I’ll add my experience to it as well.

I recently used it for a trip. I put into it my flights, hotels, checking/out times, reservations, and any other pertinant travel data. It gave me one single place to find a rather large amount of data.

It also helped me keep my timelines straight as I was booking things to make sure I didn’t have any overlap.

I’d think, in this case, you’d still have to legally acquire the content. So meta pirating a ton of books would still be piracy, the act of piracy would be illegal. Scraping the entire internet for publicly posted data isn’t illegal, however, so that’s still “fair game”. Of course, the internet is full of illegally posted content, so I’m not sure how you account for all that when training AI (most model makers probably don’t bother to try). “Sure, we trained our model on Disney movies, but user FartFace6969 posted them to youtube mirrored with the audio pitched up, your honor!”

Oh yes, and it is really only a business feature. It isn’t competing with Skype. It is actually hard for me to think of Teams as something non-business users are supposed to use.

Teams, as a business product, does actually offer phone service. It is a special license though and from what I hear people managing it hate it, even though users tend to like it.

For cereal and similar breakfast applications, I quite like oat milk. It does have a strong oat flavor though.

I absolutely disagree. That’s a fantastic reference for a union logo to make.

I haven’t touched Photoshop since like CS2 I think, so really can’t compare the two, but I will say that GIMP 3 was a huge enancenent to GIMP. It now has non-destructive editing. For my common uses, this is giant. Not having to redo 8 steps because I decided step 1 wasn’t right is so nice.

Of course Photoshop has done that for ages. My only point was that previous perceptions might be a little dated. And with the 3 update came with huge backend changes that will hopefully accelerate other feature development. Of course I’m sell on hope, but I’m excited for the future of GIMP. Also, now that 3 is out, they have been hinting that that are open to talk about a name change, which I think would be healthy if they want increased usage.

Sounds like I stand corrected.

Doesn’t the US already have full sanctions with Russia? So literally no trade is happening with them, so a tarrif would be pointless? Maybe I missed trump removing the sanctions at some point in his onslaught of nonsense.

For most people, the thought of replacing an outlet or switch is daunting to say the least. My IKEA smart bulbs are going on 7 years old and still working great.

I did replace every single outlet and switch in my house when I moved in, but that was before I knew about ZigBee or Zwave, and well before matter existed.

I don’t feel the need to replace most of my switches and half of my outlets again.

Any smart lights I’ve seen always turn on when going from no power to power. It’s a little annoying when the power blinks and half the house lights up, but it means physical switches always work.

Per your suggestion, I went out and took a new photo. The blog post has already been updated, but here’s the image.

I agree. I really struggled finding good light once the acrylic was on. It was just too shiny. Maybe I’ll try a daylight photo outside or something. In the article there are better pictures of the individual components though. It’s also hard to get the 3D effect in a photo. I thought about trying to embed a short video/gif of it, but didn’t have any handy.

Disasters do happen. Hurricanes are a big problem that often take out everything you mentioned except for starlink. And starlink has several problems, being owned by a Nazi is certainly one of them.

If you want to practice investing, give the 1984 hit video game Drug Wars a shot.

Oh, I’m not defending these dumb-asses doing illegal things to avoid systems setup to safeguard American and its people. They absolutely could have synced things to compromised devices. Just that Signal, themselves, couldn’t do that.

So I and some others here have probably sounded a bit antagonistic to you, but good on you for asking and trying to understand. Public Key Cryptography feels like magic to me too, it’s just magic that I’ve accepted exists without understanding the base math of it all. Without it, however, most of the security of the Internet doesn’t work.

Even most symmetrical encryption (Like AES, which is how you are picturing encryption working) layers on asymmetrical encryption as a negotiation layer to share a key that both parties have but that nobody eves dropping can read. Then once the key is exchanged, they use that because symmetrical encryption is way easier for computers. But for short messages like Signal sends, it wouldn’t surprise me if they stay asymmetrical for the entire communication.

Signal does hold the public keys for every user. But having the public key doesn’t let you decrypt anything. You need the private key to decrypt data encrypted with the public key. So in a chat example, if you and I exchange public keys, I can encrypt the message using your public key, but only you can decrypt it, using your private key.

Signal does run the key exchange, which means they could hand a user the wrong public key, a public key which they have the private key for, instead of the other person’s. That is a threat model for this type of communications, however, signal users can see the key thumbprints of their fellow chat participants and verify them manually. And once a chat has begun, any changes to that key alerts all parties in the chat so they know a change has happened. The new key wont have access to any previous or pending messages, only new ones after the change took place.

In the case of signal, it is provable that it cannot. They do not hold the keys to decrypt. The closest risk is the server injecting a new public key into the conversation, which the Signal app will warn about.

The server can’t decrypt it if it doesn’t have the keys to do so. It can be proven that private keys never leave the local device. It can also be proven that the proper public keys are being provided, and that the local device alerts on public key changes with a partner are announced.

Of course, nobody as part of the linked article did any of that verification, but still, a server doesn’t need to be trusted to be functional.