Yep. My work requires some Windows programs, and I run them on a separate Windows machine I got for cheap. The only policy I have is no personal computing on Windows, and I keep it disconnected from the internet permanently. That OS is creepy af.
I’ve found many startups are merely “investments” by some entrepreneur that were intended from inception, whether explicitly or not, to be grown to a sufficiently negotiable state and sold to the biggest buyer. That’s not to say that big tech companies don’t buy-out their competition, but many startups also dream of being bought-out.
I don’t put much value on the content on Wikipedia anyway. Most of it is written by only a tiny percentage of accounts, that have so many contributions that they may well be state/corporate actors. It has come up time and again that glowies of all colors edit Wiki pages.
Did they do anything about the cartridges yet? Some printers detect when cartridges have been refilled by the user and are programmed to stop working then. That’s not just with HP printers, but across the board. Even at consumer level, the prices of a cartridge is criminal compared to a bottle of inkjet ink, with enough for many dozen refills.
Cartridge: $50
10 fl oz of printer ink: $12
Of course she wouldn’t lie to anyone. Just wait 'til your totally safely kept money becomes programmable by central banks, regulating where you can spend it, when you can spend it, what you can spend it on, and builds a neat profile of yourself linking every single activity you do, online and offline. We wouldn’t want any terrorists or bad citizens to be out there now, would we? /s
It’s slowly extending to tangible things too. Based on the trends, it may end up that you’ll no longer own a house, car, bike, tools, clothes, or anything else, but just rent them. Anything you use won’t be as a product, but as a service.
I would like products to come back to me as the original designer and manufacturer, and once you get your head around that notion, why would I actually sell you the product if you are primarily interested in the benefit of the product? Maybe I can stay the owner of the product and just sell you the benefit as a service. – Philips Electronics CEO, Frans Van Houten, 2016
You will own nothing, and be happy.
I agree. I think for most the answer may be a mix of complacency, convenience, and conforming to the norm.
Free software and the FSF. When the Snowden leaks came out, they weren’t news to me – just confirmation.
This has been around for a very long time. I’m always surprised that more people haven’t heard of it.
Yes, this is the crux of LineageOS. There is a fork called DivestOS that is more libré and reduces dependence on Google services, as well as having bootloader re-locking for some devices.
Google does this time and again, and a workaround always gets released eventually. Then again YouTube has been steadily going downhill these past several years, so maybe it’s for the best.
Fedora users are just “beta testers” for Red Hat’s main distro, RHEL, and it really did feel like it. I started on Fedora and moved on swiftly after finding better distros.
Firefox? That’s a strange way to spell LibreWolf.
I don’t think it’s simply “left wing” being the problem any more, at least not the classical left. I’m generally left-leaning libertarian yet over the past few years (particularly since 2020) I’ve been called far-right, far-left, and every “-ist” and “-ism” in between, by people in various places. I think people in general have become “woke”, childish, and tribal – incapable of comprehending a point of view other than what is fed to them. One could see the mass downvoting without discourse as a minor form of “cancel culture”. These things are reflected in the general state of politics at large in many countries, also contributing to their decay.
OSMAnd is very good, with a lot of features, but lately I have been using Organic Maps. It has fewer features but is SO MUCH FASTER when rendering maps.
I remember Sony forcing everyone to use their proprietary SonicStage software and proprietary ATRAC3 audio file format with their Mini Disc players. Nothing else would work on their products. Thank goodness big industries don’t influence governments worldwide, or we’d be heading into some kind of dystopia DRM-laden in every aspect of our lives. Oh wait…
Mysterium looks pretty interesting, being completely decentralized. All the mainstream VPNs are pretty shady to me, being run in a centralized manner and some heavily marketed by “influencers”.
You do realize that RHEL is open source, right? The “pirating” has already been done by RockyLinux (formerly CentOS).
Do you actually have anything to say? Or did you only want to point out that you think I’m an AI (lmao)?