Time and time again, I prove that I'm human by giving this crap the finger and then visiting some other site. It's calling out a false positive and then exercising good taste.

Gmail turned me off way back when it became obvious that they scanned your email to present relevant advertising.

I've paid for email nearly forever (Earthlink, not the most high tech provider but good enough) and get nearly zero spam. Their price went up again recently, but apparently if you mention Fastmail they'll match the cost.

I was listening to the local TV news a few weeks ago and the reporter talked about an SMS scam insisting that you owe unpaid turnpike charges. He said "most of us have seen them". I'm thinking, I've never received anything like that!" and then realized it could be because I don't give out my phone number to just anybody who asks. And tend to push back when they do.

I use GMail and Hotmail/Outlook but via Thunderbird or the Android app, I almost never use the Webmail interface.

What happens if Google pulls the plug on your account and you have no offline archive?

Just wanted to say that reading all the comments here, I'm getting flashbacks to alt.aol.sucks.

I'll be waiting.

In the meantime, I'm currently using a low end Motorola moto g 5G 2023 which lets me turn off Play Services. Chrome and the Google Calendar don't run (really do need to find a replacement calendar), and I couldn't be happier. Motorola's interest in GrapheneOS makes me wonder if they did this on purpose.

For calendar, I now have my own local setup, with Tailscale

Calendar server: https://radicale.org/v3.html Sync: https://manual.davx5.com/

So, you run Radicale server, you can import Google Calendar.

Set up Davx5 on mobile to sync with the local server

Access from anywhere with Tailscale.

I ran into this just tonight. Coincidentally, I also just received an email from IMDB:

>> Dear IMDb customer,

>> We noticed you haven't signed in to IMDb in over three years, and your account shows no activity (no Watchlist, ratings, reviews, or lists).

>> To keep your account active, please sign in to IMDb.com. If you don't sign in by May 20, 2026, your account will be closed. You will then need to make a new account to create a Watchlist, rate and review titles, and access other IMDb features.

Good. Saves me the trouble of figuring out how to close it.

My gut reaction is that people don't come forward to maintain their bragging rights.

Same here, but just Lowes stores. That I know of. I surveiled the two local Lowes roughly a month ago and found two cameras not mapped, which I gleefully added myself. Want to send them a snail mail complaint at some point stating they won't be getting my business until they step back from turning us into a police state.

I contacted them about it too and got the most generic corpo pr about them being essential for the safety of their employees.

Are they Flock cameras or bog standard CCTV?

The Lowes cameras are definitely Flock. The look is unmistakable. See

https://deflock.org/identify

Agreed, but this would then inconvenience millions of non-techies.

Could a solution be forcing Amazon (and Google and Flock and...) to open their backend software either for self-hosting or for running on somebody else's "cloud"? So subscribing to such a device isn't that different from getting web hosting from Dreamhost or Hetzner?

Maybe there's a host or IP field in the settings that users can easily change?

If there was an IP setting users could change, all the self-hosting etc. forums would be talking about how to change it instead of explaining other options. I'd expect not just fixed hosts and an ecosystem dependent on their proprietary protocols, but also pinned certificates and secure boot so you can't change any of it.

N.B. Flock isn't really targeting the consumer market.

I know this is not constructive, but fuck 'em and their convenience!

The 16% of Trump voters who want military action in Iceland was what particularly floored me. Added to the poll, I suspect, to see if people were paying attention...

I was going to say, "at last, something good out of Texas". Maybe you're on to something?