I’m confused by why they would do this, and at the same time, why not for private text messages.

I’m in favor of encrypting as much communication as possible, but I don’t think many of Discord’s users were complaining that their voice chart wasn’t secure. I’d expect more of them to care about text chart, which is less effort to spy on.

Having used a butane iron before, I don’t think it would. They don’t have the temperature control modern digital irons can, and they’re forbidden on flights.

Signal and WhatsApp work with the free messaging option. I was a little surprised by Signal.

That’s similar to the iFixit iron, as is the less expensive Pinecil.

Those are probably the best options currently available, but I want something more compact and self-contained.

I would not want multiple cells for reasons of ergonomics and convenience.

I probably don’t need 100W for most field soldering. 60 is plenty, and temperature-controlled soldering irons usually don’t need to pull high current continuously. It would need 60W for maybe 10 seconds when powered on, and when heating something large. The rest of the time, it takes relatively little power to keep the tip hot.

What I’m describing is, of course not the right tool for production soldering. It’s for field work.

Assuming the M12 CP1.5 battery pack, it’s probably three 18650s. Specifically, it’s probably three LG HB series 18650s, which handle high burst loads well, but hold only 1500 mAh. A single Sony VTC6 holds 2/3 the energy of one of those packs. Wait… why am I speculating? Youtubers tear down power tool battery packs on video all the time, and someone did that one. They’re Samsung 15Ms, which are a little worse than HBs.

Anyway, short runtimes are fine for most field repairs, which is the whole point of something entirely self-contained. Spare batteries can extend it indefinitely, but a battery soldering iron is probably not what I’d pick for extended soldering sessions.

I would accept a bit of an awkward balance for being self-contained.

What I want from a battery soldering iron is a field-replaceable 18650 in the handle, not Webserial.

Yes. It allows then to avoid ultimate responsibility for moderation policy decisions.

One of the better credit card rewards is a small percentage cash back, so literally free money. Money is fungible though, so any discounts on things you were going to buy anyway are effectively the same thing.

Musk: starts allowing Nazi shit on Xitter

Advertiisers: Hey, we don’t like Nazi shit. We might stop advertising if that keeps happening.

Musk: Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.

Advertisers: stop doing business with the guy who told them to go fuck themselves

They gave one of those to fucking Henry Kissinger. It clearly doesn’t mean what you think it means, if it has any meaning at all.

Telegram isn’t open source, so I don’t think you’re going to find forks of it.

I stand corrected. Telegram’s client is open source (GPL) and what OP is asking for is reasonable.

Yes, absolutely. Any time I need to buy a product I don’t know much about, I look for an enthusiast community with a FAQ. Most of the active, high-quality communities are on Reddit.

I would like decentralized services to replace that, but that’s a slow process, if it happens at all.

On one hand, that’s a shitty, greedy move from Reddit. All of the data, and value is provided by the users.

On the other hand, Microsoft does want to feed it into OpenAI and present it on a Bing search engine result page rather than sending the visitor to Reddit where they might join a community (or view an ad or ten).

If you have reason to think you’ll get searched, methods like this can be very effective. If you’re entering the USA and you’re not a citizen, there’s a chance having a freshly wiped phone will lead to you being denied entry.

Evidently quite a few people who have evidence of crimes on their phones don’t do that sort of thing; the person in the ruling this article about is accused of possessing child sexual abuse media on his phone. It probably isn’t a waste of resources with regard to finding evidence of crimes like that; it is a cheat code for searches that would ordinarily be unconstitutional, at least in judicial districts where the courts haven’t cracked down on it yet.

It isn’t random. They search phones belonging to people they suspect of crimes, but don’t have enough evidence to get a warrant for, people they think are connected to criminals even if they are not criminals themselves, and people they want to harass such as activists.

I use a computer a lot, and I have an expensive keyboard and mouse. I’m the target market in a sense; if there was a compelling enough upgrade to either, I’d probably buy it.

I can’t imagine what software features they could possibly offer that would qualify, doubly so as a subscription. I picked my mouse because it has lots of buttons, a responsive sensor, low-latency wireless, and it runs on a standardized replaceable battery. It would be hard to improve any of that with software.

“Security” as an excuse for self-serving bullshit isn’t new.

Sure, there’s a risk of breaking things. I can do that with a hacksaw and a soldering iron too, and it’s widely recognized that it isn’t up to the manufacturer of the thing to keep me from breaking it. We need the same understanding for devices that depend on software.

Locked bootloaders should be illegal. Manufacturers should have to provide enough specs that third parties can write code that runs on the hardware.