techsupporter

Google Voice now requires identity verification for new numbers or porting a number into an account that does not have a number assigned: https://support.google.com/voice/answer/16768664

... I'm old ... you can live life without holding a cellphone all the time. It's not as hard as you think.

I'm in my 50s and I don't know where this stance comes from. Sure, you physically can in the same sense that anywhere can be walked to if you're willing to walk long enough. But so many businesses and services have gone "mobile-first" or "mobile-only" to the point that if you're traveling for leisure you're doing extra work on your vacation, and if you're traveling for business you're wasting time that could be used doing your job. Just as a first order, the denizens of every airline subreddit will tell you that the most useful tool during a trip is the airline's mobile app and that's either tied with or just above or below the Flighty app if anything goes wrong.

Combine that with QR codes for everything from menus to parking, public transit tickets and fare cards that can be easily loaded into a phone instead of using a ticket machine made when we were kids, or paper maps increasingly hard to find if they're available at all, and you're looking at a real challenge. How are you going to talk to and plan with your travel partner or colleagues with payphones removed?

It's also not incumbent upon us to make the government's life easier by making our lives harder. "Just leave your phone at home" is ludicrous behavior to expect when it's the government being the intrusive jerks.

I can say that we're not exactly a state worrying about water shortages.

Except we are.

We're probably one of the more reasonable places to build data centers due to cheap green energy and pretty plentiful water.

Most of our water comes from snowpack that melts over the spring and summer. Almost every year for the last several years, snowpack has been abnormal and has affected downstream flows.

https://ecology.wa.gov/water-shorelines/water-supply/water-a...

https://www.plantmaps.com/www.plantmaps.com/www.plantmaps.co...

https://ecology.wa.gov/blog/november-2021/snowpack-washingto...

And datacenter construction has put a major strain on central Washington power and water supplies: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/pow...

low quality network participants are joining

(Genuinely curious because I truly don't know in this context) What is a low quality network participant? One of the "bulletproof" hosts?

A birth certificate is just a piece of paper so that's a bit of a red herring.

No, it isn't. Birth certificates are how we have proven citizenship in the United States almost since the founding of the Republic.

...an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien...

What law gives ICE permission to ignore a document created through the authority of a co-sovereign government of our federal system? Responsibility for recording of births and deaths falls to the several States. If my state has issued a birth certificate documenting the fact of my birth, that is it per the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

ICE is not a court; they do not make determinations of law. If I have a birth certificate or, even more arguably, a passport then that beats whatever cooked up bullshit ICE is spewing from a mobile device. ICE is not a prosecutor; they do not decide who has faked documents or who has real ones.

People need to stop apologizing for ICE vastly overstepping what they are permitted to do in their haste to become an internal secret police.

Everyone follows the same rules at the airport.

All travelers do but all border inspection people do not. Or if they do, they apply their discretion very unevenly in some Very Interesting Ways.

I've watched it happen twice since COVID, both times traveling abroad for work and coming back into the United States with coworkers (different coworkers each trip) who are not nearly as pale as I am. Neither of us had Global Entry or anything like that back then. Both times, I got waved through with barely a glance and my US-passport-holding coworker got grilled. "Where do you live", "why did you go on this trip", "who do you work for", and so on.

To reiterate: All of us are citizens, all of us were born here, and we were taking the exact same trips at the exact same times coming back with the usual things you take with you on a business trip.

Anecdotes from friends who are darker than a sheet of printer paper tell me this situation has not improved.

The reason I can't use Tailscale at work is because it routes traffic through servers we can't control.

You can run your own DERP servers and exclude the Tailscale ones even if you don’t run your own Headscale server: https://tailscale.com/kb/1118/custom-derp-servers

I’m not sure what your criticism is?

Ars is reporting on a legal case and also on people who say they will be harmed by that case. The reporter then goes on to detail the policy work that groups are doing to try to change copyright laws in the country.

What else would you like to see? A legal analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the case?

Does it have an in-frame modal that pops up immediately after page load to beg me for my email address?

What about an embedded video window that covers the bottom 2/3rds of the content and follows with scroll?

Oh and I hope you've not left out the absolutely mandatory "Read More" button that spawns a user interaction and auto-plays everything on the page.

Those are all of my favourite things on the web and I really enjoy seeing them all over the place!!

My niece was born deaf and her parents went the opposite direction: they chose not to have her get an implant because of the risk of surgery at such a young age and being fortunate to live in an area with a sizable deaf community. They took ASL classes (my spouse and I joined them) and she’s now enrolled in a mix of ASL and English interpreted classes.

