I disagree - Outlook is a walled garden of closed standards, and it makes users vulnerable to the whims of Microsoft or dependent entirely on their office ecosystem.

The recent outlook hack with senior accounts hacked and only being informed by Microsoft of the hack 1 year later is a good example.

Outlook is superficially good but essentially big businesses and organisations are locked in to a proprietary system for email and calendars and entirely reliant on Microsoft to keep their data secure.

I’m actually surprised Antitrust laws aren’t used to break up the Office 365 monopoly. Only the teams integration is being challenged but the tight integration between Outlook, Office and OneDrive is monopolistic. Other services could integrate in the same way if Microsoft was forced to open up its APIs, which would be good for competition and customers.

At the moment you pretty much have to go all in with Office or forgo major integration benefits if you want to use different cloud or mail services. Why do you need 1 single provider for office software, mail and cloud storage?

Well they said themselves why there is not a focus on desktop apps: web apps work well. I use proton calendar for my personal calendar. For work I use outlook. For both I access via phone apps or web browser on my desktop.

The big problem with calendar desktop apps is not the apps, it’s how they sync and share. You have either ICS or caldav.

The biggest problem is Microsoft Office. It partially supports ICS and is a nightmare to work with Exchange calendars. Most Microsoft clients (84% apparently) are hosted in Microsoft cloud services, and Microsoft is removing EWS support in 2026 (which Thunderbird is working to support). Microsoft’s own Graph api for cloud access is limited preventing some basic desktop features.

So existing calendar software is fine if you use good services that support standards. Its bad if you’re locked into the proprietary Microsoft ecosystem. Mac calendar tools will hit the same problems in 2026 when EWS support is dropped.

There is basically no incentive to work on these tools with Exchange because its a deliberately walled garden. But Thunderbird and other desktop calendar apps are decent, they just don’t support Outlook/Exchange.

Its on businesses to challenge why Microsoft keeps their data walled within a proprietary system. Security may be an argument but that’s a little flimsy when you see how very senior outlook accounts have been accessed by hackers and Microsoft has been keeping it quiet. Theyve only started contacting people now to tell them their emails maybhave been accessed after a major hack last year. And were talking CEO level account access.

That is then not a technology ready for mass use. That would be McDonalds paying IBM to let it beta test (or alpha test it seems) its software for them.

And the only way to check the order would be to listen to each order and confirm the order is correct - so totally duplicating the AI’s job. It then becomes “what’s the point” for McDonalds?

AI tools at present are broken and not fit for purpose.

AI is and always has been a bullshit technology. Its no where near as capable as its proponents in tech industry have been claiming. Its all driven by greed to feed into a stock price frenzy but its the emperor’s new clothes. In the future it may be something useful but at present even the tools that exist are unreliable and broken.

Self Drive Cars is different, very much a Tesla issue rather than generalised. Tesla has a first move advantage but then Elon Musk blew it by forcing his engineers to cut back on sensors and tech to save money because he knows best. Other self drive manufacturers are doing well and even have licenses to test their fully featured systems in multiple locations.

AI is a generally crap technology (maybe in the future it will be something useful). Self Drive is a generally myself up technology, except at Tesla where they went for the crap unworkable version.

Regardless of the supposed motivations, this is mass surveillance on a scale never seen before. The EU wants to become China 2.0.

Batteries can be replaced. An EV that could run 1 million miles would still need maintenance - I think the point is that they could be designed to last.

Planned obsolescence is so wide spread we don’t even notice it, but lots of products are designed to fail either through cheaper components or deliberately flawed design. That means we have to go and buy a replacement. It is also generally cheaper.

So we either have cheap products that will break or seemingly expensive products but they last for a very long time. But in the long run the cheap products generally cost you more to buy than one expensive product.

Manifest V2 phase out is a big deal, as Google is pushing towards Manifest 3 only. Google’s version of Manifest 3 is hobbled by removing WebRequest blocking which breaks privacy and ad blocking tools - an obvious benefit to Google as an Ad and data harvesting company.

Firefox is implementing Manifest 3 with WebRequest blocking, as well as supporting Google’s hobbled version declarativeNetRequest to allow compatibility with chrome extensions.

