(though: Why TF are you still using that shithole of a site‽).

Maybe some places don’t have alternative suppliers than Walmart? Similarly, some places have governments that still only use the porno social network for some services.

Wait wait wait. Where does Vivaldi say that in any way?

In the bit I quoted from what was linked. Of course, they don’t phrase it like that, but it’s what they’re doing.

Their user security https://vivaldi.com/privacy/browser/

We strictly protect the security of any and all personal information you provide to us while using Vivaldi products and services. We do not share or sell information to any third party and we proactively protect all user data from disclosure, with the only exception being if requested by legitimate law agencies with a court order.

…which is immediately contradicted lower down the page by most paragraphs in “Type and purpose of data collected by third party vendors”. OK, it’s not personal information, but it is still information that they’re sharing with third parties.

It’s also not clear to me how much notice they give of changes to that policy, either.

That’s privacy not security, though. The basic problem is that we can’t look at all the code, audit it, modify it, test it, check it always behaves well.

No disagreement there, but Vivaldi isn’t repeating anything that’s been tried before. Vivaldi is an employee owned company that wants to succeed, wants to offer the best interface, security and features to the general public it can whilst simultaneously keeping itself uniquely true to its values and survival. Gee, so horrible of it to want to scrape a living for its employee owners. Ridiculousness indeed.

But this has been tried before. I’ve worked in employee-owned software companies for decades and seen many others come and go. Attempting to hold part of your code hostage seems doomed to fail eventually: most go bust, and some get bought out by so-called “carpet-baggers”. To succeed in an ethical way, they need to find a way to get paid to develop the software, not fall into the trap of creating it and then trying to get paid later by keeping part of it secret. I don’t want to be caught in the fallout yet again if another company learns this the hard way and then their software becomes obsolete and lost.

You’re the one talking about LineageOS, not me. I’m only saying the average user now in most countries isn’t walking into a store any more, but buying their phone online, having it shipped to them and following the pictorial setup instructions.

Stores here don’t directly charge for helping you, but they charge more for things: phones in store are often much more expensive than online (especially phone network shops - some of the broker shops sell closer to online prices), and they only sell a limited range of plans which usually don’t include the cheapest ones. The days of networks selling their locked phones much cheaper than unlocked ones seem to be over, when you add up all the charges over the minimum contract term.

Even the website of a phone company can be much cheaper than their own stores, and sometimes you can still get help from the stores if you have problems. The phone companies now all operate multiple brands and the brands without stores are even cheaper (Smarty and Voxi from VodafoneThree, Giffgaff from Virgin-O2, and so on).

It’s worse than that. It was one batch of rolls, specifically yesterday’s rolls.

Read the Bloomberg Chats That Got a Former RBS Libor Trader Paul White Banned for Life - Business Insider – https://www.businessinsider.com/read-the-bloomberg-chats-that-got-a-former-rbs-libor-trader-paul-white-banned-for-life-2016-4

They’ve had several punches in the face from tariffs, but keep insisting they walked into doors and it’s all fine and still love him.

Just read “AI LLMs” as “alliums”, think about gardening and be happier!

Potatoes

Much more likely to be the phone vendor not releasing this “absolutely basic functionality” to customisers. Some vendors hate their customers having freedoms.

That’s not so informative without any idea of your age and thereby the ages of your examples.

Many of them could still follow the assembly/card insertion instruction sheet with pictures that comes in the mail from the phone company, even without knowing which part is called a SIM.

And maybe your area’s phone stores aren’t as notorious for overcharging as the UK’s.

You can buy an eSim adapter online for ~$15 off sites such as AliExpress.

And does it share with Chinese intelligence only, or the NSA too? 😉

It says €14.99/month for life. And why is eircom now an Irish branch of a Jersey company? Tax dodging?

In most countries, getting a phone in a store is something done only by people happy to pay lots extra for a little human help, surely? The average user now signs up online and gets a phone in the mailbox.

Or much of the world never had a similar malfunctioning telco.

Not watched yet, but I suspect AI edits are using hallucinated citations with ISBNs that don’t even pass a checksum test. AI may improve on this if someone trains them about ISBNs better, but it’s cool if this sort of test weeds some slop out for now.

Vivaldi’s core reason can be summarised as

when it comes to large projects that have been around for ages or are household names, people might not even notice the fork. But with Vivaldi’s relatively smaller footprint, we could be easier to overshadow, making our brand more vulnerable.

They put their brand before user security and sustainability. And still have the gall to claim to be ethical. Sorry but that’s absurd. If imagined how it looks from outside their firm, they might wake up. Instead, they’ll probably putter along for a while, then get bought or fail or change direction or something, and their browser will be lost like the Presto Opera before them.

None are so cursed as those who fail to learn from history.

Anthony is a she?

safe or just safer?