I’ve got both. iOS for work, android for personal use. I’m in DevSecOps and therefore tend to see everything from this sort of mindset. Apple didn’t make a deal with them, they don’t have an open standard. It’s proprietary, it’s locked down. Why would any company with that sort of a product allow another company to interface with their offerings without paying for it? Even if it’s nice and secure, this will add load to the iMessage servers that people aren’t paying Apple for. It could introduce errors/issues they never tested for because they have a closed ecosystem and only have to test with their own devices, a known quantity. It could even increase potential attack vectors.

If you offered wifi to your friends via a guest network and then someone figured out how to connect their whole neighborhood to it, would you be fine with that?

Did Beeper clear its usage of the iMessage platform with Apple? Sign a contract? Get an SLA agreement with Apple in writing?

I was under the impression that they found essentially a back door/work around to latch into the iMessage platform… in that case this is no different than Cisco patching some routers or MS fixing a security hole. If anything I’d be more annoyed that Apple didn’t patch it quicker.

I’d love to be able to use iMessage with my android friends, but Beeper’s methods seemed sketchy as hell.

How was that not expected? Give people somewhere to stick files that they don’t want to lose because of a hard drive crash or computer malfunction. Files that they absolutely want backed up somewhere not locally. Files that they may want to get access to while not at home… All those are going to be things like taxes, receipts, medical forms and data, scans of important documents, etc. like, that’s the point.

“I wish I could speak whale!” - Dory

So, I’ve got a vm setup to booth and do steam auto installs with steam running periodically. It can be set to offline mode and in such a mode, if another machine on my network needs to pull the install it will do so locally from that vm without going on it to the internet. If I block external access, again steam will pull from that machine to install on my main gaming machine. Periodic backups of the machine makes sure that I have full installs ready to go for any of my truly offline machines.

It’s actually pretty cool to get gig speeds installing something from steam because it’s already somewhere on my local network.

It’s not as nice as GoG though. Definitely recommend that method if you can.

I like how literally 2 days ago the news was all “Google postpones Gemini until next year” and here we are.

This is why anytime I buy content like this, I mirror it locally. DVDs, CDs, videos, music, whatever. GoG and Steam both allow local offline copies. Storage is cheap and not only can I continue to play these items if the store goes away, but I can also access them where and when I want thanks to things like Plex and Jellyfin.

So, dns blocking will always block the requests to things on the block list, which includes ads… however I’ve noticed that a many sites are now using js to detect images that don’t load before calling the “full the body with text” api call. Originally this would just do some fancy css hiding of the content so SEO scraping would still work (and oh can just use reader view), but now I’ve seen them pull the first paragraph and then, if the images loaded (or an additional call to a tracking pixel for instance) it would also call to their API to get the remainder of the content.

The other way it’ll fail is if they use the same server/dns hostname for content as they do for ads.

Not sure why you’d assume you sound like an idiot. You’re just coming to a hypothesis based on all available information. It seems like a sane train of reasoning based on all the empirical evidence we’ve seen thus far.

It’s likely that he didn’t mean for it to happen the way it did, or that he hoped there’s a bigger appetite or marketplace for X in this capacity. It’s also possible he didn’t think it all through as was made more likely by the way he was trying to come up with reasons to get out of the deal.

I quite enjoy my PiHole as well.

That last part is a HUGE part of why they generate revenue. There’s an entire industry based around what goes where in a grocery store. Companies fight over getting their stuff at eye level or on end caps to make their products more appealing and likely to get bought. The entire point of sales is to get you to come in and buy more things you didn’t have on your list. (Even online sales)

A very large percentage of child abuse, kidnapping and pedo issues involve the child’s own family. “Stranger Danger” isn’t the solution.

This is better with kids. My niece figured it out and often spoke to Alexa:

Niece: Alexa, add farts and pepperoni pizzas to the grocery list. Niece: Alexa, play baby shark on the bedroom speaker. Niece: Alexa, remind me to kiss my butt in 10 minutes. (Leaves room, her mom was there a few minutes later, in time for the reminder.)

Etc…

When you leave an Alexa enabled echo sitting around 4 to 8 year olds, you get some interesting requests… and entertainment.

I feel like all the people running Firefox (most of my friends/family and many colleagues) are just going to say “damn, YouTube sucks. I should look elsewhere” and not “oh, it must be slow because I’m not on chrome.” Heck my parents don’t even know what chrome is.

I feel like if they want to prevent flipping for profit, make the agreement that you can’t sell it for more than you bought it for, but still allow the sale. Otherwise you’re not policing the right thing.

Agreed, but I absolutely need somewhere to test drive the car as well before purchasing. There’s no way I would buy a car without it.

But if you bought the CD you actually owned something. Stop paying for the services and you have nothing if all you used was spotify/YouTube/pandora. I gave up on paying for streaming years ago and spend the same amount monthly on purchasing music. I get CDs, either new or used. I’ve amassed a collection and I don’t need Internet or monthly charges to play them.