Something completely realistic, right?

Buddy, the world is a dumpster fire right now and it’s only getting worse.

I don’t watch films for realism. I want the billionaires to get fed into their drug crushing machine*, or sucked out of the window of their private jet, or get minced by their giant drill or blown up in their yachts.

I want the good guys to win for a change.

*yes, I know this was a henchman. Don’t @ me

I don’t know about the US, but in the UK, rebuilding would be covered by the homeowner’s buildings insurance.

Although insurance companies would probably try to claim it as an Act Of God to get out of it. Don’t know how that would go legally…

There are many reasons why renting is better for some people and buying is better for others.

Renting gives you the flexibility to just up sticks and leave at a known notice period. You don’t have to worry about the boiler breaking, or mould/damp, or the roof coming off (or like I’m about to have to deal with, a fence panel getting blown away in a storm) because your contact with the landlord says they’ll fix that for you.

There should absolutely be that choice available.

The problem, at least in the UK and probably elsewhere, is that renting is just SO expensive that it’s not possible to rent and save money, meaning that if your goal is to buy, you can’t because you can’t raise the deposit, even if paying a mortgage on a similar sized property would actually be cheaper on a monthly basis.

Sure, you read stories about people who are wonderful landlords, they don’t raise rents, or at least, by less than market rates, they’re quick to fix any problems the tenants have, all that good stuff.

Equally, you read stories about people who are basically renting from Satan and all the things I mentioned above take months or years to get fixed, if ever. (Slumlords are definitely people who should be put up against the wall and shot come the revolution)

I’m assuming the vast majority are somewhere in the middle.

But the fact that you’ll probably rent for at least some of your life shouldn’t drain all your money into someone else’s mortgage. As I said in that other post, housing of some form should be a basic human right. And the fact that individuals or companies can buy many houses and leave them empty because they can afford to have rents set so high that most people can’t afford them? That’s just wrong.

Hah. I meant socially, not that it happened by accident!

To be clear, I wasn’t trying to say ALL rental housing should be subsidised, just that there should be a healthy supply available for local councils to make available to people who need it based on whatever criteria they set for that.

Even when I was renting, I’d earn too much to qualify. People with young children would take priory over single people. That sort of thing.

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s better than companies gaming the system to maximise profits at the expense of the most vulnerable.

Yes. The ability to have a place to live should be a basic human right and therefore be affordable.

If that means the government* subsidises it for the low income families (as in owns them and rents them at below market value), so be it.

We used to have “council houses” in the UK for exactly this purpose, but in the 70s, Thatcher came up with a “right to buy” (at a decent discount) and then made two mistakes - there were no restrictions after buying to stop you selling to anyone else, and there was no building of replacement stock after they were sold. So the result 50 years later is that there are nowhere near enough council houses any more, and a lot of the old ones are privately owned and being rented out at market rates, which are (depending on the area) very expensive.

*local or national, I don’t really care which

I’m certainly not, but having seen claims you can replace the SSD with a bigger one, I can imagine a lot of people might try it…

Genuine question - what device do you have that has USB-C ports, no USB-A ports, doesn’t have WiFi, but supports the dongle?

It’s more Y’all Quaeda

My boss told me verbally “don’t call your colleague a fascist by email or anything else that leaves a record”, so that was nice of him.

To demonstrate the lack of a “clear mandate”.

Yes, Trump will win if he gets one more vote than Biden, but the more he loses the popular vote by, the more justification people have for protesting.

So if he wins on electoral college votes but loses the popular vote by a landslide, at least it shows what The People are actually thinking.

Yeah, don’t trust your most critical passwords to a browser when you can instead use a dedicated bit of software designed for saving passwords securely and which will also work on your phone and any other browser you may care to use.

The last time I tried to install Windows 11 on a VM (Nutanix AHV), I had to fiddle with a virtual TPM and lost the live migration feature as a result.

Dos this mean I can install the LTSC version, not need the TPM and have a working, live migrate-able machine?

Something to test next week…

It’s like… I want to disagree with you, but you’re making me think.

Why are we ok with having required services that are only provided by third party companies?

They’re not specific - No government says you must have a Facebook or Twitter account. But you’re right - you have to have a bank account and you’ll not get far in 2024 without email.

What about a step further? If you want a phone number, you need a landline or mobile. Both of those are only provided by private companies too…

While I don’t disagree with you in principle, I do find it a bit funny that you’ve picked one of the easiest services to change between as your hill.

There’s no reason you _ have_ to use Gmail, or Hotmail. There are a billion email providers and if you have enough technical knowledge, you can even run your own (I really don’t recommend this though, it’s harder then it seems to do it safely and securely).

If you pick a provider outside the US, your government can’t do dick about getting it shut down, and if you pick one in a particularly privacy-conscious country, you can have everything encrypted to the point where the provider themselves can’t read your messages.

Also, I assume this is similar in the States, but I’ve seen government IT projects in the UK and some of them are truly awful. I wouldn’t necessarily trust them to look after important emails for me. Plus a single source of email would be an awfully tempting target for hacker groups around the world.

Yes, a label is just a more versatile folder. If you don’t like that, you can just use a single label per email, but I genuinely can’t see any value in that. But you can if you want.

If the government can get your current email or bank account shut down, why do you think they couldn’t/wouldn’t do that on a government-provided one?

I want to use my main mail address everywhere, even public places.

No you don’t. It’s not quite as simple, but buy your own domain, get an email provider such as Fastmail that will let you use a catch-all, then use a unique address for every site you visit.

Then if one starts receiving spam, you can block that specific address and voila, no more spam. Plus you know what sites have either poor customer detail hygiene or are actively selling your details.

Ok, so not great, but not terrible.

Firstly you had to fall for social engineering to get the dodgy app via TestFlight. Later on, you had to fall for social engineering to get the dodgy app via you installing an MDM profile on your own device. In the future, you’ll doubtless be able to get socially engineered to sideload it.

Currently, in the UK (I don’t know what this is like in other countries), we get regular prompts from our banks not to share one-time codes with anyone, not even bank employees. And not to transfer money to ‘safe’ accounts, even if someone claiming to be the bank or the police tell you to. They’ll just need to update those to also say “We at Bank will never ask you to install test or special versions of our app, or update them anywhere other than the official Apple/Google app store”.

This is a social engineering problem, not really an iOS (or Android) technical one.

EDIT: The article is suspiciously vague one one point:

Once installed on either an iPhone or an Android phone, GoldPickaxe can collect facial recognition data, identity documents and intercepted text messages, all to make it easier to siphon off funds from banking and other financial apps. To make matters worse, this biometric data is then used to create AI deepfakes to impersonate victims and access their bank accounts.

What ‘facial recognition data’ is it gathering, and how? As I understand it, FaceID is processed in a secure enclave, and regular apps don’t have access to that - they send a ‘verify this person’ request, the phone itself triggers a FaceID scan, does the verification itself and sends back a ‘yes, all good’ reply to the app - the app itself does not get FaceID or biometric data. So unless it’s just doing something like using the camera to take some photos or videos of the user, I’d like to know what the article is talking about there…