Gross. I didn’t know that. I do occasionally use AirBnB. I’m aware of their impact on the rental market, so I favor hotels most of the time. But there have been a few occasions in recent years where I was traveling in a larger group and an AirBnB made more sense. But no more of that.

I looked in to this a little, and Joe Gebbia is no longer the CEO, but he is still on the board. Still a good enough reason to boycott.

They could just deny access without verification. But thinking more broadly there’ll certainly be ways to fool the system. But, shouldn’t have to in the first place.

There are a few qualifiers here. It’s for some users in UK and Australia trying to access sensitive content. And it sounds like it’s reaction to laws against youth under 16 accessing social media. In Australia, anyway. So the scope is currently fairly limited.

Should we be worried that this will pave the road for larger privacy abuses? Yes, of course we should. That scenario feels likely, in my opinion.

Is this enough to convince my friends to use a different platform? Not yet.

It’s a novel idea. But despite the article’s claims this is not a practical alternative to a laptop in planes, coffee shops, etc. Nor is a minipc inherently more serviceable than a laptop as others have pointed out.

For traveling, if it’s a longer trip, it almost makes sense to me as you’d have it set up for a while. Though I’d do a mini ITX system. The ones with external power supplies and no drive bays or expansion slots are pretty small. But even then, I don’t feel like this would be significantly better than a laptop. And that’s a lot to buy for a niche use case.

Edit: spelling and grammar