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).

The article doesn’t talk about the fact that the increase is far greater in dark conditions, which is not readily explained by the changes to car design the article discusses.

This article talks more about that, and the linked report suggests population trends have contributed to more people walking at night along arterial roads with poor pedestrian infrastructure.

To be clear, daytime fatalities are up by about 40% in the interval shown, which is much more than the increase in population. Increasing vehicle size and hood height are real problems too, but don’t seem to be the biggest factor.

Do you see ads you don’t want to see? If not, it’s good enough.

I don’t especially want to be in the position of defending either spez or r/jailbait, but I was on Reddit at the time and I do think I should explain how 2008 was a different time on the web.

There had been a number of attempts to censor and age-gate the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s. People involved in creating internet tech and building its culture were almost universally against anything that even smelled like censorship. Much of the early userbase migrated from Digg in response to Digg censoring a leaked DRM key. The only sitewide rule on Reddit was “don’t break Reddit”.

When r/jailbait finally did get banned in 2011 and Reddit’s first content policy was imposed, that decision was unpopular among Redditors even though most thought sexualizing young teenagers was disgusting. It signaled a change to what Reddit was, and people rightly feared that it would lead to significantly more restrictions. Now I have to enforce a rule on r/flashlight that people can’t sell flashlights designed to be attached to guns, and I don’t want to make or enforce such a rule.

spez implicitly supported the jailbait subreddit when he left it up for several years

spez did not work at reddit between 2009 and 2015.

I normally dislike self censorship of profanity, but replacing fuck with fsck (filesystem check) is a Unix joke, and I can appreciate that.

I’m sure I hit numbers like that on my DSL.

Yes, that’s adequate for someone who knows how their phone works and doesn’t stream video while out and about.

Signal seems unlikely to comply. It will be interesting to see how they respond. A way to register without a phone number would be ideal.

It looks like that plan allows 35gb of data use in a month before it throttles, I don’t think I’ve ever used that much mobile data.

The fact that casting to older devices is allowed on the expensive plan but not the ad-supported one offers a clue.

Headline is bullshit. This is an archiving feature for sectors where the law requires employers to retain records of certain kinds of communications. It only applies to phones set up with mobile device management, and it displays a clear notification to the user that the conversation is being logged.

Here’s Google’s announcement.

Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm.

Yes, the Kel-Tec KSG bullpup shotgun has two magazines and a manual control to choose between them. In addition to twice the capacity of a single tube magazine of the same length, it offers the user the option to switch between two types of ammunition - a more significant advantage for a shotgun than most firearms due to the variety of ammunition available.

Correct, though the car in question here is electric and will almost certainly use the motors to slow the car to reuse that energy. The motors should be able to stop the car even if the hydraulic brakes fail, and probably more effectively than a mechanical parking brake.

It is like paying to unlock satellite TV reception (even though we are receiving the signals the whole time).

It’s reasonable to charge for this because the value is in copyrighted content and a service that costs the provider money to operate. The same would apply for satellite radio in a car or an internet-based streaming service. It is not reasonable to charge for access to the adaptive suspension or seat warmers that are already in a car a customer bought. That breaks the traditional model of ownership.

An interesting middle ground might be to allow the owner to install arbitrary software on the car, and charge for the OEM adaptive suspension app. I think I would like a world where things work like that; OEMs would whine about security to no end.

I think it should be legal to attempt to decrypt satellite signals without paying; if the satellite service is designed well, it won’t be possible. All the anticircumvention laws should be repealed.

It’s an electronic parking brake. Those are common now because a small switch takes up less interior space than a lever for a cable-actuated parking brake, and the computer can disengage the parking brake if it detects that the driver is attempting to drive with it activated. The computer is involved in brake pad replacement to tell the parking brake motor to open to its widest position to accept new pads, and calibrate itself to their thickness.

This requires a special adapter and software subscription rather than a button on the infotainment screen because Hyundai is engaging in rent-seeking and perhaps trying to direct business to its dealers.