True but ultimately this is about ownership - we don’t own our games. We license them - that is what is lost with Steam and DRM, and moving away from physical media.

GOG is an alternative in that you can download and back up the installers for your games (mostly) but even then do you own your ganes?

Nope, a car company with no car design team won’t be making new models.

Tesla shows what’s wrong with capitalism - companies bloat on speculation driven in this case by a show man. Tesla is a house of cards - it squandered it’s first-move advantage, the competition are now building better EVs, and it’s self-drive technology is a lemon because Elon decided to remove all the essential sensors in his solution to reduce cost.

Meanwhile his competitors are getting licenses to self drive and Tesla have jackshit. Robo-taxis are coming but they won’t have the Tesla logo on them.

Tesla is a massively overvalued stock and has been for a long time. When they announced their recent dire sales, the share price actually rebounded because the clown Mush spouted his usual nonsense about the real value in the company - self drive and robo-taxis - but it’s been widely reported for some time that the companies tech is a dud because Musk decided to remove all the expensive components that actually make the technology work. They lost their first-move advantage; their competitors have caught up and surpassed them both on EVs and self-drive tech.

The guy is a joke, the company is a joke.

Makes sense from a business point of view. Why sell to create a new competitor with the same technology and an impregnable market base in the USA?

Better to force US competition to start from scratch.

Either TikTok will win in court and overturn the law (possible), be sold (unlikely) or shut down (likely). I can’t see TikTok being sold being allowed by China, and even selling part of the business just creates a new global competitor to extend out of the US.

Multiple competitors will appear in the meantime hoping to get the displaced activity. TikTok is hugely profitable and a dominant replacement in the US would make a lot of money. This will be seen as an opportunity to make a lot of money for the winner.

I can see Meta trying to make a TikTok like clone, Google trying to leverage YouTube shorts, and Elon Musk trying to revive Vine at Twitter, plus lots of startups (mostly. American but possibly from other nations) vying to win the audience.

Ironically the more interesting battle may be outside the US - TikTok versus whatever US app comes along.

The deadline is after the US election - this could also all be political grandstanding and the politicians expectation might be that the law won’t stand up in court anyway.

Your emails are.more private in the same sense that if you have a letter with something on it, turning it over means someone can’t read it over your shoulder, but they could have read it before it got to you.

Google has access to the contents of your inbox, Proton mail does not. But the protocols are unchanged and unencrypted email is accessible in transit.

So moving to Proton is a definite improvement, particularly as email remains a basic means of communication. But as you say if you wand secure communication then it is very flawed.

Who is going to pay to post on twitter? Not only has he destroyed what was there but he’s stopping any route for growth with new users. Most people won’t bother.

He really has managed to destroy that company with his knee jerk decisions.

The other huge issue is when they confidently tell you incorrect information. If you trust the AI tool you are basically looking at the world through a filter and one that can be wrong.

In a rush for market share these companies have released broken or half baked software.

I worry about a generation of students coming through who don’t know the cardinal rule of researching any topic: go to the source. If you’re casually goofling a topic that may be impractical but you might at least go to a source you trust (such as Wikipedia, although that is also very flawed approach!).

Chat bots add another layer of error and distance from the source, as well as all the censorship and data manipulation we’re seeing.

Yeah absolutely. Even AI as a term has become a crock of shit because it’s been latched on to by companies to market their products in the AI the equivalent of the dotcom boom.

Artificial Intelligence was once a sufficient smterm for Artificial General Intelligence. Now any old algorithm is being labelled AI to sell it.

But the terms don’t matter - the concept is sound but it’s further away than we probably expect because so much crap is being sold to make a quick buck.

Chat-GPT is basically beta software and it is practically useless because it’s inaccurate. You can’t use a tool in business, government or health are when it can be wrong and worse so confidently wrong. It’s an impressive tool but they still haven’t got that working well, let alone any further “advances”.

And blindly throwing data at LLMs and hoping to stumble on AGI is not going to work - crudely that is the approach of much of the cow boy outfits out there claiming to be innovating in AI. That includes big tech companies who have jumped on the bandwagon over the last 18 months.

