Set up a new email on Gmail or Proton Mail

Two words. They could have removed two words and made the instructions infinitely better.

And this is on the web page where, if you tap on it three times, it instantly exits out and goes to DuckDuckGo. Which is pretty neat.

Company towns are nothing if not the most American thing a businessman can do!

Yeah, it doesn’t seem like the world’s worst change, but it’s weird that they got rid of the keys near the bottom while splitting Backspace in half.

Could be worse.

ZIP codes are US specific, postal codes are international.

I looked it up before my comment

I’m kind of surprised that third party cookies could entirely be phased out. Which, if they were only being used for tracking and advertising, good riddance.

Don’t services like Microsoft still like to throw around cookies between multiple domains, though? At least, at one point I thought they did.

Sounds like the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Except instead of a newspaper, you’re reading something not generated by humans.

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well… You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward… and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read.

Like the newspaper, though, I would argue that generative AI is being presented as if it knows everything about everything already, or at least collective inertia implies it does.

Remember when progressive web apps were gonna be the next big thing? KaiOS remembers.

There’s some pretty wild keyboards out there, but I have to agree. It’s not that they’re adding another key, it’s that the key has no use.

Laptop keyboards in general are a real mess. I don’t think there’s any Fn standardization (or any standardization at all outside of desktop keyboards), so these days it’s one of the biggest things I check before considering a purchase.

Narrator: “He was defending the decision”

You’re completely correct. Chromium includes the badly named “Privacy Sandbox”, and much more proprietary Google stuff. It’s a bit of a chore for independent developers to strip out the Google code from Chromium.

Chrome itself is built atop Chromium and throws in even more closed-source stuff.

I hope regulators start paying attention to Google, but Chrome has been the dominant web browser for a while now and Google has basically had free play with web standards up until this point, so I’m not holding my breath.

Is there a four digit ZIP code format I’m not aware of

To be fair, in terms of adding features, they probably care more about parity with stock Android (as their secondary focus, since their primary is security) vs actually superceding it.

Has anybody else figured out how to add it back to the Pixel? If so, you might be able to convince them to pull the work of others over.

Sometimes there’s a good reason to pay for stuff like Minecraft:

https://www.windowscentral.com/over-1800-minecraft-account-credentials-leaked-online

I think Google’s biggest argument against it being a monopoly is that the tech is open source. You can download Chromium and your ad data will be manipulated and abused the same way as if you downloaded Chrome itself.

Open source is not a synonym for good, unfortunately. It’s usually a good indicator of it, but never a guarantee.

In the case of Chromium sucking, it’s because Google is the exclusive gatekeeper for what code actually gets added to the browser.

Painting and selling an exact copy of a recent work, such as Banksy, is a crime.

… however making an exact copy of Banksy for personal use, or to learn, or to teach other people, or copying the style… that’s all perfectly legal.

And that was the bait and switch of OpenAI! They sold themselves as being a non-profit simply doing research, for which it would be perfectly legal to consume and reproduce large quantities of data… And then, once they had the data, they started selling access to it.

I would say that that alone, along with the fact that they function as gatekeepers to the technology (One does not simply purchase the model from OpenAI, after all) they are hardly free of culpability… But it definitely depends on the person trying to use their black box too.

Boost too

A helpful chart for unethical food/drink brands to avoid:

Petition to rename “Privacy Sandbox” to “Google AdSense@Home” or something similar, since it’s never been about privacy… breaking competing ad networks in order to serve ads in a way prescribed by Google.

You know, Google. The advertising company.

I’m surprised Facebook etc weren’t already doing this.

On a bit of a tangent, isn’t it amazing that Apple and Google make WebView components that allow enough JavaScript injection to compromise your privacy, but restrict developers from making decent, comprehensive ad blocking for browsers using the same engines…

ETA: in late 2022, this was described as a privacy concern. Now it’s a reality.

https://youtu.be/yDp3cB5fHXQ