I agree that people can only make the decision with what they have at the time. After watching her grow up these last several years, her parents think they made the right choice.

And communicating specialized stuff like technical programming is not possible, gestures only cover basic words.

I want to gently push back on this. While sign languages do have signs for common, “basic” words (ASL has a lot of 1:1 mapped signs for English), sign languages are languages. They can, and do, express “specialized stuff”.

I have two coworkers who are deaf and they absolutely communicate specialized medical and technical concepts to each other and other people who use sign language. It’s amazing to watch them sign to each other, as someone who is only intermediate at ASL.

If the law is vague, it is the duty of the judiciary to call that out and of the legislature to rewrite the law to be more precise.

Why? Nothing in our Constitution requires precise laws. Arguably (and since I'm making it, I'll say I'm in favor of this argument), the Constitution would preclude overly strict laws because the Executive is a co-equal branch of government.

Vague laws are not an excuse for executive agencies to go ham, and I applaud the judiciary for reining in executive abuse of power.

Why not?

Congress has the authority to pass the laws it sees fit. Why is it suddenly a problem that Congress passed a law that says "the agency known as the Federal Trade Commission is established and the President, through a set of commissioners appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, shall ensure that the these list of goals are accomplished and shall establish such rules as the Commission deems appropriate."

We aren't a parliamentary system. The Congress has the power of the purse and the power to enact laws. The President has the power to implement the laws and to spend the money.

What's changed in recent years is the judiciary has come along and decided that a hundred years of Congress writing laws with bullet-point goals and the President acting under those laws is no longer relevant because "Congress didn't write enough words." That's not how textualism works.

People's expectations were that pensions would be replaced by 401ks, and retirement could start at 65.

And that's kind of the rub: I don't think people's expectations were that 401k plans would replace pensions; I think employer's expectations were this and the individual worker was sold a false bill of goods.

From what I know (I wasn't economically active when this change happened), the original push for 401k plans came from a desire to lessen the taxable earnings of highly-paid bank executives when we had a much higher top margin tax rate in the United States. As there's also no requirement that employers match employee contributions to 401k--or that matched contributions be available to the employee immediately--employers could almost overnight relieve themselves of the "burden" of pension contributions.

(Not that pensions are, especially today, some magic elixir. Look at how many pensions have had to go to the public assistance well after they were either mismanaged, undercontributed, or both/more by the sponsoring employer.)

Thus we've wound up in this system where, like many things in the US, everyone loses except the people who got there first (or the people who are already very well-resourced).

Generally speaking, with caveats like always exist in life:

If you're roughly 65 or older, you probably held at least one job where you have an employer pension so that plus Social Security means you're probably doing pretty well.

If you're roughly 50 or older and in a union, you have the same thing but with a smaller pension proviso, assuming you weren't able to (and didn't, if you were able to) buy out your pension into a 401k.

People late 40s to 50s are about the age where they lost the benefit of pensions and are fully on the hook for savings if or when they want to stop working but didn't get the full run of having a 401k. They will be looking largely to Social Security and hope.

People in their early 40s to 30s and younger are asking what they're being taxed for and are facing a job market where even more jobs are piecework or lack benefits, alongside massive hikes in the costs of living where there are jobs so saving is even harder.

Yet somehow a US worker is more productive than ever. Those gains are all going somewhere, and it looks like we're all slowly figuring out where...and as a society we don't like it.

It's also not a government web site. It's a private company who, for some reason, my own government outsources identity verification to. Meanwhile, the authorization system the US government has built (login.gov) is deemed "insecure" by the IRS and Social Security for some inexplicable reason. (But it's fine for Trusted Traveler Programs.)

Most credit unions participate in the credit union shared branching network, so I recommend joining your local credit union of choice. You can then go into the branches of several other credit unions to do most banking needs.

The caveat is if there's a major problem, like here, then you'd need to deal directly with your home credit union.

I completely agree that the 542 needs more frequency. Sound Transit likely saw the dip from Microsoft wholeheartedly embracing work-from-home and figured they could reuse the service hours. Remember that Metro has been suffering from a bad shortage of workers (drivers, maintenance, and operations) that they've only just started to recover from. This is important because Sound Transit contracts out operation of most of its transit service to the local agencies so Metro operates the 542, 545, 550, and others.

Hopefully now that Metro hiring and training is on the upswing Sound Transit will be able to get more bus service hours.

