housemate and I are sick of smartphone AI and spyware!! looking for cheap, refurbished cellphones from the 00s
- the problem: all models we have found run on 2G, which is rapidly being phased out by all US carriers
- desired features: basic call and text functionality, durability, physical buttons, fits in pocket
Since the 1980s, academic publishing has become increasingly commodified. It is now shaped by profitability, competition and performance metrics. Universities have adopted market-based management practices and rely more and more on performance metrics to assess their staff.
Needed to find some super old DMs, iirc before even the pandemic, and was greeted with this beautiful message. Luckily the DMs aren’t absolutely necessary for what I need, just would make things much easier.
As banks and brokerages become increasingly enshitified and hostile toward Tor users so they can track you better, I quit logging in. I switch to paper or email statements when possible. But enshitification avoidance comes with penalties now.
It’s as if humanity is dying off. They don’t want to see you in person so physical addresses are being withheld from contact pages. I now must dig into the privacy policy or ToS to find an address. It’s really a shitshow because whoever handles privacy requests could be entirely outsourced to someone who has nothing to do with an org.
Linked post gives detail. The absolute shit-show of fake PDFs comes amid the eur-lex site’s restricted access that blocks Tor users, which means we can only reach laws that are mirrored on archive.org. And only if the builtin search tool can be avoided.
Congo Basin countries have announced the launch of a payments for environmental services, or PES, initiative at the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, intended to encourage practices favorable to forest protection and restoration.
Qualcomm-owned Arduino quietly pushed a sweeping rewrite of its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and the changes mark a clear break from the open-hardware ethos that built the platform.
The new documents introduce an irrevocable, perpetual license over anything users upload, broad surveillance-style monitoring of AI features, a clause preventing users from identifying potential patent infringement, years-long retention of usernames even after account deletion, and the integration of all user data (including minors) into Qualcomm’s global data ecosystem. Military weird things and more.
The long-term effects of tech enshitification are becoming apparent in how people perceive software bug reports. A software defect that would have been easily regarded as a bug in the 1990s is now seen as software functioning normally and as expected. The rise of enshitification and fall of software quality has conditioned consumers to unwittingly lower their standards of quality.
A chatbot erroneously told a traveler they get free travel in a particular situation. I don’t recall exact circumstances but it was something like a last minute trip for a funeral. The airline then denied him the free ticket. He sued. The court found that the chatbot represents the company and is therefore legally bound to agreements.
So I remembered a bookmark I used to have and went to look in Chrome and it was there. Went to export the bookmarks and import them into my current browser. Apparently unless you are on a desktop there is no export option for Chrome in Android now? I know it exists on Chromium based browsers because it exists in Cromite.
Banks are equally (if not more) innovative in all the creative ingenious ways to thoroughly enshitify a service while still retaining loyal patrons who accept it, lick their boots, and stay over the long haul to experience new developments in enshitification techniques.
There is hardly any discussion on this trending variety of web enshitification where a website needs to give physical locations to people. Many web devs are starting to spotlight their profound incompetence in accomplishing this very simple task. They throw up an interactive map which requires the full utilization of fancy GUI browser frills with 3rd party js enabled, which excludes all but those who “chase the shiny”. A 1990s high schooler could handle this better in plain HTML.
The attachment is a page from the annual report by a national ombudsman produced for politicians who use the stats in policy making. The ombudsman accepts complaints online and also by analog means. The annual report considers the method of complaint submission a “key figure”.
There is immense pressure on public administrations now to respect the environment. They have obligations to satisify green policy objectives which includes pushing the “digital transformation” down our throats. They care more about that than public satisfaction. They also know that environmental policy influences election votes much more than digital rights policy.
My fight against enshitification entails hand-delivering paper correspondence by bicycle. I also re-use the windowed envelopes that I receive. When I run out those, I leave the envelope unsealed so the recipient can easily reuse the new envelope.
The whole capitalist infrastructure is designed for corporations to fully exploit profitability to the most extreme possible result. Sure, we can blame capitalism, which is a useless activity. In fact, it’s a harmful stance because blaming capitalism artificially puts solutions out of reach.
Broadcom stopped selling VMware perpetual licenses in November 2023 in favor of pushing a small number of VMware SKUs that feature multiple VMware offerings. Since Broadcom is forcefully bundling VMware products, the costs associated with running VMware have skyrocketed, with customers frequently citing 300 percent price hikes and some firms claiming even larger increases. As a result, some VMware users have opted to keep using VMware perpetual licenses, even though Broadcom refuses to renew most of those clients’ support services.
A lot of tech knowledge is jailed in #StackOverflow, #StackExchange. Too much. The tech world is very dependant on this single gate keeper. This week, freedom to access SE’s indispensible tech knowledge has been lost.
“The average American,” Zuckerberg says, “has fewer than three friends, fewer than three people they would consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's something like 15 friends or something.”
Googling about an event in a Europen micro-nation, I ended up in an archive of the 1957 LIFE magazine. I was shocked at how reminiscent it is of modern news website, with advertisement everywhere that does its best to blend in and pretend it is content.
A few days ago I sent a GDPR request to some company to delete my personal data. They said to install their app and send a ticket from the app.
The email was sent from the email address to which the account is registered.
Is this even legal?
Feddit.online
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