Some banks in the USA will trigger a voice call to verbally give you a code to type into your PC when you log in. That's the work-around for elderly people without a smartphone.

If you really think you need to pre-emptively record the people you talk to every day, you should find better people to talk to, move to a better neighborhood, or else not leave your own home.

I've been calling them "cheater" glasses, because of the recent influx of university students trying to cheat on exams with them. But "pervert" glasses works outside of academia.

You're talking largely to people who don't think rural exists, or who think suburban and rural are the same thing. The point that urban and suburban aren't the only lifestyles, and that rural life is car dependant but also often highly active is just, whoosh, lost on them. You are speaking mostly their culture-blinders.

The problem is that cell towers and EV chargers are both infrastructure that gets primarily built along population centers, with decisions made by corporations looking for larger populations, because that equals bigger profits. The only reason that cell towers exist along most of our interstate highways is due to government subsidies and requirements. Those main artery roads pass through many hundreds of miles of rural areas without the population centers to draw in large corporations. It took ~30 years with different repeated waves of government pressure and subsidies to get us to where we are now with there still being dead zones along major roads in some places. The same will happen with EV chargers if there is no government investment in getting that infrastructure in place. Whether private citizens driving between cities, or fleets of autonomous EV trucks driving themselves, charging will be required along that rural territory if we ever want EVs to be the dominant transportation.

However, sometimes you get _The Expanse_, so it can work. We shall see what happens with Sanderson.

Yes, this is the way. Instead of mere advertising revenue, as with traditional radio stations, they can still do that with a stream while also collecting and selling all of your data. An still, too bad, so sad, if you drive into a rural area with no cellular signal. Steep mountains blocking satellite signal? Oh, well. Too bad there aren't local radio stations anymore, and very few have enough storage on their phone to have local copies of owned music.

VLC isn't compromised. Windows has a weakness in it's design.

VLC here is "clean". A compromised machine uses VLC to load a dirty dll file, because Windows allows this, not because VLC is doing anything wrong. It is essentially a Windows flaw that the attackers are using VLC to trigger, just because VLC is very common on so many PCs. The same thing could happen with other apps.

This article says that the perpetrators use a "clean" version of VLC to exploit a weakness in Windows. The vulnerability here isn't with VLC. It is with Windows. You could never use VLC and fall victim to DLL sideloading attack.