More detail / similar concepts if you're not a video person: https://www.centerforbuilding.org/blog/we-we-cant-build-family-sized-apartments-in-north-america
Big fan of that one, been using it for years.
They published this in Popular Mechanics in 1912, we've been ignoring this for a long time:
The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year,” the article reads. “When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
Also, this Wikipedia article has a good summary on the overall arc of our understanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science
It seems like the attack surface is limited to RF (bluetooth/wifi can be turned off if one is willing to make that compromise), app install (many just use a small selection of well-trusted apps), and messaging/browser which are regularly updated if the device is properly configured. Apps that aren't pulling in random untrusted content are far less of an attack vector (eg. one's bank app isn't connecting to everything, just to the bank, pinterest is hopefully escaping user content, etc.)
Based on helpful details at the other thread (eg. Project Mainline, baseband isolation) I’m beginning to form the opinion that it is not unreasonably foolhardy for someone to continue to use an unsupported device if they are willing to make the compromises necessary to limit their exposure. Which wouldn't necessarily mean "giving up bluetooth entirely", just not using it when you're in bluetooth range of an untrustworthy party eg. if you just use your headset to make zoom calls at home and are fine not having it on the subway.
Thanks for the reply. Definitely appreciate the point that lacklustre updates mean we need to pay attention even if we're vaguely covered by our vendor. I think you've convinced me to subscribe to CVEs for android too, I've only had alerts for my browser. Really too bad they don't make smaller Pixels.
Thanks, that's encouraging and very relevant. Looks like it was introduced in Android 10 and aside from "Project Mainline" is referred to as "modular system components": https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/modular-system
Can you shed more light on what someone would be risking by continuing to use an EOL device? You say you don't advise it, but it'd be helpful to elaborate on why.
It seems like the increased vulnerability would be relatively limited: I presume the browser and messaging are by far the most common vectors and those would be as up to date as ever but I can see how exploiting an unpatched vuln there on an unsupported device could have more impact as it would give more options for privilege escalation.
Otherwise it'd be something RF based. Aside from widely publicised things like BlueBorne (that we should be keeping an eye out for anyway), is it a reasonable concern that there are identify theft rings employing people with modified hardware wandering around subway systems trying to exfiltrate credentials from devices with specific vulnerable basebands? Seems like Android also offers some defence in depth there that'd make it unlikely enough to ensure it wouldn't be worth their while?
There are a few technologically disinterested people in my life that I advise (as is no doubt the case for many here) and I don't know how strongly to push for them to get new devices once theirs fall out of support. Most of them are quite content with what they're using and are not in the habit of installing apps (and will reliably ask me first) so they really would be replacing the device solely for the updates. In some cases it's not only the time and effort to decide on a replacement and get things transferred over but the expense can also be a burden. So I don't want to raise the alarm lightly.
Just because we want thoughtful regulation does not mean we support Meta and Alphabet. Why is this fascinating or surprising? Do you think the EFF is a huge fan of link taxes or Facebook?
It's just the building, seems fine really but like, maybe less of a non-event than the almost no attention it appears to be getting.
Or you mean the part where Bell unnecessarily routes Canadian traffic through the US just cause they can get paid more that way? Ya that doesn't seem good to me either but has been widely known for years now and apparently we're okay with it.
foreign corporations are extracting most of the profit from local journalism simply by hosting links to the content,
I don't believe they are getting particularly much revenue from journalism. I think that's why their reaction to this is just to block the links being posted: it won't really affect their bottom line. A blip. Even if Cali does it, people will just post memes or screenshots of headlines or w/e.
And sure, hosting links to those news stories is mutually beneficial, except that almost no one clicks the links. The headline, teaser and photo are scraped and displayed on the third party app, and that’s all anyone cares to look at.
Indeed, few of us spend much time reading the news. Especially actual investigative journalism and not just what amounts to entertainment content. Saw an article recently saying that Canadians level of interest in news media is even going down from what was presumably a fairly low baseline (see how easy it is to get by without links?)
I think there is a silver lining to this though: it doesn't cost that much to make the kind of news that's important. It's certainly not free but you mainly need to pay a few talented and driven people enough salary to support them while they doggedly pursue the truth. You don't need a massive printing press and a delivery fleet like in past. So news doesn't need to be corporate. News doesn't need to be Reddit, news can be Lemmy.
If something is happening, those of us who pay attention should be linking to it when it's important. And should be linking to quality sources.
I live in Toronto, recently some protected lands were going to lose their protection and the circumstances around it were suspect. The most in depth journalism on the topic was this piece from a very small donor-funded org that investigates environmental issues: https://thenarwhal.ca/ford-ontario-greenbelt-cuts-developers/
Indeed, the federal government has an excellent program that supports this model (and that very publication) -- it allows news orgs to be recognised as tax-deductible charities if they meet certain criteria, effectively amplifying the impact of those of us who think it's worth paying for news to exist:
I do value journalism, and I do think more people should care and I think we should be linking to it everywhere we think we might be able to engage our fellow citizens with what's going on around us.
I don't especially value corporate manipulation and lobbying which is what I see from things like Postmedia, which owns way too many newspapers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Canada
A for-profit business is seeking profit first. That necessarily distorts journalism. Especially when the business model is based on ads. I'd rather support a smaller, more focused sort of news gathering. And it's better if more of us donate, they should beholden to a large sampling of the minority of us who think it's important journalism happens and not to shareholders.
Currently I contribute to: Canadaland, The Local, The Narwhal, and The Tyee. I also pay for The Guardian because they don't have a paywall.
I'd like to support the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail but they have paywalls so I'd have to log in to read them and then they're associating my reading habits with my identity and selling it to advertisers. That business is gross. Much like what Facebook and Google do. I don't want to support that. Plus I can't link people to the paywalled news. And I think it's important to be able to do that: it's all the more important to have it there for the few people who will click through and become informed precisely because, as you said, most people won't. And I don't see pay-for-links helping; if the platforms eventually cave and start supporting that scheme, won't it just encourage vapid Buzzfeed style clickbait as they try to get as much link juice as possible?
So I want to pay not for access to the news, but for the news to exist for everyone because I believe it's important. And I think it would probably be good for society if ad-funded news died. Any other publications I should be supporting and linking to?
Good. This law is ridiculous and I'm glad it won't give the result they intended. Being able to link to things freely is a very basic part of the web, we really shouldn't mess with that. And Facebook is a ridiculous place to get news from so it may have ancillary benefits as well in terms of maybe slightly improving public discourse and encouraging people onto other platforms with more transparency around their content weighting and data use practices.
I got a nice deal on the x280 and am happy with it, was also looking at the various X1 carbon. Two criteria I had were I wanted USB-C charging (since I have those chargers around and they can handle these laptops) and a single battery (eg. the T470s I have from work is nice but it has two small capacity batteries that each cost the same to replace as the full size single ones in the carbon and x280). One thing to keep in mind is some of the earlier X1 carbon don't support NVME SSD (I think it started with 5th gen?)
Edit: another thing to consider is soldered RAM. Part of why my x280 was cheap was it's only 8gb and can't be upgraded. Since you're looking at lighter weight things and using FOSS (and perhaps open to tinkering with things like ZRAM) that might be a useful aspect to focus on because there is probably a glut of such machines given how memory inefficient things are lately with every trivial app running a whole browser engine. OTOH, depending how many tabs you tend to have open and how many electron apps you tend to keep floating around, 8gb might start to feel cramped. Especially if you think you might want some VMs around.