My uncle has been wearing an apple watch because he lives alone at 80 yo. A couple of weeks back his watch alerted his sons and emergency services that he had fallen.
When they arrived he lay on the floor unconscious and bleeding from a headwound.
He is in hospital still. Without the watch… who knows.
My dad is finally considering getting a similar watch, too, even though we live in the same house…
Apple and Samsung are the 2 best options and neither will work for him. Apple is a nogo as he has no other apple devices and getting it to work easily for someone almost 82 years old is a primary concern. And we have had bad experience with Samsung devices failing “the day” after the guarantee period was over.
There is a new Garmin watch coming that would have all the features he wants–he says it needs to work without his phone because he does not always want to carry his phone when he works in the garden. The Garmin is prohibitively expensive.
For now he is carrying around a button that triggers a door bell thing that is so loud that we can hear it in the whole house.
I am mostly worried about winters because his basement access in the apartment is from a staircase outside… I have told him to walk through our dining room and use the inside staircase repeatedly now…
As for my uncle living alone in a house that has narrow stairs and 5-ish levels … probably not looking so good. But he is being obstinate about not wanting someone to be there 24-7 …
I really haven’t thought about it though I knew some changes were coming.
I wish the mobile browsers were a bit better. a good mobile site is worth more than a shitty app.
it is just one more move in enshittifi… whatever it is too early for complex words. My frustration while still present is very tired with that relentless drive towards control by the big tech players
GrapheneOS was the alternative I couldn’t remember, but they’ve just aggressively signed up for slop code and “coincidentally” done a deal with Motorola.
So it used to be the one home menu, where we had various apps like YouTube locked behind a PIN so the kids wouldn’t watch endless crap.
Then it updated, and suddenly everything was unlocked, with no way to lock them.
Now every time we want the TV use to be restricted, we have to remember to switch to a “kids mode” before leaving it unattended, which is a straight downgrade. Worse, every time “kids mode” opens with a pop-up asking us to set (more) parental controls. Doing so does not get rid of the popup, so that’s just something that now has to be clicked through every single time.
“Smart TVs” are just the worst possible intersection of everything that’s wrong with technology these days.
For a year or two I avoided agreeing to the contract for voice activation, until an update made aggressive popups appear constantly while watching TV. So yeah, even though the function is disabled, it probably is.
We have a 15 year old Sony… my partner says modern Sony TVs are as bad. It is as he is just saying “a catastrophe” → Sony TV production was just sold to TCL. It is unclear how that will go.
He says for a potential future TV we want a dumb display and stream via our own setup. If we cannot get a dumb display we make one somehow. For now our old one is still working. But there is always the option that it might be bricked by a remote update…
I haven’t had a TV since I moved out of my parents’ place. Computers, displays small or large, and for films a projector. The tech moved away from anything I wanted after I stopped using it.
My television is not connected to the network. Streaming is done with an external dohicky. Putting aside the spying aspect, the apps on TVs suck. They are not kept up to date, and support ends before the tv stops working. External dohickies have their own set of problems, but they are cheap and easy to replace when they require it. (We recently upgraded ours because the app for the network the Sox stream on stopped working on our rather elderly device. $40 versus whatever a th costs these days. I don’t think the app we need exists for the Tv, so we need an external device anyway.)
Fortunately my song logger allows me to edit the details after the fact. I have however just downloaded Deezer to see if it will replace (my limited use of) Spotify.
What has kept me using Spotify is the “Discover Weekly” playlist. It’s the only feature of Spotify that I actually use these days, and the only way I get to hear new music.
I’m hoping Deezer/Tidal have a similar feature. I’m so used to throwing that playlist on when I’m driving or at the gym and not having to choose something.
I briefly thought this was relevant to the hosting of the forum, and then realised it wasn’t, but I’ll note it here just so anyone who needs to know has another opportunity to know…
Short-notice critical PHP release scheduled for 2026-20-21 at 14:00 UTC
“The original key generation was flawed - rather than any issue with the produced signatures. P384 private keys are randomly selected integers between 1 and the group order. The 8 impacted keys all used integers less than 256. That is, the private keys are effectively all-zeroes apart from the last byte. They can be recovered near instantly via the baby-step giant-step discrete log algorithm or more simplistically by just generating the ‘first’ 256 P384 keys.”
– https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2083449
Which presumably explains another quote (which I haven’t seen the source for):
“It was discovered that the private component associated with one of the revoked intermediary certificates was simply the number 4.”
(There may be memes about “4” floating around.)
Edit: Apparently the private keys for these certificates were:
4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237.
Edit: And unrelatedly (as discourse doesn’t allow 4+ posts in succession for… reasons?), something for those who are being made to deal with A.I. code…
