bsammon

I submitted this gripe (before I saw your comment) to the "report an issue" widget on the puzzle site. I wonder if this puzzle will get ongoing development.

I have a few ideas for feature requests, but I'm not going to bother submitting them if it appears there's no interest.

Yeah... not actually objecting to you bringing him up, but I was briefly confused (longer than it should have been as I had some trouble getting the NYT artictle to load), and I thought the point was worth clarifying.

> It's essentially almost impossible to create a Google account without giving up your identity, and your phone number often leads directly to your real-life identity.

A process I've gone through a few times (though I didn't actually want a Google Account):

1) Get a new (second-hand sometimes) ChromeOS or Android device.

2) (if necessary) do a power-wash or factory-reset.

3) Do the "set up a new device" process.

4) When it asks you for a Google account, click on the "I don't have one. create a new account" button.

In all these cases, the device didn't (or couldn't, in the case of the Chromebook) have a SIMcard in it, so it couldn't link it to a phone number.

One smartphone that I bought for $20, and never (IIRC) had a SIMCard in, I think the only identity-oriented app I have on it is Netflix. I've wondered if Google links the smartphone's google account to the Netflix account (which is actually not me, but a cousin's), and whether Netflix is complicit in this linking.

> I have never seen any case of searching for information in any belongings of the travelers,

"I have never seen" is very different from "it doesn't happen".

I'm pretty sure in many countries, border control agents do their worst stuff out of sight of the public.

On one hand, at the price point of >$10000 for the whole terminal, it's quite possible that >$100 went into the keyboard.

However, I suspect you're coming at this from the perspective of a coder or a gamer or some other category who types thousands of keystrokes per day (tens of thousands?). With the assortment of special-function keys that enabled the user to execute common tasks with only two or three keystrokes, I suspect that even actively-used Bloomberg terminals may see an order of magnitude less keystrokes.

(On the third hand... I seem to remember reading that the Bloomberg system included chatroom functionality, which may increase keystroke count)

"teetol" has two additional connotations beyond simply "no alcohol" for some readers/listeners:

  ** abstaining from caffeine also
  ** has a religious motivation (e.g. mormons)

Similarly, I've considered describing myself as "straight-edge", but that has the connotation (for some) of being disapproving/judgemental of drinkers.

(Not sure if you were saying this in your comment) I read somewhere that Weird Al always asks permission before releasing a parody song.

IIRC, the same article/post also said that some other prominent parody artists (Stan Freberg might have been an example) generally did not.

Another didn't-do-my-homework mistake: Beware of buying one of the waterproofed models if you want to hack/mod your Kobo. On un-waterproofed models, the case is easily opened, and the main storage SD Card (IIRC - maybe it was a different kind of flash card) can be removed/replaced easily. On waterproof models, the SD Card is under the waterproofing layer, which would have to be cut through to remove the card.

My experience is over 2 years old, so I'm sure some details have changed.

The main thing I'd like to see HTML (maybe more accurately, without-Javascript) do is AI-bot protection.

Browsing the web with Javascript turned off makes things much more tolerable on my low-RAM computer. Until a year or two, I could access the vast majority of the sites that I cared to. With anti-AI-bot protection becoming prevalent, this has gotten a lot worse lately.

I've read somewhere that recent versions of Anubis support no-JS mode. I haven't seen it in use much yet. I wonder if that's because sites are still using old versions of Anubis, or because it's turned off by default in the new version, and sites haven't bothered to enable it, or some other reason.

One instance I've noticed is codeberg, which seemed to be using some no-JS-compatible bot protection -- I'm not sure if it is/was Anubis -- I don't use codeberg regularly (I haven't needed an account there yet), so I'm not sure about details.