Posts by Stuart Castle 1870 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2007
I used to think that. After all, Musk made an awful lot of money and was coming up with what were, on the face of it, wonderful ideas. He, through Tesla, also made the electric car the most marketable alternative to fossil fuels. And whether you like Electric cars or not, we do need an alternative to fossil fueld sooner rather than later. Fossil Fuels will run out, and, thanks to the fact the entire industry is relying on a strait consisting of a few miles of sea to transport about a third of the world's oil, are vulnerable to an idiot with a few missles and an army holding the entire world to ransom..
But, I digress. I used to think Musk was a force for good. Perhaps he was, but then he started believing his own hype, and is clearly in it just to gain power. I don't even think he is really interested in money. But even if you look at his original ideas, apart from the electric car, and the household/industrial batteries, none of them are feasible. Even the Hyperloop was, by his own admission, developed to divert funding away from high speed rail.
My old sotware engineering management lecturer talked about secure coding. Basically security in the 90s wasn'r really much of a consideration, but even then, he touted providing (and testing) decent error checking on function calls, as well as ensuring users have the minimum rights they need..
He also said something else that it true. He said that no security system is perfect. Every one has flaws, even if you never find them. He also made the point that if anyone did actually invent perfect security, they would become very rich very quickly.
The problem is with spending money on security (or even backups or infrastructure) is that it doesn't directly generate profit, or even new features for people to get excited about. It *is* necessary to keep the company functional, but if you spend all that money, on the face of it, all you've achieved is the system is doing what it should have been anyway.. That won't get the beancounters excited because it costs money and doesn't give them any return they wouldn't have got anyway.
They forget that if they don't have security, and the system is compromised, the costs to the company may be many times what the security would have cost, and may include the company itself.
One of our users in one of our rooms reported that he was given a shock everytime he touched an electrical appliance (even a switch or socket) in that room. Being concerned there was a problem and being unable to find it, having unplugged all the electrical equipment and him still having the problem, we got an electrician in. He checked all the sockets (over 30), and all the light switches and fittings. He tested each with every test he could, and they all passed. He was confused, until he realised the user was wearing polyester.
Yes, the user almost exclusively wore polyester and tended to shuffle while walking, so over the several hours he was in the room (he tended to walk), he was building a large static charge.
We asked him to change his clothes, and the problem went away.
I purchased (well, not me personally) a couple of Hololenses for work.
The tech is good, and it is an interesting gadget, but tbh, it has always seemed to be an expensive solution looking for a problem. IIRC, the consumer version was over £1000, which is what you pay for a high end consumer VR headset for something that isn't as useful. The enterprise edition is the same hardware, running essentially the same software (Windows Holographic), but adds the ability to integrate with Active Directory and be managed by System Center. It is also over £3k.
FIA, you are right. Microsoft made plenty of noise about the end of support for windows 10 (and still are) because it's a consumer product, and most consumers would not know if they didn't make that noise. Windows Server isn't a consumer product, and, TBH, anyone using it *should* already know that it's EOL. Microsoft does tell admins these things, just not as openly...
The rewriting of the Cobol isn't the hard part. The hard part is the testing, and fixing any errors that come up (and there will be errors). If it was as easy as rewriting the COBOL, everyone would have done it. After all, during the millenium, it would surely have been cheaper to port all of the old systems in uses to modern servers and ditch the mainframes if it was as easy as just rewriting the COBOL..
The fact is it isn't that easy. There is often more than just COBOL at the heart of these system, and any changes would need testing anyway. Certainly if you are planning to run your business on it.
This might seem like I am anti AI. I am not. It is a tool with a lot of uses, but I think we need to be careful to avoid the hype. AI companies need a lot of money, and they will only get it if they can get people think they are making regular and impressive breakthroughs that are going to disrupt industries.
Years back, I was doing tech support, and was also a massive fan of the open source remote desktop system, VNC.
I worked in a University computer lab. We have about 50 PCs, and 1 Power PC based Mac.
My boss managed both staff and student support, and his office was a couple of floors down. I was (and am still) friends with the technicians who did staff supoprt, and they were based in his office.
One day, we were going to lunch, and my friend came up with an idea. He asked me to install the VNC server on the Mac, put an out of order sign on it (to prevent the students using it), turn the monitor off and give him the IP. He also asked me to disable power saving.
Then, when our boss went for lunch, he leapt on the boss's PC, installed the client, connected it to the Mac, and made it full screen.
