Could you do it? Give up your iPhone and depend on just an Apple Watch? “Loup Ventures went phoneless last week. That is, some of the Loup team turned off our iPhones for a full week and only used Apple Watches for connectivity. It was freeing. And frustrating.”  There’s a lot of substance in this report, including a discussion of the “Eisenhower matrix” a “four-quadrant graph … meant to help people analyze where they’re spending time.” Fascinating stuff.

Pando is the world’s biggest organism. It’s a forest made up of genetically identical aspen trees numbering 47,000. Scientists think it’s anywhere between 80,000 and 1 million years old. And humans are slowly killing it.

“People are at the center of that failure,” Paul Rogers, an ecologist Utah State University who co-authored the paper, told Earther. Nearby ranchers have allowed their cattle to roam and snacked voraciously on young stems, and as human populations have grown in the area, deer hunting has decreased for safety reasons. But thriving deer populations wreck havoc on young aspen stems. For the past 40 years, it appears the root system has not been able to reproduce fast enough to keep up with the decimation.

CAN 2018 GET ANY WORSE? GET YOUR SH*T TOGETHER HUMANITY!

Chat app Discord recently updated its terms of service to prevent users from suing the company.

In a section of the terms of service titled “Dispute Resolution,” Discord asserts that “most disputes can be resolved without resorting to arbitration.” Any Discord user wishing to raise issue with the company must now provide “notice of the dispute,” which includes “a brief, written description of the dispute, the relief requested and the contact information of the party giving it.”

The policy goes into effect on Oct. 23. Those wishing to opt out will have 30 days to send a notice to Discord.

Why do I have a dark feeling that Discord will announce a data breach within the next six months? If that happens, users can’t sue Discord for mishandling their data.

Louis Rossman, a computer repair technician in New York City, recently made a YouTube video accusing Apple of using U.S. Customs to seize his shipment of Mac batteries.

“Make no mistake. I am not an Apple customer I do not take to being ripped off nicely. I don’t care if I have to spend $50,000 in legal fees, to get back my $1000 worth of batteries. This is principle. Apple, you are not going to get away with this. And don’t think I don’t notice the timing on this stuff,” explains an angry Rossmann.

I think the situation is a little odd. I watched the video, which you can find here. It sounds like Mr. Rossman got the batteries from China. He doesn’t outright say they aren’t counterfeits, he just implies it. But if they are counterfeits, then U.S. Customs is just upholding the law. If the batteries are genuine, he should explicitly state that.

Leonid Bershidsky writes how you can avoid Google data collection by not using the company’s two biggest tools: Search and Chrome.

Ditching Chrome and Search, however, is an easy way to reduce the amount of information Google gets, essentially without users’ informed consent despite its pro forma compliance with European regulations.

Google says it uses the data collection of Chrome and Search to subsidize other products. Well, if the company is willing to charge phone manufacturers for those products, why not end users? Putting a price on the Google apps, against a promise of no data collection, would quickly show which of them are viable.

I really think Google should offer a paid tier for all of its services. And have the paid tier be free of advertising and data collection. Otherwise it’s eventually going to get regulated into the dirt like Microsoft in the 90s.