Spyke

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You know, this somehow completely fails to surprise...

Last year I made a fake twitter account using a temp email just to look at some tweets from an artist's account. The fake account had a random gibberish username, and I only used it for a few minutes and logged out. Then, about 6 months later I needed to use it again to check something, so I logged back in and noticed the fake account now had 200 followers.

Draw your own conclusions from that.

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LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps – Krebs on Security

Just an FYI to anyone looking, you can still actually buy mostly-dumb TVs.

I was looking for a TV to buy for my parents last year and it seemed like the only options available were "smart TVs," and I begrudgingly ended up buying a Philips ambilight unit. I was pleasantly surprised by how dumb the Titan OS on it was. Sure, it had WiFi, and the usual Netflix and other streaming apps, but I just didn't connect it to the WiFi, and from then on it was just a souped up version of their 15 year old TV. It did ask to be connected to WiFi, but stopped after being told no a few times.

I'm sure other manufacturers have similar "smart on paper, but dumb in reality" OSes, as it seems to mostly be a cost cutting exercise. The hardware in the TV would need to be more expensive to run an actual smart platform. So the manufacturers just make a low end thing that ticks the right boxes to be able to call it smart for marketing, thinking that's what people want.

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Feature parity or get out

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Gnome forced me onto Wayland a few weeks ago and I've been dealing with issues ever since. Some issues even affecting the most basic level tasks like typing text, imagine dealing with that in 2025. Following your analogy, if the Uber with the fancy new transmission came to a halt every kilometre, you'd care too.

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MAGA melts down as Germany declares far right ‘extremists’

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Their slogan for the election was "Alice für Deutschland", meaning Alice for Germany with Alice being Alice Weidel, the party co-chairman and chancellor candidate. Seems like a predictable sounding nationalist slogan that also aligns well with their party name, until you realise it's actually a serendipitous pun on the Nazi slogan "alles für Deutschland", a phrase which is banned in Germany. The pronunciation of the two phrases in German is virtually identical. There's dog whistles, and then there's foghorns.