When the boss came back, he was rather confused to find that his Windows NT 4 desktop had apparently been replaced with a desktop he didn't recognise (he was one of these people who viewed Macs as a a waste of time, so never bothered to use one).
It's not the same. Security measures, non-discriiminatory hiring policiies, working at home, honesty , staff training and ecological awareness are not marketed as boosting your productivity and / or reducing costs. In fact, in some ways, they add to your costs. But if all of those are done well, businesses will see beneifts in various ways, including, perhaps, an increase in productivity or profit. But they've not been promised either.
AI *is* almost exclusively being marketed on boosting your productivity and reducing costs, which means that businesses will be looking for those benefits, and if AI doesn't deliver (it isn't in a lot of cases), they will cut funding.
My employer couldn’t do anything like that. Initially because during Covid, we gave staff usb headsets and laptops so they could work from home, but now because we’ve switched a policy of giving out laptops and docking stations in preference to desktops. You have to have a pretty bulletproof business case to get a desktop now. Most docks require usb connections now.
I used to get the 108 bus in London fairly regularly.
For those who don't know, London buses have automated announcements in them that give the bus's destination, next stop and a whole load of other announcements. This is part of a london wide management system called "iBus", which also powers the various apps and journey planner websites that tap into TFL's journey planner.
The iBus hardware on each bus is essentially a small PC that as well as doing the announcements and digital signs for the passengers, also tracks the bus's position, and reports it to the iBus servers via a mobile connection.
Buses on some routes have dot matrix indicators, some have LED screens.
The buses on route 108 have quite large LED screens. For the first few weeks they were running, they were on, and clearly running the iBus software, but not displaying anything remotely useful. Then, while the announcement worked, the screends just displayed the top of an AMI Bios screen. I wish i'd have got a photo of this, because now the screesns are just left off. The announcements still work, which suggests that they have a seperate computer for the displays.
I used to be on the on call list at work. Thankfully I was so far down it that I think it would have taken a major disaster for me to have been called.
I say thankfully because I can’t drive, and live far enough from the company that it’s not practical to walk, and difficult to cycle.
As such, me getting to work if something had failed over night, I would have had to get a cab.
Thankfully I was never called.
Same here.
The 380z did have a green screen monitor and keyboard, but was there primarily to be a file and print server, and was hooked up via a parallel cable to an Epson Dot Matrix printer (I *think* it was the fx40,but can't find it).
The 480z's had colour monitors, which were (of course), Microvitec cubs.
Windows is terrible for a lot of things (particulalry the amount of data that gets sent back to microsoft with little or no knowledge of the user, let alone consent), but one thing it does have is mature and powerful systems for deployment and management at scale.
We use System Center at work, and while it's a beast that ideally you need training, and time to master, it's powerful. I could, should I need to, log on to the Console and get thousands of machines to wipe themselves, reinstall windows and any software needed for the machine. This would take a couple of days to complete, and in terms of my interaction, about 30 seconds. I am not going to do so because it would be too disruptive. Want an application on 1,000 machines? Ignoring the time required for creating and testing the deployment, it would take, again, about 30 seconds of interaction and a couple of days. If Microsoft issue a new update, we can have it on 99% of our estate 48 hours after it completes testing.
Linux is also good, particularly on machines that aren't necessarily as powerful as the latest machines. Despite how this post might sound, I love Linux.
But Linux has problems. One of which is the sheer number of distributions. I like Ubuntu, but if I were a newbie, how would I know which linux to use? There are dozens, all seemingly very similar. Also, I had a project at work a few years ago. We needed a lot of digital signs quickly and had almost no budget to install them, so couldn't afford the £1000 windows based totems used elsewhere.
i came up with an incredibly cheap solution involving mounting a raspberry pi on the back of a monitor and mounting the monitor where we wanted signs. The Pi's would just have displayed a webpage, or still graphic with the sign. It would have cost about £150 per unit as opposed to £1000. I'm not counting power or networking, because both solutions would likely have needed that.
Our IT department refused to authorise the project unless I came up with a decent way of managing updates to the Pis. I considered Pi Server (the Raspberry Pi produced VM that enabled netbooting pis (which would have made updating them easy), but it didn't look like it would scale up.
I needed an integrated management system that could, in theory, manage hundreds of pis. I asked on various Linux forums (and on here), and didn't get a sensible answer, with every query being answered by a general "Use Linux U noob" type response, and usually a lot less polite than that.
