I’m old enough to remember the web being primarily text, and turning off automatic image loading being a good way to see fewer ads. I’m old enough to remember popup windows and popup blocking.

I suppose the underlying issue is that if something I don’t like happens on my computer, my first thought is to look for a way to change it, and most people don’t think about computers that way. I’m sad that most people don’t think about computers that way.

Right, I do understand that’s a limitation. I think I’m more puzzled that many people find the presence of ads in a device they paid for to be a minor issue rather than intolerable.

I haven’t moved to a privacy OS on Android yet because of money.

That’s entirely reasonable. You can still block most ads if you want to:

• You can use a web browser that supports extensions. That includes Firefox and its various forks, and perhaps surprisingly, Microsoft Edge. uBlock Origin is still available for both, despite Edge being Chromium-based and Google trying to cripple adblockers there.
• You can use web, rather than app versions of most services so that they’re covered by the browser’s adblocker.
• You can use DNS-based adblocking to reduce ads where you need/want to use apps that display ads.

“But personalised ads are really convenient!”

Not seeing ads is really convenient, and I have trouble understanding why anyone wouldn’t block ads aggressively on every device they spend much time using in 2025.

To cover a couple common objections:

It’s a corporate/institutional device and I can’t

Then it’s the institution’s IT department I’m puzzled by. If I was running corporate IT, ad blocking would be part of the standard install. The FBI recommends it for security.

The device is too locked down for that

Why would you buy such a device, or continue using it now that you know better?

Someone logging timestamps for messages received on both ends of a conversation would be able to determine that two people are probably talking to each other given enough data. Signal is probably not doing that, but Signal’s other security guarantees provided by an open source client that encrypts communications end to end hold even if the organization was infiltrated or taken over by a bad actor. The anonymity of participants in a conversation is not protected as strongly as the contents of messages.

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.

not likely to affect users who can count to 20 without taking off their shoes

There are a surprising number of people who aren’t stupid, but never learned basic computer admin skills before getting a smartphone. There’s some debate going on over whether the onus is on the user to learn those skills or the OS vendor to make devices so appliance-like they’re not needed. I’m firmly in the former camp.

Can you? The blog post says it only works with Pixel 10 devices, which GrapheneOS doesn’t support yet. There’s no explanation for why it might need a specific model of phone.

They have been for years. I had a 2016 Sony that definitely wasn’t a good value on paper. I accepted that because it was small.

It depends on what phone you have. Some phones have bootloaders you can’t unlock, and you can’t do much at all with that. If you can unlock the bootloader, your options are determined by which third-party Android builds support your hardware.

LineageOS is a popular option with pretty broad device support; GrapheneOS is a privacy/security focused option that only runs on Pixels.

I imagine they announced the most extreme form of it they were considering and had several fallback plans depending on how much backlash there was.

I’ll expand this question to my entire social circle.

I haven’t found that anybody cares about my email provider. It doesn’t affect them because email is federated. Nobody has ever asked me why I’m mailing them from a domain I own rather than a service provider they’ve heard of.

Where I do run into a lot of resistance is trying to get people to use Signal. Some people seem to find the concept of having multiple messaging apps objectionable, which has never made any sense to me as long as they have basic computer skills. On occasion, I’m on the other side of that conversation when I’m unwilling to use Facebook Messenger for reasons that should be obvious to anyone in this community.

You will get rid of that phone long before the battery dies.

Why? There was a time where smartphone tech was improving fast enough that there was a large benefit to a new phone every 2-3 years, but that time is in the past for most use cases.

School seems like a good use case for a powerbank since most people carry backpacks to school.

The advantage is that I can occasionally charge it to 80% or 100% if the situation demands it.

The amount of time the battery spends at higher voltage definitely affects its capacity over time. There’s plenty of research on Li-ion battery service life characteristics done with greater scientific rigor than is possible with batteries installed in phones.

It can take longer than the few months these tests required to see the effect. A phone that’s usually stored at 60% will eventually show a big capacity advantage over one that’s stored at 100%. That’s probably mostly true at 80% as well.

For some anecdata, my Pixel 4a has spent most of the past five years limited to 60%. It reports 1152 cycles and 91% capacity.

A quick search suggests all X1 Nano models can run Windows 11, so they won’t be ultra-cheap because of that.

That’s not criminal anywhere to my knowledge, but very creepy for an adult to say to a 13 year old.