In my experience, the line worker's instincts are to be trusted but verified. If we blindly follow every crisis from the line we'd quickly find ourselves in a pit. These crises need to be backed up with context and a sense of criticality as there are finite resources to work through problems, and solving one person's immediate problem on the line may have a crushing impact elsewhere.
Not sure if its true, but even if it is, those two corps transact nearly the same amount as the US GDP every year.
Bitcoin's entire market cap is right now at a less than 1/10th of US GDP. Hard to say what the payment volume is since by all accounts, most movement in BTC is speculative rather than transactional.
I hate having to defend Visa and MC, but at least they using that energy to enable day-to-day transactions that real people actually use.
Also, and a bit harder to overlook... Visa/MC are able to work thousands of transactions per second in the US alone. Bitcoin can do like 7. Not seven thousand, just seven. Worldwide.
It's not even a competition, really. BTC has no future without some radical changes.
They never said anything about keeping their messages away from Google. It's about having some agency.
One fine morning, you'll find yourself locked out of your gmail account and every other Google service because they just decided that something you said isn't politically correct. You'll also be locked out of any external thrid-party services that rely on Google's OAuth service, email 2FA or verification. You'll never find any help to restore any of that, except to write a whiny blog post and hope that it goes viral on HN or something. It's not an indignity you want to live with.
Another scenario is Google changing their ToS or their service degrading (especially like their really bad spam filters these days). You don't really have a choice of migrating, because you'll have to change your email address as well.
That doesn't happen when you have your own domain. If they do something wrong, you just take your domain to another provider. And all these are worth doing while your gmail is still active, because it will take a few months to migrate your third-party services and your important correspondences over to your new account.
And finally, I really hate the pervasive argument and attitude on HN in the lines of "They trample on us regardless. Might as well learn to live under their feet". Why do you deny yourself self-respect like this? Even if the odds seem insurmountable, it's worth resisting the tyranny in voice and in action. And your voice is important to other people, even if you don't know it. Your defeatist attitude can influence them as much as your relentless defiance can. Choose how you want to influence the society.
I don’t use google oauth, prefer user pass and email
I use google for email and docs, it’s convenient. i use my own domain though, and i backup my data nightly.
I feel like i have de-risked the relationship as much as is reasonable and am happy to move if i have to with minimal data or access loss (time to restore all data somewhere may be a bit of an issue, but there are workarounds)
Often it is not so much about "not using Google" (they are pretty much a monopoly, they don't care). It's more about "supporting something that is not Google".
> and am happy to move if
In order to move, you need for an alternative to exist. And alternatives exist because some people use them :-).
Even if you use Gmail, you should do it behind your own domain. So that you are not locked in.
Now I can understand saying "I have been on Gmail for years and I can't be arsed to update my address everywhere". It's not a lot of work (I've done it and it was actually a lot easier than I had anticipated), but it's work. And in a world where people can't be arsed to spend 3 clicks installing Signal, updating an email address sounds like a PhD. (I am being judgemental here, but you get my point :-) ).
But the article says "I am moving, I decided to do the work of updating my address everywhere!". And the only reasonable way to do this is to move to your own domain, IMO.
Except it's not the '00s anymore and most emails don't come from personal gmail accounts. Almost every single email that people receive are automated ones that come from corporations.
That tickled a memory of a video... and I hunted it up.
Adam Savage's Tested : Look Inside Apple's $130 USB-C Cable - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD5aAd8Oy84 (1 minute in "we've been saying that our phones have more computing power than the Apollo guidance computer but I'm positive now that this cable has more computing power than the Apollo guidance computer")
That video is a look at cables (not just Apple's) with Lumafield's CT Scan.
Lumifield quite recently showed on Adam Savage's Tested again, with some literal insights on a reasonably-diverse array of different 18650 cells: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD5aAd8Oy84
It's a good watch, and I learned some new stuff about some things that I only knew a little bit about before.
It would be a pretty amusing demonstration to plug in the cable to a display, then pretend to plug the other end into an imaginary computer sitting nearby and have something boot up on the display.
It'd be a cool physical demonstration at a cybersecurity roadshow.
A concern: with all this computing onboard, does this mean a malicious USB-C cable could record screen and keystroke?
Often the keyboard receiver is plugged into the monitor's USB hub and so screen and HID are both going along a single cable ... Which also does power delivery. Such cables are a definite "sales category" and could be a target for supply chain attacks. But if they now have chips onboard, doesn't that mean an attacker could even takeover a genuine cable? It seems like a real risk tbh.
> A concern: with all this computing onboard, does this mean a malicious USB-C cable could record screen and keystroke?
Keystrokes: Easily. At least for USB 3 and 4, USB 1/2 data is a physically separate channel that just happens to almost always be packaged alongside the faster stuff, so the lower speed stuff like input devices is easy to intercept. I don't know if Thunderbolt does the same or not, normally USB-C alternate modes still keep the USB 2.0 signals available but Thunderbolt might be an exception.
Screen: Probably not modern video modes in a purely stealthy cable formfactor *YET*, at least not using COTS parts, but it wouldn't surprise me to find the secret squirrel types either already have it or are working on it.
It is possible that the tech exists, but isn't yet at a point that it can be easily mass-produced, which means "spy cables" may actually be available, from Q-types.
Was going to say the same thing. With way more processing power you could output the video over USB-C/TB at one end and connect a keyboard at the other.
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