Category: Current Events

My thoughts about the Google Pixel 5

I’ve had this phone for several weeks now and I have to say I’m fairly disappointed.

The touch sensor is great. It should never have left. But that’s about the only improvement that I’ve seen. It takes longer to boot up than the Pixel 4 or even Pixel 3 it seems. The processor seems way slower on the active task. The voice-to-text typing is very sluggish compared to the quick response from the Pixel 4.

Free civic engagement tools – Vote.org

https://www.vote.org/technology/

These tools are wonderful!!

In order for democracy to exist, much less thrive, citizenship must be a perennial exercise and not an election-year phenomenon, a passion-fueled blip. Please consider adding them to your own website.

Google relents slightly in ad-blocker crackdown – for paid-up enterprise Chrome users, everyone else not so much • The Register

Freeloaders will be limited to less capable content filtering

Source: Google relents slightly in ad-blocker crackdown – for paid-up enterprise Chrome users, everyone else not so much • The Register

I will happily discard Google Chrome and its lovely ecosystem in the event that end-user-level content-filtering is rendered significantly inconvenient or worse.  😀  It is truly absurd to accept that software that I run on my machine might be crippled in order to prevent me from blocking content I do not wish to receive; in other words the browser will force you to receive content whether you like it or not.  Doesn’t sound to me to be very free, open, happy, good, independent, democratic, or whatever else we pretend to care about.  🙂

Thank you, Mozilla/Firefox/GNU(Linux)/EFF/Netherlands/The Hague/Star Trek/Costa Rica!  🙂

F#@$ you, Wall Street/Viacom/Time-Warner/Comcast/Dow/Dupont/Johnson&Johnson/Disney/Sony/Facebook