Google Earth is almost not usable in Firefox. I’d like to ask for suggestions from the community because I really don’t want to use Google Chrome where it works great. I’m on Linux Mint, an Ubuntu derivative.

Points taken from article:

• Android 15 is adding a built-in mechanism to protect your device from “juice jacking” attacks.
• Charging will be allowed when lockdown mode is enabled in Android 15, but USB data access will not.
• Juice jacking is a largely theoretical problem you don’t really need to worry about, but it’s still nice that Android will protect you against it.

I’m not sure if an opinion piece is appropriate here, so please let me know if this doesn’t fit the theme of the community, and I’ll avoid sharing such thoughts in the future.

I’m extremely frustrated with the car centric culture in my area. I live about 25 miles west of a quarry. Every day I watch trains go up and down the railroad mostly carrying gravel. This railroad stretches for several hours by car in each direction, connecting several large cities and even passing a few tourist attractions, and despite our traffic congestion problems there is little interest in trying to use this rail for actual people.

One company moved in and started running a new passenger rail service. Within a few weeks, we had protesters at the railroads complaining that drivers don’t understand railroad crossings. I saw posters about how trains were killing residents when drivers park on the tracks and get hit. I don’t understand! Where do you think the train is going to go? They don’t exactly come out of nowhere. They follow the tracks! And we’ve always had trains passing through our town before. At a later local election a candidate ran on the premise that they’re going to protect home values and our children by reducing or eliminating the number of trains passing through our town. This candidate did win our local election and sadly they succeeded in cutting down on rail investment.

Fast-forward a couple years later. Passenger rail stations were built at the endpoints of this rail to ferry tourists. I drive parallel to this rail on the way to work several times per week for almost 45 minutes each way, 20 minutes of which is heavy traffic. I get to enjoy watching people ride the train while there’s no stop anywhere near my house because our local government has sided with homeowners that a passenger rail station is “simply too dangerous.” I would have to drive over an hour to the nearest passenger rail station to ride the train, and I can literally see the tracks from my apartment.

Every time I see that train I feel bitter. I could save so much money if these boneheads would have let them build a train station in our town. Absolutely ridiculous! The train is there. The rail is there. I don’t understand why a train is such a personal, existential threat to your way of life.

AI Summary:

Google Messages will support texting 911 via RCS starting this winter, offering features like location sharing and read receipts. This upgrade improves emergency texting which is already supported by over half of US dispatch centers. Google collaborates with RapidSOS for enhanced responder info. This announcement precedes Apple's expected RCS support in iOS 18, aiming to broaden RCS adoption.

I wonder how many thousands of spam bots have tried to connect to the servers and send email using text ripped from these pages federated across numerous domains.

And they can’t just block one website. They’d have to individually block every node if they want to crawl the web for email addresses to steal. I hope it’s a real thorn in their side.

You’re indoors in the sense that you’re protected from the weather and the elements, and the cave could even have some kind of covering or entrance area that could be considered a door or doorway. People have built homes in caves.

Is caving an outside, inside activity?

This sounds like a nice step towards modernizing texting, but it's a shame that Messages doesn't have an open RCS API to encourage broad adoption across messaging apps.

On many operating systems, I can create audio loopback devices to feed audio files into another app as if it was coming from a microphone. I can also tee off audio going out to the speakers.

Is there an app that lets me redirect audio devices to perform the equivalent of connecting audio inputs and outputs on Android?

Note to moderators: while such a feature can be used for piracy, that is not my goal, and there are better methods if I was trying to be nefarious. I want to use it to feed audio samples from soundboard apps into my active phone call without having to play the sound effects through the microphone. I'd also like to use it to directly supply the output of an MP3 into another app that records my voicemail message for better quality than can be performed by simply recording through the microphone.

Google claims that privacy is a priority, and perhaps it is, but we can't deny there's an essential conflict of interest between protecting your privacy and Google being an advertising company.

Recent events in this space include Google's new Ad Topics framework, which purports to offer users more control. I feel it's an improvement over cookies, but having my device participate in tracking me is backwards. After all, my device should be protecting my privacy first, not implementing features to track my behavior.

Data "nutrition labels" in the Play Store are a step forward by encouraging proactively a discussion about how user data is processed and used. On the other hand, recent attempts at DRM for the web in Chrome remind us that the main vendor behind Android doesn't always have user interests at heart.

Is Android doing enough to keep your data safe? If not, what steps could reasonably improve the situation?

In sharing your opinion, please take care to distinguish between Google the company and Android the product. While related, given Google may have privacy issues in one line of business doesn't necessarily define privacy practices on the Android platform. Also, another interesting angle includes what's best for you versus what's best for users as a whole. For example, a privacy feature, to be successful, needs to be reasonably understandable by most users and offer a net benefit without complicating the platform for casual users.

Smudge, Smudgie, Puppy...

He is a four-year-old puggle. He gets bored very easily.