Not sure why the parent is marked troll. The deprecation of the Prolific USB-serial chipset affected thousands of embedded systems. Expensive lab equipment turned into e-waste by Microsoft. Though of course the admins of said equipment should also maintain sensible backup images for known-good configuration of their hardware.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — Santayana, George (1905) Reason in Common Sense
History might not repeat, but it certainly fucking rhymes.
You can still post as AC, but you require an account. This is regrettable technical limitation due to inability to control the spam.
The spam was controlled by user moderation. The ascii porn and race bait was was always modded down to -1. Bring back anonymous posting!
These companies selling petroleum would stop selling petroleum if people stopped buying. If you bought petroleum then you share in the blame.
A single person doesn't have the power to choose not to buy petroleum products. A single person doesn't have the power to make a city build sustainable transport, or even to prevent that city from tearing up their existing infrastructure, as happened to light rail across the western world over the last century.
....remembering Terminator 2 and forgetting Hudson Hawk. You're just blaming routine shitty movies on DEI...like a bigoted asshole.
I never understood why Hudson Hawk had such bad reviews, it was a fun movie and has actually aged pretty well.
Your phone doesn't look for authorization from you before just giving your money away via an NFC transaction?
Or do you just blindly (and boldly) approve every box that comes up asking for authentication regardless of if you took an action that would require authentication?
The whole idea of NFC is "convenience" which is usually inverse to security.
Many cities allow NFC for public transport, for example. If you have to authorise every single tap-on and tap-off when using your phone to pay for the subway or bus. this is *not* convenient and I would expect that ~99% of people who use their phones for this job have the authorisation turned off.
Note that I am not suggesting that using your phone to pay for stuff like this is a good idea, just stating what I have seen other people do. I use the dedicated public transport pass, and add credit with cash to the pass when required. If I visit a new city, I get a new pass for that city's public transport. This way, if my pass gets stolen or hacked, the most I can lose is whatever cash was loaded onto the card, usually in the order of $20. No login details, no personal info. Bank and ATM cards stay in my wallet until they are needed at an ATM or to pay for good/services that allow me to insert the card.
When articles like this come up, I used to post a link to a live demo that was done at defcon(?) over a decade ago, when the presenter took a volunteer from the audience and removed some money from their NFC card by basically brushing against their pants. I'll see if I can still find this online, I don't think NFC has got any more secure since then, and the proliferation of people paying by phone has only increased the number of targets.
IIRC there's a limit to how much money can be taken from a debit/credit card (or its equivalent on a phone) before active authorisation by the card holder is required, usually somewhere between $20 - $100. I don't think this really improves security though. What worries me is NFC harvesting en masse in busy areas. Imagine a busy shopping mall, subway station etc, with a concealed NFC antenna in a briefcase, that grabs money from every card that walks past. How much money could that harvest in a day? Even if the limit on each card is "only" $20, if a thief harvests the money from 1000 passers by, that's twenty grand in a day. Easily enough to pay for the hardware, laundering the money, and a tidy profit on top. Then go to a new crowded area and do it again the next day. It's technically feasible and I have found zero published stats on how often this happens - they don't want the public to know how easy it is to make unauthorised charges to their cards.
Some of us have always wanted smart glasses. But we also want them to not be crap. I have pretty limited requirements for the graphics capabilities, but it does include overlay. But they also need to be in basically the same form factor as ordinary glasses, and they have to not be under the control of someone who's going to piss me off all the time showing me a lot of sponsored fuckery, and any processing has to be done on a device on my person and not someone else's computer. And I really don't want to be around other people who are streaming video to teh cloud 24/7, either.
What we're going to get will be very different from that description for the foreseeable future.
Wait, YOU want control of the hardware that YOU bought and paid for? Google and Meta won't like that.
I don't use Facebook. There have been brick and mortar businesses that I turned around and didn't use because they had no hours posted on the front, no information, nothing but a facebook QR code. And I don't use facebook so I didn't use that business, even though I was willing to come back when they were open. And it was in a dead mall too, they probably really need business. Same with businesses that put their menus only on facebook or under QR codes. I will just go elsewhere.
Ditto. If a business can't work without facebook, it can work without me as a customer.
I liked Jitsi, other video conferencing programs exist too of course.
Jisti was great until one day they just demanded login via facebook/google et al.
Overnight it went from "anyone with a browser can use it" to "everyone must be tied to facebook/google etc." There was supposed to be a way to self-host but this wasn't easy or well documented.
Jitsi claimed the change was because people were doing naughty things, but the change was so rapid and so hostile that it really seemed there must have been someone else pulling the strings. Did one of their competitors dislike the competition from Jitsi? "Nice video chat you've got there, it would be a shame if something happened to it..."
If you've got people who can't figure things out and just want to learn things rote, then Microsoft is going to make your problem harder, not easier.
I swear that networking under win95 and win98 made me dumber. You could do the exact same thing 3 times, and get a different result every time. Cause and effect seemed completely divorced from each other.
Go do stuff you like to do. Talk to the people there. Decide which ones you like, then ask the single ones for dates. Rinse and repeat.
NB: If "stuff you like" is something really nasty like stomping puppies, well, it might take a bit longer to meet someone. Then again, we know that there's at least one person out there who has looked up how much blood you need to get enough iron to make a sword... so there's hope for everyone!
Isn't it odd being a dissident these days? All the former dissidents come up to you and shout at you to obey the US government and lick those boots.
Same thing happened after 9/11. Then the roles were reversed during covid. Now we're here in 2025, it's hard to know which rules to follow or boots to lick because they get changed with a sharpie on a whim, then walked back a few days later when Wall St complains.
where will they get the nuclear fuel from? Yes, Belarus and Russia are big exporters, but what if the political situation worsens and it's no longer a good idea to import fuel from there?
Probably from an allied nation, most likely one that is part of the Commonwealth. E.g, Canada (2nd biggest uranium exporter) or Australia (4th biggest uranium exporter)
The broader corollary to that is "Why not extract a toll on every single transaction or interaction between the citizens and the bureaucracy whose thumb they're under?"
This literally happens every time most people use "tap to pay" instead of cash. The difference is the toll goes to the banks, and not to the government, who might at least spend a few of the dollars on schools and hospitals.
Unless your tax situation is extremely simple, it is nearly impossible to do them correctly on paper without current expert-level knowledge of the tax code. One W2 job? No problem. If you're a consultant, and/or have investments (which have capital gains, dividends and other tax considerations) it's basically impossible not to overpay without the assistance of software. The stamp is cheap, missing deductions is expensive. Most paper returns are generated by software and printed to be mailed in, usually in edge cases such as amended returns where e file isn't available.
Sure, but these could be baked into an electronic form or a spreadsheet that you can fill in, then print and mail the output (or copy the relevant boxes into a paper form by hand)
I file my taxes on paper, and this is how I do it. I made a little spreadsheet to do the maths for me, and I write its outputs into the paper form. If I ever get audited, I can show my calculations to the tax man.
The answer to the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is... Four day work week, Two ply toilet paper!
