Damn, I apparently missed the memo that the backend service for Mozilla Monitor was shady while I used it.
Are there any actual services like this that work properly? I've noticed whenever it indicated that a service has removed my data, that same service would come back online as having my data a few weeks later.
The "respawning" issue slabity mentioned where data vanishes and then pops back up weeks later is the core structural problem of this industry. It’s a game of whack-a-mole: you get removed from Broker A, but they re-ingest your data from a public record scrape or another broker a few months later. That’s why effective removal has to be continuous, not a one-off.
However, the specific issue Krebs highlights with Mozilla/OneRep is trust. It turns out OneRep’s founder was actually running active people-search sites (like Nuwber) on the side. It's hard to trust a removal service that has a financial stake in the very industry it's supposed to be fighting.
For an alternative without that conflict, take a look at Optery (YC W22). We've been flagging the OneRep situation for years. Full disclosure, I'm on the team at Optery. Optery launched on HN in 2021.
Looks more like an ad for your app though... Which for some reason collects tons of data unrelated to health, like messages, location data, and photos/videos/files?
Photos are used to track nutrition -- you choose each photo to upload within the app.
Location is only used, in context, to help find healthy meals near you. (You can use the app with or without enabling this location-based feature; if you don't use it, then we don't ask for location.)
Where are you seeing messages? We don't track messages, so this is probably a mistake in our metadata.
Sorry for being pessimistic, it's just whenever I see a health related app I immediately look at the data collected and data shared sections and get concerned. Especially if it's being shared with insurance companies.
Quick edit: That "messages" part might be only in-app ones. Google does not word that well in the summary.
I see -- yeah, the Android metadata says "in-app messages". That refers to features where you can message support or a doctor within the app. We don't attempt to read your text messages or anything like that.
You think that's bad? I had my own Google Workspace account with Google Domains and then foolishly linked my Google Fi cellphone to it.
Trying to get that stuff resolved was such a pain that I eventually had to ask a friend who knew someone that worked at Google for assistance. Their support team had absolutely no public contact info available. I eventually managed to get my data and migrate the services I actually use (Google Fi and Youtube) to a non-workspace account.
The funny thing is that a few months later they tried to send a $60 bill to collections because they reopened the account for 2 days for me to migrate things off. I was originally going to pay it to just get them off my back, but Google's own collections agency wouldn't let me pay through card or check or anything. The only way I could pay was to "Log into your Google Workspace account" which NO LONGER EXISTED.
Now it's just an amusing story about incompetence to look back on, but at the time it was stressful because I almost lost my domains, cell phone number, and email addresses all at once. Now I never trust anything to a single company.
Ironically, I stopped paying for a workspace a few years ago when I shutdown a startup. The workspace got suspended and removed. I am still able to use it across any service requiring a Google account, which makes me think that if I buy a failed startup domain and sign up I could get access to their data.
> Guess I'm not moving on from the RP2040 anytime soon...
Doesn't matter what you move to, there's still going to be 2000 pages of datasheets+errata, and one line in the middle of all of that will tell you "This does not work".
That's why for hobbyists it's best to stick to devices with a large community around them, who surface niche problems in community forums.
However, with everyone moving to Discord, this will no longer be useful too...
I've been interested in the progress of the PineNote since the reMarkable company decided to put certain advertised features behind a subscription paywall.
Does anyone have any information on the OS being developed looks like? I have not been able to find any videos or screenshots that indicate what interacting with the device is expected to look like. I found this blog post here, but it shows it running a GNOME environment which is... Not at all what I would hope for in this type of device: https://pine64.org/2024/10/02/september_2024/#pinenote
Here is a rather old vid of the interface I put together for use on my Pinenote. I’m still running Sway with lisgd for gestures, waybar + lavalauncher for widgets. Lots more possibilities if you are into ags/gjs, eww and others.
It’s a great device and I wish people would be a little more open to taking the plunge with it. Forget boox—-you won’t be able to properly root it, they disrespect and even stole FOSS. Meanwhile, remarkable is cool, but anemic hardware compared to Pinenote.
Thank you for sharing this with me. This is the first time I've seen the `rnote` app on an E-ink device. I'm quite surprised in how functional it looks, though I can already tell the latency is quite high.
I'm definitely going to keep my eye on this device though. I think it will just be a few more years before the software has caught up with the hardware.
It's Debian running GNOME. You can install whatever UI you want from the repos, but the developers have written convenience tools in the form of GNOME extensions, which you can see in the top bar in the photos. It works fine, in my experience, modulo some finicky bits involving the onscreen keyboard. I have the original developer model, and I don't know what differences exist in the community edition.
GNOME is the one Linux desktop environment that can be said to work reasonably well on tablet devices, including the PineNote. It also has well-supported "high contrast" and "reduced animations" modes that can serve to enhance UX on an epaper display.
I think there may be a misunderstanding of my point.
The fact that GNOME works well on typical tablets isn't really relevant here. The PineNote is an E-ink device with very specific hardware constraints and use cases. It's primarily meant for reading and writing, and these tasks require software specifically optimized for E-ink displays and low-power operation.
I've personally experimented with desktop environments like XFCE and i3 on a reMarkable 2. While it was an interesting technical exercise, the experience wasn't practical for daily use. For comparison, look at the reMarkable's unofficial/hacked ecosystem (https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable) - it's full of applications and utilities specifically designed for E-ink displays and writing/reading workflows.
This is why I'm hesitant about the "community device" designation. Simply saying "it runs GNOME" doesn't tell us anything about the actual user experience for reading and writing on E-ink. To be clear, my concern isn't that it runs GNOME - it's that this seems to be the only information available about the software experience.
> Note: Determinate Nix is not a fork, it is a downstream. Our plan, and intent, is to keep all our patches sent to the upstream project first.
And what happens if the Nix community doesn't pull those patches, and instead goes with a different solution? Will your downstream adapt to the upstream project, possibly breaking things for your customers?
Indeed, part of the motivation for our downstream distribution is to be able to ship some of our patches faster than upstream wants to. However, these patches are generally about usability improvements that are not incompatible.
If the upstream project evolves in a different direction, it will be on us to move with them too.
Even if the OS could perfectly deduplicate pages based on their contents, static linking doesn't guarantee identical pages across applications. Programs may include different subsets of library functions and the linker can throw out unused ones. Library code isn't necessarily aligned consistently across programs or the pages. And if you're doing any sort of LTO then that can change function behavior, inlining, and code layout.
It's unlikely for the OS to effectively deduplicate memory pages from statically linked libraries across different applications.
> Not to nitpick too much, but while wood is "technically" a composite material made up of fiber embedded in lignin, I don't think it's very useful to include it under the broad category of composite materials. Engineered woods like plywood and cross-laminated timber definitely are, but it's more useful to classify regular wood as an organic raw material rather than a composite.
Why would defining it as a raw material be "more useful"? Why is defining it as a composite "less useful"?
Not just that. When learning about the anisotropic nature of composites (different strengths in different directions) wood is a tangible example for anyone who’s done arts and crafts, woodworking, etc.
I think they wanted an example of each animation in a list.
But I'm going to add my own nitpick and say that there shouldn't be any gifs. It's a wasteful annoying format. Use a video for it's smaller size, better visuals and it's ability to be paused/played/seeked. An asciinema would be nice too.
Are there any actual services like this that work properly? I've noticed whenever it indicated that a service has removed my data, that same service would come back online as having my data a few weeks later.