Sadly, becase of that, my company just bought a few more totems (they can be managed with our existing infrastructure) and called it a day.
Unfortunately, in that case, ideology lost out to practicality, even though practicality cost more.
When I was a green young support bod, I supported a lot of university researchers.
One had a fault with his pc and had likely lost data. Of course it wasn’t backed up and he was shouting at me. The university had a policy that because they provided network shared areas that were backed up, they didn’t back up individual workstations. Users were expected to either use the shared areas or back up their own data. This researcher had done neither.
The researcher was shouting at me when his boss heard. His boss came over to see what was happening and stopped him. The researcher explained and called me an “oily rag” while doing so.
His boss replied pointing out the university policy on backups, and explained calmly that “The person you called an oily rag knows more about computers than you ever will”. He also ordered the researcher to apologise.
Part of me almost wishes they'd go back to shipping the OS on floppy disks, I should imagine the cost of shipping hundreds, if not thousands of floppies to a customer would make the vendor think twice about any bloat they add. Not to mention requiring the customer to sit there for the best part of a week swapping disks while installing.
OK, so that's not really practical, but I suspect with a little work, Microsoft could get Windows to a point were the install media is less than a gig.
But then I also wish they'd offer a paid option for Windows that disables most, if not all, the telemetry, or at least gives the user the option to opt in, with a detailed explanation as to what they are opting in to, what data is shared, with whom, and what they will do with it.
I used to support a Uni computer lab. Just off the lab, we had a small Audio/Video studio that I also supported.
This studio had a powerful (for the time) PC that as well as doing any AV capturing also controlled the Audio mixer via MIDI. The mixer had, however, analog sliders that were powered by motors. As such, if you sent a Midi command to increase the level of a certain channel, the slider for that channel moved up, apparenly under it's own power.
Because it was a sealed off room, that could be booked freely by students, it frequently got booked by students for purposes other than AV work. Us techs could see this because it was covered well by a couple of CCTV cameras. As a couple of students found out, covering these CCTV cameras was a good way to get thrown out of the lab and have your login account suspended for a few days.
For support reasons, I had, long before, installed a VNC server on the machine, which I generally used if there was a problem on the machine.
One day, I noticed a bunch of students, sitting in a circle. I did not know what they were doing, but it clearly wasn't anything that needed the facilities of the studio. They weren't, strictly speaking, breaking any rules, but they were taking up a resource other students likely needed to use, so I decided to have a little fun with them.
I logged on to the computer remotely and fired up an application that could control the mixer. I set all the channels to their maxium level, then to their minium. I knew that when each slider reached the maximum of minimum level, it would hit the casing of the mixer and make a quiet click. 24 of them doing it nearly simultaneously would make a fairly noticable bang. When I was sure the students were looking, I started setting the channels to random levels. This scared the students and they packed up their stuff and left. I don't think I saw any of them again.
I like the phablet style of phone. I have an iphone 16 pro max, and I love it. I do a lot of things on the iphone that that take advantage of the larger screen. Mainly accessing work related apps and websites.
While doing work related stuff, I usually also have a Macbook Pro with me, but it's not always practical or safe to get that out, so a phone with a relatively large screen is good for me.
One thing I wish phone manufacturers would move away from though is this idea that we all only want thing phones. I don't. I have pockets large enough for a slightly thicker phone, and i suspect i'm not the only one.
I think having a larger battery would benefit me more than a thinner one, and perhaps they could use the power saving tech to ensure my phone lasts for a week on one charge, rather than the day that a thinner battery would allow. Perhaps even go back to interchangable batteries.
One of my old colleagues used to tell a story of when he was a young, newbie support person. We used to have a PBX and the extensions were patched in using the structured cabling used for the computer network with each patch room having a dedicated voice panel. Each socket on the voice panel was assigned a phone number.
One weekened, my colleague was in tidying the connections on the patch panel. He'd assumed that patching the phones was the same as patching the network. IE as long as you plugged each patch into the right switch, it didn't matter which port on that switch you used. He thought it was the same for the voice panel.
It wasn't. As he discovered when, having removed all the cables from the voice panel, he plugged one back in and tried to ring the extension he thought he'd plugged in.
He spent the whole weekend plugging cables back in, then rining extensions and seeing where he could hear the phone rigning. Of course, had he done this during the week, he could have contacted the switchboard, who did have plans of the all the patch cabinets showing what was patched to what.
