True, and then there’s the other side of the coin. Federation exposes you to trolls, nazis, and doxxing.

No we don’t. We need small instances, each with their own specific topics and communities that DO NOT share your information far and wide, like the fediverse does. I don’t think the fediverse model is the way forward.

They should give MLS to the Mozilla Foundation in that case.

This sucks big time. Many users of custom mobile phone ROMs are concerned with privacy, and use Mozilla Location Services as an alternative to Google. Not sure what other options are available right now.

Edit: The more I’m reading about this, the more absolutely fucked up it is. There really are no viable alternatives. Mozilla is going to just take all its collected data offline, and that’s that. Given that they accept monetary donations from the public, they should make the information public for download even if they don’t want to host the service anymore. Unbelievable.

Supposedly a Cisco software update went wrong and took everything down for a while. That’s the rumor.

FFS lay off the artificial intelligence bullshit. I don’t want or need machine learning in my fucking browser. I tell it where to go, and it goes there. This is not a problem that needs solving. There had better be a way to turn this garbage off.

Just checked the website. VoLTE is not supported at all, and there’s no aGPS, so I don’t see much of a reason to use this as a phone operating system. Maybe for just a mobile data device.

Good questions, particularly about the LTE. If you’re in the USA and not running a stock ROM, and not using a Pixel phone, there’s a good chance that VoLTE is not going to work. So you’ll have 4G data, but no voice calling.

Can’t find it now, but I believe I originally read about it in here: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1alzzep/exclusive_mozilla_names_new_ceo_as_it_pivots_to/

Probably. And that’s why I hesitate to use it.

They subcontract it out to a third party, who’s name I’m forgetting, that doesn’t have a great reputation.

This is helpful. Thanks.

And yet the fediverse has the opposite problem. You can never trust that something you deleted has actually been deleted on other servers.

I take my ill-gotten gains and fuck off to another country, perhaps the USA, and buy up a small little-known automotive start up that has some promising IP. When my car company is bigger than all the others combined, I don’t spread the love around, but instead allow them all to stew in the juices of their mistakes. While I’m at it, I might buy a social media company and do everything possible to run my entire empire into the ground.

I have a fantasy where I’m a powerful executive at Volkswagen. I’m in a meeting where this idea is presented. I ask who thought of it. Someone raises their hand. I smile broadly. I ask who else thinks it’s a good idea. Others raise their hands. I call security and have all those people escorted out of the building. Those of us who remain set about manufacturing small, efficient & affordable electric vehicles with manual windows & door locks, and a not a single touchscreen anywhere. The End

I’m absolutely with you. Having run face-first into MongoDB more than once, I finally learned not to trust the hype around these things.

What an absolute shitshow this is going to be. If I want a digital assistant, I’ll get one. Keeping concerns separate is what has always worked. This reads like Elon wanting X to be the “everything app”. That ship has already sailed. The web is the everything app. Back when the web was new, you had AOL and Yahoo wanting to be the “gateway” to everything. How did that work out? My gateway to everything is my bookmarks folder. I don’t want AI in anything I use locally unless I explicitly enable it and ask for assistance. IMHO, this is the reason so many digital assistants have failed (especially Microsoft’s); because they tried to anticipate your needs rather than STFU and stay out of the way.

I’m old.

/rant

Good. I hope SMS Messenger happens next.

It’s a fork of LineageOS. Not sure how excited about it I’d be. Willing to give it a try tho.

First choice: Get a used new(ish) Pixel and flash Graphene OS. Second choice: Get a used older Pixel and flash Lineage OS.

Got it.

Didn’t know I could do that. Gonna change it now.

I use Brave Browser (with Ublock Origin and AdBlock) and rarely have any issues.

You don’t have issues because Brave is based on Chromium, which is basically Chrome.

I seem to remember reading that Google is purposely degrading the YouTube experience on Firefox. Don’t know if it’s true, but it sure seems that way.

I love it. Used it for years. But it really hasn’t worked properly for the past maybe three years now. Read some of the reviews on Google Play. The F-Droid version misbehaves the same way. I’ve considered forking and working on it myself, but I don’t know enough.

This is particularly bad because there are really no reliable open-source SMS apps anymore.

Nice. Not a lot of people remember this. I miss it, actually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)

I’ve used Firefox since it was called Mosaic. I’ve never not used some form of the browser that eventually became Firefox.

an X-cretion.

And when support ends, if there is any sort of lock on the firmware, it must be removed so the aftermarket can service the device. They should do cars next.

I don’t doubt you, I just don’t need features like that. I’m not a gamer and don’t think I’ve ever run a monitor above 60Hz in my life.

I prefer HDMI because it’s simple and it just works. When I plugged my current monitor in via DisplayPort, if the PC was sleeping, the monitor would wake up every two minutes or so, look for a signal, then go back to sleep. Very annoying. I figured this was some poor implementation in the drivers (linux). Regardless, when I got rid of the DP cable and connected via an HDMI cable, everything worked fine. I’m not a gamer, btw.

I wish I could find this again, but I read an old article where someone proposed paper ballots that are given a unique ID number. They are marked in the middle by the voter, then scanned to be counted electronically, then part of the ballot with a copy of the ID number is kept by the voter. The rest of the ballot is retained in the ballot box. Later on, if the voter wants to make sure their vote was counted correctly, they can go to a website, enter the ID number and it will display the votes for that ID. This is an electronic counting system with a physical paper backup that’s verifiable by the voter. I like that system. I was only bringing up blockchain because OP asked about possible uses for that tech.

Personally I don’t trust electronic voting at all and think paper ballots are the way to go

I agree, but we’re probably in the minority.

It seems like most of those concerns are handled by other means, like actual humans checking Voter IDs, etc. There would be no way to link an individual to their vote if the vote is generated by the voting machine, not the voter. For example, a machine could bundle votes together, generate its own block every five minutes, and send them up to a central server which would bundle all those blocks into a much larger block. And that would be the immutable ledger. That way if someone were trying to change the results, they could only alter a very small amount of votes, and because of how blockchain works, it would be obvious where the cheating occurred (in the chain).

Conducting elections would be a valid use case for blockchains.

If hosting NextCloud is your problem, you can purchase a hosted instance for less than $20/year. Woelkli even has a free tier.

I’m curious what use case your trying to solve. What’s wrong with Electron? Too slow?

Happy to say I’ve never used Zoom because it was a privacy threat even before all this. Not happy that people always treated me like I’m some kind of space alien for not using Zoom. Also not happy that those same people won’t care about any of this, and will keep right on using Zoom.

I personally never touched a Chromebook, and have no idea how hard it is to get Linux onto them, but it sure proves Stallmans old argument about freedom.

In some cases you have to physically modify hardware to get a different OS onto a chrome device. It could be anything from removing a write-protect screw from the motherboard, all the way up to flashing an EPROM.

See here: https://mrchromebox.tech/