Guy behind Beeper fucked Pebble smartwatch users and developers on his way out.

So when Beeper isn’t making enough money and he sells it… Will you trust who he sells it to to keep it secure instead of aiming to use data for ads or some shit?

I won’t.

I'll admit, the reason I ended up reading the whole article were the words "Ben Schwartz."

Scott Aukerman is an absolute wreck over this news.

making (presumably) thousands of dollars off their users

I agree with this post completely but for some reason you finishing with this makes me chuckle.

Oh no! Thousands! They might be able to pay rent for a month or two!

I’m just being cheeky, and while its true what they did was scummy, it also feels like a really… smallish amount of money?

If we’re literally just talking thousands, and not tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands.

But yeah, fuck Brave.

Firefox gang and Hardened Firefox gang here to stay.

Mozilla’s got its own problems but that’s a story for another day.

I think this has less to do with Microsoft and more to do with the average human has no interest in learning something that only passively helps them.

I only know a handful of things about working on an automobile, while my father could practically take one apart and put it back together wholesale.

I can take apart a computer and put it back together wholesale, but I’m lost on an internal combustion engine.

I pay someone with expertise to handle the engine, because I’ve spent my time learning other things.

Look, unless the people you’re talking about are doing tech jobs, there isn’t a reason for them to learn the depths of it, just like there isn’t a reason for them to learn the depths of how their car works. Both a car and a computer are tools, and those tools are made to be used by people who may not know the depths of the internal workings of either.

This post feels like elitism and gatekeeping to me, as someone who thinks Windows sucks and prefers Linux. The idea that it’s the OS that is “holding people back” and not that those people might have more important things to do with their time than dedicate half their life to an operating system is absurd. If someone spends 20 years becoming a doctor, I’m not going to act like they’re a dumbass because they don’t know everything about fucking computers.

People don’t want to learn more because for most people not knowing more doesn’t impact their fucking life. Just like me not knowing more about my car doesn’t generally impact my fucking life. Because I’ve never had trouble finding someone to pay to fix it for me.

Surprise, we’re the people who are paid to fix computers for the people who are just using them as simple tools. Maybe we shouldn’t be so upset about that.

Also, last but not least, Android is a strain of Linux and it suffers from all the same issues listed above as Windows. Acting like you couldn’t pull the same bullshit in Linux if you wanted to is kind of a joke, because it’s already been done with Android.

All the ad infested bullshit we all hate about Windows 10 and 11? Blame Linux-based Android.

EDIT: Also, personal opinion, if we’re talking about which CLI is easier to learn and use. Microsoft has made great strides with Powershell being easy and accessible to people who haven’t faced a command line environment before. The things that make its command line better than Linux’s are two things, and only two things. (I hate that it’s object oriented instead of text oriented, Powershell has a lot of bad things, too)

First, human-readable commands whose names describe what the command does in a verb-noun format. This means instead of Linux with some very, very obscurely named commands that are not descriptive and you just have to sort of memorize, you can just sort of remember because the name is human readable.

Secondly, the get-command command is huge because it allows me to search these verb-noun names for the command I’m looking for. On Linux, if I don’t know the specific command, I have to search the internet, because there isn’t a built-in tool that will give me an idea of what each command does and allows me to search for them through a filter. Once you find a command you think might work, it has the get-help command which produces something similar to a Man page.

Linux has Man pages, but because there is no rhyme or reason to how any commands are named, it’s not very easy to find the command you’re looking for if you don’t already know the command. On Windows, if I know what the command does I may already have enough information to find the command using get-command instead of having to turn to Google and be like “what command do I use if I am trying to do X?”

So if we’re talking about the superiorly designed command line that’s easier for first time users. Powershell is where it’s at. Because Linux is a confusing fucking mess of 30 years of random decisions by lone programmers. Literally the only reason I know commands in Linux CLI is because I had to memorize them. I don’t do so much memorizing Powershell commands. If Linux was being built from scratch today, I’d practically demand a similar naming convention system to make it easier to understand what the fuck commands do.

PS C:\> get-help get-help

I guess it’s too hard to consider real people with real opinions might populate a niche website with small userbase and an active anti-advertising attitude.

I guess it’s also too hard to just look at an account and decide if it seems spammy or if it seems like a real person, and easier to just cast aspersions because they… annoyed you?

Anyway, thanks for standing up for us both.

Forgive me, you’re correct. I stopped using it when it dropped SMS, because I had only ever able to get people on it through SMS, but at the time had read plans about eventually dropping the phone number requirement. I mixed those things up in my head.

From what I understand, they’re fully invested in dropping the phone number requirement though, and some more googling says that they’ve had versions of Signal PNP (phone number privacy) running for a while now.

You’re correct, that part hasn’t actually changed over yet, but it’s in the works.

GPS was short for Google Play Services, not Global Positioning System. Sorry.

Signal is always encrypted by default. Same with Matrix. Telegram you have to choose for it to be an encrypted chat, and you can’t do encrypted group chats.

Earlier this year. It no longer functions as an SMS service and you now have a username instead. I think the changeover was in March or April.

If you trust Telegram you’re naive. Here is a great breakdown earlier this year from Kaspersky.

https://usa.kaspersky.com/blog/telegram-why-nobody-uses-secret-chats/27662/

Signal isn’t perfect either, but their mistakes are far less egregious. They also have removed some of the more egregious mistakes, like needing a phone number (edit: incorrect, see below) or google play services to function. It can be run on a device without Google Play Services because it only uses Google Play Services for push notifications.

And literally how you get yourself in hot water with copyright cops. They’re willing to turn a blind eye to pirates who don’t profit from their ventures, but the second you get money involved, you’re boned.

Exactly, which is why the type of warning they’re getting matters.

What’s the actual warning? Is is the one about “do you really trust this file you found online?” or is it Windows Defender saying it’s infected?

It could potentially recognize from the metadata that the files were downloaded from the internet, but I’m not sure why it would do it to just a video file.

I tend to get warnings for things I install from the internet, not just video files I’ve downloaded.

The original creators are long gone, the philosophy of the site has changed, and it’s filled to the gills with ads and is just pretty sketchy at this point.

Which is surprising, honestly, because the whole reason that the original team got absolutely fucked was because they had way less advertising on the site to help cover the costs. They were railroaded with “profiting off of facilitating piracy.” Yet the current team clearly is actually doing that and yet its fucking crickets from law enforcement. Reeks of it probably being owned by some government and they keep it up so they can keep track of piracy and send out cease and desist notices.

Why else would they be allowed to continue to exist while flagrantly doing worse stuff than the original team that they literally jailed over less?

You’d have better luck on private trackers and/or just sharing on Soulseek.

I mean, they haven’t had that much trouble. Last I checked they had portions of the French and German governments using Matrix as a secure messenger. (To be fair, those both came after the rename.)

Jesus just go back to calling it Riot.IM the name keeps getting stupider and more corporate.

So then this falls under “devs didn’t care” because it was useful information for them and they didn’t see how it could be used negatively.

It would mean every Unity game was not-so-secretly shipped with code that phones home to the Unity company upon install.

Either they’ve been egregiously spying on gamers for years (and by extension, game developers using Unity have just been fine with that), or they’re lying through their teeth.