benologist

Buying your neighbor's surrounding houses for privacy...

For months now I have been using youtube-dl to preserve all the concerts and workout videos I like on YouTube because I don't expect this content to remain available and unencumbered. My original plan was to store just the IDs on GitHub so I could recreate the video libraries without backing up the video files, but already some of the concerts have been removed. I expect the exercise videos will be hidden behind a subscription at some point since they provide utility.

What if they lied about how much music was worth though? You can stream 10,000+ songs in one month for the price of one album today, in the early 2000s we were asked to believe that was $10,000+ worth of music and their suffering was relative to that...

About 400 million people pay monthly for access to music instead of listening to radio, occasionally buying albums or piracy so idk if anything really backfired...

This NPM cache been a huge time-saver for me, you can run it locally or across your whole network for a shared cache -

https://guides.sonatype.com/repo3/quick-start-guides/proxyin...

https://hub.docker.com/r/sonatype/nexus/

I host mine too because I'm not interested in paying ~$100/year for the rest of my life to access music, this is like welfare for tech giants and record companies and very little even trickles down to musicians. I got a Synology NAS and these days I just run the Synology operating system in a virtual machine and it's accessible via web UI or mobile apps and backs up to the cloud, this has served me very well for years now.

I wish the technology existed so they could just correctly bill you when you get back to your car and you drive away with a receipt instead of a fine... the idea that you have done something wrong and you deserve a financial punishment for it is ludicrous.

Same. This recharger + 4 battery set has been invaluable with my remote.

https://www.amazon.com/Lithium-Battery-Charger-Rechargeable-...

I have maintained my fitness and saved so much money by switching to videos on YouTube. I think this stuff should at most be a category on Netflix etc it's not worth $9.99 separately. The trainers are all good, the only thing missing is being able to superimpose your Watch metrics when you want.

You can block a lot of apps individually from accessing the internet with NetGuard -

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/eu.faircode.netguard/

https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard

hundreds of experts working to prevent it

Every major operating system has this regardless of whether they force you to download software through one marketplace. You're not less-secure if you use two marketplaces as long as both those marketplaces are kept secure. iOS is kept secure independently of the App Store as well.

In real life on the iPhone we have had apps secretly uploading your address book, copying your clipboard and listening for tones embedded in television ads. And "The Fappening" where many people's private photos were leaked.

Apple and Facebook have both been sued for this. Facebook were literally calling it friendly fraud and trying not to prevent it.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2019/01/25/facebook-tu...

The FTC alleges Apple allowed the same thing on their platform for three years after they became aware.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/technology/government-and...

But what's really amazing is Google, Amazon and Microsoft have all been sued for the same thing too and it still not illegal to have games where kids can spend unlimited amounts and conduct unlimited transactions using obfuscated virtual currencies.

Can't they control the quality of external or replaceable batteries in exactly the same way?

It is absolutely a deliberate decision by Apple to pressure people to use iPhones and to pressure people not to convert to using Android. Hopefully this will be one of the items on Congress' agenda as they disempower 'big tech'.

“When I asked a senior Apple executive why iMessage wasn’t being expanded to other platforms, he gave two answers,” reports Mossberg. “First, he said, Apple considers its own user base of 1 billion active devices to provide a large enough data set for any possible AI learning the company is working on. And, second, having a superior messaging platform that only worked on Apple devices would help sales of those devices — the company’s classic (and successful) rationale for years.”

https://www.cultofmac.com/433784/apple-reveals-why-imessage-...

Nobody's saying Facebook and Amazon won't get charges too. They and Apple were all part of the same investigation. The investigators say all four companies are abusing their positions but they haven't given a lot of detail yet.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-26/house-ant...

They could have a Screentime-type system just for being transparent about what you or your family spent in the last week on subscriptions, apps and in-app purchases, what free trials are ending, what apps have active subscriptions but no usage etc.

They could make virtual currencies show the real price if they were bought with real money. They could require 'free' transactions with virtual currencies to go through the same payment authentication.

