> Genuinely interested: how good does the screen have to be for mimicking text on paper? I have a Kindle from around 2013, I don't think I would ever need a better quality?
The 300 DPI screens are a nice step up, as are the variable colour-temp backlights.
Even disregarding fingerprinting, a single household doesn't have enough traffic from separate devices/users to the same servers to really matter from a privacy standpoint.
If my PC uses the same IP as my partner's to talk to Google, it hardly matters for our privacy if they mix up the attribution of traffic between the two of us.
Speak for yourself. I also don't want it to be readily apparent how many different devices I have, or when I'm using which one, or how many people are in the household, or when who is home.
Granted any service that I consistently interact with is likely to be able to figure out at least some of that information if they put in some effort. But I don't want to be freely providing a complete picture for zero effort.
Creepy data aggregator stories pop up on the HN front page regularly so hopefully I don't need to explain why I feel this way.
Yeah, I mean, I share those concerns in general, but my efforts are mostly centered around aggressive ad/tracker-blocking (moderate DNS-level blocking at the network level, more aggressive at the device level + browser-level blocking) and the avoidance of non-privacy-focused services, e.g. avoiding the popular social networks entirely, and using privacy-supporting pay-for services.
Using the same IP for all of my devices, for me, generally falls into the same bucket of anti-fingerprinting techniques that are used by the Tor Browser like letterboxed resolution that I don't find practical for general use. If I want to actually prevent fingerprinting by IP, resolution, etc. then I'll actually use the Tor Browser.
> From outside there's 1 IP address. With IPv6, every device would get it's own address outside. Why do I want that? That sounds less private to me. Am I mis-understanding something? Lots of traffic on one IP address sounds more obfuscated than all separate.
Having recently enabled IPv6 for my home network, the "why" was that a) IPv6 to IPv6 connections are nominally more efficient than those that have to traverse NAT and b) it enables connectivity to/from IPv6-only internet devices.
The privacy upsides of a single IPv4 IP for a household are, to me, more marginal than the above benefits.
> Everywhere there is state/municipal owned utilities it's almost always considerable cheaper than private.
Not everywhere, it's really the regulation that matters, not just the ownership - here in Alberta we've got a market where we get municipally-owned utilities where we still get high rates comprising of energy fees + transmission fees + distribution fees.
> This is like saying, "I bought a car and don't drive it." -- which people do.
Well, it is, but in the same sense, if you own a car for a long time and don't drive much, your per-km costs end up high (due to car components wearing out from age rather than mileage) and your essentially fixed costs (insurance, etc.) end up proportionally greater compared to truly variable (gasoline, etc.) costs.
And if you really don't drive much, you get additional problems; the typical recommendation is to drive a car a minimum of a continuous 20 minutes every couple weeks.
Asides from Steam, consider one of the biggest markets for displaying text on the Windows OS - low-end office PCs. My entire company runs on Dell’s cheapest 24” 1080p monitors. I don’t expect that will change until Dell stops selling 1080p monitors.
4G and 5G can use the same frequencies, but they don't coexist on the same frequencies like the different revisions of WiFi can.
5G can also operate on additional higher frequencies than regular 4G deployments. But often a lot of 5G you see deployed are in the same 700-1900MHz-ish kind of range.
I dunno, it makes conceptual sense. Networks infrastructure is largely commodity utilities where duplication is effectively a waste of resources. e.g. you wouldn't expect your home to have multiple natural gas connections from competing companies.
Regulators have other ways to incentivize quality/pricing and can mandate competition at levels of the stack other than the underlying infrastructure.
I wouldn't expect that "only a single network" is the right model for all locations, but it will be for some locations, so you need a regulatory framework that ensures quality/cost in the case of a single network anyway.
IMO this can be neatly solved with a peer-to-peer market based system similar to Helium
https://www.helium.com/mobile.
(I know that helium's original IoT network mostly failed due to lack of pmf, but idk about their 5G stuff)
Network providers get paid for the bandwidth that flows over their nodes, but the protocol also allows for economically incentivizing network expansion and punishing congestion with subsidization / taxing.
You can unify everyone under the same "network", but the infrastructure providers running it are diverse and in competition.
The 300 DPI screens are a nice step up, as are the variable colour-temp backlights.
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