@dalias After the article says this:

"an absolute no-go for the more privacy minded among us, and honestly, it’s hard to blame them. The whole thing is pretty creepy when you think about it."

...they proceed with a video showing their repurposed unit in the original housing.

I appreciate the agency to explore and tinker, but repurposing the bag-of-glass kit for a real function is tempting fate. You think you repurposed the tractor as an ATV without realizing you still have a body-mangling tiller still attached. The people who wrote the reverse-engineered drivers don't know what's really in that silicon AND, yes, you are likely depriving FOSS-respecting hw vendors the chance to grow their business.

It is a false economy.

Putting this in context, I've been recommending routers with Mediatek chipsets because that co. maintains open source drivers for them, and they work great with OpenWRT. No one around here f*cking cares. They want to brag about how their Netgear trash fought them and they won some little victory over it, or maybe go back to the "Oh Nvidia" wailing wall for some predictable Linux commiseration. I think the stupidity is breathtaking.

Based on what I'm seeing, there will be a LOT more pain from the tech sector. None of the various flavors of big tech fetishists are going to stop it or even slow it down.

@dalias Sorry, I don't give much notice to "branch of the thread".

Software isn't going to fix everything that is wrong with a piece of hardware. And part of what's wrong is that people may notice such a surveillance device and assume you have certain intentions. And that people with tech fetishes don't (yet) take those social issues into account.

@dalias @enron @mc_lewis This is founded on the conceit that a machine will only do what you tell it, and not what others (like, hackers) tell it.

Amazing how quickly that notion insinuates itself when "open source OS" is mentioned: The illusion that you control something perfectly. You don't know what surprises are in there or in what respects the cheesy reverse-engineered drivers are lacking.

it's exactly the same situation as any PC or phone.

Just no. And the fact that brands are trying to sell these cheap un-PC-like devices en masse is the main clue. If I slice a mic out of a laptop or phone, it still functions fine when I attach a headset. Do the same on a spy-tchotchke device and its reason for being is gone. The fact that it has been physically streamlined for that role is part of the problem.

@enron @dalias @mc_lewis It is still a wireless microphone connected to the Internet, and you have little-to-no feedback on what its internal state is like (unlike a PC or phone).

Without a hardware cutout switch on the mic, its tempting fate.

@ryanc I'd say not. Reliability is far better than Ext4-on-Thin LVM, and its worst-case throughput scenarios (esp. large container disk image files) have simple workarounds.

Its still fashionable to do benchmarks comparing Btrfs with plain XFS and Ext4. IMO those comparisons only tell you that copy-on-write has a cost. If you want copy-on-write features then Btrfs performance on Linux >6.1 kernels is solid.

There are no more "out of metadata space" oopses as Btrfs will now automatically allocate more mdata space as needed.

Of course btrfs-send is brilliant (better than zfs-send) although there are other backup tools like Wyng that can achieve a similar level of efficiency using the metadata Btrfs makes available.

So let me see if I've got this straight about Bluesky:

Anyone can host their own domain, and their identity on that domain. But the Bluesky org controls the "app view" and also the "bsky.app" domain through which all links to Bluesky content are referenced.

:blobcatthinkingsmirk: :blobthinkingcool:

But.... "you control your identity". Except Bluesky corp can cut it off from the rest of the Internet because web sites must reference the content via 'bsky.app' URLs. So your identity is really '@bsky.app' no matter what screen name says.

:blobcatthinkingsmirk: :blobthinkingcool:

I must be missing something. Please someone explain it to me like I'm in grade school...
#bluesky #bsky #decentralization #techbros

@tchambers Yep, this is all we have, but only about 1M people worldwide can stomach fedi's shortcomings. Almost all of us are some type of Linux/FOSS enthusiast which ought to be a gigantic red flag that something is fundamentally wrong with UX – things I've complained about but no one with any ActivityPub expertise has acknowledged.

TL;dr We are fucked.

@rrb @Gargron Any instance with a conscience would defederate #Threads

@shalien @ErikUden @Gargron Fedi is still too rough around the edges.

