kadu

I don’t understand why society accepted that the hardware maker gets to decide what software you run.

That’d be like your car deciding which roads you can take, or your blender deciding you’re not allowed to use strawberries in your smoothie.

Are you nuts? Why the fuck would your phone decide which apps you can run?

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Wouldn’t really matter in a federated network like this. Mods banned you from a community? Make a new one. Account banned? Move to another instance.

There’s zero reason to feel attached to online accounts like these, which is the only thing you can lose on Lemmy.

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Reddit, and by extension Lemmy, have this infatuated vision of how private companies are actually great for customers because whenever somebody asks about Steam the explanation given is that if this were a publicly traded company it would be horrendous but because it’s private everything is perfect and there are rainbows inside their offices.

The truth is EA will be just as aggressively profit driven as it already is, the new owners will try to reduce costs just like always, and IPs that sell more will continue to be prioritized just like before.

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A “certified Android device” is a device running Google Play Services, Play Protect, Google’s WideVine DRM scheme and a few other requirements. If you purchase a device from a known manufacturer, like Samsung, you’re falling into this category.

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Hasn’t he admitted to changing his opinion after learning about the effects on children?

He did. The argument against him was half based on misquotes and incomplete sentences, but the other half was indeed once his opinion - he argued that age of consent was a dumb concept and that instead it should be based on what the child wants to do and any harm they were subjected to.

He later on said he regretted this view because it was explained to him that there’s no ability to consent and this always causes harm to the child. His original arguments were, in typical Stallman fashion, quite obsessed with definitions themselves, almost as if the subject at hand didn’t really matter he was just bothered about how the definition had some flaws.

But even with that in mind… I can’t feel comfortable knowing he defended this point of view, and it does significantly harm my opinion about him.

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openWRT is fantastic and does indeed give you full control over your router… but not your modem. Modems are a complete mess of patents and proprietary software that nobody can control but a select number of companies.

the benefit of it is just not bloating my 128gb phone to it´s limits

That’s kinda the thing though, using modern codecs there’s no way you’ll get anywhere close to facing this issue. A song encoded with Opus at higher than necessary quality is 2.5 MBs on average - that’s over 20 thousand songs in 50 GB, not even half of your total storage gets you 50 days of continuous audio.

Whaaat? There’s Android for jailbroken Kindles? Back in my day the only thing you could do with a jailbreak was installing a slow version of KOReader that didn’t really work very well.

This was only a controversy because GIFs were falling out of favour

They were never falling out of favour, and there’s not a single human being out there using WebP, only Google and bots touch that format.

The only Organic Maps controversy I’m aware of was the presence of certain closed-source elements on what they claim to be a FOSS app, and that the main developer refused to open up, then partially did, then backtracked and never fully released.

Maybe that’s what that user is referring to? Not sure.

Even if you fixed the issue with drivers…

…your modem runs it’s own firmware with a lot of extremely shady behavior, and you can’t touch that regardless of which OS you install. Even your SIM card can arbitrarily execute Java applets and fetch from the network without your command, but at least it’s somewhat contained. Your modem though, it can do a lot without your control and people like Qualcomm have been caught doing nasty stuff with it (plus, of course, giving the US the data whenever they ask for it).

This is why people like Stallman and Snowden often talk about teaching users how to use libre software on their computers, but rather than pushing for the same with smartphones, they tell you to not touch these at all instead. They’re fundamentally anti-privacy devices, built this way.

Of course I carry one, it’s fairly hard to live without a phone nowadays, but we must be aware of the impossibility of fully containing the data harvesting they do.

Why wouldn’t the internet survive the fall of capitalism? It started in universities wanting to share information faster, not for profit.

The Homebrew Channel for LG WebOS is got three pieces of absolutely essential software:

A YouTube app modified with built in ad blocking and sponsor blocking. The Jellyfin app. The Moonlight app.

With these three plus the toggle to block system updates your TV gets 1000% better for free.