It's for a few reasons, let's see if I remember them all from the run-up to the Sound Transit 2 vote in 2008:

Mercer Island exists and has political clout (even though they tried to use that clout to force Sound Transit to not use the express lanes on I-90) and would demand a station no matter what.

Running across a floating bridge is hard enough and the Governor Albert Rosellini Bridge (SR 520 Floating Bridge to the Yanks) is the longest in the world. Going across the dual-named bridge that carries I-90 would be shorter and was seen as easier back then.

You don't have to turn around to serve Bellevue and then Redmond. Coming up from I-90 you hit the big part of Bellevue then you turn right and keep going northeast to Redmond. Coming from SR 520 you'd go south into Bellevue then have to U-turn to go back to meet BelRed and Overlake.

At the time, we didn't know when, if ever, the SR 520 bridge would be replaced. The previous span was a nightmare. It had a movable bit in the middle, the road deck sat at roughly water level, and would routinely sway so hard in strong winds that the bridge would have to be blocked off so the midspan section could be opened to relieve stress and prevent the thing from sinking. The I-90 bridges have no such issue (considering the damn thing had already sunk once in the 90s). There was no way to use the previous SR 520 bridge for light rail, though the new one is built to support it.

You also catch a lot more potential riders in station areas around I-90 and South Bellevue. The Points cities are basically HOAs with delusions of grandeur. There's no hope they'll gain more people in any of our lifetimes, meanwhile the areas the 2 Line passes through are already fairly populated by Eastside standards and have room to grow (also by Eastside standards).

Meanwhile, the 542 and 545 are comparatively very fast.

I suppose because a bunch of the automated solvers use the audio as a workaround, the audio ones have become borderline (or even over the line) unlistenable.

The most recent few I've done have sounded like someone whispering "they threw their hair through the chair there" next to a propeller plane in a heavy thunderstorm.

The Internet is full of these micro-tyrants and I never see anyone complaining about them.

I'll complain about them. They're, at best, poorly-informed people who don't understand the ramifications of what they're doing as it winds up as abuse, or worst they're malicious actors who I hope are condemned to a life of a 300 baud modem over a rural telephone line in a lightning storm.

The hiccup is, these are two different problems. I'm not the service administrator; I'm the user who has to put up with the absolutely onerous "bot prevention service." Frankly, if you're a private entity, I'm mostly of the mind of do what you like. If I encounter a CAPTCHA, I will probably just bounce off the page. Except, of course, that Google penalizes me for doing that, too, because I Might Be A Bot That Got Stymied(tm).

Where my hackles are truly raised is when the government requires me to work through these moronic puzzles. I shouldn't have to do a CAPTCHA to log in to my transit pass or look up county records!

Finally, it's everyone who will handwave away "well, it's inaccessible but whachagondo" without the acknowledgement that we are all on varying levels of "abled" and that level changes throughout our lives, and not just as it relates to age.

One of the many reasons I pay for Carrot is to get the other, more expensive, data sources. If you do stump up, you get access to the Apple Weather API--what once was Dark Sky--as well as Foreca. I've found both of them to be very accurate based on what Carrot reports.

(For what it's worth, I never used the Dark Sky app directly. I've always consumed it via Carrot or a free API key that Dark Sky used to give out for individual developers.)

...a 30 minute back and forth for partial credit for missing food when they used to just issue you a full refund in 30 seconds.

Back when I regularly had to go to an office, my coworkers and I tried out a bunch of the delivery services. The one we settled on was Bite Squad because they apparently paid their drivers as actual employees[0], so an hourly wage and benefits, and had actual performance standards. If an item was left off, Bite Squad would dispatch a driver to go get it and bring it to us.

All of the contractor-based services would just refund for food and be done with it. The problem is, that isn't what we wanted. If we'd wanted money instead of food, we wouldn't have ordered. The service expects us to do the management of additional attempts instead of it being part of their service.

Ever since Bite Squad left Seattle, and especially now that I don't have to go to an office more than once or twice a month, I've not bothered with the food delivery apps.

0 - This was pre-pandemic, before Bite Squad "overhauled" their business model.

One of those life experience moments:

I "knew" this and a had a really good friend who did not. Both of us grew up in the same area, and we met in school, so you'd expect we should agree on this, right?

While "arguing" about it one day, it turns out the suburb they'd grown up in had several private subdivisions where the builders could do whatever they wanted. Houses were numbered sequentially following one direction of the private street, then the other. So the house nearest the entrance of the subdivision would be "100 Maple Street" and across the street would be "143 Maple Street".

