Apple has three realistic options:

1. Submit to the UK’s demands and grant them a backdoor to encrypted backups.
2. Disable encrypted backups in the UK.
3. Leave the UK market entirely.

They went with #2, which is probably the least user-hostile option available.

From 1500GMT on Friday, any Apple user in the UK attempting to turn it on has been met with an error message.

Existing users’ access will be disabled at a later date.

I am very interested in seeing what the UX around this will be. Ideally, they should give users direct notice well in advance, so they have time to plan a migration or mitigation. Of course, Apple makes it basically impossible to perform a full backup through any mechanism except iCloud, so…one more example of how vendor lock-in is inherently a security and privacy risk.

Neat, I didn’t know that. I currently use Joplin this way, synced across my devices with Syncthing. Joplin also supports directly syncing to Google Drive or Dropbox (with optional encryption).

I’m sure there will be workarounds.

I think there are plenty of people who would be pirates if it were more convenient, but I suspect the point of diminishing returns for legislation has already been passed. If you’re savvy and dedicated enough to use a VPN in the first place, then this probably won’t stop you. Non-tech-savvy people are already turned off of torrents for half a dozen different reasons.

DNS, though? That will block a lot of people from accessing things like Z-library, which is currently easy enough to access for anyone who knows how to use Google.

China’s measures have been largely successful, unfortunately. It’s still possible to VPN out, but it’s a risk a lot of people are unwilling to take since it could realistically get them in trouble. I’ve lost contact with some friends in China because we have no shared platforms and the increasing blocking measures over the past 10 years finally passed their tolerance threshold.

I guess I could figure out how to use iMessage, which AFAIK is the only end-to-end encrypted messaging service that still works (or at least the only moderately popular one). Makes me wonder how secure it really is if China hasn’t banned it…

I’m not (currently) in a position where others would find it desirable to do so. Potentially in the future?

It’s hard to imagine a scenario where this would happen and your voice would not otherwise be available. For example, if you went into politics, then you’d be a target, but you’d already be speaking in public all the time. It only takes a few seconds of a voice sample to do this nowadays and it’ll only get easier from here.

Maybe just make a point to educate your family and friends on the risk of voice cloning so they don’t fall for phone scams.

I’ve noticed that Google is getting more and more aggressive with VPNs. It won’t let me load anything on VPN without logging in. This applies to third-party tools like yt-dlp too.

This probably depends on your VPN provider. Perhaps I can make a throwaway google account just to get it to stfu? I don’t know how hard it is to make a semi-anonymous Google account nowadays.

That’s when Windows 10 stops getting security updates. Expect most software vendors to drop support for Windows 10 this year if they haven’t already. That doesn’t necessarily mean things will stop working, but it will not be tested and they won’t spend time fixing Win10-specific problems.

In enterprise, you can get an additional three years of “extended security updates”. That’s your grace period to get everyone in your org upgraded.

While I strongly relate to anyone who hates Windows 11, “continue using Windows 10 forever” was never a viable long-term strategy.

Windows 10 was released in 2015. Ten years of support for an OS is industry-leading, on par with Red Hat or Ubuntu’s enterprise offerings and far ahead of any competing consumer OS. Apple generally only offers three years of security updates. Google provides 3-4 years of security updates. Debian gets 5 years.

There has never been a time in the history of personal computing when using an OS for over 10 years without a major upgrade was realistic. That would be like using Windows 3.1 after XP was released. Windows 10 is dead, and it’s been a long time coming.

Now go download Fedora.

This will likely be rejected for one the same reasons that they decided they would not add any new flag emojis. Flags come and go. Bitcoin hasn’t even been around for 20 years yet, and its future is highly uncertain.

Also, considered as a currency, it would be better as a regular text character, not an emoji. Like $, €, ¥, £, etc.