We currently have a VOIP switchboard, with extension numbers assigned to IP addresses, so it wouldn't matter which port on which switch you plug the cable into, as long as it's assigned to the right vlan.
Re: "The EFF said previously that although Trump's executive orders are designed to target student visa holders, because these individuals' networks likely include fellow students that are US citizens, the surveillance likely infringes their free speech rights also."
Ironically, one of Trump's legal cases (and, as a result, his claims his phones were illegally tapped) likely came from the fact that one of his lawers had *his* phone tapped because of some other wrongdoing by him or someone else, and Trump was caught because he phoned the tapped phone.
At Uni, I discovered that all of the University students were on a mailing list. Being the young niaive thing I was in 1994, I sent a "Happy Christmas and Happy New Year" email to all students., and went home for the Holidays.
It did not go well.
For one thing, I didn't factor in that not everyone celebrates christmas. I also didn't factor in that some people get offended at the thought you might be accusing them (or others) of celebrating Christmas. I got a lot of abuse, both in email and in person for merely wishing that everyone had a nice time (for that was the intention).
The second thing is that I left both delivery and read reciepts on. So, when I got back, I logged in. The computer moaned I was out of space in my home area (they gave us about 2 meg at the time). I didn't know where the space had gone, but thenn I found that the my mailbox was taking up all the space. So, I logged into email, only to get told my Mailbox was out of space. I had over 500 unread emails in my inbox. I read a couple, realised what had happened and started deleting them. As I deleted emails, more arrived. Eventually, after a couple of weeks, I was starting to get control of my mailbox back. At some point, I was called into the Computer Lab manager to explain what had happened. I did, and while he was a little irritated, he said I hadn't actually broken any rules and he could see I was trying to be nice, so he told me to carry on, but that I should delete the emails manually, so I learned not to do this sort of thing again.
The good thing was that the Uni locked down access to the mailing lists, so only nominated users could send to them.
In all, I think I deleted over 36,000 emails.
When I was a green youngster hoping to get a job in tech support, I went for a job doing IT support for a local private school. As such, they were very well funded, and, IIRC, the job was well paid.
Having applied for the job, I was excited at the thought of potentially working there. I would have been managing a Novel Netware network, with a couple of servers and hundreds of workstations. This was the late 80s/ early 90s, and it was apparently unusual for a school to have as large a network.
The interview was at 1:30pm, so I turned up suited and booted, slightly nervous, but confident and excited. At 1:30, a secretary came up to me and said there would be two interviews, a personell and a technical one. I was quite happy with this, and said so. Then she dropped a bombshell. They had originally arranged the interviews in order of surname, so mine was originally first. They had decided that morning that this was unfair anyone whose surname begins a letter toward the end of the alphabet, so they flipped the list. I was disappointed but didn't see a lot of people in the waiting room, so I waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually, at 6:30, I had both interviews.
The personell one was the generic personell questions. The technical one, which they held immediately after because they wanted to go home, consisted of an aptitude test and also a couple of PCs, one set up as a server, and one as a terminal. I had to diagnose why they couldn't communicate. I correct diagnosed that the server wasn't plugged in properly.
I didn't get the job. Apparently, although I interviewed well and resolved the tech problem (both of which suprised me as I was extremely stressed due to the delay), I didn't quite score highly enough on the aptitude test.
I was angry at the time, but I think I lucked out. Imagine working for a company disorganised enough to flip their interview list a couple of hours before the first interview. I don't get stressed easily, but I suspect the stress would have killed me.
While I do agree that the developer bears little responsibility for the problems (after all, telecoms at a technical level is quite a complicated beast, he may not have been aware of everything that needed to happen to terminate a call), but once they'd detected a problem, the company should have refunded the money without the customer complaining. That is terrible.
I used to think being online the whole time was a cool thing. I still do, to a large extent.
But I wish we could go back to the the days when if you wanted Windows, you paid once, and perhaps again for the next major version. I don't like the fact Windows is free because Microsoft still wants to make money from it. As a result, far too much of Windows is now dedicated to tracking you and sending various data on you to Microsoft..
I know about Linux, and I do use it on various machines, but I also do need access to Windows, and, TBH would happily pay to use it, if I could guarantee that paying would disable any telemetry that isn't for reliabilty or safety.
And the MAGA voters think he gives a toss about them. I wonder if they'll feel the same when he has sold the last vestiges of US industry for personal profit. It starts with selling a given product to the chinese. It ends with your suppliers of that product being driven out of business because the chinese have copied their products and flooded the market with cheap clones.