Because they'd grown up mainly going to other friends' houses in the private subdivisions, my house address was the odd one and theirs were normal to them.

What is 'fake news' for one person is truth to another.

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." - Everyone from Daniel Patrick Moynihan all the way through to Mike Pence.

There are some things that are demonstrably true and untrue. Society gains nothing, and loses much, by simply throwing up our hands and saying "well, nothing to be done!" in the face of this.

who decides what is the truth and whether they have the right to censor everything and everybody else

That is one heck of a leap.

Screaming the cries of censorship when faced with people who disagree--either on your point, your presentation of your point, or the facts underlying your point--is escaping to a place where your position is no longer the one being debated, it's the "terms of the debate." Thus, one no longer needs to defend their position; they can simply stand to the side and feign being the actual aggrieved party.

I definitely don't like this trend of censorship, it's not what our western democracy is built upon.

It is not censorship. Censorship is not saying "you are incorrect about this and I am calling you out for it and encouraging others to take note of your being incorrect." Heck, censorship is not even being shouted down for one's beliefs. If you say something and other people yell at--or praise!--you for it, that's not censorship.

This article alone says there is no active censorship since people can, and do, merrily spread incorrect statements and half-baked "just asking questions" that even the Weekly World News would have found too preposterous to print.

Your sponsoring LIR for IPv6 space and ASNs can also be your sponsoring LIR for legacy IPv4 assignments: https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/legacy-resources/ri...

You can then issue RPKI ROAs.

And while we are at it stop tunneling my data back "home" when I travel. I don't want increased latency.

You might not, but a whole lot of customers who aren't as technically sophisticated did. When T-Mobile first started doing included international data roaming, they didn't tunnel back. That caused a lot of confusion from customers who didn't realize why stuff they expected to work, like checking their bank balance, didn't. (It also made throttling speeds a lot more difficult.)

So to fix that, T-Mobile tunnels you back to a few endpoints in the States. Banking apps are generally happy, as are Netflix and Spotify. Most customers are happy because their phone "just works" the same as it "always has".

For those of us who want to avoid the latency, we get a local SIM for data (if possible).

nobody donates physical books anymore

It's partially number one but definitely this for me, insofar as thrift stores go. The two thrift stores around me that take books are Goodwill and the Salvation Army and I won't donate anything to them any more.

My book donations go to the neighborhood independent bookstore for them to price and resell and keep their employees paid.

The large chain bookstore near me still has several shelves of science fiction, new release and perennial favorites, so I think at least some are still being made and sold. Hopefully you can find what you seek.

The US is an odd case where there is no central government ID or identification base layer.

As others have mentioned, the US Federal government issues passports and passport cards, yet it's entirely up to the agency that wants ID what IDs they will accept. I've been turned down for using a passport card for some Washington State government activities ("the card doesn't have a signature"), using a passport to buy an age-restricted item from a store ("we can't scan it"), and a passport card with the state's largest credit union ("too much fraud with passport cards").

Yet none of these are documented anywhere. Everyone just assumes you'll have a state-issued driver license and if you don't, well, you're obviously up to something nefarious. (Before anyone asks, I do have a state-issued enhanced identification card. It looks identical to a driver license, except it says "identification" on it. I've still been told "that's not a driver's license, I can't take that.")

In the USA, non-citizens (legal permanent residents aka "green card" holders) can't get passports.

Is there a reason they can't get a passport from their country of citizenship?

Plus, passports are fully standardized, at least the biometric ones are. It's possible to read and verify the data on a biometric passport entirely offline using open source applications that implement the documented processes.

The picture shows model number M110w, which has an optional "instant ink" (toner) add-on service. According to HP, only model numbers ending in "e" are Printing As A Service and have ink/toner subscriptions required.

Another reason in an increasingly long list of reasons that being a T-Mobile postpaid customer is frustrating: Customers haven't been able to manage our own physical or electronic SIMs for almost two years. T-Mobile shut down the online self-service process with the claim of making it "more secure".

Meanwhile, SIM swaps continue by malicious actors with seemingly nothing that can be done to stop them. So I can't swap my own SIM without waiting on hold for an hour or two, either by chat or on the phone, but the scammers can do it with apparent impunity. (I have tried messaging T-Mobile's help group on Twitter but they seem to be the only competent support available and thus are also incredibly backlogged.)

I get that providers have to cater to the lowest common denominator but I wish there was a MVNO or similar who would allow use of authenticator keys and maximum level self service, with the understanding that if I break or lose my authentication methods, I am out of luck. Right now, my current carrier seems the worst of both choices.