God’s sake. I mean… At least he’s apologising? I could imagine some of our recent lot doubling down on this and refusing to give in to wokeness blah blah blah…

But yeah. I’m really trying hard to be charitable cos it’s Christmas and everything. That’s not really pleasant stuff to hear from the guy who is in charge of the Police (over 1,100 under investigation for sexual assault or domestic violence atm)

Yeah it’s a real shame because from what I saw of the Artemis app it looked good as well. I hope the dev is ok.

Kbin definitely needs a decent app. The web app does the job but it can be a bit irritating as you say

What if this is the afterlife of a religion we don’t know about from our previous existence?

I don’t think you can have a rational reply to your question - it’s all head canon

It’s not really that surprising that the average user wants the most popular search engine instead of yahoo (of all things) baked in, whatever your views on Google.

I’ve been seeing these on r/comics and assumed he was her secret alien friend or something, I never realised he was a sex toy.

Thanks for the, uh, enlightenment

I love this guy’s stuff so much. Especially with some of his longer comics you think you know where he’s going and he’s just on a complete tangent!

I remember having to change things I got from… places… from epub to mobi using calibre for my old school kindle to recognise it years ago. I don’t even have that device anymore.

Glad they’re accepting what appears to be the standard format tbh.

From a British perspective I know there was always a huge political obsession with maintaining the ‘Special Relationship’ with the US up until Trump came in and Brexit happened basically simultaneously making us more irrelevant.

It’s still there in a half hearted transactional way when it comes to intelligence sharing, day to day stuff etc. But in terms of the PM sucking up to the President photo opportunities to get some media attention - that aspect seems to have died pretty quickly.

It strikes me there are a lot of similarities with our politics right now though - lack of faith from the voters, rampant cronyism, lawbreaking heads of state FFS, culture war obsessions dominating the discourse when the average person is more worried about affording their rent/mortgage at the end of the month. I’d say our government is dysfunctional on the same level but the difference is we stopped being a superpower way back when.

I’m rambling way off topic, sorry. Reading that just reminded me of when our politicians used to be all over the American ones as being the glamorous ones to suck up to (whether the public agreed or not) but things have definitely changed.

This is about misinformation on social media plays a part in war and journalism

Funnily enough gay sex was fine in ancient Rome (as long as you were the dominant one) but having sex in the light (whether natural or candle light) was seen as a massive taboo.

(Amongst the upper and middle classes anyway, I doubt the majority of people cared)

Obviously - I guess I’m more surprised at The Register in that case. They’re a very savvy industry magazine. Presumably they get a hefty wad.

Thanks for this - this is something that has passed me by. So essentially plagarising another website’s content for traffic plus the usual Google shenanigans? Nice

Thanks for the info - was not aware of this before. Yet more wonderful business practices from the world of big tech…

Sorry for that, but I don’t actually understand what you mean…

EDIT OK I’ve googled it and it seems to be a page that is sponsored by Google but I use Firefox and it worked fine with that - so is the problem that it doesn’t work with certain browsers?

Someone I’m in a Discord group with wanted an invite to bluesky because it was more familiar to him than Mastodon.

He pretty much wanted a like-for-like replacement for Twitter, though to his credit he had already tried Mastodon before dismissing it out of hand.

It’s not that he disliked it exactly, but he wasn’t that interested by what he saw so didn’t stick with it - to each their own

I mean this isn’t miles away from what the writer’s strike is about. Certainly I think the technology is great but after the last round of tech companies turning out to be fuckwits (Facebook, Google etc) it’s only natural that people are going to want to make sure this stuff is properly regulated and run fairly (not at the expense of human creatives).

I’ve been using a VPN, blockers, all sorts in the UK to disguise some of my online activity from Google and other companies so if I’m just doing the same thing to avoid the government there’s not much difference.

The fact that I still use Google products is a lapse and due to laziness on my part…

Of course it could be a vote winner for Starmer at the next election to say he’ll repeal it on free speech grounds of he played it right. But then the opposition could spin it as him not wanting to protect children online so he probably won’t have the guts to risk it.

WhatsApp certainly won’t, they own the UK chat app market and it’s not like they genuinely give a shit about privacy.

The others - remains to be seen.

VPN subscriptions in the UK will be a lucrative market then for people wanting access to, let’s see, Wikipedia…

I’m interested to know what the Signal President meant when she said she’s much more optimistic about working with the government than she originally was.

The thing is it obviously does come from good intentions, and it’s very rare you’ll find me saying that about something to do with the Tories. But it’s so obviously the wrong approach and yet here we are. Thanks for nothing. Yet again.

Still use Google search, but switched out Chrome for Firefox recently and it’s working out well. I do still use their calendar, docs apps but I’ve never been a big one for YouTube. I do have some Google speakers though and use Maps all the time - so I guess out of big tech Google is the one I’m suckered into the most…

Stopped using Facebook around 2016 and deleted my Twitter account a few years before that, basically when the novelty had long gone and it all seemed to be more toxic.

In the UK around that time it was just everyone going on about Brexit on Facebook but even before then people weren’t sharing stuff about themselves (with good reason) so it was just low effort memes). Use Facebook once in a blue moon to get in touch with really old friends

Didn’t miss either, although I recently signed up to Mastodon more just to see how the fediverse worked over there.

Then Reddit - probably the social media I was most invested in just because it was so granular in it’s There’s A Sub For That ability to cater for virtually all interests. But the utter disdain they held for their own volunteers and the contempt they seem to hold virtually everyone in was a bit of a wake up call. I do go back and check on it but I’m finding that I check on it less. Fedi has less content so I am reading all those eBooks I should have been reading instead!

My son is 7, I’m interested in how things are looking in 5 year’s time when he’s an early teen. He’s already got bored of watching YouTube videos, tiktok isn’t really a thing with us or anyone we know yet… time will tell I suppose. The main thing will be constant reminders that porn isn’t real and cyber security lectures