Turning off location services isn't enough. You can still be roughly located by watching what cell towers your phone connects to.

It's not enough if there's a manhunt (like it was for Kevin Mitnick more than 30 years ago) but it would probably be good enough to not get caught into these lazy dragnets. Google can (or could, back then) pull the data for everyone and is a one-stop shop, random providers let aside there are usually multiple ones don't have nice APIs to answer such queries, not all last-mile devices are reporting detailed logs to the mothership, and as these are for critical troubleshooting usually they might not be kept for more than a few days. It really doesn't compare.

On that note keep in mind Google itself decided to not store the location history anymore, possibly triggered by such cases (this happened in 2019). I was quite annoyed by the change initially as it seemed stupid because you still get the choice to back it up back to their servers, but it's encrypted with your PIN/password and even if they could probably easily brute force it for most of the people it's still a high enough barrier for them to claim is data they don't have. At first, you couldn't even export it from the phone (like you could from Takeout) and I was sure between that and the fiddly optional backup you're bound to lose it (yes, some people would like to have that Location History, spanning 10-15 years easily, well integrated in Google Maps, it's nice). But now you can even export it from the device and save it locally, so it isn't too bad.

... without a difference? If anything phones are worse both for unindented security issues as they commonly run tons of large attack surface user space programs (browser, mail, IM, etc.) and more problematic in case they get breached (or have backdoors in the first place). Taking over a router is of course bad, but for most people that don't have much of an infrastructure behind it's like using a random public wifi, not so great but also decently safe with 99% of the things we run nowadays over SSL. Having a phone backdoored is game over, for all its data, all the apps, and even for targeted and really dangerous spying (including recording audio or video without any indication to the user).

... you very much, and a new wave of notices about price increases are on the way, despite the European (and North American) summer being really easy on the providers with all the solar installed (and not that much A/C use in large parts of Europe).

Even if Microsoft didn't do any AI crap whatsoever they would still have to jack up prices because the bubble is devouring all the ram.

If "Microsoft didn't do any AI crap whatsoever" we (most likely) WOULDN'T HAVE THIS BUBBLE IN THE FIRST PLACE. They're THE most significant investor in OpenAI (certainly the ones that had to proffit the most, by far) and somewhere in the second place as far as hyperscalers go (usually 2, might be 1 depending what metrics you have, what and where you count, install versus growth, etc.), building these datacenters that gobble up everything.

It's unclear what Microsoft is hoping for but when this is finally buried I bet it would be a catastrophe that dwarfs their whole Windows Phone shenanigans, when they put into the ground both their mobile OS (coming since well before there were even iPhones) and the whole Nokia's mobile business that they bought and buried. And they managed to do this over the whole "wild west" of days of smartphone introduction and raise.

They just don't get it that Windows is valuable because it's Windows, because all your apps and peripherals just work, not that you need to pester 5 years some developers to build something for your special snowflake OS that runs only on some tiny market share of light premium laptops and nowhere else. People value Windows because they don't even need to think if their old printer or apps work, it's Windows = it works. There won't be good things coming to Microsoft if they insist in breaking this conditioning.

ISP = Internet service provider. Blocking packets is precisely THE OPPOSITE of providing Internet.

i hate the fact that i need to go on ebay and research whether or not the laptop in offers have soldered ram.

You don't need to anymore, anything that's vaguely power efficient in this space is soldered RAM now.

Framework had to go to some ancient and power hungry Intel 13th Gen on their smallest laptop to keep the socketed RAM. And their "desktop" has soldered RAM!

... "reporting". There's nothing harder to keep the limit for X minutes instead of half a minute and not a different concept for "dodging" the tickets. The point is that these being fixed you can just as well speed with confidence anywhere else.

Maybe not.

Basically every computer, phone or tablet not only runs some OS that can act as a powerful stateful router/firewall but also has the UI and some workflows specifically designed for that (connection sharing, tethering both wired and wireless, etc.).

Probably ... YES. Not intentionally, but I've seen quite a few posts over the last months where I said "surely this isn't AI" (and by AI I mean what mostly everyone mean by "AI" nowadays, these LLM autocomplete). We got to the point where the AI stuff is coherently crafted from beginning to end while the "human" posts are what the average human (that's a really low bar) would do, possibly drunk or on drugs.

Not sure what all posts about "Chromium something something" are about. Chrome has 65-80% market share. Most of what's left is Safari, with the rest being mostly in the noise. I'm sure Chromium runs on all these platforms, yet approximately nobody prefers it. Yes, Chromium or Firefox would do fine. But all the "[gasp] why people would want Chrome when Chromium and Firefox exist" posts are pointless, people just do.

And Apple has MacOS, iOS (and iPadOS) based on Darwin (BSD).

Ask Google why they're trying to fold ChromeOS into Android. On that side they barely managed to just give it a new name, while on Android side they're toying with a terribly lacking "OS" UI, and all apps are still the regular Android apps, missing even the (proper) Chrome from ChromeOS (!). And they've been at it since late 2024 (publicly, probably more behind the scenes).

LOL Guess again Asians are considered a minority for the mandatory Oscar quotas.