Microsoft Office is built on such model, where the document specification is intentionally vague, contradictory, and the implementation is full of constantly changing details that make 100% accurate re-implementation by competition impossible, thus maintaining its hegemony in the office software niche.
A smartphone is a device designed on all levels to be used against you, not by you. In a better world you'd have a choice on the driver level to give or refuse access to any data you choose, or to send fake empty data. With every version of Android it's progressively being made more and more useful to Google and advertisers, and less useful to you. At this point they should be given away for free, because paying for something that is designed to enslave and exploit you is just silly.
It ruins the trust completely if something presenting itself as a way to communicate safely and securely is itself ridden with so many security problems. I know I won't be using matrix for anything sensitive anymore.
The Github issues created by the hacker just got wiped clean, I guess they want to censor any negative opinions users may have about the quality and security of their service.
Chinese have different sensibilities than westerners. It's completely normal and accepted for them. They have a word for self-important westerners who are obsessed with politically correct speech and behavior - baizuo. It's a different world there.
I subscribe to a couple of newsletters that send the most popular repositories in several languages to my email every week. There's been a trend of increasing Chinese activity for months now. The problem with Chinese programmers is that they very rarely bother to use English, as the rest of the world, rendering their technically "open source" code largely useless for most of us. There's clearly a niche for a Chinese language counterpart of Github, and I suspect it's going to be filled soon.
Years pass, we have sci-fi level technology, and the main method of distributing programs to users on Windows is still downloading .exes from random sites and being on the lookout for the browser toolbar trying to sneak by when installing. I don't know what's worse, this, or Google trying to wrestle yet another group of website owners into obedience.
It's still no proof of existence of black holes. It's like saying that a lightning storm is proof of Thor, because the legends say he wields the very same lightning. The cause could be something entirely different (spontaneous spacetime ripples, alien generators, whatever really).
There is still zero evidence that there exists such a thing as a black hole with all its fantastic properties. We have a picture of a red-yellow accretion disk and that's it. Black holes remain a mathematical artifact of general relativity and there is as much evidence of their existence as of crystal healing and astral travel. There is at best some evidence of very massive objects at certain points.
Mozilla is almost fully financed by Google. Any day now, Google can retract its funding and effectively fully consolidate its iron grip on the fate of the Internet.
The more websites use Google's "captcha", the more pointless it is to resist fingerprinting. And since that "captcha" is built into Cloudflare's "spam protection", it blocks you from half of the internet already.
Why the scare quotes? Because the purpose of recaptcha isn't to tell humans from bots, it's to punish users who do not wish to be tracked by giving them an endless stream of challenges to solve no matter if they keep getting them right or wrong. It is especially obvious when they intentionally delay the loading of subsequent images if you have too many privacy features enabled, because it does nothing to prevent bots from solving them. It's grouped into several tiers, depending on the amount of frustration they want to generate:
1. Invisible captcha - you have Chrome, you're logged into a Google account, your advertising ID has a profile full of useful data. You go in with no hassle.
2. 1 click - maybe you're on a new IP or a new device, but you're logged into a Google account and use Chrome. Click the checkbox and that's it.
3. Regular captcha - You're not logged in but you don't use any privacy enhancements, so through a combination of fingerprinting, cookies, and other tracking techniques you're uniquely identified anyway. You get 9 images, select 2 or 3 of them and you're good to go.
4. Annoying captcha - you're blocking third party cookies, you're not on Chrome, looks like you're not being a good cog in the machine. You get a captcha with 9 squares that load more images, or you have to "select squares containing X", and you get 2-5 of these in a row.
5. Infuriating captcha - you're blocking third party trackers, cookies, all other storage methods, you block or mitigate canvas fingerprinting, you're behind a VPN, your fingerprint is not recognized, there's no data in your profile. Google won't squeeze a cent out of you, so you don't get to use the internet. You're getting an endless stream of slowly loading squares, or 5-7 objects to recognize. Even if you do all of them correctly, it won't let you in. Maybe after 4-8 cycles, but that will still waste ~10 minutes per try. You're barred from any website that links to reCaptcha.
These days websites using it are for all purposes dead to me. I can't visit them and I won't waste my time clicking their images or selecting squares or whatever.