I never had it myself, but their dialup service either forced or heavily pushed their own browser, which encouraged the use of AOL keywords rather than URLs. Always thought of this as major negative and the start of heavy corporate control over the web. Seeing commercials list AOL keywords instead of their own websites annoyed me a lot, as did the transition to using myspace then facebook then twitter the instagram etc.
On the other hand, I liked AOL Instant Messenger a lot. It used XMPP so I could use other IM clients most of the time (namely Adium). On top of that, AOL Instant Messenger's Direct Connect feature was by far the easiest way to send files of any size* to your friends. Far more convenient than much of what exists today.
* Google suggests this limit may have been 4GB, but that was basically limitless in the 90s and early 2000s
It’s the opposite, the web was the new disruptor and AOL served everyone AOL as a pre-web online service, which continued to be used by their legacy users for many years.
Pre-Internet AOL was like Yahoo in the 2000s which aped it on the Internet. Sort of a hybrid syndication machine like a magazine/newspaper/tv hybrid.
There was a few similar services, Prodigy was the one my family used. They basically did web commerce before the web. My dad even did banking. Prodigy was a joint venture between Sears and IBM and used an x.25 network behind the scenes powered by AS/400 iirc.
I was under the impression that AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN all used XMPP. It seems that AIM added support for it in 2008, but Adium (and the other multi-chat clients) were just doing some magic to make it work seamlessly.
Definitely not. AIM, YIM, and MSN all used their own proprietary protocols, and multi-client messengers like Adium contained implementations of those protocols. There was no messaging between services (except AIM <-> ICQ), and some of the services supported features the others didn't.
Sure there wasn't messaging between systems, but the point was I had friends on AIM, YIM, and MSN and I could use one program (with three accounts signed in) to message them all and not have to think about it. Adium would just aggregate them together, so I'd see "FirstName LastName" and it would message from the right service.
But modern chat apps like FB Messenger, Google Chat (if it still exists?), etc. managed to successfully break all that, never worked reliably in Adium or Pidgin (if at all).
I remember I had a pluging for Trillian that allowed me to write code to script it in Tcl. And then a plugin written in Tcl that allowed me to quicksearch my contacts. Good times.
No, this means there is a 98% chance you get _at least_ 1 account.
`1-1/1,000,000` is the probability you fail 1 attempt. That probability to the 4millionth is the probability you fail 4 million times in a row. 1 minus _that_ probability is that the probability that you _don't_ fail 4 million times in a row, aka that you succeed at least once.
The expected number of accounts is still number of attempts times the probability of success for 1 try, or: 4 accounts.
I'd amend rollcat's statement to say something like: "I've just launched this application and not pressed another key or clicked a mouse button since then."
Once you do that, too fucking late application. Should've been faster, now you don't get focus until I actively do something.
That being said, I've only ever really noticed focus stealing issues happening on Windows or OS X, never Linux.
lol on a much lighter note, for many years I used to use 111-111-1111 as a general phone number for CVS card discounts. It stopped working several years ago though.
As a Canadian I was lost and confused when visiting the States (in the before time) and a gas pump asked for my zip code. So I put in the one and only zip code I know. I bet you can guess.
I used to use that one too, but you're supposed to put the 3 numerical digits of your postal code followed by 00. (I have no idea how you're supposed to know that though.)
Really? Or does that just work because it's numbers? I can't imagine how that's useful because without the letters the same 12300 could be in Vancouver or Montreal couldn't it?
I don't know much about credit card validation, but I have the impression that the zipcode is just one more correlation that tells them you're more likely to be the real owner of the card.
If the 3 numbers I type match the 3 digits of the owner's postal code, it's probably a reasonable signal that I'm the owner (even without the letters).
It probably did. I was in the us this summer and was similarly confused that the pump wanted a us zip code for a foreign card. I input the zip for the address i was staying at and it worked...
Huh. I'd always assumed the zip code was validated against the card's billing address but maybe it's actually for some kind of market research. I'll have to try myself.
Following up: I tried a valid but incorrect zip code recently and the transaction was declined. Presumably this is because there is a valid one associated with my account?
