I’m editing my response, 'cause you know what? You don’t know anything about me, my business, or my ethics. You have no standing to judge my character, and based on the fact that you have anyway, I don’t care to know anything else about you or engage with you further.

Yes, that is indeed the fact I was downplaying as “minor”. I have an even bigger target on my back, and I’m a lot less mobile with all my assets tied up like this.

https://swappa.com/faq/devices/unlocked-device

This has most of the information you’re looking for. As it says, an unlocked US phone might not be compatible with a foreign carrier (like if you go to another country) because not all carriers use the same “radio band frequencies” for carrying their phone signals. Phones don’t just have one radio in them - there are loads, at least a dozen, to handle different frequency bands. If your phone doesnt have the right radio to pick up/transmit in a carrier’s frequency band, it won’t work with that carrier - it doesn’t have the right hardware.

Locking meanwhile is a software thing, and that can be undone in most cases. Swappa does specify if the phone is unlocked, that’s what those categories are. “Unlocked” is all unlocked phones. The phones you see here, for example, will work with any US carrier: https://swappa.com/listings/google-pixel-9?carrier=unlocked

(And you can put GrapheneOS on it, but I’m just a graphene fanboy daily driving it for several years now so don’t mind me 😂)

Edit: Cricket Wireless is an “MVNO” or “Mobile Virtual Network Operator”. They buy airtime on networks owned by other companies like T-Mobile at wholesale prices, and re-sell the service as their own. You save money on your plan, but if there’s network congestion it’s always the MVNO customers who get slowed down/booted off first.

Sure! “Locked” means that it has to be activated on and can only be used with a specific carrier network. Back in the day almost all phones were sold by and locked to the carrier, and usually paid off as part of your phone plan, the idea being to lock YOU in to the carrier by making you buy a whole new device to switch networks. That might sound anticompetitive… 😶

Now, phones can be unlocked to work on different networks even if they were bought locked, and it can be really easy online, or a bit of a process depending on the carrier.

My recommendation would be to go unlocked. It’s just less of a headache.

The law is a funny creature. I own a business myself (just started, actually!) and it would suck to be brought up on charges I have no idea about but I’m being held personally liable for. I’m grateful for the LLC protection in that case. Of course, I’m also not planning on committing any crimes, nor having my business commit crimes, so it’s a minor worry. Really only important in the event the law gets weaponised against the people, say for example by a foreign asset in high office… 😬

But that’s what I’m saying - I don’t think those kind of jokes are funny anymore. When I was younger I thought it was all in good fun, that nobody really meant it and that’s why it was funny, but then I saw the world and realised it’s very much not. The humour was drained away by the hatred.

Yeah, I agree. I guess I should have said I used to think he was funny. It’s been a long damn time since he said anything that made me laugh.

Dammit. I thought he was funny, turns out he’s a xenophobic fuckhead.

I actually already couldn’t enjoy Fawlty Towers anymore, the racism is obvious to me now that I’m an adult. It’s distasteful. I guess for John, it wasn’t just “the times” the show was made in. Ah well, plenty of not-fuckheads whose work can be enjoyed.

You said everything I came here to say, so I’m just seconding your recommendations.

I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

Limited liability companies are “limited” in the sense that there are limitations on the responsibilities of the members of the corporation. The CEO can’t be held personally liable for the actions of the company, for example; their underlings could have been responsible and kept the leader in the dark.

However, there’s this interesting legal standard wherein it is possible to “pierce the corporate veil” and hold corporate leadership personally liable for illegal actions their company took, if you can show that by all reasonable standards they must or should have known about the illegal activity.

Anyway Elon has been elbow-deep in the inner workings of Xitter for years now, by his own admission, right? Really getting in there to tinker and build new stuff, like Grok and its image generation tools. Seems like he knows an awful lot about how that works. An awful lot.

It’s a very nice concept to be able to dump a shitload of knowledge into a folder, look at “processing…” for a few seconds, then ask questions to get exactly what you’re looking for out of it rather than having to go digging through the mound of information and without having to worry that the computer just threw in a few made up facts for giggles. The idea is that the dumping happens over time mostly, allowing you to quickly find buried information from years ago with a few relevant queries.

One thing I’d do with this is dump all my emails into it, from across all my accounts. That might save me having to search keywords in 8+ accounts over 4-5 different platforms every so often…

It also might have been useful in a lawsuit I prosecuted a few years ago. Instead of going through two years of encrypted messages by hand to pull out relevant excerpts with context, I could have exported the lot and just asked for the information. If it worked it could have saved me months (I spent a few hours after work every night screenshotting, dating the screenshots in chronological order, then I’ve that was done I kept a spreadsheet that I filled with relevant excerpts and links to the screenshots, by reading every single screenshot… it was a lot).

Exactly what it says, what’s confusing about it? The problem with LLMs is that they bullshit; the problem with LLMs bullshitting is that you have to check everything they say, they are not trustworthy - severely limiting the utility. So, don’t trust LLMs. God meanwhile is assumed to be the paragon of honesty, and thus completely trustworthy, so would be the only entity to be trusted implicitly.

This works even if you don’t believe in god, like me: trust nobody, everyone must bring data if they want me to trust what they say.

My take is only valid for my environment, I think 😅 What’s your environment and threat model? Are you feeling that your current defenses are insufficient, is there an actual or potential increase in attacks? Are you finding yourself struggling to manage and secure company infrastructure with everyone’s personal devices connecting to it? Are your users frustrated with the security you do have in place? Or, are you looking to add new layers to address a deficiency?

IMO cloud services like this are either overpriced now or will get overpriced in the future; they usually work fine until there’s an outage or until they get compromised. But, I haven’t had to run a large corporate environment yet, and I could see the allure of offloading all the security onto an external vendor that we can blame (and sue) if things go wrong down the track.

edit: reading u/False’s comment it does sound like it’s at least a decent user experience, at least if they’re using the Sonicwall product you’re looking at. You can almost certainly build an equivalent service internally with FOSS tools, but will the user experience be as good/seamless? That’s a lot less certain.

after all a corpse can’t fight back.

And a good thing too, have you seen the size of his face? Couldn’t have hit that thing with a sniper rifle.

(do not expand on the joke, do not expand on the joke, it stands on its own merits, do not expand on the joke)

What? I was agreeing that this is one hundo percento something those cunts would do. I didn’t know they’d already named a highway after him, though 😑

Ugh, you’re right, they totally will. Yeah, I can see a case for pasting printed copies of his tweets all over such institutions (for example).

One quote I’m particularly fond of is “Oh. Gurgle. Ahhhhhh”

Oh yeah, fair enough. That one I want to get in cross-stitch to hang over the fireplace.

There are plenty of hate-filled shitstains to fight. Why would we focus on one who isn’t here anymore? As to learning from history: we don’t, we won’t, we’ve proven it. And by “we” I mean “humans”.

Dude’s dead. Reposting his hate amplifies his message and makes that matter less. We should collectively forget he ever existed, and it would still be too good for him, but it’s the least we can do.