Using an ad-blocking DNS server solves most of those problems. Mullvad offers a public DNS server with no account required, but there are plenty of options out there.

You should still use a browser extension on top of that for pattern-based URL blocking, but a DNS-based blocker should be your first line of defense.

A good ad-blocker goes a long way. You can block all Google domains with minimal impact to non-Google services.

Who do we arrest if a crime is organized via phone call on T-Mobile’s network

I guarantee you, T-Mobile does not hesitate to hand over any and all data they have to the government. And they don’t encrypt shit, as evidenced by their many many data breaches.

or via mail?

The postal service is from a different era, and has legal protections I wish online equivalents had. Logically they should. Realistically they probably never will.

Not all use-cases require a high speed:capacity ratio.

I mean, I have an 18TB USB hard drive, which sustains transfer at about 50MB/sec in practice. It is nearly full, and its level of performance has never been a show-stopping problem.

It’s hard to imagine a use case where a NAS would be a viable alternative to an SD card.

It’s incredibly annoying, but it gets easier over time as you fill out you whitelist.

One of the big advantages to something like NoScript is that it lets you enable scripts only from certain domains. So you can enable the functionally-required scripts while still blocking other scripts.

But yes, it’s a giant pain in the ass. It’s absurd that the web has devolved into such a state.

Switching to another Chromium-based browser is a half-measure. Other Chromium-based browsers are on borrowed time.

As time goes on, it will become more difficult for them to maintain v2 support. Nobody has the resources to properly maintain a browser fork with more than minor modifications. And you can bet Google will go out of their way to make this difficult for everybody else.

I mean, sure, use what you’re comfortable with if you really can’t use a non-Chromium-based browser for some reason. But it means you’re likely going to have to jump ship again sooner or later. Why not just jump once, to something with better long-term prospects?

Then again, the folks behind Arc Browser have expressed interest in becoming engine-agnostic, so perhaps there will be a Chromium-free Arc version in the future. That would be very cool.

I don’t know about strictly “unable” but there are a million contexts where it is a bad idea and simply not done. Like a spreadsheet or financial document. Or anywhere you want your text to behave like text — with a consistent font, color, style, etc. The difference between $ (text) and 💲 (emoji) is pretty stark in most contexts.

This will likely be rejected for one the same reasons that they decided they would not add any new flag emojis. Flags come and go. Bitcoin hasn’t even been around for 20 years yet, and its future is highly uncertain.

Also, considered as a currency, it would be better as a regular text character, not an emoji. Like $, €, ¥, £, etc.

This doesn’t seem to be a problem with disaster recovery plans. It is perfectly reasonable for disaster recovery to take several hours, or even days. As far as DR goes, this was easy. It did not generally require rebuilding systems from backups.

In a sane world, no single party would even have the technical capability of causing a global disaster like this. But executives have been tripping over themselves for the past decade to outsource all their shit to centralized third parties so they can lay off expensive IT staff. They have no control over their infrastructure, their data, or, by extension, their business.

You’re right, but I think there’s a lot of overlap here. Large businesses are not laser-focused and are not rational actors.

Someone pitched this as a way to make money. Someone believed that was plausible and approved it. But the motivation for even pitching it was likely a step or two removed from that.

Executives and middle managers are not above bullshitting to justify their salaries.

The “problem” of having more people than we have meaningful work for. This is not a new problem, but it is increasingly exacerbated by automation. So we manufacture bullshit work just to keep busy, because we’ve decided people shouldn’t have food or shelter if they’re not doing work, bullshit or not.

The world would be better off if whoever got paid to plan and implement this instead got paid to just stay in bed. The economy is fundamentally broken.