They were only decent because the bar was on the floor. As soon as Google Fiber entered a city, entrenched ISPs slashed their prices, improved customer service, and made things better for everyone.

There was a post on Reddit back in the day of a guy who quit his day job to bring fiber to people at roughly half the price of the local ISP and still made enough money to live comfortably.

From what I remember, it’s actually fairly straightforward to start an ISP but just takes someone with the time to do it. Between the grants and small business loans, you effectively can get started with very little risk. It’s just that very few people actually do it.

The problem with “age” verification is that politicians are confusing it with identity verification.

I should not have to prove my name and other biometrics to prove age.

Age verification is the fascist way to get people to identify themselves and their online activity. Almost every state that has some sort of age verification law has zero method to actually verify age. No digital ID service, no way to share a credential for verification.

They want people to upload an ID.

This isn’t about keeping children safe and it never is. It’s about identifying critics of the government.

The same public libraries that vigorously defend the privacy of our reading lists

The Patriot act allows the feds to get the books you’ve checked out at your local library.

!waterfox@programming.dev

This behavior seems to be very similar to NFL stars and how they never wanted their kids to play football.

Everyone involved knows how dangerous social media/football is and many of them are in positions to actually do something about it. But because it benefits them personally, they won’t even rock the boat.

I’m on the same page. I’m a bit of a wonk and, yeah, politico has a perspective but I wouldn’t call it right wing. Centralist, to an extent.

In a completely unrelated move, Ring will partner with a complete difference company that will pay 20% above what Flock was paying.

I wonder if removing the cameras is the best move.

It might be better to let them run but have them watching a TV streaming Disney movies.

Then drop the dime to Disney that they are copying their IP.

My understanding is that if your community is not adult content and you aren’t on any adult servers, you won’t need to ID verify. But I suspect it’s only a matter of time before all accounts are required to verify.

If people didn’t leave Twitter when it became an unholy cestpool of alt-right propaganda, they have chosen to stay there because their audience is the alt-right.

The DevOps way is to have them die at regular intervals in addition to other triggers and then rebuild on a regular cadence. Iirc correctly Netflix servers have a 12 hour TTL. Windscribe could easily do a 1-2 hour TTL with matching certs and encryption keys.

The biggest issue is that making a browser from scratch takes a lot of resources. It’s not cheap and takes a long time.

We essentially have Chrome and Firefox now. And Firefox is starting to enshitify.

We desperately need a third browser.

Mozilla are using a similar model to Microsoft and open sourcing Firefox code under the MPL while distributing the executable under a new Terms of Service.

Firefox (the executable) is no longer considered FOSS since they can revoke your license at anytime. I posted a comment that details my personal view of this change.

TL;DR: they would have only done this if they planned on farming user data. And last month announced that they intend to do just that.

The goal of companies mandating RTO is attrition. They want people to quit without firing or laying them off.

Their goal is to hire younger, hungrier (both literally and figuratively) coders who are cheaper and less experienced and will use “AI” to clean up their code.

I’m okay with Opt-Out so long as it’s clearly marked.

I shouldn’t have to go into the config or click through 7 layers of UI just to opt out.

That said, this is a reminder that Firefox is no longer open source. It’s source available and you should use Waterfox or LibreWolf if you want a browser based on Firefox but without AI out of the box.

Bare in mind that the government requires a warrant to obtain data against you, the barrier in which to get a warrant requires probable cause.

Obtaining data about you from a company only requires a subpoena if the company doesn’t cooperate.

BUYING data about you from the same company is completely allowed.

Until we get privacy laws, we are truly fucked.

I wanted to like lawn chair and gave them an honest try but so many features I have come to rely on weren’t quite there.

I realize that they were designed as a replacement of pixel’s launcher but still… I would have loved to keep using them.

I am now using a paid version of Smart Launcher and praying to God that they won’t do what Nova did.

“Do Not Split”

Learned about it from this episode of the Team Human podcast

But what is happening in Hong Kong is they come up with a slogan, which is translated as Do Not Split, which is, we know that some people are willing to be confrontational with riot police.

And when they are, that’s going to cost the state in terms of not only resources, but it’s going to cost the state in terms of political capital and support. And we know that there are some people who are not willing to do that. And we are going to abide by the protocol of Do Not Split, which means that we’re not going to criticize them openly, and they’re not going to criticize us openly.

If we’re the pacifists, we’re not going to have them criticize us for being sort of like, I don’t know, limpid or flaccid or not courageous or whatever. And we’re not going to criticize them for being more confrontational. And the thing is that the support is also tacit.

It’s not like they have to come out and tell the media, oh, we approve of our more sort of confrontational colleagues. They just keep quiet. They just keep quiet.

Understanding that a range of tactics is probably going to be necessary. Nobody really knows what’s going to work. But if everybody’s pushing back against a particularly violent state, then everybody’s really on the same side.

take accountability

[Citation needed]

As we push more average Windows users to Linux, we need to be prepared for these users to download and run completely untrusted code.