Biden did get some new appointees on the board: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/people/2022/05/usps-board-is-now-mostly-biden-picks-following-latest-senate-confirmations/ but i’m not sure what the hold up is now.

edit: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/07/25/president-biden-announces-nominees-4/ more recent additional nominees.

Price fixing is a problem because of the power imbalance between businesses selling products, and individual consumers that need to buy them.

Worker unions are a solution to that power imbalance.

Delta Chat just a clever chat interface over SMTP/IMAP, and thusly every user can use their own mail server for sending + receiving messages. Any encryption is between the end devices, and to cooperate, they’d have to produce a compromised build that leaks those keys.

https://pairdrop.net is FOSS, cross platform, realtime, peer-to-peer, and only needs a browser. You can host your own version if you prefer. In contrast, Firefox Send (also FOSS) was ‘asynchronous’ (you could upload, and then email a link), but it was shut down due to abuse. https://github.com/timvisee/send is a fork of the archived github project that you can self host with many improvements, notably authentication, so only yourself and trusted users can upload. (edit: wrong link for ff send)

Here’s the REAL reason: Apps grant Developers/Content owners more control/metrics/data about the user to feed their advertisers, which translates to more revenue. It’s way easier to hoover up data about the user outside of the browser sandbox, and in apps.

If it’s a secure enough environment, I imagine that there will be monitoring on the device, and the moment a hub shows up that’s not supposed to be there, or any other USB device tree that doesn’t match the approved list, , alarm bells ought to go off. If it’s valuable enough; the attack would be to use a passive device picking up leaky signals on the wire, or even hidden camera watching screen/keyboard.

TOR needs to have a lot of ‘background noise’ legit use, otherwise the folks needing to hide in the weeds stick out like a sore thumb.

How were you playing the sound? (What software)

Was the phone plugged in @ the same time?

If you repeat the setup/performance, does it stop again? If it was plugged into the mains like your keyboard, A transient voltage anomaly might be to blame?