Maybe Musk can turn X over to Alex Jones, if Jones loses Infowars. X can’t get any worse than it already is, right? Right?

Huh?

I’d consider it unlikely that Google or Apple put anything like that into their phones on purpose, because of the reputational hit if it came out. But, new vulnerabilities are being exploited every day. And don’t forget the need to protect metadata.

Do you know the movie Citizenfour, a documentary about Edward Snowden? During its production, if the filmmakers wanted to discuss something sensitive, they would leave their phones in the office and go outside to have their conversation without them. There still might have been listening devices around, but they did what they could about the phones.

I swear, this place is even stupider than Reddit. Kamala Harris spent a billion dollars literally campaigning against Trump, far more than you did by simply voting against him, but she helped him by running such a terrible campaign. And Biden? Among other things he managed to actually get infected with COVID just in time for his debate with Trump, causing him to throw a cog on nationwide TV. That helped Trump more than anything. If he had just worn an N95 mask, well I can’t guarantee that he would have been re-elected, but he’d have probably avoided infection and done a lot better in the debate. Thanks, Biden.

It’s not false equivalence when they really do both suck! Anyway, have fun under Trump 2.0, courtesy of people like you refusing to acknowledge your leader’s mistakes.

And you downvoted anyway. Silly cultist. 800,000 people dead of Covid under Biden, not a good look.

I think you are rationalizing. Biden and Trump both did terrible at dealing with Covid. OWS was one of the few things done right. It really was something like the moon program. Otherwise you can never credit or blame a politician for anything unless they are the ones personally doing the work. But that’s not what they do.

The alternative to OWS would have been to just let big pharma develop vaccines the usual way, instead of using a lot of approaches in parallel with government funding to get usable ones faster. Of course the protection from those vaccines was then pissed away under both administrations, by doing almost nothing (except during the initial lockdowns) to stop airborne spread of the virus. The Herman Cain Award is one of the most memorable legacies from that.

Trump already met with Biden a couple days ago.

Biden welcomes Trump for fireside chat as he prepares to watch his legacy burn

Trump authorized and funded OWS. Obviously he didn’t do the actual science. It’s JFK and the moon landing. JFK didn’t build the rockets or fly in them, but the project as a whole happened because of his getting behind it.

The 8 to 9 upgrade wasn’t terribly expensive but the rest were a lot more. Do you think the individual upgrades were worth it? What were the biggest jumps in usability?

I still think of the 4A as the last good Pixel, since it has a headphone jack. So I’ve been wondering if it can run current versions of Graphene.

The main attraction of the 9 from my perspective is NTN (satellite) messaging, but older models might get that later. I certainly don’t want AI in my phone.

I see there are some fairly affordable older Pixels on woot right now, particularly refurbs, but some new units too. Refurb 6 is $145 and refurb 7 is $200. New 9 Pro XL is $900, way more than I’m willing to pay. I wonder whether the older ones are basically as good if you don’t care about AI or the fanciest cameras.

This is farcical. Operation Warp Speed (fast development of Covid vaccines) was one of the few good things that Trump 1.0 did.

Then my laptop is a phone? It’s sort of a phone but it doesn’t connect to the phone network, so only sort of. Since it needs a wifi signal it’s not so mobile either.

Ok but wifi only isn’t really a phone?

I didn’t watch the video but I don’t think there is any phone that lets you avoid having your location tracked. If there is wifi near where you want to use the phone, you could run a voip client on on a wifi-only tablet, perhaps.

I’ve been wondering whether satellite communications gizmos with no GPS allow any type of precise location tracking from the satellite. I’ve been interested in this, which lets you exchange text messages at fairly low cost (about 2 cents per 50 byte unit). Besides possible privacy advantages, it also lets you communicate where there is cell coverage:

https://shop.blues.com/products/starnote-starter-kit

Harriet Miers is smiling.

What exactly do you want it to do? You can implement TOTP with a 10 line python script and I probably have a few of those kicking around. I’ve ended up doing that at least a couple of times.

Use a medic alert bracelet if you need something like that. EMTs are trained to look for it. They aren’t going to derp around looking at your phone.

I’ve never been able to get a library card anonymously, but anonymous email is pretty easy I thought. I use mailinator sometimes, which has no registration even.

They don’t say what models but it probably doesn’t matter. It’s fine with me if my phone is basically generic. (Moto G Stylus 5g 2023).

I set up ZNC and got it working but it was a pain in the neck, took some trial and error, and the docs were confusing. Once I got it going I basically left it alone rather than try to clean up the situation.