slow n easy

Anilu_777 said:

Anyone ask BlackBerry? Yeah it’s Canadian but still - that’s their bread and butter. 

Reading your first sentence, I started laughing. Then I saw your second sentence and realized that you weren’t joking. I wasn’t sure that BlackBerry was even still in business. I know that they haven’t produced their own Operating System since 2015 and I’m not sure if they’ve had any new products at all since 2018.

fallenjt said:

netrox said:

I am tired of Homekit being unreliable with "no response" that happen too often - I am waiting for Thread enabled products which in theory should solve that issue since they "self heal" the network. 

HomeKit is not reliable compared to Alexa. All my HomeKit devices at home are also Alexa compatible. I had to use Alexa a lot to control them. Only Philips Hue is HomeKit consistent. 

I wouldn’t replace the smart switch but smart bulbs instead. There’s so many light bulb options to choose including RGB and the can be controlled individually.

For me personally, I would rather use the smart switches. This way I can use the physical switch, use the app, or use Siri interchangeably. If I use smart bulbs, then I can only use the app or Siri because if the switch is off then the bulb is no longer smart. The majority of the time I turn the light on or off at the switch.

cpsro said:

"In-wall smart plugs are a staple of any smart home."
Not if your house is older and lacks the extra wire. In that case, smart bulbs are a staple of your smart home.

Not necessarily. The standard Lutron Caséta smart switches don’t require a neutral wire and are also great switches. I installed 20 Lutron switches last year and I absolutely love them. However, I got the much more expensive version that actually does require a neutral wire. The reason I went that route is because when I installed the standard switch I noticed a buzzing sound and when I tried the more expensive one, the buzzing pretty much went away. Also, the more expensive ones have a favorites button in the middle of the switch. I set all of the presets to 50% which is very useful for when I don’t want to be blinded in the morning. Some of the 20 switches I have are actually remotes. If you have 3-way switches, then you install the remote in the secondary location instead of a second switch. I think you technically can install 2 actual switches but it’s a more complicated setup and the remote is drastically cheaper. Plus the remote looks and acts exactly like the expensive switch. Unfortunately the standard switch doesn’t have the favorites button. One of the reasons why I went with the expensive switches is because I wanted all of the remotes and switches to look identical to one another.

mknelson said:

MisterKit said:

So Apple scans our photo library for a hit on known child porn. Somebody at some point along the chain had to watch it and establish the library.

That's not quite the process. It isn't viewing your library in the way some articles imply.

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf

The hash list is provided by National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). The images or likely just the hashes would have been provided by prosecutors/police agencies/child welfare.

The article above describes the hash algorithm. The algorithm creates a hash value. The hash value computed for the photos in the iCloud library are compared to hash values in the list.

An account is only flagged if there is a certain number of such hash matches.

You misread the original post. The commenter wasn’t saying that someone was viewing your library. The commenter was saying that someone had to view the child porn video in order to add it to the list.

physguy said:

It would be nice the the interviewee actually said something substantive. “ They've been allowed to acquire competitors, destroy competitors, favor their own goods and services, engage in very anti-competitive conduct”. Every company in the world does that. It’s called competition and running a business, successfully. It’s only deigned to be a problem when one company has a monopolistic position in a given market. No where in this article, and presumably in the interviewee’s responses do they address why any of these companies are monopolies, and in what market. I believe a good argument can be made that Google is a monopoly in search, that FB is in social media. Beyond that I don’t see it for the tech companies. Amazon certainly isn’t in online retail as there are numerous competitors large and small. Walmart is a significantly bigger company in retail than Amazon. Apple certainly is not a monopoly in phones or apps as they remain the smaller player in both markets. They just provide such service that they get the profitable sectors of those markets. AWS might be in web services,  but I doubt it given google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Rackspace, etc. 

I think you are wrong about Google being a monopoly in search. There are a large number of search engines and I don’t think it’s Google’s fault that everyone gravitates to Google. I use Bing myself and no one is forced against their will to use Google. I believe Facebook almost needs to be a monopoly. I tried Google+ for a while but it doesn’t work if you are the only one you know that uses it. I kind of feel like it would be similar to AT&T having their own telephones that only work with other AT&T telephones and Sony telephones that only work with other Sony telephones etc. It wouldn’t work. At first MySpace was dominate and then Facebook took over because I guess everyone thought Facebook was better. Then for a while Google+ was an alternative to Facebook but it never caught on. I don’t see how it would work very well to have alternatives to Facebook. Maybe if there was a way to post something on Google+ and everyone on Facebook could see your post or if you posted something on Facebook and everyone using MySpace would automatically see that same post. But that is probably not possible.