This reminds me: I've noticed that Starbucks now requires a few pieces of information to use their WiFi network. One is email and they are doing some sort of validation which will reject emails like whoopsileanedonxxxxxxxx@aol.com but will accept other, legit AOL emails. How are they deciding what is/not a valid email? Are they using a compiled list of emails that have been seen in the wild? What if it's a brand new address, though? Presumably AOL isn't exposing a service for them to use in realtime. I haven't tested this extensively or with other providers.
It's obvious that they care (to some extent) that they're getting valid emails, so why not use a basic regex on the FE and an OTP which gets sent to the provided address?
You're looking for the SMTP VRFY and EXPN commands. However implementation is very hit-or-miss. In the good ole' days of the internet, VRFY was widely implemented. Then spammers realized they could connect to a mailserver and do a form of a VRFY dictionary attack to find valid addresses, so it stopped being supported.
Some wifi networks give you a limited number of minutes online during which you need to click a verification link they've emailed you in order to not get cut off.
But it's a similar concept. If someone accidentally gives some website their name + email, they could be part of a leak for some service they don't even use. People probably care less about Tea in particular because they've never heard about it before the data leaks.
"So-and-so used Tea" is clearly not the focus of the coverage of the Tea app leak. Again, let's be explicit about impacts here. You can deploy hyperbole and hypothesis to make anyone a horrifying villain. But if you do that at least be honest about it.
Edit to note: the Tea story has now fallen off the front page while this one is still going strong.
> You can deploy hyperbole and hypothesis to make anyone a horrifying villain.
Alternatively you can deploy a dismissive attitude and subtle ridicule to make any concern sound silly, no matter how important the issue is to people for a variety of different reasons which you don't seem to be receptive to understanding.
And that sort of infighting is certainly many orders of magnitude more fashionable, both on social media and in real life, than people being observant and critical of companies and governments when they find new ways of eroding our rights and freedoms a little bit more than they already have.
I sympathize with ~everyone affected by any type of data leak, but I'm only human with limited time and attention. That means I can't actively engage with every single issue that plagues our world, both out of practical, as well as sanity-maintaining reasons.
Implying that we're hypocrites if we don't engage with completely unrelated issues before we engage with issues that directly affect us is probably the clearest example of a bad faith argument I've read on this site in a very long time.
Must have been placed improperly. They should not be installed in kitchens or in or near bathrooms.
But also, you should run the exhaust fan in the bathroom when you shower, this removes at least some of the moist air and cuts down on the chance for moisture damage and mold to develop.
It was in the hall right outside the shower, the exhaust fan didn't work very well so I left the door open. I live in a different place now and no longer have that issue.
But the point is that machines are not particularly good at detecting smoke lol
Smoke detectors detect microparticles in the air. They typically don't or can't differentiate between steam and smoke, at least not the cheap household type detectors.
> They should not be installed in kitchens or in or near bathrooms.
But then you can't catch vapers in the most popular vaping place: the bathroom. Oh no! Our revenue stream! It's broken!
I think, elephant in the room here, smoking is conspicuous and does real, tangible damage. Vaping? I'm not so sure.
Yeah vaping is lame but does it actually harm properties? I mean, if someone vapes 10 feet from me I can't smell it. And if I can smell it, it's gone in < 5 seconds. There's no smoke in it, it doesn't linger.
6" doesn't register as small to me at all lol. The HTC 8X was 4.3" and that was a "normal" sized phone for me.
I used the Palm Phone (PVG100) (3.3" screen) (basically the size of a credit card) [ https://www.ricklohre.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/dsc_097... ] as long as I could until it became too slow to use as software got slower and increasingly battery-hungry and I had to give it up last year.
The specs are more than strong enough to handle whatever I need on a daily basis. But I miss the slimmer size of the Palm Phone.
Right now I've pre-ordered this phone https://aiphor.com/products/bluefox-nx1-4-0-android-smartpho... with the 8gigram+128gig storage capacity. Has an even stronger cpu than the Soyes, but I am slightly worried about the resolution of 540x1168px because some elements may end up overlapping.
Even though it's 4", it has a tiny bezel so it's only slightly bigger than the Palm Phone, although a bit thicker cuz of a bigger battery. But still relatively slim, especially compared to the Soyes.
For me, screen size is what matters. Because I'm using screen. Small bezel is very bad thing, because it registers accidental touches now. Best phone in the history of mankind was iPhone 4S. Perfectly balanced. It's all went downhill since then.
