How can any line that is on the surface of a sphere be straight rather than a curve?

How is that different from the usual way of having a password as your way of accessing your phone?

This is one of many reasons you should use a password of some kind that you keep inside of your head to unlock your phone rather than a biometric that people can use to unlock it against your will.

In my opinion, relying on upgrading users automagically to an encrypted and secure protocol isn’t good practice. If someone wants to use an encrypted chat, they should do so consciously. It will only cause confusion otherwise.

This is my theory for why they ditched this feature - the ultra-concerned about privacy superusers don’t approve of its messiness, even though in practice it’s the main engine for user growth.

Do people still use SMS these days though anyway?

I would have thought iMessage, RCS and separate chat apps like Whatsapp, Signal and WeChat would have largely replaced SMS by now.

SMS, MMS, iMessage and RCS are all compatible with each other and mostly used interchangeably and are the main way people text each other (in the US anyway). You just have a phone number, and when people text it with any of those formats you receive the message and respond the same way.

Right, the idea was that you could use Signal as your SMS app, and so whenever there was someone else doing the same you’d automatically upgrade to Signal. Whereas now I never have those auto-upgrades, any new contact I am just stuck on SMS with.

I’m still just so furious at Signal management for removing compatibility with other text apps. I used to be constantly growing my Signal network, now it’s a slowly shrinking rump that I never add anyone to.

Sure, why would election coverage not be news?

This will cause me to torrent the Amazon shows I want to watch even though I’ll likely still have access to an Amazon account to watch them on.

This is why the alien entity in the Expanse was called the Protatomolecule

Nice. All corporate mergers are anti-consumer and anti-worker.

Reddit removed downvotes?

Lately I’ve just been rewatching the final episode of the previous season before starting a new one. I’m a little lost in that episode but by the end I’m following along, and it’s usually an exciting finale episode that gets me excited to watch the next episode.

I’ll forever be in mourning that Signal shot themselves in the foot and stopped functioning as an SMS app replacement

Wow it may get rid of those annoying alerts too? Win-win!

It turned out to have no basis in reality - the person telling the story turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US or something like that.

I need something in between this and a Kindle. I don’t want to build my own electronics, I just want to buy them from somewhere without sketchy ulterior motives for how they’ll use their control over my device.

It came out yesterday. You are probably looking at the date on the screenshot of an article that it starts with rather than the date of this article at the top.

I assumed the piracy sub would be a safe space for this sort of thing

Bring back physical keyboards!

This is was France needs Alsace and Lorraine so bad, otherwise his forehead would look absurd.