My name is Jess. I build and manage servers for both work and fun. I also occasionally make music.
Ah, the Apple strategy of forcing a standard.
EDIT: By that I mean when Apple started putting USB (1.0) on their Macs back in the day to encourage more USB accessories. Not their proprietary (what was the old iPod connector called?) or lightning BS.
I literally wait every year for this video.
Greedy companies do shit like that regardless of any laws. I don’t think this law makes it any more likely.
FOSS developers could create an ethical solution while still remaining legally compliant. The language is generic enough to allow for different implementations.
The bill I mentioned actually relies on parents configuring their kid’s devices. The system it describes just gives online (and even offline) platforms a standardized way of asking the OS what age category a user is as defined at account setup–hardly “dystopian nightmare fuel”…
This isn’t going to stop unsupervised children, which is it’s own problem that technology doesn’t (and probably can’t) solve.
Agreed, but you’d think they would prefer that. The way it is now, they have no way of knowing which platforms have your government IDs.
Though, let’s be real, all they need to do is pay a data broker for the tracking data that’s already being collected everywhere.
What you say??!!
IDK, the amount of abuse people have withstood only to keep using MS platforms is astounding. Some people would rather use trash than learn a new platform.
Clearly, no-one involved in making these laws has ever heard of OAuth. Not every single site needs to manage your identity / credentials. The government already has this info, they can be the identity provider and use OAuth to grant access to age-gated resources without giving any personal data to the platform. Someone mentioned id.me, and I’m pretty sure that’s how that platform works, though they’re a private entity if I understand their site correctly.
I know most politicians are comically tech-illiterate, but it’s so frustrating to see them constantly implement terrible solutions to already solved problems without asking a single expert who knows how this shit works.
That being said, California passed a bill with a not perfect, but better approach. User age is configured on the OS level when a user account is set up, and then it will tell platforms what age category the user belongs to, and nothing more:
(a) An operating system provider shall do all of the following:
(1) Provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store.
(2) Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies, at a minimum, which of the following categories pertains to the user:
(A) Under 13 years of age.
(B) At least 13 years of age and under 16 years of age.
© At least 16 years of age and under 18 years of age.
(D) At least 18 years of age.
(3) Send only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply with this title and shall not share the digital signal information with a third party for a purpose not required by this title.
I think iOS already does this, actually.
The vast majority of things gen AI produces becomes pointless when you take the human out of the equation imo.
Indirectly, this was. He said this was a bug in their recent tool that allows sites to block AI crawlers that caused the outages. It’s a relatively new tool released in the last few months, so it makes sense it might be buggy as the rush to stop the AI DoS attacks has been pertinent.
Yeah, I noticed this, so I started using RSS feeds of my subscribed channels. I honestly think RSS (and other web 2.0 tech) is when the internet peaked from a user experience perspective.
RSS only faded away because it’s so convenient that it’s hard to monetize. When the goal became keeping people on your platform as long as possible, RSS was antithetical to that goal. So platforms either abandoned support for it or (like YouTube) stopped advertising its existence.
As for the “Sound Connect App” that’s unfortunately the core of the problem. That app doesn’t exist for Linux. If the hardware relies on that app to set up or manage profiles, it creates an unavoidable roadblock for desktop Linux users.
The app runs on your phone (Android or iOS), and then you use the phone to manage Bluetooth connections for the earbuds. IMO you shouldn’t need a second device, but I guess they just assume 99% of people are connecting to a smartphone.
It just seems to be a non-standard implementation from Sony that doesn’t play well with the standard Linux audio stack.
I think the issue is that the actual Bluetooth connection is obfuscated behind a proprietary connection to the app, and the app exposes the protocol.
I agree it’s a stupid implementation, prioritizing a UI for pairing over literally everything else, but you still might be able to get it to work. I’ve successfully paired my WF-1000XM4 earbuds with my EndeavourOS (KDE) desktop.
Drivers (other than your Bluetooth chipset) generally shouldn’t matter. AFAIK Bluetooth audio device protocol is generic.
How are you pairing the headphones? Are you adding your PC as a device using the Sound Connect App? I have different SONY earbuds, but they can pair with 2 different devices and switch between them with the app. Perhaps they still have another device (like a phone) selected for output?
Smells like desperation. Still struggling to find a sustainable business model are we?
Yeah, way too many services have chats. I think it’s because every large platform wants to be an “everything app”. Messaging is a really easy to feature to implement to (theoretically) add value.
How about: “You probably should trust or use X at all… ever.”
They keep your private key on their servers.
Then it’s literally not even E2EE, lol
double grins in self-hosted Fedi instances
I was thinking of the 30 Pin Dock Connector, which was proprietary, but it looks like it used both FireWire and USB protocols.
Apple was known for helping propagate FireWire too.