Years ago, I had a job in Freight Forwarding. It was my job to help prepare the documentation for my various clients exports to various middle east countries. Sometimes, I had to deliver the documentation personally to the relevant country's embassy in London (this was the one aspect of the job I liked, because I love exploring and I got paid to go to all sorts of areas I wouldn't normally visit).
To ensure that customs were notified of the shipments, we had to use a special computer system to enter the details, and print any relevant documentation. For this, we had an IBM AT, connected to both a dot matrix and daisywheel printer, a modem (it used this to upload details of our shipments to an HMRC computer) and a serial terminal. I can't remember the OS, but it was either Concurrant DOS or Multi User DOS.
We had strict rules on how long we needed to keep documentation on shipments (5 years, IIRC), but due to the time required to upload, we were asked by customs to keep the online records to the last year or two, which meant one of my boss's jobs was, on a friday afternoon, deleting any out of date shipment records. For Audit purposes, we still had the paperwork.
The system asked the user to enter the record number to delete. This is terrible UI design, and asking for trouble already. It did allow you to enter a range, which made things slightly easier. My boss had been happily deleting ranges of records for years, and was comfortable doing so. But he made a mistake. He entered the range backward. The software did not check for this, and couldn't cope with it. It happily started deleting everything. When the deletion (which normaly took a few seconds) was still going over 20 minutes later, he looked and realised what was happening. He immediately turned the computer off (there was no option to stop it or quit).
When we got it back up and running, he tasked me with replacing the missing records. They didn't have a backup, and he didn't want to request access to our records from HMRC, because doing so would have meant admitting to an error.
So, I spent the next 3 months knee deep in shipping paperwork, re-entering the details of all relavant shipments on the computer. The company didn't survive much longer, and ultimately I was rewarded with redundancy a few months later.
RE "Ah, exactly how you'd tell your young offspring *not* to train their private natural language models. The next thing you know, we'll have LLMs exhibiting odd behavior because they were trained on truly warped subreddits."
That bought to mind Grok's recent adventures, along with (and this is going back a bit), Tay.
Not IT related, but I was in Vegas for a wedding in 2006. I had a great time, until I got to the airport. I was just going through security and put my handluggage on the conveyor. The guard was quite polite, and chatty, apart from asking all the normal questions (did you pack your bag etc).
All of a sudden, he stopped, so I went to pick up by bag. All of a sudden, he unclipped his gun, getting his hand into position to use it, and said "Sir, please step away from the bag".
Not surprisingly, I almost crapped myself. As far as I knew, all that was in my back was some washing stuff, a change of underwear and my iPod. All of this was allowed at the time.
Thankfully, the problem was resolved quickly. My friend was a smoker, and he'd accidenally dropped a rather large cigarette lighter in my handluggage that they had detected. When he saw it, the guard/agent was happy with my explanation, but would not allow me to take the lighter on board. I didn't mind this. I don't smoke and, TBH, my friend should have packed the lighter in his luggage.
Being able to patch software relatively easy is a good thing, undoubtedly, but it's also a double edged sword. I think that when they could only update software by sending out new discs (be they CD or floppy), companies did seem to try that bit harder to get things right.
Now, because they have tools that can update software automiatically within a few hours, and with little cost, it seems that they rush things to market a little too quickly.
It's not unheard of even with physical copies of software to have to download tens of gigabytes in patches.
It's the same in the console space. I've heard there are a few games on the PS5 and Xbox where all that is on the disk is a downloader application. I've also heard that the on the Switch 2, some of the game cards don't even have that. They just have some of code that when the Switch reads it, it just downloads that game..
In fairness to apple, that is a problem that isn't specific to car play. It's a problem with all modern cars that make extensive use of touch screens, and while I think touch screens can provide amazing interfaces, any kind of vehicle isn't a good use for them. For the reasons you say. With physical controls, you can use the control without looking at it. With touch screens, this is a little more difficult.
Never had to drill holes in a server rack, but I remember a few years ago working for a Uni. We had a switch in one of our patch panels that was refusing to connect, and just displaying an error light. It *was* end of life, and was eventually replaced, but to get it up and running again, I thought I'd give it a quick reboot. I did, eventually, and it came back up, but not before I'd accidentally unplugged the wrong switch, taking out the connection to two computer labs that were both full, and had lectures booked.
