C’est ne pas une ~~pipe~~ Mona Lisa

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

The lawyers I’ve used have always asked and used encrypted email. I don’t know if that’s regional, but it was taken very seriously here.

Probably greatly depends how old the lawyer is and how big the law firm is.

If it's one older guy, good luck. You're probably better off doing everything by FAX honestly.

How is the primary way of interacting with your computer being good a gimmick?

I try to use my partner’s windows laptop and it’s borderline unusable for me. She only almost uses it with a mouse plugged in. Meanwhile I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone plug in a mouse to a MacBook that wasn’t docked to a monitor and keyboard.

Similar experience, the first thing it did for me was update production data models without a confirmation. It has always shown me the command is going to run and then I confirm.

When most people have a bad experience at a restaurant they never go back, so the harm is hard to quantify until it stacks up.

So two regions declare they want to be closer and your reaction is “we should conquer a couple countries just to show them up”?

This is exactly the problem.

What specifically do you mean “under the wings of the US?”

So the implication is continue doing that?

I’ve always been told don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, and the journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step.

The lesson here is that you can’t rely on the US anymore. Not for military protection, not for defence procurement, and not for trade or supply chain. That legacy has ended entirely by choice of the United States.

The problem has moved beyond monetary trade value and into existential risk.

A few weeks ago my dishwasher broke, flooded the kitchen, and refused to drain. I went to the manufacturer’s website to download the manual so I could drain the basin, except then Cloudflare flagged me as a bot for suspicious activity trying to download the right PDF (there’s the dimensions, spec sheet, installer manual, and user manual) and I couldn’t access the manufacturer’s website anymore.

Ironically, I could get the right manual through an aggregator that scraped appliance manuals and slapped ads on the page.

To me that perfectly encapsulated the issue. Clearly the manufacturer wants owners to have access to manuals, that’s why they have the portal. But due to bots, they pay an intermediary to hold their site ransom from users. And then the bots still clearly can access it anyways.

Cloudflare has gotten out of hand for me lately. Not even solving a challenge will get me through many times, I'll just get straight up blocked from normal browsing. I guess because I do crazy things like use Firefox and block some trackers I get punished more than the average internet user.

I don't like the way things are heading. The free and open internet might be fully dead before we realize it.

The manufacturer does not known there is a problem. You will be counted as a bot in Cloudflare's reporting, and most people do not question that.

Why does the manufacturer need to block bots? The information is only useful to their customers. Its not like a site trying to profit from content.

They already knew to drain the basin. Control-F in a PDF is way less annoying than watching a 9 minute long (for the algorithm) YT video.

Sure, you can search the video transcript... but all the YT video is doing is regurgitating the manual.

This was my thinking. It seemed easier to find the exact instructions for my dishwasher and most of the advice available was for newer models that had different control layouts.

Plus, the repair manual is full of flowcharts for diagnosing and resolving issues, which is very useful.

I've yet to find a video as straightforward as the manual. Not only do you need to find a video with the right information, you need to find where within the video that information is.

Also, videos are one-dimensional, whereas print materials are two-dimensional, so finding things is much faster.