I don’t have a Mac but I can offer you a viewpoint: in general it is better to compartmentalise your data and if you’re using products by the big tech companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta etc) then to separate date between them as much as possible. In other words, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

If you’re on a Mac, you’re in Apple’s ecosystem. In some ways they provide better privacy as they’re not as dependent on advertising like Google for example, however they do have advertising buisness and are still mining your data and profiling you as it’s their business to sell you stuff whether that’s more Apple hardware or digital content.

So I personally wouldn’t be using all their various apps without knowing in detail what data is going to them. Web browsers, email and calendars are data gold mines, as are anywhere you shop for content such as App stores, music, video etc.

If I were on Apple, I would be using Firefox so as to wall off as much as my data from Apple as possible. I’d also consider Thunderbird for email & calendar to remove Apple from that data trove. I personally also pay for my email service rather than using anything bundled in (i.e. iCloud) - the reason being you’re not beholden to one provider longterm and can access and migrate your data on other devices (e.g. not Apple in the case of iCloud).

Apple tries to sell itself as a bastion of privacy. It’s not - it’s probably a bit better than some of it’s competitors but it still is involved in user tracking and selling data to advertisers. They made a fanfare about letting users disable advertiser tracking on iPhones but what they didn’t make as much noise about is that they actually built the tracking tools in the first place, and they’ve been building their advertising business as the services side of Apple is big money (it’s app store, it’s content etc)

I’m not sure how much better privacy Chromium has; it is “degoogled” by default but that doesn’t mean it’s necessairly more private.

If you wanted better privacy and control then Librewolf is probably the better option - it is Firefox stripped of the telemetry tools, default google search links (which are minimal in Firefox, just default search engine) and privacy hardened (including HTTPS only & default install of Ublock Origin extension)

It’s the first expensive iteration of something that could become viable if costs come down as production scales up.

In fairness to Apple, it’s a powerful device and is the sort of device VR manufacturers are trying to converging towards. Their’s is an all in one unit, with powerful on board processing so it gives high quality VR without tethering. It also has a lot of sensors built in, both negating the need for external sensors and hand control devices.

Compare that to other high end VR, and the competition remains high end tethered devices such as the Valve Index which is an expensive headset, limited to a room with sensors, tethered to a decent gaming PC, and requiring hand controllers to interact with the world. At the other end you have cheaper all-in-one devices like the Quest 2 which try to do what the Vision Pro does to an extent but are too limited techwise due to the price point they’re targetting.

A valve index is about £1k, and a decent gaming PC is about £1-2k depending on how high end you go. The Vision Pro is £2.7k ($3.5k, but pre-tax); more expensive and perhaps offering less than the PC would beyond VR but still not crazy far away numbers wise. And it is offering a paradigm shift towards how VR is likely to be in the future.

All the stuff about it being a “new” device type (“spatial computing”) is marketing nonsense - this is an AR/VR headset but it is one that’s ahead of it’s time as an expensive gamble by Apple to take a stake in the future. Expect a Vision Pro 2 in the next year or two with similar power but a lower price, but also I’d expect other manufacturers such as Meta and Valve to be converging on the same type of device from the other direction. But I’d honestly expect it to be more like 5+ years before such devices with similar specs to the Vision Pro are mass market and “affordable”. Like, £3k for a headset would be a no to me; but £1.5k for something that did that… that’d be expensive but getting into an affordable luxury for me. And is they were convincing around some of the “spatial computing” type productivity apps missing from game centred VR being a UIP, then it’s more like considering a new lap top and a £1.5-2k devices starts becoming a real consideration.

And as an expensive gamble it seems to be paying off. Supposedly 200,000 sold so far at $3.5k a pop - thats $700m in revenue. Even if it’s not massively profitable per device, thats a good user base for such an expensive product and hints this could be something that does well as the price comes down. This is well away from mass market appeal, but I can see a trajectory where this becomes affordable as a luxury computing device first before eventually becoming mass market.

Yeah we’re in the middle of the idiocy of an AI speculative boom. People will try and bend anything to include AI for attention or to make money, and “journalists” will lap up this crap. Bring on the bust.