From looking at their website, that is 8 years of software updates. Not 8 years of Android version updates. Apple has released security updates for 10 year old devices such as iOS 12.5.7 which released in 2023 and runs on iPhone 5s.
FP5 owner here. IIRC, this is a guarantee for security updates at least, yes. There was some promise on how many major android updates they guarantee I think, but I forgot the details. I also wonder if and how far the promised minimum will be exceeded.
That said, I am just glad Fairphones are usually relatively well covered by open source versions of android and other operating systems. Even if I may need another phone for banking apps and all that annoying stuff in 2030 or so, I can at least safely re-use it for other purposes. My "old" Android is now nothing more than an offline mp3 player, which is kinda sad.
I've tried VS Code and Haystack (based on VS Code) for writing PHP and I just couldn't stand it after having used PhpStorm. Basic things like copying variables, indenting, moving lines into if statements, multiple cursors etc. just aren't intuitive in VS Code when writing PHP and a lot of the things I can do in PhpStorm with the press of a button just aren't possible.
I really hope they move PhpStorm to the same payment model as Rider so I can also use it for my own non-work projects.
Honestly, it's not a bad article. I'd not heard of OWASP Juice Shop and now I'm interested to check it out. The article also prompted me to look into how user input sanitising works in the framework I use. So all in all I'd say it's a positive addition to the internet.
Paper is environmentally expensive to produce and recycle. If it's worse than plastic is surely debatable but it's definitely not significantly better.
I didn't think having to create a PSN account was that bad to be honest. I'd have preferred them to back down about the NProtect GameGuard rootkit that comes with the game.
A quick Google tells me there's a total of 196 countries. So, are we only talking about 6 countries served by PSN or are there radically different definitions of "country" at work here?
You're right it's more than 6. The 190 figure probably comes from the number of "countries" that were restricted from purchasing the game after (and only after) the PSN account linking was announced. Steam defines a lot of territories and unrecognized regions as "countries". Supported PSN countries are listed here https://www.playstation.com/country-selector/index.html
E: Actually some of the countries in the selector aren't supported for PSN either (at least PH), so I'm no longer sure if there is an offical list of supported PSN countries anywhere.
The one real downside is that learning to cook well at home spoils eating out - it sets your standards for what constitutes a good meal that much higher. If I'm spending €16 on a plate of pasta, it better be a lot better than I can make myself.
You are so right. There are very few things I look forward to when thinking about eating out - french fries is one. I don't deep fry and air fry or baked at home does not compare to the real thing.
Steak is one where I've had better at a restaurant, but it was a $100/person type of place that work paid for. Mine at home is not quite there, but far above the average steak.
When I eat out now I'm hoping to find some combination of spices I don't use or some new idea to take home.
Once I learned how to make a great steak at home, the appeal of going to a high-end steak house has completely lost its appeal.
Sous vide makes steaks 100% idiot-proof. Takes zero skill to get a perfect steak every time. Kosher salt, pepper, granulated garlic, vacuum seal it, drop it into the circulator for ~2 hours, then use whatever the hottest method of cooking you have available to give a quick sear on each side. I use my gas grill pre-heated to about 800 degrees.
But to really kick it up another level, get yourself a smoker. Doesn't have to be a fancy $2000+ offset, a $600 Traeger or even a $200 electric can give good results. Smoke at 225F until it gets to about 125F internal, then sear like above. If you like it extra smokey, you can smoke at a lower temperature.
Now, the only expensive meals I will go out for are seafood. I haven't quite mastered seafood. Fish can be very delicate and fall apart, and it's hard to get the right color on shrimp without overcooking it and drying it out.
The trick with steak, I’ve found, is to think “Steak is $50”. Then you spend that money at the butcher instead of a restaurant. Put it on a skillet for a couple minutes each side and voila, you have a delicious steak way better than you’d find at any normie non-michelin-star restaurant.
Cooking is 60% having good ingredients, 30% avoiding mistakes, and 10% technique.
Steak is the one thing I can get consistently better than restaurants. It's all thanks to the book "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking"
It's a text book size cookbook. The author experiments different cooking methods and documents, taste tests.
It boiled down to seasoning the steak over night so the salt extracts juices and tenderizes. Getting the temperature just perfect using a thermometer (I have a Ninja Foodi Grill that does it automatically).
The quality and thickness of meat also matters. I get mine at Costco or Sam's Club.
My pasta game is a lot better too. Main thing was to stir as the pasta cooks.
Eating at home made me realize how hard restaurants lean on salt and fat to make food taste good.
I don't like eating out anymore because it's all either expensive greasy over seasoned food, or extremely expensive tiny portion food that maybe tastes about the same as home cooked.
Plus your messages will no longer be fully E2E encrypted. As per their FAQ (emphasis mine):
"For example, if you send a message from Beeper to a friend on WhatsApp, the message is encrypted on your Beeper client, sent to the bridge, which decrypts and re-encrypts the message with WhatsApp's proprietary encryption protocol."
Directly underneath that they also say:
"Using native end-to-end encrypted chat apps independently may be more secure than connecting to them to Beeper"
In context your use of "no longer" is very confusing. This thread is talking about what might change in Beeper as a service, if you want to interject with information about how the service currently works there are other phrases that would have made that clearer.
You are correct. I was adding what I considered extra privacy-relevant information in response to GPs statement about WordPress sharing data with other companies, but the fact that I'd not heard of Beeper before unintentionally influenced my word choice.
I think you underestimate how painful wrangling the proliferation of chat apps can be!
Another application is resource-constrained devices. I love the netbook form-factor, but my little Intel N200 machine buckles under the strain of running what amounts to six web browsers simultaneously (because everything is Electron now) in order to receive notifications from all the chat networks I have people on.
It can also be nice to have a kind of buffer layer in between you and the chat network, which doesn't necessarily have your interests in mind. For example, Facebook Messenger's Android app somehow managed to wake up my phone's screen every time it received a notification, despite my turning off every related setting and permission I could find. So I put it behind Beeper and the problem is gone.
that FAQ is accurate but (rightly) doesn't cover high-security deployments.
if I'm running the bridges local-to-the-client (I am, on my McBook) it's not meaningfully any less e2ee. encryption happens in the matrix client (running on the laptop), the encrypted message is sent to the homeserver on localhost, the bridge (on localhost) grabs the encrypted message and decrypts it, then the bridge re-encrypts it and sends it to Whatsapp (or wherever). the content of the message is as secure over the wire with this approach as using first-party apps directly
if one hosts their own bridges they're person-in-the-middling themselves and should take all the necessary precautions. if they're using beeper's hosted options they have to delegate read/write ability to beeper (though I think the signal and imessage bridges might be device-local), and beeper is clear about that.
I had a very similar experience when changing my email address. I went through my password manager to update my accounts and ended up liberally deleting all the accounts I don't use regularly. I honestly found it to be very 'freeing' and therapeutic.
