While I have no doubt Meta is doing the absolute minimum it can to comply, they’re not allowed to pick and choose arbitrarily. They can have technical and security requirements, but we’re not hearing from major players about how WhatsApp is refusing them access when they’ve asked.

I’m inclined to think most of them either don’t want to (Signal doesn’t) or aren’t in a position to make it work.

There’s some confusion because of the reference to “Signal protocol”. This refers to the key exchange and encryption protocol originally developed for Signal and adopted by WhatsApp, iMessage, and others.

This is a means of establishing a secure end-to-end encrypted conversation, not a federated protocol for different messaging networks to interoperate. WhatsApp announced that Signal protocol or a compatible E2EE implementation is one of their requirements to allow third parties to interoperate.

Signal has signaled its intent not to interoperate with WhatsApp or anything else several times over the years for both technical and security reasons.

A quick look suggests the UAE has stronger worker protections than are typical for the region. The government strongly encouraged employers to allow work from home last week, but I didn’t find whether that has been continued into this week. It doesn’t look like that recommendation is mandatory for employers.

Someone who reads Arabic will probably be able to find more recent statements from the government with relative ease.

You haven’t said what country or line of work you’re in, so nobody knows what’s normal. Countries in the middle east are not known for their strong commitments to worker rights, so it’s a good guess that having to do whatever management wants or get fired is normal there.

During an air raid, it’s probably safer to travel a short distance to a bomb shelter rather than a longer distance to your home, if that accurately describes the options.

A useful video would be a bunch of people beating on stuff (off-screen or in an extended cut) to figure out what’s actually easy and reliable for beginners, then presenting that information. It would get approximately 237 views, which is roughly a million fewer than the linked video has at this time.

What succeeds on Youtube is entertainment first and information a distant second. A video where everyone sat down in a quiet environment with no pressure, installed a reasonable Linux distribution, and had a smooth experience wouldn’t be very entertaining.

I used Jetpac last time I needed an esim for travel. I did not install their app, but activated the esim manually with the facilities built in to the OS.

Either the AI bubble pops and the demand drops, or the AI industry becomes stable and supply increases.

I’m inclined to bet on the bubble popping. There are real businesses to be built on top of generative AI, but most of the current players have high costs and a long way to go before their revenue comes even close.

I’ve used several iterations of Gnome, several iterations of KDE, Mate, Cinnamon, Hyprland, XFCE, LXDE, Fluxbox, and several other things I can’t be bothered to remember. I can be productive on any of them given some time to set them up.

I do have preferences though, and I like KDE on a laptop/desktop and Gnome on a tablet. I just wish Gnome would do something about its horrid onscreen keyboard.

“If you put money in a vending machine and got two items instead of one, would you put additional money in for the second item?”

No, I fucking wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t like to work for anyone who wouldn’t hire me because of that fact.

If 99% of applications that run on *nix desktops didn’t want to accept middle-click to paste text where that’s an operation that makes sense, I would agree with you. I do not believe that to be the case.

KDE and Gnome already have toggles for it, though Gnome’s is in gnome-tweaks because Gnome hates exposed settings.

I’d support unifying behavior between toolkits and apps to provide users with a single point to set their preference, but I use this feature a hundred times a day. I’d also like it to remain the default; *nix desktops should have their own flavor instead of just copying Mac OS or Windows, and middle-click paste has been a part of that flavor for 40 years.

Middle click to paste the X PRIMARY selection predates Blender.

Yes, I do know how old Blender is.

I am not a doctor and I am definitely not your doctor, but this sounds like an eating disorder to me. Are you in a position to talk to a doctor about it?

I’m pretty happy with my P14s (essentially a T14). It’s even worse in that all the RAM is soldered, but as I understand things, AMD had legitimate performance reasons for doing so, and the trend is likely to continue.

IBM did the same thing 25 years ago on the Thinkpad 600 series.

However, there are no limits to political donations in the US afaik, which I guess means the rich and powerful ones can invest as much as they can to denigrate the other side, usually a democrat (correct me if wrong).

Almost right. There are limits on contributing to candidates, but not on political action committees advertising anything they want, including a candidate. PACs aren’t allowed to coordinate closely with a candidate’s campaign, but that hardly matters in practice.

Is it possible for local candidates to run against their own party and actually win? Like a republican that lost his party’s nomination for a district, then becomes an independent and actually wins against his former party?

Yes, but it’s extremely rare for it to succeed due to the voting system in use and in some states, ballot access rules biased against new parties. The governor of Alaska was elected that way in 1990.

Do candidates have to give back the money that was given as a donation that wasn’t actually used to try to win an election?

No. They can, but they can also donate it to charity, make (relatively small) contributions to other candidates, hold it for future campaigns, transfer it to a party committee, or give it to a PAC.

Can a politician actually pretend to raise money for a campaign and then simply pocket it?

That’s illegal, which doesn’t always stop them from doing it.

That sounds like a very negative experience, pretty much opposite to my experience with the same model.

She got 50 USD back. Not worth it at all.

50 USD was one of the compensation options Google offered; a battery replacement was another. The latter might have been wise if she wanted to keep using the phone.

Be sure to give it a one-star review.

So far, Magisk and Play Integrity Fix have been sufficient for apps that don’t like it.

Messaging, web browser, podcasts, navigation, a couple services that require a phone to access. I tend to not install apps that could be websites.

Hardware drivers are surely dated. Android, on the other hand is 15, and I assume getting updated to 16 soon. I think I’m pretty good with regard to the sort of zero-click exploits I’ve heard of used for targeted attacks. If somebody slipped a trojan into a software update, I could have a problem, especially if it was a privileged app like AccA or Adaway. Of course, updated drivers wouldn’t protect me from that.

The entire smartphone industry.

I use five year old smartphone (Pixel 4a). I can afford a new one, but I don’t need a new one, and it would be worse in ways I care about (bigger, probably without a headphone jack), without being better in any way that really matters to me, so I don’t want a new one.

Official software updates ended a couple years ago, but I’m running LineageOS and I got an update this week. Google has intentionally made it hard for most people to use LineageOS or any other Android distribution not blessed by Google as their primary phone by allowing app developers to check whether it’s Google-approved. For now, I can usually work around that, but it would be too big a hurdle for most people.

The kernel is getting pretty old though; it’s 4.14 when I’m up to 6.17 on my laptop. This is because SOC vendors don’t release open source drivers, nor maintain the proprietary ones for very long.

Finally, there’s the battery. Mine is in great shape because I use AccA to limit charge to 60% most of the time, but charging to 100% as most people do would have greatly reduced its capacity by this point. Replacing it requires melting glue and some risk of damage. Most phones are like that now (though that’s changing due to EU regulation).