IcedRaktajino

After dying a painful death at the hand of the iPhone’s revolutionary capacitive touchscreen, the QWERTY smartphone is rising up from the graveyard this year.

Whether it’s nostalgia for a physical keyboard, frustration at iOS’s ever-worsening software keyboard, or just plain boredom with glass slabs, companies are rebooting QWERTY phones this year for some reason.

At CES 2026:

• Clicks, the company behind the Clicks keyboard case and the new Power Keyboard, announced plans to sell the Communicator, a “second phone” with a QWERTY keypad
• Unihertz also teased a new phone with a physical keyboard. The Titan 2 Elite seems to be a less gimmicky version of the Titan 2, which itself was a BlackBerry Passport knockoff but with a bizarre square screen on the backside.

[T]wo QWERTY phone announcements in this still very new year suggest there may be some kind of trend. Maybe after 19 years of the iPhone and touchscreens defining the mobile experience, it’s time to go back to the physical keyboard and its more tactile typing.

My electric rate got hiked again.

I'm already planning a ~7 KW solar setup in the spring but I may see if I can go bigger and sooner.

CBS cannot contain the online spread of a “60 Minutes” segment that its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, tried to block from airing.

The episode, “Inside CECOT,” featured testimonies from US deportees who were tortured or suffered physical or sexual abuse at a notorious Salvadoran prison, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. “Welcome to hell,” one former inmate was told upon arriving, the segment reported, while also highlighting a clip of Donald Trump praising CECOT and its leadership for “great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games.”

Weiss controversially pulled the segment on Monday, claiming it could not air in the US because it lacked critical voices, as no Trump officials were interviewed. She claimed that the segment “did not advance the ball” and merely echoed others’ reporting, NBC News reported. Her plan was to air the segment when it was “ready,” insisting that holding stories “for whatever reason” happens “every day in every newsroom.”

But Weiss apparently did not realize that the “Inside CECOT” would still stream in Canada, giving the public a chance to view the segment as reporters had intended.

Critics accusing CBS of censoring the story quickly shared the segment online Monday after discovering that it was available on the Global TV app. Using a VPN to connect to the app with a Canadian IP address was all it took to override Weiss’ block in the US, as 404 Media reported the segment was uploaded to “to a variety of file sharing sites and services, including iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent,” including on the recently revived file-sharing service LimeWire. It’s currently also available to stream on the Internet Archive, where one reviewer largely summed up the public’s response so far, writing, “cannot believe this was pulled, not a dang thing wrong with this segment except it shows truth.”

...

As Americans scrambled to share the “Inside CECOT” story, assuming that CBS would be working in the background to pull down uploads, a once-blacklisted tool from the early 2000s became a reliable way to keep the broadcast online.

On Reddit, users shared links to a LimeWire torrent, prompting chuckles from people surprised to see the peer-to-peer service best known for infecting parents’ computers with viruses in the 2000s suddenly revived in 2025 to skirt feared US government censorship.

“Yo what,” one user joked, highlighting only the word “LimeWire.” Another user, ironically using the LimeWire logo as a profile picture, responded, “man, who knew my nostalgia prof pic would become relevant again, WTF.”

Re-bawks