nyan

It would be pointless with my mother, anything involving technology developed after the 1980s goes were in one ear and out the other.

I just told mine, "If someone calls claiming to be me and says that 'I' am in trouble and need money, ask them [about thing from my pre-Internet childhood], and if they get the answer wrong, hang up, because it's someone else imitating my voice." No tech understanding required.

Unfortunately, it's rare that we can control what hashing algorithm is being used to secure the passwords we enter. I merely pray that any account that also holds my credit card data or other important information isn't using MD5. Some companies still don't take cybersecurity seriously.

intelligent regex

That would be much, much worse than what we actually have. Complex regex are positively Lovecraftian. You'd be chanting "Ia! Ia! Cthulhu ftaghn!" before you knew it.

Cracking an 8-char on an ordinary desktop or laptop PC can still take quite a while depending on the details. Unfortunately, the existence of specialized crypto-coin-mining rigs designed to spit out hashes at high speed, plus the ability to farm things out into the cloud, means that the threat we're facing is no longer the lone hacker cracking things on his own PC.

Only problem is that you wouldn't be able to visit most sites, because Mosaic only supports HTTP 1.0. You could go for Lynx, though. Just remember to disable the cookie support.

Open up the back of the device and check inside. If you see something that looks like a lump of modeling clay with wires sticking out of it crammed into the corner, your device has been compromised, and you should maybe try to remember whether you bought said device during a visit to Lebanon. After you put it in the middle of an empty driveway with a wall of sandbags around it and call the bomb squad, that is.

(Trying to associate literal exploding pagers with hacking borders on the surreal.)

One question I haven't seen an answer to yet: if this thing had been loaded with the maximum available warheads, although they presumably wouldn't have detonated, how large an area would have been contaminated with how much radioactive material from their rapid unscheduled disassembly? The Russian nuclear arsenal may be a bigger threat to the Russians than the people they want to attack, even without taking the possibility of wind blowing fallout from a successful strike back into Russia into account. Not that Putin cares.

Y'know, if something seems too good to be true, it pretty much always is. Batteries are no exception.

Oh, for the love of . . . If you need, or even just want, accessibility options, including larger pointer targets, they should be available to you, but as options, since not everyone needs the same ones, and things that help one person's issues can actually make another's worse.

The killer combination is to have both ramps for those who need them and stairs for those who can use them, coequal and well-maintained. Sometimes space may dictate that you can only fit one in, in which case you should choose the ramp, but a dozen different Windows skins would take up less space on the install media than one flop "feature" like Paint 3D, and I assume it's the same for a Mac. Part of the reason for the currest state of affairs is that corporations are horrified at the thought of giving people actual choice and letting them find what works best for their level of ability as well as their preferences. They might make $0.01 less per unit that way, you see.

If people liked it, that’s what we’d have. Surely this is a simple concept?

It's bullshit. Most people choose from among the handful of things the corporations offer them. You have to be exceptionally blockheaded to stay with an OS that no longer receives security patches, even if you prefer its interface paradigm, and if you're not the one controlling the machine you may not even have the option. The type of retrofitting I've done on my work machine is just that—work—and I understand why people may not want to do it, or may not be able to do it if they'd have to fight a draconian IT department for permission.

Furthermore, most people aren't designers or even terribly compute-literate. They don't necessarily understand which design elements are causing them to be so inefficient when they move to a different OS version, or how to revert them in cases where that's possible. They're stuck with Microsoft-Apple-Google's poor design decisions, until the same corp hands them another set of poor design decisions. The corporations don't want to decouple the UI from the OS the way Linux and other Unixoids do and let people choose, because the shiny new UIs are an advertising opportunity and impress certain types of reviewers.

TDE. Mate would work too, I suppose, but I imprinted on KDE3 early.

Given the amount of electricity training and running all these LLMs requires, they might, like cryptocurrency, become drivers of climate change as they cause polluting generators to be built or unmothballed.