For one, people start to gain traction and then it flops because why? Ans: Popular posts become super annoying, recurring in TL dozens or hundreds of times per day..... so people react by muting those users and conversations.

Little if any chance you'll see replies (to other users' threads) from people you follow show up in your TL. Great candidate for a simple "algorithm"; as it stands its just poor engagement.

Picture-only posts where most people can't view the thread, because the only place to click on such posts is a 1px tall line about 3px under the poster's avatar.

Its very sad. Years back I donated money to Mastodon, but there are still UX holes you can drive a truck through and nothing is done about it. UX isn't taken seriously here, so its mainly techies that stick around.

@Infoseepage @appleinsider Tim Cook is in the "coming out of the closet after making Billion$" club. He probably feels he's got more in common with Peter Thiel than any of us.

@rysiek Who is Starlabs? Never heard of them.

@pushcx Also, is the page content being uploaded to Google so they can decide what/where to inject? That is a potential spyware issue.

@vaurora @phire Going by the tone of the article, I would argue that all the apps they feel are necessary aren't actually enhancing that person's life.

Many people still feel like they did in the 2010s, that incorporating an app/service into their life is an act of personal agency and freedom so they habituate to using more and more. But they are learning its actually the opposite of freedom.

In this case, the extent of the damage appears to be that no one is stepping in to offer a clean migration path to a different server. And there is no big-bucks foundation offering to maintain a stable fork.

Rejecting the idea of enshittification, though... that sounds like rejecting a radical perspective. The term appears to the author to stop the conversation, when its really recognizing the underlying societal malady. (And how is calling it "modernity" any better?) If you don't want to talk about SV oligarchy and such, and want technical solutions instead then the conversation is about finding a data store that never goes away (maybe something Velid is what you need).

@jerry @Gargron Honestly, how am I supposed to expand this collapsed post without activating the link to another website?

(This is using /deck mode)

I was curious to see the post, but I don't open random links like this. This seems like a security issue.

@fsf Apple's response to this (from which they indirectly profit) was nothing. No comment...
https://www.404media.co/inside-global-phone-spy-tool-patternz-nuviad-real-time-bidding/

@phiofx Linux is a synecdoche that only techies understand. It can't succeed as a consumer product.

Build a reasonably complete stack on top of the Linux kernel, to the point where apps don't rely much on kernel specifics, and give it a decent default UI. Finally, don't ever refer to it as "Linux". Voila, you'll have something that might evolve into an Android competitor.

@tchambers @rwg A huge problem with not "pre-emptively" defederating is that the federating sites then set a double standard for compliance with the covenant. And that will be resented and fought.

And what we will have in effect is the fediverse flipping its covenant in order to partake in Meta's pattern of attacking marginalized groups. You will be complicit.

@nf3xn @andthisismrspeacock This is a strange way to frame a company like Meta/Facebook. They have a long history and people came here specifically so they could exit the sphere of corporate influence. Trying to sneak it back into our online lives is a threat.

If they have a history, then there is no reason why entities cannot be ethically blocked before they join.

@evacide EFF should be advising their followers to step out of the box that makes them the product. "Harm reduction" my ass.

I am no longer a follower, or a paying member. What I'm seeing lately is both moral and technical decline.

PS - Its hard to see an impact from EFF's fractional "harm reduction" when Google just shoved Chrome users into a new surveillance mode because too many were opting out of the old mode with blockers like uBlock Origin. If your workaround becomes popular, then #Google will react again with yet another scheme. That math won't add up. It is not reasonable to assume that Google is anything less than hostile to privacy at this point, but the EFF's behavior has been mollifying. #chrome

Doubtless your defenders here would dismiss all of this as some kind of FOSS purist pedantry, but it should concern you that their excuses sound like the old Internet Explorer hype of yore. With followers like that, something has gone wrong.

@tomw Worse... the Substack CEO is a longtime Musk associate (and fan).

Be very skeptical of any 'drama' you see between these companies.