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> I get that people who are fans of things tend to be blind to the thing's faults.

Wow, there's Obsidian, Kagi, and Apple in a nutshell.


> It’s not even because everyone else's trackpads are fucking garbage (they are). It’s that systems that aren’t macs just weren’t built around using one.

Great news for users depending on accessibility


PSA - A crucial detail about Fastmail's spam filter that should really disclosed more clearly is that your filter is only trained on email you flag from within the web UI. Invoking your email client's "move to spam via IMAP" function does not train the filter.


They're Australian


Australian companies are also subject to the USA Cloud Act. As is the UK, with Canada coming on board soon too.

Even the entire EU is in the process of negotiating the same agreement.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/united-states-and-ca...

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-a...


Your linked information doesn't indicate anywhere that Australia or any other foreign government is subject to US law. The latter states that negotiation with the EU on this topic was suspended in 2019.

Things have changed. With Chinese law in regards to data within Chinese jurisdiction a long-standing thing and an unfriendly American government potentially in power for an extended period, other countries are realizing the importance of data sovereignty.


https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-oia/cloud-act-agre...

> The latter states that negotiation with the EU on this topic was suspended in 2019.

Dated 2023:

> Justice Department and European Commission Announces Resumption of U.S. and EU Negotiations on Electronic Evidence in Criminal Investigations

The negotiations are still ongoing. Canada is further along than the EU.


That is plain wrong, and on top of that, the CLOUD act doesn't really solve anything because if the order to obtain data is legal for the US arm but illegal for the EU arm, releasing the data from say Ireland to the US would immediately lead to steep monetary and legal penalties for the EU arm.


It is not wrong...

You can read the text right here:

https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-oia/cloud-act-agre...

The same agreement is in place with the UK. Canada and EU are currently in the process of negotiating it.


That’s not going to help anyone.

The Five Eyes is an Anglosphere intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries are party to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes


Even being stored in EU doesn't preclude your data from being targeted by signals intelligence. Which is different than requiring US based companies to provide non-US data to American government.

Does fastmail have a US presence? If no - then they're not bound at all by US jurisdiction.


Meanwhile, in realPolitik, they are Australian, they are subject to AU government pressure, and the AU government is deeply intertwined with and compliant to US government wishes, AUKUS, Pine Gap, Harold Holt Sub communications, Over the horizon radar on China, etc.

See: https://roncobb.net/img/cartoons/aus/k5092-on-Tucker_Box-cuu...


> Does fastmail have a US presence? If no - then they're not bound at all by US jurisdiction.

This hasn't been true for several years. All Australian companies (and UK companies) are under jurisdiction of the US Cloud Act. Just the same as American companies are.

https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-oia/cloud-act-agre...


No, it would be a different act in each country.

They didn't even manage to extradite Kim Dotcom for years.


Kim dotcom was extradited from New Zealand, not Australia. They're different places.


They're both Five Eyes


Sure, but the point was that the US doesn't even need to exercise their capabilities under the five eyes treaty. They have a separate Cloud act agreement with Australia already which is a more direct route to get what they want.


The question isn’t whether a service has a presence in the sense of employees or regional office, or headquarters.

The question is: do they office services to residents of said country / state.

If so they may well be subject to certain laws that, if broken, could result in penalties up to an including extradition of the responsible officers.


As an Australian, all I can say is stop being naive.


isn't there this five eyes thingy?


that's surveillance orgs agreeing to cooperate, but they're still just surveillance orgs, all they can do is surveil


For now


everything is for now. If you refuse choices because they'll go to shit in the future, then you must refuse all choices.


I suggest you run this by an actual doctor.


That's not a trick. It's just how you list files. Same awkwardness as any other disk command.


If I recall correctly, for Commodores, the equivalent of the disk operating system was handled by the drive itself. If you wanted to do anything beyond a LOAD or a SAVE, you were effectively opening the device then sending a command to the device. The exception was getting a directory, which used the LOAD command (as described earlier) rather than a dedicated command. In my opinion, it is accurate to describe loading a special file in order to retrieve a directory listing as a trick.

Looking at the Apple II and Commodore 64, I think it is fair to say that while the BASIC environments supported varying degrees of disk command they were quite different from what we think of as command interpreters. With Unix shells, anything you can enter into a shell script can be executed from the command line, and vice versa. If memory serves me correctly, anything that could be done from the MS/PC-DOS command line could be done from a batch file (though I don't recall if the opposite is true).


I did not mean it’s a trick users applied, I meant that the developers of the 1541 DOS implemented this very trick. You load a textual representation of the directory into memory as a BAISC program, that’s pretty funky.

And it was precisely done because the straightforward way, which would have been something like opening a sequential channel with a dedicated directory listing command and reading out from it, would have been immensely awkward under BASIC 2.0. Hence the magic “$” program.


It leads to the catch-22 that when saving a BASIC program you cannot tell which filenames are already in use, since you cannot get a directory listing without losing the current BASIC program in memory. All you can do is guess a filename that is probably free.


“When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”

Well Tim, I suppose the blind do outnumber the handless.


Can confirm.


Nor the Flux Capacitor from Back to the Future.


Nor the famed Good Will Hunting and Argo actor and director, Ben Afflux


Nor the Cartoon Network show (and later movie) Aeon Flux.


I think it originally aired on MTV.


Nor the streaming service Net Flux


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