This makes me sad, that we can’t engage in civil discussion about this. Why did you assume and not ask questions? Be curious, not judgmental.

To me it’s a question of laws. The laws of the U.S. at least somewhat constrain the people of my own country, and can prevent them from working against their own citizens. Like me.

Please be kind when replying.

As a US citizen, I prefer services that US consumer protections could apply to. (While we still have them, ahem.) I know that Chinese laws will not protect me from things a Chinese business does in China.

Don’t worry, you aren’t missing much. That paragraph was kind of goofy anyway.

Think of a Seedbox as a cloud service provider with convenience features focused on enabling piracy, by keeping the hardware in a jurisdiction that doesn’t care what you pirate and giving you one-click easy installation methods for apps that make piracy simple. But without going so far as “Thank you for your payment, download these specific media files here.”

You debatably have to be a techie. But by techie standards it’s very easy to use.

If you really hate piracy, I suppose you could pay for one for a month, get the identity of who you paid, and use one of the apps to host a shell script that listens on one of the few public ports you have access to, that answers every incoming connection with “this is a seed box operated by ABC, with cards payments accepted by LMNOP Inc in Athens, Greece.”

But the most common usage is running packaged software they let you run (like BT clients you can remote-control, sickchill, radarr, sonarr, Plex, etc.) or remote desktops or shells. Usually implemented as docker containers.

Scrooge McDuck is an employee of his companies too.

BBS software. Nerds always find a way. I guess if I have to be a sysop now…

Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.

Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.

Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.

Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?

What? Did I turn it off and on again? I’m a very smart technology person, of course my big brain already thought of that. I develop software for a living. It couldn’t be that simple or I wouldn’t be calling you.

. . .

Turning it off and on again worked. My shame is immense and I have wasted everybody’s time.

(And that is how I learned to embrace my own idiocy and do the recommended, simple troubleshooting tasks without questioning them.)

So I’m curious . . . what reference am I missing that helps me understand what menu settings cause exactly which pieces of personal data to be shared with which Apple services? I want to RTFM, and while I appreciate people wanting to be helpful, comment replies are not themselves documentation.

(I switched from Android to ios in 2020 and haven’t really figured out details beyond turning icloud sync off for specific apps. I’d like to add more devices and learn to trust that sync method but I don’t understand where crypto is used and how the keys are handled.)

I still miss Naomi Wu’s tech videos.

Plagiarism should be part of the conversation here. Credit and context both matter.

How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?

Start early in the commit history, see if you can understand the general shapes and concepts the project was using at the start.

Then sort of binary-search your way forward in different sized jumps and see how quickly you can get to present day without sacrificing your sanity. Completely at least.

Giving up land to an invader was ever acceptable? LOL

Ugh, this makes me want to “slash slash slash.”

Could be a MUSIC/SP reference. (No I don’t remember how to use it either. I had a letter-letter-number-number %nemomus@academic.nemostate.edu email in college though.)

I use Due on iOS for repeating timers/reminders where I need it to be persistent and annoying because the task is important. Like paying rent, or physical therapy “homework” I kept forgetting. The persistence might be good if you’re worried you’ll just dismiss a normal alarm or forget to start the next timer.

Yeah a bit. IBM QRadar is alright. I’m confident there’s something real (and real expensive) underneath the buzzword salad in that article.

And those jobs are critical to the process of making new developers.

An important part of my education - the part that grad school can’t teach you, you have to learn it on the job - was being new and terrible, grinding on a simple problem and feeling like a waste of money. Any of the experienced guys sitting behind me could have done this thing in a few hours but I’ve been working on it for a week. “What’s the point? Any minute now they’re going to tap me on the shoulder and tell me I’m done, it’s time to go find another job.”

But that never happened.

Those early problems weren’t fun. At home I would have never chosen to work on them. I’d leave them for someone else. “But now that I’m collecting a paycheck for it, this isn’t up to me. I have to work on it. I can’t give up. I can ask for help, but I need to show my peers that I belong. I can solve difficult problems. I can persevere.”

As a mediocre professional developer, I had to struggle to learn that. I wasn’t getting far on my own, without mentorship and motivation. Homework, pursuing degrees, wasn’t getting me there. (And even now, I seem to have about two weeks of attention span, for projects at home.)

I think the most important thing we can do is shout about this from the rafters, so every potential IPO investor can hear. Most of the subject matter experts have fled. The best data is available for free elsewhere. (And none of us are too happy about having our collective knowledge shared without attribution or appreciation by an AI, but that’s not the point. Money is the point here.)