The problem is that the biggest service Cloudflare provides is DDoS protection, and doing that requires that you have more bandwidth available than your attacker. Having enough bandwidth to withstand modern botnet powered DDoS attacks is ridiculously expensive (and it’s also a finite resource, there’s only so much backbone infrastructure). Basically it’s economically infeasible to have multiple companies providing the service Cloudflare does. You might be able to get away with two companies doing so, but it’s unlikely you could manage more than that without some of them starting to go bankrupt.

I dove into their FAQ which explains it. I don’t agree with their logic, but the core idea seems to be that in order to run their equivalent of a TOR relay you have to stake a certain amount of their crypto, and you periodically receive some of the crypto as a reward for running the node. The theory is that the more nodes there are, the less crypto is available on the market and the more expensive it will become to acquire enough crypto to create new nodes. It’s all supposed to make it prohibitively expensive to control a significant amount of the network.

The fatal flaw in the reasoning is the assumption that anyone will actually care enough about their crypto to drive the price up. With no central authority setting a price for the crypto the price becomes whatever anyone is willing to buy or sell it for. Their fatal assumption is that scarcity automatically generates value. It does not. A thing needs some kind of value in addition to scarcity to become valuable.

You might have a point if those people had no choice, but there are several good or at least better alternatives to TeamViewer and at least one of them is free. Nobody has any excuse for being negatively impacted by this change. Hopefully this is a wakeup call to those people that have been either too lazy or too incompetent to replace TeamViewer to finally do so. TeamViewer is a shit company making a shit product that has just made yet another shit anti-consumer decision (and potentially illegal but I’m sure there’s some sneaky license clause they claim makes this legal).

If they’re not using it, why does it matter what happens to the license? There’s a “it’s the principle of the thing” argument sure, but practically speaking this is irrelevant. Shitty company does shitty thing that should have no practical impact on anyone because nobody should be using their product. What exactly would change for people not using TeamViewer if they hadn’t revoked those licences? The argument is that anyone still using TeamViewer deserves this, and anyone who isn’t isn’t actually impacted by this change so it’s irrelevant.

And you missed my actual point. It doesn’t matter when they purchased the license because the fact they’re still using it means they deserve it. Nobody should be using Teamviewer today because they’re a terrible company, and if you aren’t then this license change doesn’t impact you at all.

It’s not really about the data breaches themselves but rather the way the company responded to them. The fact they tried to cover it up and gaslight their customers about it shows how terrible they are, and remote access is a highly sensitive thing that should be treated the same as handing the keys to your house over to someone. Anyone that isn’t deeply investigating the company or individual making a remote access product prior to using it does deserve what they get in the same way someone handing the keys to their house to a complete stranger they know nothing about would deserve whatever happened to them.

At the end of the day Teamviewer has a history of screwing over their customers for their own profit and in that regard this move is very much on brand for them and entirely predictable. Nobody that has looked into the company’s history should be surprised that they’ve done this at all.

You’re technically right but only because Taiwan (despite what China fervently wants) is a separate country from China. If you follow the official Chinese party line that they aren’t then yes you could make a modern phone entirely from parts made in “China”. It would at a minimum be more “made in China” than anything Trump is peddling as “made in USA”.

The DNC needs to just finish the slow metamorphosis they’ve been going through for decades and finally merge with the RNC so we can get a new actual opposition party. It’s looking likely that that new party would end up being the democratic socialist party.

That’s certainly part of it, but I’d use any mobile payment app, not just Googles one, but there’s basically zero competition there. Some banks apparently had their own mobile payment support briefly, but it seems like just about every single one of them has removed that feature and replaced it with a wrapper around Google Pay.

This is nice for Europe I guess, and I want to like the fairphone, but unfortunately it’s not viable for me.

Besides basic phone features and the ability to run Android apps I have 3 requirements, 2 of which the fairphone fails at. I need it to be usable in the US on my phone carrier. I need to be able to use Google Pay or another mobile payment alternative (that’s accepted in most stores). Finally it needs to have at least a 48 hour battery life.

Fairphone unfortunately doesn’t work in the US with most carriers, and the one that kills not only it but all the de-googled phones, it doesn’t support mobile payment of any kind. I’ve done a ton of research trying to find some kind of fix for that second point because I’d gladly use something like GrapheneOS if I could, but every time the answer I come to is it’s just not possible.

That is not even remotely why they added a tax on EVs. The reason they added the extra tax is because they make a ton of money by taxing gas and as EVs are gaining popularity they’re starting to see their tax revenues plummet. There is a nugget of truth in that some of those tax revenues are used to pay for maintaining the roads and that EVs do still put wear and tear on the roads, but it’s not that they’re destroying roads any more than any other car does.

If you’re seeing a drop in road quality it’s because your government isn’t paying to have the roads maintained like they have in the past, not because there are more EVs driving around.

Already? I knew it wouldn’t go anywhere but man that’s the shortest attempt yet. I didn’t think it was possible for them to disappoint me with my basement level expectations but they certainly have managed to do so.

Could have ended that sentence 4 words sooner and been just as accurate.

Pretty sure he meant intentional.

If only that would do something. It’s good he’s at least going through the motions, but I’m doubtful this will do anything more than generate headlines. Then again maybe a miracle will occur and Trump will have pissed off enough Republicans to make this actually stick.

We’ve seen the way Israel does ceasefires and it looks an awful lot like Russian ceasefires. This is just Israel taking a timeout to restock ammunition and hoping for a good opportunity for a sneak attack. Also it’s Trump saying it so who knows what if anything was actually agreed on. The only thing you can reliably count on Trump for is lies and grifting.

The only way I could see Israel going for an actual ceasefire is if Iran has nukes or one of their backers makes a believable threat to drop a nuke on their behalf. Or maybe Israel did the math on what it would mean if their psycho buddy Trump actually dropped that nuke he’s been salivating about on Iran and don’t want to deal with nuclear fallout and the very real possibility that someone would nuke them as a freebie while chucking nukes at the US.

Safe and private? Nope absolutely impossible. If you don’t care about privacy at all pretty much the only way to do it is to have your government issue you a unique hardware token and require that to access the internet and it shares your unique ID with the website. It’s not 100% impossible to spoof an identity as you could borrow/steal someone elses token, but if they were secured with a pin/password or basic biometric it would become significantly harder.

So I had this joke idea of “they’ll just start showing the ads to the AIs”, but the more I thought about it the more it started to sound less like a joke. Imagine if someone figured out how to cram ads into the AI training models and it skewed the outputs. Why astroturf when you can train the AIs to astroturf for you. This is some black mirror shit and now I’ve made myself a bit depressed.

Less depressing example. A country (I think it was India but my memory is hazy and I’m too lazy to go google it right now) had a problem with a certain venomous snake. They decided to offer a bounty for every snake corpse brought to them. The goal was to incentivise people to hunt snakes. What actually happened was people started breeding the snakes to turn in for the bounties. They realized the program wasn’t working and cancelled it at which point the breeders dumped their snakes into the wild making the whole situation even worse.

So CAP theorem says you can have a distributed system with at most two of Consistent, Available, or Partition tolerant. I haven’t looked too closely into the federation implementation of Mastodon but I suspect they opted for Available and Partition tolerant (as Consistent and Partition tolerant would mean the entire network goes down when one node does, while Consistent and Available would mean once any node lost contact with the network it could never again rejoin). Since consistency is not guaranteed (and provably can’t be) there is absolutely no way to guarantee that deleting something from one instance will remove it from all instances even allowing for a very generous time span.

TL;DR: You’re not just right, you’re mathematically right.