Happy cake day, banana!

the official app tries to not be killed by Android woth the usual tricks (permanent notification, disabling battery optimisation)

…

You can (theoretically) control how often locations are tracked and sent but for me was using the location service constantly and draining battery quite a bit.

Ah. Those are exactly what I was worried about. It’s not able to just happen entirely in the background the same way Google’s feature does, then? Kind of automagically?

But not exactly how the app works. If it’s a Strava-like app you have to remember to run in the foreground, the value is a lot lower to me than something that either uses or replicates GPS’ automatic background behaviour.

How exactly does it work from your phone’s perspective? Does it hook into Google Play Services location data? Do you need to install a different low-level application that replicates that functionality? (If so, what’s the battery life impact like?) Does it need a foregrounded app?

I’m really interested in this, because like the author I’m really upset at Google killing yet another incredibly useful feature. But the article is a little light on details.

The front of it presumably is. But the back, that we’re looking at, seems to be in shade.

What room? It looks like we’re looking at the back of an object that’s facing out into bright sunlight.

“both sides”

One side is committing genocide.

The other side are an oppressed people fighting for their basic human rights.

Yes, there are civilian deaths on both sides, and that is lamentable. But to imply that it is anywhere near an equal conflict or that both sides are anywhere near equally to blame is completely ignorant of the facts.

I’m usually pretty good at shifting between the two ways to perceive optical illusions. But for this one I cannot see anything but white and gold. Even knowing that it’s actually blue and black, I still see it as that.

am I part of the joke here??? It’s clearly blue and black…

The objective fact is…it is a blue and black dress. Other photos of the same dress show that.

But I cannot, for the life of me, see how anyone can possibly get that from this photo. Sample the RGB values all you want and it clearly is not black in this photo. The exposure and white balance have messed around with it so much it is incomprehensible to me how anyone can see it as blue and black.

fyi you can put alt text on an image by putting it between the square brackets

![alt text here](url here)

Might not be a great option for long and detailed alt texts describing all the text in a comic, but for something simple like this it’s much more convenient for people with screen readers.

That’s definitely at least a 2nd rank spell.

In Australia we call them “seppos”. Short for “septics”, which comes via rhyming slang from “yank” -> “tank” -> “septic tank”.

Reread the comment you replied to. Not one word of it was in there accidentally.

Oh yes, that’s a very good point, actually. That actually seems such a fundamental use case that you could almost justify it being available without a permission.

No u in Qantas. It’s an acronym. The Q stands for Queensland.

Maybe, but I’d like to see a concrete example of how they are “designed to talk to each other” that couldn’t be achieved by the extension just reading the DOM.

I agree with you about dropdown menus being something that could/should be natively available to HTML, but I’m less convinced about form submission. Sure, if we assume everything is happy path it’s a great idea, but a system needs to be robust enough to handle a variety of cases. Maybe you want to redirect a user to a log-on page if they get back a 401, or present an explanation if they get a 403. A 5XX should usually display some sort of error message to the user. A 201 probably needs to add an element into the page, while a 200 might do nothing, or might alter something on the page.

With the huge range of possible paths and desired effects, it pretty quickly becomes apparent that designing an HTML & CSS–only spec that can meet the needs is infeasible. There’s definitely a case to be made that JavaScript has become too powerful and can do too many potentially dangerous or privacy-invading things. And maybe a new range of permissions could be considered to limit a lot of that at a more fundamental level. But what we’re talking about here with the form submission stuff is the real bare-bones basic stuff JavaScript was designed to make easier—alter the contents of web pages on the fly in response to user actions. And it’s really, really good at that.

• Your operating system
• Your CPU architecture

Agree. No reason they should have this.

• Your JS interpreter’s version and build ID

I can see a reasonable argument for this being allowed. Feature detection should make this unnecessary, but it doesn’t seem to be fully supported yet.

• Plugins & Extensions

This is clearly a break of the browser sandbox and should require explicit permission at the very least (if not be blocked outright…I’m curious what the legitimate uses for these would be).

• Accelerometer and gyroscope & magnetic field sensor

Should probably be tied to location permission, for the sake of a simple UX.

• Proximity sensor

Definitely potential legitimate reasons for this, but it shouldn’t be by default.

• Keyboard layout

As someone who uses a non-QWERTY (and non-QWERTY-based) layout, this is one I have quite a stake in. The bottom line is that even without directly being able to obtain this, a site can very easily indirectly obtain it anyway, thanks to the difference between event.code and event.key. And that difference is important, because there are some cases where it’s better to use one or the other. A browser-based game, for example, probably wants to use event.code so the user can move around based on where WASD would be on a QWERTY keyboard, even though as a Dvorak user, for me that would be <AOE. But keyboard shortcuts like J and K for “next”/“previous” item should usually use event.key.

There could/should be a browser setting somewhere, or an extension, that can hide this from sites. But it is far too useful, relative to its fingerprinting value, to restrict for ordinary users.

how sensors are used to fingerprint you, I think it has to do with manufacturing imperfections that skew their readings in unique ways

It’s also simple presence detection. “You have a proximity sensor” is a result not every browser will have, so it helps narrow down a specific browser.

Idgi

drawing a square in thr corner doesn’t make it 90°

No, it doesn’t, but it does mean that, for the purposes of your 6th grade geometry question, you can assume the angle is a right angle. Even if it visible looks like 45°, if they put a square there, that’s 90.

More to the point though, a radius of a circle always meets the circumference at 90 degrees. All the squares in this problem are doing is telling you “this line, if it were continued, would be the radius of the incomplete circle”.