They could make subscription apps require an ongoing service or value being added, aside from fixing their own bugs or trying to improve their software to attract new customers.

Apple has been sued for games defrauding children thousands of dollars, but what's really ridiculous and amazing is they are not alone. All of the tech giants have gotten in trouble for defrauding children with deceptive in-app purchases.

So far we know Facebook recognized it as fraud and referred to it as fraud internally so it's a bit hard to believe it is innocently occurring again and again wherever platforms permit games to bill unlimited amounts and players to perform unlimited transactions and developers to obfuscate transactions with layers of cash substitutes like gems and virtual currencies.

Apple: https://money.cnn.com/2014/01/15/technology/apple-ftc-settle...

Amazon: https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ftc-sues-amazon-app-pur...

Facebook: https://phys.org/news/2016-07-facebook-refunds-in-app-minors...

Google: https://lifehacker.com/get-a-refund-for-your-kids-unauthoriz...

Microsoft: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox/forum/all/child-spe...

Why do you think GitHub does not have this problem? There are actual "hello world" apps on GitHub but literally nobody is adversely affected by it even when they download popular software by other developers.

The congresspeople who investigated them for a year and a half also think they are abusive.

the investigation has confirmed that Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook are all abusing their market power to the detriment of consumers

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/26/antitrust-investigation...

This story keeps floating around but the reality is Apple saw a $0.99 in-app purchase for a one-day pass, interpreted that as a one-day non-recurring subscription, which they don't support, but they demanded subscription billing be used instead of in app purchases.

They conceded this utterly pointless problem they invented for the developer. Developers have been arguing against these for years, stupid rejections were once so common that Apple threatened against revealing them to the press in the official guidelines [1].

It's yet to be seen if they will cave on any issues like emulators, or apps mocking President Xi, or Xbox streaming, or external billing, full web browsers, transparency about their transaction fees, porn etc.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141226094343/https://developer...

McDonalds didn't want nutritional information on hamburger wrappers, cigarette companies didn't want health risks mentioned, Apple doesn't want consumers to be conscious of how they pay $150/year to Apple for every $10/week subscription. Transparency is good for consumers, not companies.

This is why NoScript is complementary to uBlock.

"The kind of common theme is the abuse of their market power to maintain their market dominance, to crush competitors, to exclude folks from their platform and to earn monopoly rents."

- the antitrust committee investigating them

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/26/antitrust-investigation...

Have you tried Thunderbolt accessories? You should be able to add NVMe storage and AMD graphics that might speed things up. I couldn't try this out because I have an nVidia eGPU, but using Apple's TB2-to-TB3 adaptor I can actually game quite acceptably in Bootcamp.

Apps being rejected was a talking point for the anti-trust investigations for Apple. I don't think Google is quite so famous for its rejections but they were part of that investigation for other abuse, hopefully any changes that come about will apply to them too.

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/26/antitrust-investigation...

You can make a virtual machine very easily but it performs very poorly:

https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox

Or you can lease them online:

http://macstadium.com/

GitHub has some kind of Mac hardware or virtualization for their Actions too so you could probably wire something up to build on GitHub:

https://github.com/marketplace/actions/setup-swift

I find my dual-core 2013 to still be alright if I SSH into a six-core NUC to work. Visual Studio Code makes this super easy to do and almost exactly the same as working locally, it can be done without it too. I used a remote VM this way as well for about 9 months while wondering what to buy and on wired connection it was also pretty seamless.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

This is possibly going to happen due to the anti-trust investigations into Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook:

One possibility is what he described as a Glass-Steagall law for technology platforms. That Depression-era law separated commercial and investment banking until it was repealed during the Clinton administration. For tech companies, it would mean prohibiting them from running a platform and competing on it at the same time.

That’s a common complaint about Amazon in particular because it both runs a marketplace and competes with third-party sellers with its own line of products.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-26/house-ant...

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/26/antitrust-investigation...

Even if the nudity and sex was deemed aesthetic content in apps is prohibited from having realistic violence, gore, rape, demeaning portrayals of any group, etc.