Luckily I was able to get the switch back up and running before any users complained.
This has been going on a while. I saw a scambaiting video a year or so back where the scamer had a very convincing Joe Biden voice and was selling some bitcoin.
Also, the other week, on Youtube, I saw a surprsingly convincing of Kier Starmer walking around a garden, talking to the camera telling me that the UK government recommended I buy some sort of meme coin.
It was obviously fake, because I'm fairly certain the PM isn't allowed to endorse any particular product or service, and no one high up in politics would ever have anything to do with something that could be a scam.
Oh, wait.. Trump has a memecoin. In fairness, that doesn't seem to be a scam. You do get what you pay for, if you pay enough. Time with the President. Now, whether that is legally or morrally right is another matter.
In theory you could, but there is the issue of cost. CPUs cost hundreds, and in the case of higher end ones, thousands of pounds. There is also the problem of finding it. In even a small or medium size datacenter, you may have several machines with multiple CPUs. In a large datacenter, you may have hundreds or thousands of machines with multiple CPUs. How do you find which is affected when any tools you have for detecting viruses would need to run on the infected CPU, so would likely produce incorrect results.
I think the form of the disruption they experienced is largely irrelevant. Hackers gained access to internal systems, and could have done enough damage to bring Harrods (or any company) to it's knees, They could have hacked names and address, what has been ordered, card details. They could have shut down the tills in the stores, and the website. There is also the reputational damage. If people think going to Harrods might cause their card details to be stolen, and ultimately lose them potentially a lot of money, they might be less inclined to go to Harrods.
IT security, done properly, is expensive, and doesn't produce an easily quantifiable benefit (after all, if it's working, you just won't see a difference), but companies need to remember that computers are likely the heart of their business. If they are hacked, it can easily take out the company.
This is a radical idea, I know, but if we (as a race) carry on cutting jobs, are we not going to get to a point where we cannot sustain ourselves economically?
Those 3% of staff Microsoft have cut will all purchase things in their local towns. The people that supply them also have employees, who will also spend money on the local area. That will reduce.
Yes, the money saved will go somewhere. Probably those who are already wealthy in returns on their various investments, but those who are wealthy generally have everything they need, so an extra few million won't make any difference to what they spend. That money will likely sit in accounts, doing nothing for any local economy.
SImilarly, the AI, or other technology Microsoft replace them with will not contribute nearly as much to the economy as thousands of people.
I hate to say this, because I think it will make people think I am some sort of looney left winger or socialist (I am neither), but I think Capitalism has failed in it's current form because it has enabled a few people to horde the bulk of the world's money.
I've dealt with something similar. I was working in a computer lab, and was called to a student workstation because they were trying to use a system we'd set up so they could manage their own accounts on the uni's database server . The student, when he logged in, got the error "Get Back Thickyhead". Feeling rather offended, he came and got me. I apologised for the error, and explained that it didn't mean anything personal. It was just an in-joke within the team. I forget where it came from, or why we did it, but we often jokingly used it amongst the team. I couldn't see why the system was failing, so logged directly on to the admin console and performed the actions the student wanted.
Thankfully, the student was quite happy when I'd finished, and did not put in a complaint.
I went to my colleague, who maintained the system. He explained that it was actually a piece of code that would normally require about 7 things to fail before it was triggered, so the student should not have seen it. Thankfully, he updated the message to say something a little more helpful and less offensive, and also fixed the errors.
He should, but he won't. Despite claiming to be, he appears not to be a free speech absolutist. He often says that if you advocate for free speech, you have to be prepared to hear or read things you don't like. This is correct. However, people who post things on X that Musk doesn't like, tend to disappear. Not banned, but their posts lose visibility. This is subtle, but it is censorship none the less.
It should be noted, however, that when he promised free speech on his services, he did not promise totally free speech. He promised free speech subject to local laws and other government requirements. He did actually say it would be subject to local laws.
Whenever re-install either my work computer or my home computer, I ensure any configs and data that need to be kept are backed up, but when I re-install, I re-install all software from scratch, restoring the backups when I finish.
I also install any software as and when I need it, because my needs change from time to time, so I don't have a massive list of software I install when I re-install the OS.
Re". iPhone users were certainly lost.
Not sure why you highlight iPhone users. All smartphones get through batteries quickly, and even if they didn't, the various mobile networks would not have lasted that long without electricity, so it's likely any mobile phone without satellite facilities was useless.
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