Unfortunately that’s the goal of a lot of startups. A startup is considered “successful” if they get acquired by a large company and employees of the startup make a lot of money.

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You have to meet clients where they are. These days, clients are far less likely to find you if you only have a site with no social media presence.

So people in rural areas without good internet, or places where the network is airgapped, can’t use them at all? Seems like there’s be a way around it.

I totally get where you’re coming from. It’s hard to find devices like that. I think the issue is that regular customers are demanding the smart features, and using them without caring about privacy aspects.

If it wants a network then stick it on an isolated VLAN with no internet access.

You can have a smart TV but never set up any of the smart features. I have two LG OLED TVs but rarely touch anything on the TV itself. I’ve got Nvidia Shields for streaming and turning it on or off also turns the TV on or off. Same with my Xbox.

I just need to figure out if I can use CEC with my SFF gaming PC (so that turning it on also turns the TV on, and turning it off turns the TV off), then I won’t have to touch the TV’s remote again.

Ethernet port or wifi are good for controlling the TV using something like Home Assistant. I have my TVs on a separate isolated VLAN with no internet access. I have a automation that runs when the TV turns on, to also turn on some LED lights behind the TV.

The rate limit was only client-side, so you could patch it with Messenger Plus and spam the button to keep sending nudges over and over.

Practically everyone in Australia used MSN Messenger. Once it died, most people switched to Google Talk, then to Facebook Messenger. Messenger is still the most popular by far - last I checked, it had around 2x the number of users as the second most popular (which I think was WhatsApp).

ICQ was popular too, but just for one feature: free SMS. In an era where every SMS cost $0.25, being able to send them for free was incredibly useful. (it never cost money to receive phone calls or SMS in Australia, only to send them)

I was on Linux so I used an MSN Messenger clone called aMSN. It was a decent enough experience, although the UI looked pretty dated since it used Tk. I learnt basic Tcl (programming language) so I could implement new features myself.

They are for anything that’s E2E encrypted such as Messenger and WhatsApp, so that the link isn’t revealed to Meta servers.

As far as I know, for things like posts on Facebook, the server does the scraping. This is especially the case in the web version, since client-side scraping of arbitrary sites would require those sites to have an open CORS policy, which comes with security risks.

There’s a Sharing Debugger tool on the Facebook developer site that lets you force rescrape a site.

Are they sure that the Meta traffic is AI bots? A lot of people share links in posts on Meta products, which scrape the links to generate a preview.

Oo

CGIProxy / PHProxy were definitely very popular when I was in school. Some of the more tech-savvy kids would get free hosting accounts and install a proxy in them and share the URL.

If you have issues with IP blocks, get the AWS equivalent of a VPS (Lightsail). It’s expensive compared to other VPS services - $5/month for only 512MB RAM, 20GB disk and 1TB monthly transfer, whereas good deals usually have at least 8GB RAM for that price - but it’s difficult for anyone to block Amazon/AWS IPs because so many services use them :)

Only commercial VPNs? So HTTP proxying, Tor, SSH tunneling, SOCKS tunneling, running your own VPN node, etc are all allowed? There’s plenty of VPS hosting companies that don’t need ID or proof of age to sign up. Even if the UK requires this, you can just sign up for a server outside the UK.

There’s also weird approaches that work but not many systems catch, like tunneling stateless data (like HTTP responses) over DNS TXT lookups.

When I was in high school in the 2000s, kids figured out how to bypass the internet filtering at school. Kids these days have way more resources available to them, making it even easier to do.

+1 It’s not a real news site unless it has RSS :)

my state seems to be functioning at a better level than the federal government

As someone who lives in California, this just seems like a normal thing.

MacOS only has ~10-15% market share (depending on which stats you read) so something breaking in MacOS has much less impact compared to Windows. Apple also control the hardware, so there’s fewer things that can go wrong.