And because Hamas leaders don’t want to find their entire families (regardless of which country they are in) delivered to them in small pieces, just before they get a serving of Novichok themselves.

The biggest problem is that it uploads your entire contact list and thus social network to Facebook. That alone tells them a lot about who you are, and crucially, also leaks this information about your friends (whether they use it or not).

With contacts disabled it’s a pain to use (last time I tried you couldn’t add people or see names, but you could still write to people after they contacted you if you didn’t mind them just showing up as a phone number).

It still collects metadata - who you text, when, from which WiFi - which reveals a lot. But if both you and your contact use it properly (backups disabled or e2e encrypted), your messaging content doesn’t get leaked by default. They could ship a malicious version and if someone reports your content it gets leaked, of course, but overall, still much better than e.g. telegram which collects all of the above data AND doesn’t have useful E2EE (you can enable it but few do, and the crypto is questionable).

Endless approval processes are a good one. They don’t even have to be nonsensical. Just unnecessarily manual, tedious, applied to the simplest changes, with long wait times and multiple steps. Add time zone differences and pile up many different ones, and life becomes hell.

It’s fiddly and can go wrong but a hot swap (wiring a second power source in parallel) is possible.

I assume you already swapped the savegame battery?

One conspiracy theory I like is that it’s a measure against people working at two companies, collecting two salaries.

You probably have limited practical ways to do something about it (aside from freely talking to your coworkers, reporting to the NLRB if you’re in the US, and hoping they care), and anything you do does risk retaliation (illegal, but you need to understand that being right doesn’t mean people follow the law, or that the law will be enforced effectively).

Obviously you should be looking for a less shitty job regardless.

(The extra context is important - without it it would be no big deal. In Germany, sending your comp info by email would be illegal because privacy, and the envelope would definitely be labeled confidential).

What, you don’t like getting your news from such an obviously neutral source?!? /s

If I installed a different app for every friend I had, I’d have a homescreen full just of chat apps. What’s worse, those niche privacy friendly apps go under or out of favor often.

You might be able to convince some of your friends to install an app just for you once, but by the time you’re telling them “this one now sucks, I’m on other app now” for the second time, they’ll just stop chatting with you, and if you ask them repeatedly, likely shun you even IRL because most people want to live their lives, not chase chat apps for their friends’ weird interests.

And even if they do that, they’ll have one app that they use every day, and one that sits in the bottom of their app drawer. Guess who gets invited to do something on the weekend, the person who shows up on their main contact list, or the person that would show up if they dug out that dusty app? And guess what the phone is gonna do with that app once it hasn’t been opened for a week… it’s going to deprioritize it so it won’t even work properly, while their main daily-opened app always gets push notifications immediately.

You don’t have to like it. You can pretend it’s not happening. But it will happen.

It absolutely is a thing. Network effect matters. Usability matters. Open source/community solutions usually lack that (and the lack of familiarity makes it worse).

The bathroom/shower.

1 kW is enough to heat 1 liter of water per minute by 14.3 degrees Celsius. If you have a 20 l/min shower head and water pressure to actually deliver that, that’s 20-30 kW of power for as long as the shower is running (if the water is heated by heat pump, that’s output power, input would be 1/4th to 1/3rd, and wastewater heat recovery is possible - but most places don’t have that and use fossil fuel or resistive heating).

A 15 minute, 20l/min shower uses 5-7.5 kWh. You can reduce that by a factor of 6 by using a 10 l shower head and 5 minutes of water (turning the water off while you don’t actively need it). At 200 kg CO2 per MWh (natural gas), that’s 0.3-0.45 tons of CO2 saved per year.

Likewise, lowering the thermostat and saving heating can make a huge difference.

In general on a large scale, living in a smaller apartment is “greener”, since less space needs to be heated, but also less space has to be built, and higher density means less travel.

The only alternative that’s FOSS and not centrally controlled is Matrix. By being decentralized, anyone can run their own server and good luck stopping that.

There may be 200 other “alternatives”, but they’re irrelevant to the point where I consider then non-existent. Nobody has heard of them. Nobody is using them. Trying to push them on normal people will most likely result in them no longer talking to you as often or at all, and none of the other ones has any chance of reaching a critical mass. Matrix at least has some recognition among nerds and some, tiny amount of adoption outside.

Stop pushing random niche shit, it does privacy a disservice.

A messenger can at best be pseudonymous, since you want your friends to be able to find you.

And in practice, a mobile messenger that actually works (i.e. makes your phone go “ping” when someone sends you a message, not hours later) will always be traceable to you, as it needs to be able to deliver the message.

Also, regardless whether Signal is perfect or not, it’s the one privacy friendly messenger that people actually use. A messenger where you can reach only your privacy-extremist friends is useless. Signal is already on the extreme end for most people, trying to push anything “more perfect” (but more niche) will just make people use WhatsApp.

I think it’s because there just isn’t any sensible explanation so people are trying to come up with something.

The tech companies do have massive real estate footprints, but I think it doesn’t make sense at all, those are a cost center for them.

You shouldn’t, and many demanding it are saying “bring me solutions not problems” to say “stfu and stop complaining” more politely. Let them faceplant.

Most European countries do have free speech protections, but with much more limitations than in the US. (IIRC the US would also not allow e.g. speech calling for a lynch mob, as long as it’s specific enough.)

Various forms of hate speech, including support for terrorist organizations, are covered by those. Terrorist usually isn’t just what the government dislikes; it usually requires (or is subject to review by) a court decision.

There are obvious arguments against such rules, but there are very few social benefits to letting people support literal child murdering terrorists, call for the lynching of certain groups of people, claim that the Holocaust never happened and should be repeated (sic), or just march up and down the street in Nazi uniforms showing off their right arms much to the dismay of any survivors, their descendants, and the people who would be next on the list.

The main risk is the government abusing its power to ban all anti-government protests. Europe has decided that this risk is small enough with all checks and balances in place to be worth the social benefit. The US has decided otherwise.

I think cutting off water is nothing compared to what most people are expecting and many actively condoning or calling for now.

Previously, there would be an uproar any time Israel targeted a “mixed use” building (residential building presumably with Hamas also having a base there). Now, the response to the bombing campaign and even cutting off the water is a lot more muted.

This “mastermind” just managed to lose Palestinians most public support and sympathy (and foreign aid from Germany, the EU and others), retroactively justify many of Israels harsh acts and security measures, and make large parts of the population at least indifferent to, if not supportive of, whatever Israel will now do to Gaza.

Good job?

It’s all about reputation management. If they don’t put in these restrictions, headline-seeking “journalists” will make their life hell until politics steps in and “does something about this scourge of AI doing horrible things”.

From the misleading snippets I saw, my best guess was that someone (either through incompetence or malice/desire for a better story) turned “hacked a smartwatch and listened in on an after the fact meeting” into “tracked a submarine”.

Tracking a submerged submarine through a smartwatch is bullshit.