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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • The kernel update issue on Android is going to be exactly the same for PostmarketOS and for the exact same reason: proprietary firmwares and/or drivers.

    There is a huge ecosystem for Android today, including apps for so many EU companies, that they would have to re-develop to port them to Linux, or they’ll just rely on Waydroid, so you still have to follow Google somewhat, and now you need to maintain both a GNU/systemd/Linux AND a compatibility layer with Android. With a fork of AOSP, you need only the last.

    From a security and privacy standpoint, Linux was never designed to handle hostile apps designed to aquire as much data as possible. Android has a sandboxing system: an app cannot go and check what other apps you have. A Linux app can pretty much access everything on your system. GrapheneOS adds on top of that storage and contact scopes: you can define a subset of each per app, and they won’t see anything else.

    In an ideal world, it wouldn’t matter: everything would be opensource and developed in good faith. In the real world, you still have tons of malevolent apps that people will want to use anyway, so better take that in account.








  • Social media in general don’t need to. Atpor servers operators in general don’t need to. But Bluesky does, because it’s accountable in front of its investors. So yes, they do have to make money, and no, there is no solution that does not go with some level of enshittification. And then they’ll get pressed to make more money, to grow their revenues every year. And it can only go down from there.





  • But there will be more satellites, and not just from SpaceX. They are already disturbing astronomers work, and it will only get worse.

    There was no real debate about whether the world population is ok with it. Big corp has money, big corp acts for its interest and nothing else.

    And I’m not denying the benefits of low-orbit satellites and having vast but lowly populated areas at last getting access to a fast Internet. I’m jùst pointing out that this whole thing is happening mostly out of control (or very very few control).

    If you add that now international laws was shot and its body discarded in the toilet, also note that getting too much dependent on these satellites makes you very vulnerable to a military strike. I have no doubt that Russia, China and other countries (Iran?) are actively working on satellites destruction, with or without creating debris and giving us a Kessler syndrom. If you look at climate change, on-going life mass extinction, water scarcity, etc. there is little doubt that world leaders will make the worst possible decisions in the name of pragmatism (or religion, but it doesn’t really matter).




  • “Robots will replace all jobs and work for us!” – Who realistically thought they would be in the “us” here?

    Robots belong to companies owned by shareholders, but mostly oligarchs. In their view, when robots work for “them”, human population has been culled with 99.9% of the population died by starvation and/or stopped reproducing, and the 0.1% billionaire families survivors enjoy a cosy life where robots do everything.

    Until the system crashes and none of these idiots know how to fix anything.

    That’s one more human extinction scenario to the list…





  • Metadata. They would still know where you were, for how long, who you talk to, when and from where. Then they combine these info. ex: you call your pop and mom, théir fridge broke down, and you start receiving ads for fridges. Was Meta listening?? No: pop and mom hinted the fridge was down (Google search or other), Meta has established your family links a long time ago, and you usually visit them after a longer than usual conversation (as they have an issue and yuu go help). Here: you fridge’s ads.


  • They could always do that, and basically anything you can read on your phone, they can access if they need.

    Encryption is a math thing: generate a pair of keys: one te encde, one to decode. I broadcast the one to encode (“public key”), and the whole world is tu use it to send me encrypted messages. I keep the decoding (“private key”) only for myself.

    In client to erver encryption, we exchange keys with the server through which go all the comms: it decodes my messages and re-encodes them for my contact.
    In e2e, the key exchange is between contacts: the server does not have the private keys.
    In Meta, the proprietary app can send your private key to the server and then they know what you wrote. You have no way to know it doesn’t do so!

    Opensource audited software is the only way to make sure.