Hmm…

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This might be better as a prank on a friend when you visit their place, assuming that they’d enjoy that kind of thing

It might be that this one can take non-PWA websites and make them behave like proper PWAs?

For some web apps, I want it to look and behave like an “app”, without the clutter of the extra menus that a browser has.

For others, I want it to have the protections and capabilities (ex. adblocking and extensions) that the browser has

It might also be the kind of data center that is being built. Cheaper data centers are noisier, inefficient with water, etc

Working class areas may already be distrustful towards large companies coming along and using up all of the local resources

I don’t use Brave, and don’t recommend it to people, but it seems like the $60 is intended as a donation/“vote-with-your-wallet on how we monetize” type product rather than something that is actually worth that much.

It doesn’t change all of the OTHER problems with Brave, but it might be a step in the right direction when it comes to monetization? Pay once vs. LLM/crypto/injected ads

https://account.brave.com/?intent=checkout&product=origin

Brave Origin is a paid version of the browser for users who don’t need all the features that support Brave as a business, but still want the privacy that only Brave offers. Origin users will continue to benefit from our industry-leading privacy, adblock, and speed (via Shields), as well as regular software updates, Chromium patches, and security and privacy improvements. Origin is available on desktop and mobile versions 1.91.x and above.

• Support our mission & open-source work
• Minimalist browser UI centered on Brave Shields
• Maintain core adblock, privacy, & speed
• One-time purchase can be activated multiple times across all your devices

From what I’ve heard, Vancouver is in a similar boat as Seattle and we’re seeing proposals for two datacenters in the middle of the city.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-ai-data-centre-plan-vancouver-kamloops-9.7195426

I want more infrastructure in Canada, but the location choice is still weird. It might be a good thing if this law will incentivize companies to take that into account.

The way BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) works is that each device has various registers (called GATT characteristics) that, if you’re connected to the device, you can write to, read, subscribe to notifications for, and so on. What’s important to note is that to connect to a device, you don’t need to (necessarily) pair with it. You can often just connect with a device and immediately start reading and writing data to characteristics. Pairing establishes encryption, but a connection can be made without it.

To my surprise, upon reading the characteristic 9e9daaeb-3a10-4fe8-b69f-7397aff77886, I was greeted with the full version string. This means anyone can just connect to any Katana V2X over Bluetooth and start sending CTP commands to it, reading information, changing settings, etc.

I thought of the implications for a bit. The speaker has a microphone. An attacker could, theoretically, upload a custom firmware that effectively turns the speaker into a covert monitoring device, listening in on conversations and forwarding them to a receiver over Bluetooth.

What was more interesting to me was the fact that the speaker is, in a standard setup, connected to a PC over USB. It’s by all means a trusted USB device.

What if we wrote custom firmware that forced the speaker into acting as a keyboard, sending keystrokes for opening up the terminal and executing arbitrary commands? We would turn the speaker into a Rubber Ducky, but remotely, without ever having to plug anything into either the speaker or the PC.

I opened up Fdroid to check, and I found this one. I think it might be my new favourite calculator. I’ve always wanted something like speedcrunch on mobile.

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.vishaltelangre.nerdcalci

It’s still FOSS, and you can either download it offline or selfhost the server if you want to use it without paying. Services cost money to run, I’m not going to ask for them to run that for free indefinitely 🤷

Assuming this is about duck.ai, I didn’t know they got shit for it. People I’ve talked to generally enjoy having that option available. It’s free and about as private as you can get with the current LLM chatbots, unless you self host one yourself.

At least until Confer gets off the ground. Once that happens, I’m hoping DDG switches to a similar model

https://confer.to/blog/2026/01/private-inference/

That’s a bit of a stretch?

People who pay for Kagi likely tried the trial and found the results to be far enough better than google/microslop that they are willing to pay for the ongoing service. Or they want to support a business model that isn’t based around the advertising industry, so that someday Kagi can realistically compete with the incumbents. I don’t need to search for things often enough to justify the cost, but I know people who use it for work and consider it to be worth the cost.

Meanwhile people who bought NFTs thought that they could sell a copy of a digital image for lots of money.

I think they’re talking about DDG, not google

I’m surprised it took this long. The skill argument makes no sense, since you could just as easily try to apply it to any form of traditional gambling.

The article speculates that this isn’t intentional by Motorola. I’ve also seen mentions speculating a compromised library

Secondly, we can speculate as to what’s going on – and that’s what the following is, speculation and conjecture. While many would quickly, understandably, point the finger at Motorola here, my gut says something else is going on, and that it might not be a decision Motorola actually planned out. The redirect through a seemingly fake website and affiliate code of an influencer that has no obvious ties to Motorola is just too bizarre to ignore.

My bad, I missed that 😄

The links are dead for me, maybe it’s set to private? The first one doesn’t open anything, and the second one takes me to a login page

From what we can see on our end, this account doesn’t match the pattern of the other harassment accounts

They’re somewhat sandboxed, likely to be up to date, and it behaves similarly across different machines. It’s nice for GUI programs that don’t need access to the wider system, and it won’t mess with anything else that I already have installed. I guess it would have similar pros and cons as containerization with Podman/Docker?

I get the vast majority of my GUI programs from Flathub. I didn’t know there was a controversy with it, other than just wanting a different way of doing things.

When people hear the word “addiction” they often assume it implies catastrophe intoxication, loss of control, destruction. But addiction medicine describes a process long before those outcomes appear: the gradual shift from optional use to psychological reliance.