More options is more good. The beauty of the open source community is different offerings of the same product catgory directly benefit each other instead of competing. Looking forward to running Cosmic system apps on KDE.

He most likely inspired Scihub.

If you’re talking about Toronto and Ottawa, as far as I heard, a huge part of the reason is Downtown businesses are struggling now that way fewer people are commuting Downtown.

But the solution to this is not RTO. If your DOWNTOWN of all places isn’t self sufficient I don’t know what to tell you other than your municipal policies are failing. Just let people live in the office buildings. “Oh they’re too wide and you’ll have to make the units narrow strips that only have a tiny sliver of window on one side” Do that then. Tons of people would still live in those because Downtown should be the most desirable place to live.

Also, they dumb it down in order to make it readable for the widest possible audience so they get the highest possible revenue.

IDK if it’s just me growing up but I swear news from when I was a kid was more technically worded than now. We literally used news articles in school to learn technical words. Now they’re so patronizing.

Issue is whether you can even use it outside of China because of the wireless band difference. I had a Fairphone in Canada that suddenly stopped connecting to the network.

Containerized Cat for the Docker version?

Dock Dog would work too.

There’s no trustworthy VPNs period because the client-server architecture makes it impossible, it’s just the reality of how VPNs work. You cannot prove what they’re running on the server so claims like they don’t record your traffic or metadata are by definition unverifiable. Even if they’re audited, what’s deployed on the server can be changed in an instant. This is true for all the internet, there’s always a chance that any infrastructure that handles your packets is logging them and you will never know for sure.

Dog /s

All of the long time Linux users have what you perceive as flawless experiences because they already did all the stumbling you did and more. Every operating system has steep learning curves and you will struggle with how it does things when first starting out. I recently had to start using Windows again after exclusively using Linux for years (and Windows 11 no less which I never used before) and there are plenty of times I’ve failed to do simple things I could do on Linux without even thinking.

Do Samsung phones even have FM antennas? As far as I know they have to be a minimum length and old school feature phones had a hacky workaround where you had to plug in earbuds to listen to the radio because it was using the earbud cable as an antenna. Modern Samsung phones don’t even have headphone jacks so I can’t imagine they support FM at all. Probably your best bet is to use an internet radio service that has access to the stations you like.

Are they trying to evoke the Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs vibe by saying Harvard dropouts? Do they not realize that those are HORRIBLE people no one should ever look up to?

We still have a chance with Linux mobile.

You could argue the browser is NOT showing your code the way you intended

I don’t think that’s a good example because how line breaks are treated is defined in the HTML standard.

A better example might be “reader” mode on mobile browsers? Or that mode in Opera where their servers act as a proxy to compress images and reduce the amount of data required to load the website for slow connections.

Actually the default HTML form and button elements are good one. Chromium and Firefox have different default styles.

But why disable it for the people who can use it? Unless there’s a security implication to the handshake?

What magical company do you work in that gives you UEFI access on your work computer? Mine’s so locked down.

I sort of suspect that the wiring is in a diagram somewhere

That’s called a schematic and not only are those not public, they’re closely guarded trade secrets that companies will spend a lot of resources to prevent from leaking to the public.

Also, just because a schematic says the switch is connected a certain way doesn’t mean that’s actually how it’s connected. The only way to prove how the switch works is to inspect the traces in the PCB, which is very difficult to do especially without destroying it. Modern computers have multi layer PCBs that you’d basically need to peel apart to see the inner traces.

Framework laptops have a little physical switch to turn off the camera / mic when you don’t want them.

Unfortunately even this is not that comforting because we don’t know how the switch is implemented. Is it actually in series with the microphone data lines? Power lines? Ideally both but you’ll never know. It could even just be a software GPIO switch (gonna bet Amazon Echos with their microphone switches are implemented like that) and unless you have the knowledge to check the PCB you’ll always have that lingering suspicion.

So, is there an easier way to completely disable the microphone?

First take it apart and determine what form factor the microphone is.

Is it a through hole microphone with two pins that are soldered to the underside like this? If so it’s best to desolder it to prevent damaging the PCB. Use a soldering iron to heat up the pins and pull it out with pliers from the other side. If you don’t have a soldering iron and don’t want to buy one, I’ve also seen people using side cutters to cut off the solder joints and loosening the component enough for it to be pulled out through brute force without breaking the circuit board. If you can’t or don’t want to do either of those and don’t mind risking the device, you could just yank it out with pliers like you’re an old timey dentist pulling teeth, and hope that the pins break before the board does, might also help to twist it back and fourth repeatedly until the metal gets fatigued and break.

It might also be a surface mount microphone that, as the name suggests, is only soldered to the surface of the PCB. Might look something like this. These are pretty challenging for most people to desolder especially if it’s close to other components, but they’re small enough that the solder pads don’t need a lot of force to break, so if you can get a good grip with pliers you should be able to just rip it off. Twist it until you feel the solder joints snap and then pull straight up. It doesn’t really matter if you rip the pad off the circuit board since you don’t plan on soldering anything else to it. But what you do need to be careful of is if you peel off more of the copper traces than just the pad, which can damage other components. If you do want to desolder it, touch the soldering iron to the metal casing which should hopefully heat up the entire component enough to melt all the solder joints, then pull it off with pliers. Just be careful not to touch any nearby components with the soldering iron.

Failing all those, you could also take a screwdriver or awl, put the pointy end on the microphone, and hammer it a few times to cave the metal casing in and hopefully crush the audio sensing parts. This will probably destroy the microphone, but less certain than removing it.

I’ve also heard recommendations about grounding the microphone connections after removal for extra privacy, mainly to prevent the traces from picking up EM waves, but I don’t know how to reliably do that without breaking stuff so can’t give any advice.

Does putting tape over it completely mute it?

No. Speech is surprisingly robust from an audio perspective and it’s entirely possible for audio not recognizable to humans as speech to still be decoded by speech recognition AI. The thing is even if this works 90% of the time and makes the audio completely unusable, you can never prove if your case is in that 10% where there’s juuust enough information for AI to detect. You also can’t easily hear the actual output of the microphone so for all you know it might be fully intelligible and just muffled. If you’re concerned about privacy to the point where you’re asking how to remove a microphone, I doubt you’ll accept that 10% chance anyway and removing the microphone entirely will save you a lot of anxiety.

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Somewhat tangential hot take: I REALLY think the scope of free as in beer use of open source projects should be limited to personal and small scale business use only (when the business makes below a certain yearly revenue). It’s infuriating how the biggest tech companies openly use open source software as the base of their products while giving NOTHING in return to those open source projects, and in fact only bash them when they show the least bit of resistance to whatever evil profit driven change they demand the project make. If you’re making billions in revenue using open source software which has saved you R&D money, why shouldn’t the open source project itself be entitled to even half a percent of that which will more than cover all their development costs? I’m so sick of companies seeing open source as free outsourced labour they can exploit. There are also existing licenses that only allow free as in beer use of the software if it’s for personal use or in a worker co-op, which I think is also an interesting approach worth considering.

Alternatively, I think we should seriously explore even more copyleft licenses than AGPL. I think it was either Elastic Search or MongoDB that tried to implement a license requiring every software that depends on the open source version of their software be open source as well? Everyone, including the OSF bashed that decision when it came out, and as far as I know there were indeed a lot of problems with how that license was written, but people also denounced the very concept of going beyond AGPL which I don’t get.