heise online: “EU launches its own DNS service with practical functions”

The EU now offers its own DNS resolution service (Resolver) and wants to help its citizens to become less dependent on offers from large US companies such as Cloudflare and Google. The service is called DNS4EU and pre-filters internet addresses at the user’s request: In addition to phishing and fraud sites, it blocks websites and advertising that are harmful to minors.

A DNS resolver is one of the almost invisible basic services for stable Internet access: it works in the background, usually at the provider, and ensures that Internet addresses such as www.heise.de are translated into IP addresses such as 2a02:2e0:3fe:1001:7777:772e:2:85. However, in many countries – including Germany –, blocking orders by lobby associations or youth protection authorities are often implemented at DNS level. For this reason and for reasons of speed, users often make do with alternative providers such as Google, which not only uses one of the most beautiful IP addresses with the resolver 8.8.8.8, but also answers over a trillion queries a day. Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) and Quad9 (9.9.9.9) also operate open resolvers. The problem is that many of these servers are located in the USA, which is why the Quad9 consortium has already moved its headquarters to Zurich.

Dr. Christopher Kunz

Good to see the European Union taking – albeit small – steps towards that elusive digital sovereignty and autonomy from US-based companies. While far from the flashy headlines about AI and quantum, DNS over HTTPS improves user privacy and security by preventing eavesdropping and manipulation of DNS data by man-in-the-middle attacks.

Authentication issues in Adobe Digital Editions

Since the start of the pandemic back in 2020 and the sudden shift to working from home, I have found myself reading far less than before. On one hand I had lost my regular reading time slot, during my commute to and from work on my Kindle, on the other it felt that the real world delivered a whole lot more excitement than before, and fiction couldn’t quite keep up with that. And of course, there are so many more things competing for your time, from TV series to games.

But lately I have joined a new book club, an offshoot of my circle of photographers in Bucharest. Since our next book selection is a work I had already read years ago (and reviewed here), I wanted to read it again. I had it as an e-book, purchased in the Romanian edition from a local publisher. The ePub file, as with most e-books not published in the Kindle store, is DRM-protected, and to activate it and read the book you need Adobe Digital Editions installed. As I have switched laptops since the last time I’ve read ePub files, I hadn’t installed Digital Editions yet on the new laptop, so I downloaded and installed it to get things going.

The Wall Street Journal: “T-Mobile to buy Ryan Reynolds’ Mint Mobile in $1.35 Billion Deal”

Ryan Reynolds used his celebrity and wit to build Mint Mobile into a low-cost competitor in the crowded wireless business.

Now, the Hollywood star and his backers are cashing in: selling the upstart brand to T-Mobile US Inc. in a cash and stock deal valued at up to $1.35 billion. Mr. Reynolds owns roughly 25% of Mint Mobile, according to people familiar with the matter. That means he stands to personally receive more than $300 million in cash and stock from the transaction.

---

Mint Mobile resells service using T-Mobile’s network, so the deal will save costs but doesn’t bring new customers to T-Mobile. The companies didn’t disclose how many customers Mint Mobile has.

Over the long term, we’ll also benefit from applying the marketing formula Mint has become famous for across more parts of T-Mobile, T-Mobile Chief Executive Mike Sievert said.

It gives T-Mobile another prepaid brand, along with Metro by T-Mobile and Connect by T-Mobile, that caters to lower-income users. Mint charges as little as $15 a month. T-Mobile ended 2022 with about 21.4 million prepaid subscribers.

Will Feuer & Lauren Thomas

I’m not sure why this piece of news popped up recently on the Vergecast – the deal itself was struck more than two years ago, and completed last year – but I found it very indicative of the American economy. Mint Mobile has always operated as a MVNO on T-Mobile’s network, meaning that Mint did not own any wireless infrastructure, instead leasing access to T-Mobile’s towers and spectrum to provide service to its customers. So essentially Ryan Reynolds took T-Mobile’s services, put a different label on them, used his fame to attract customers, then sold this thing back to the owner for a hefty profit!

The Cut: “Why Don’t We Dream about Our Smartphones?”

I asked Alice Robb, author of the forthcoming book Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey, to explain our phones’ relative absence from our dreams, and she introduced me to what’s called the “threat simulation hypothesis” of dreaming. [This theory] basically suggests that the reason why we dream is that dreams allow us to work through our anxieties and our fears in a more low-risk environment, so we’re able to practice for stressful events, says Robb. This hypothesis also posits that because our dreams are an evolved defense mechanism, we tend to dream more often about fears and concerns that were relevant to our ancestors — so, less about, say, hacking, and more about running from wild animals. People tend not to dream quite as much about reading and writing, which are more recent developments in human history, and more about survival related things, like fighting, even if that has nothing to do with who you are in real life, says Robb.

While the threat simulation hypothesis can be interpreted to support the tweet that started this whole thing, Robb tells me there’s also evidence to suggest it’s not totally accurate. (Shocking.) For instance, analyzing data from more than 16,000 dream reports, researchers have shown that cell phones appear in 3.55 percent of women’s dreams (and 2.69 percent of men’s) — not a huge number, but it’s higher than the frequency with which movies (3.18 percent), computers (1.2 percent), and airplanes (1.49 percent) appear in our dreams.

Katie Heaney

I’ve never really thought about this before seeing someone share a LinkedIn article on the topic, but I have also never dreamt about my smartphone! Or at least I don’t recall in case I have.