Plus, the diagonal measurement doesn't reflect the width of the phone. Phones got taller/narrower probably about the same time as we started ditching physical buttons below the screen, so the screen size numbers went up without making phones wider, even if you keep the bezels the same size.
People comparing old smartphone diagonal screen measurements to modern ones as if they're equivalent is a huge pet peeve for me. Diagonals are a horrible way to measure screens.
I, too, used a PVG100 until it died. The "juicepack" battery doubled the thickness, but it still fit in my pocket. Now I've got a Motorola Razr. I figure the only way companies will give me a small phone if it folds.
I tried out the Razr and Z Flip 4 at a store but I thought they were too hard to use while closed and way too big when open.
If you check /r/smallphones I'll post a review of the NX1 in a couple months (or whenever I get it + a week or two). It looks like the closest spiritual successor to the Palm Phone (although the single button on the foot with multiple actions will probably never be beat)
Thanks for all the interesting links, the bluefox-nx1-specifically looks interesting to me. Do you have any information how are handling the new EU law, which requires 5 years of security updates? https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/news/new-eu-rules...
I have no idea, I don't work for them or live in the EU. But given that other users report problems loading the site, maybe they don't support EU customers. The phone exists in China but only started taking pre-orders in the US, so maybe it will change in the future.
Huh, for some reason, this page loads properly and I can see it for 1-2 seconds, but it seems like as soon as it's done loading, it redirects me to google.com. Based in Spain, so guessing it's their way of turning away EU or European customers I guess?
They seem to be doing stuff by countries, probably due to regulations. The phone has existed in China for a bit already and only recently became pre-orderable in the US.
The Soyes S10Max performs fine with 8 gigs of ram and a slightly slower mobile CPU. The most intensive thing I do on it is probably video call with people on FB Messenger or Telegram (or I guess load TicketMaster, but even my gf's expensive iPhone struggles with that one lmao), and it does that fine.
But I'll write a review on reddit once I've used it for a week or two.
No clue on aiphor.com, webdevs (or their managers) love javascript lol
I think performance requirements depend on what it's used for, and what other devices you have access to in your life. If someone only has one phone as their personal computer for everything then I can see an argument that the minimum should be higher, but if the phone is intended to be comfortably pocketable tool for tasks you're likely to need while away from a larger/more powerful device. For example have the phone to handle calls, simple messaging, taking photos (minus editing), transport/store apps, and a full PC or larger phone/tablet for ticketmaster.
The only other option that I've toyed with is buying a small feature/"dumb" phone for going in the pocket and a smartphone in a bag, which seems less ideal.
>If someone only has one phone as their personal computer for everything then I can see an argument that the minimum should be higher
Yeah for those people, they would need a beefier phone. That's certainly not me, I have devices at home. In my case, a pure dumb phone isn't of much use to me either, I make maybe one or two phone calls most months, but I've always used my phone as more of a borderline feature phone.
>a full PC or larger phone/tablet for ticketmaster.
The problem with ticketmaster is that you need to use it at the events themselves. Most events no longer use physical tickets. But a stronger phone or tablet won't help you here. Even on a high-end phone, ticketmaster will somehow forget to store your login information while you have poor network connectivity due to tons of people in the area, even if you try to load your tickets ahead of time to avoid the issue (although somehow they always deliver ads!). Everyone complains about ticketmaster's fees, but the app is the worst part.
They seem to work fine on T-Mobile. I hear the Palm Phone had some issue with Verizon where it only worked as a "companion phone" and I hear AT&T limits what phones are allowed somehow, but I cannot speak to those things.
They only have 4G rather than 5G. This has not bothered me but perhaps it would bother others.
I never had it myself, but their dialup service either forced or heavily pushed their own browser, which encouraged the use of AOL keywords rather than URLs. Always thought of this as major negative and the start of heavy corporate control over the web. Seeing commercials list AOL keywords instead of their own websites annoyed me a lot, as did the transition to using myspace then facebook then twitter the instagram etc.
On the other hand, I liked AOL Instant Messenger a lot. It used XMPP so I could use other IM clients most of the time (namely Adium). On top of that, AOL Instant Messenger's Direct Connect feature was by far the easiest way to send files of any size* to your friends. Far more convenient than much of what exists today.
* Google suggests this limit may have been 4GB, but that was basically limitless in the 90s and early 2000s
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