need, the ultimate choice is to not have the data with you at all.

So they're taking all your data, selling it, and making you pay for the privilege? Must be a nice business if you have zero scruples.

Why do you need OnStar? Who would want to steal a GM car? All the GM brands are at the very bottom of Consumer Reports reliability index for 2026.

OnStar uses cellular service to connect, so if you have an emergency, either both OnStar and your cell phone work, or neither work. So there's no advantage to using OnStar rather than just dialing 911. 911 services are allowed access to your phone's GPS location regardless of settings.

It just seems like a pork package to sell along with the clear coat. Not to mention the theft of your data without compensation, whether you subscribe or not. You have to physically disable the modem to avoid that.

Tesla is awful due to the lack of physical controls where they would really make sense. It is an actively driver-hostile car. Other than the powertrain, which is amazing, the car is completely obnoxious. The door handles in particular are a huge problem and have been banned in China. Why would you intentionally make door handles that are super awkward to open rather than just pull? Why would you make someone dig through a menu to adjust the mirrors, or adjust the A/C vents and other controls? Trying to shift with the right stalk? Awkward and horrible. I think they thought it was sexy to just have a screen and nothing else, but in reality it just absolutely sucks. Before you say, "but have you owned one?" Yes, yes I have. It's my wife's current daily driver. And I avoid driving it like the plague.

I figured if I read the comments on this post, I'd find all the incels and rednecks whining about Fark. The truth is, it hasn't really changed much, other than the fact that the people running the site grew up, and the site grew up with them and shed that frat-boy mentality.

They also had to get rid of adult content due to Google becoming the morality police of the internet when it comes to sites that they will allow ads to be run against. They are in turn pressured by various right wing lobby groups in the United States, who also pressure credit card payment systems not to support adult content. Blame the religious right for that. A legacy of our puritan origins. (Fark tried moving all the Boobies links to foobies.com, and that experiment ultimately did not work.) They have to police comment photos as well for that reason.

Fark is still a terrific link aggregator with funny headlines, and no AI or algorithms to filter it. The traffic has fallen off a good amount from its peak years, but it's still very lively.

I also find it funny that people here are complaining that fark is 'woke' or whatever, when I see plenty of borderline socialist ideology on display in posts every day on Slashdot. If you are complaining about that, why are you here? Yea, Fark is certainly anti-fascist, and I'm great with that.

I'd say Slashdot is in a much more degraded state than Fark. The original sense of community on Slashdot is long gone, though it still provides a useful aggregation of privacy and security focused tech news, which I appreciate. The comment sections here are far nastier on average. Fark is still fairly civil other than a few trolls here and there, and it's easy to block them.

I learned from here on Slashdot the two best tools to deal with Win11 at the moment you get the first windows setup screen. Used the shell trick to create a local-account-only, then installed O&O Shutup10+++ and Winhance. I used those two tools to remove every single piece of telemetry, junk software, spam, spyware, AI and forced updates from the OS. All of this before ever connecting it to the internet. (I loaded those two pieces of software from a thumbdrive.) The result is a super clean install that just does what I want. This is an older Microsoft Surface so it needed to be clean to run well with limited RAM. It's my throwaway lightweight laptop for international travel. No personal information on it. This register article is also handy.

On my main machine I'm still happily running Win10. My browsing habits are pretty boring and I run Ublock Origin, AdblockPlus etc. in Firefox to keep anything unruly out. I used to run noscript but pretty much no sites work with JS disabled these days.