Not bricked.

Still bad, and you lose your data, but if the phone can get to recovery mode and install an OS again, it isn’t bricked.

I get all that, and that’s why I feel weird about it.

Some of the stuff they do only works well with scale, though. And I definitely think at least some other leadership groups would abuse their market position assuming that their critical mass would be very difficult to displace. If they had just agreed to piracy shield, do you really think corporate customers would be scared off?

If I was doing actual stuff state level actors care about, I might still assume they’re not “safe”, but as a normal person? The fact that pirates can use their services reasonably safely and reasonably effectively definitely gives me a level of confidence that they’re unlikely to use their position in a way that harms me, maliciously or recklessly. I have a VPS as well and will eventually use that as a tunnel instead, so it’s actually end to end encrypted and I control the keys, but their consistent pattern of behavior doesn’t make me feel that much urgency about it.

Didn’t realize that. Gross.

They have me in a weird spot, because I fundamentally don’t really like the sheer volume of information they are MITMing at all times, and don’t really like the idea of letting them do so for my small site.

But their decisions with respect to security threats pretty consistently seem well measured and as minimally invasive as they can be (eg they have intervened and rewritten content as a result of a supply chain attack, but were very transparent that it was desperate measures, that they didn’t really want to do it, and only did it by default for the free users that were most likely not to know enough to enable it themselves). They’ve also pushed back against stuff like piracy shield trying to turn them into outright surveillance for private companies.

Yes, it is. The idea that giant corporations “aren’t trying” is laughable, and it’s a literal guarantee that massively lower quality, noisier inputs will result in a lower quality model with lower quality outputs.

Less photons hitting the sensors matters. A lot.

So, they’re videos.

If only there was a way to watch those.

You can keep hand waving away the statement of fact that lower precision input is lower precision input.

And yes, for actual photography (where people are deliberately still for long enough to offset the longer exposure required), you do actually need different lighting and different camera settings to get the same quality results. But real cameras are also capable of capturing far more dynamic range without guessing heavily on postprocessing.

It’s not racist to understand physics.

It’s exactly the same reason phone cameras do terrible in low light unless they do obscenely long exposures (which can’t resolve detail in anything moving). The information is not captured at sufficient resolution.

For any scenario short of studio lighting, there is objectively much less information.

You’re also dramatically underestimating how truly fucking awful phone camera sensors actually are without the crazy amount of processing phones do to make them functional.

Facial recognition works better on white people because, mathematically, they provide more information in real world camera use cases.

Darker skin reflects less light and dark contrast is much more difficult for cameras to capture unless you have significantly higher end equipment.

Reacher is so much better than Tom Cruise’s tiny Reacher.

Ebooks.

It’s still probably not close to enough for my ebooks, but at least it makes a dent. Even terrible quality video adds up fast.

There’s also a huge amount of bad will.

VR/AR are still (yes, even years later) in the tech enthusiast niche, because the actual tech is hard. But a sizable chunk of tech enthusiasts know enough to hate Facebook, hate them specifically in VR because of how they handled their purchase of Oculus, or both.

The pandemic was very clearly the initiator.

Being conservative about forcing people back (because most have wanted people back long before now) doesn’t change anything legally. You were hired for an in person job, they were forced to have you work from home by actual government orders, and they moved slowly on forcing you back because it was an extended period of time where there was an actual meaningful health risk to a big enough portion of employees.

They’re a good actual mechanism for spyware, because they see all your traffic.

Https means that they can’t see the actual contents without installing a root certificate, but they can see all the sites you visit and for how long. Reputable providers (at least the good ones) do not log any of this, but you should have a high level of trust in a provider to use their VPN, because they see a lot still.

That doesn’t mean that they didn’t ban legit VPNs. I don’t know. But it doesn’t really qualify as “reporting news” without at least a list of the apps that were banned, because they’re providing no information at all about the legitimacy of the apps, and it’s a category appealing to bad actors.

This is stupid as hell.

If you were hired as remote you have a pretty strong case for constructive dismissal.

I think you’re going to have an uphill battle if you were hired to work in a building and they allowed work from home due to a pandemic. I don’t think being slow getting back to the office is going to win you your case.

I see no mention of what they actually removed or how reputable they are. “VPN apps” are a reasonably common approach to spyware. (Common enough that literally Facebook has done it.)

There are Android ereaders. They’re mostly Chinese manufacturers, and I’ve heard more than one doesn’t follow the GPL properly with their modifications to Android, but the end result is freedom to use a variety of sources of books (including Libby and Hoopla from the library, among others).

I haven’t played with parental controls to know if they’re easy to access, but my most current Boox came with the play store installed and it’s pretty easy to learn how to adjust the display settings for different apps with different types of content.

Libation (add audible to your search to find it)