It’s a simplification, I agree, but it applies to all people who are not sysadmins and who can’t make sure those exploits are not used. Which is pretty much everyone, therefore it’s mostly a good faith recommendation, not any ploy.
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Google and Apple did the exact same thing to Gab 2-3 years ago. It’s why Gab had to build their own infrastructure, they were blocked at every turn. Even the CEO and his family are blocked from having Visa and MasterCards.
The ability for big tech to destroy a company is great. I’m hoping they don’t have the power to strong arm and influence hardware manufacturers to hurt Purism in their production if they become too much of a threat.
I think that one can also admit that there may be a transition period in which one may have to carry two (or, even, three, if one has a work phone) devices. My obvious preference would be to carry only the L-5, but if necessary I will get a real de-googled phone running Lineage OS to manage the transition. My long-term goal is to shield myself as much as possible from surveillance capitalism and quarantine it when I do have to interact with it.
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The fact that visa and MasterCard are involved is doubly worse. It’s not just big tech but corporations in general that are censoring people’s rights. The only counter to a bad idea is a better idea. This naked use of power is disgusting.
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When you cannot use the latest kernel, it means it’s harder and harder with time to update the device, because you have to maintain your own kernel version and backport all patches forever.
In contrast, Purism upstreams all necessary patches for Librem 5 to work on the latest kernels. It means, the support cost will be negligible as long as ARM64 architecture is supported.
FP3 is a nice temporal solution while you are waiting for the Librem 5, but it does not solve the problem of planned obsolescence caused by Google and the manufacturers.
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While the Librem 5 is not finished, not only is a FP3 running de-googled Android a good solution, it is for many the only solution.
This is my point. And using Fairphone who has the longest life span on their devices ignores the short term life of every other phone manufacturer with their ridiculous update cycles.
We are here for Purism. But ignoring real solutions now, doesn’t help anyone escape from Google, and others.
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Agreed - I don’t think reinforcing the fact that the alternatives available aren’t as promising as options like the Librem 5 helps when we’re still far from being able to easily supplement a standard users use case (this isn’t a knock on the product, please don’t take it as such).
Everyone’s use case is different, and getting away from Google and moving closer to non-proprietary apps is a definitive step forward in preparation for the freedom that the Librem 5 will allow.
Yeah, I hadn’t know about that until a few months ago. I was also surprised and very disappointed to hear that the open source community (at least Mastodon) did everything they could to prevent Gab from using their software, including blocking their servers. It seems hypocritical to me for people pushing “free and open source software”, even if you disagree with what they’re saying. Obviously people can still spin up their own instances and use it, but it shows they would ban you if they could, same as the mainstream social media providers.
I wasn’t aware of the credit card providers blocking them though, that’s crazy. I know that’s not the first time the banks have decided to get involved like that. I know for a while (and they still muse about it), they were threatening anyone involved with the firearms industry (including the customer) with not providing any kind of service to the business, and even not letting consumers spend money on such items. That kind of stuff is what has made me realize the important role digital currencies play.
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and cash. Cash is king. 
The thing to remember about exercise of power is: if they can, they will.
So we need to change the balance of power so that “they can’t”.
Duopolies in many industries have too much power.
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gold coins baby ! ala Atlas Shrugged ! or John Wick ? 
And 100% digital currency is exactly what the US gov. is pushing to move to. They want complete and total control over us. The US is pretty much on the way to becoming a dictatorship with only a few elite at the top and the rest of us just bottom feeders. Scary, shocking, and sad.
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Wrong.
Can we please try to keep this thread on topic? I put an explicit warning at the very top of the thread precisely to avoid this kind of thing. There are plenty of other outlets online for politics and policy discussions.
This thread is supposed to be a discussion thread for my article, which is about the risks of Big Tech control over phone software stores extending into laptops and other computers.
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I tried three times to write something here, without falling into politics, but turns out, I can’t. Central control, as exercised with Parler case, begs for politics discussion. @Kyle_rankin, you’ve opened a can of worms and they are going to crawl everywheyre now.
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My post is not about Parler. It’s about the phone duopoly and how their hardware and software control over app installation via their app stores is now advancing onto the desktop. We should be able to discuss those issues without diving into the politics behind Parler as they are only the most recent example of this. In my article for instance I point to the Epic lawsuit and the examples with competing parental monitoring apps. If it helps you can use Epic as an example instead.
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Keep in mind everything outside of the roundtable subchannel is indexed by the same tech giants that are so toxic to anything not on their 3x5 card of allowable opinion. Purism is slightly more tollerant of controversial topics in the have-to-be-registered-to-see section, but this thread is really not the place for it.
I do agree that there are tightly coupled notions of pollitical theory and centralized power that really can’t be separated from discussions de-facto monopoly censorship, but those really should not be set out for troll-bait. Maybe we’d get away with it in an unlinked topic.
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which can be continued in a separate topic in Round Table.
At a certain point though, words achieve nothing.
Well, I can cite more examples if anyone wants to talk about those. All you really have to do to find them is search for “removed from app/play store -[thing that got trashed in the media here]”.
Here’s just a few of them. Under a corporate controlled internet where there’s no liability for content removal but plenty of various forms of liability for leaving various types of things accessible, something people can get very invested in can disappear at any time.
That’s very unlikely with a repository consisting of only free open source software that has very generic, not intrinsically objectionably purposes, even when the software might be used in a way that people might get really angry about (example: Kali Linux and it’s penetration testing tools, if directed against some machine without permission).
But they are not immune to this. Recently the very important video archival tool youtube-dl was removed from Github due to a DCMA takedown request by the RIAA (with really faulty reasoning). It got put back after removing some example video URLs, but for about a month it was tenuous if you’d be unable to save the videos that you download over the normal course of streaming them. More recently, the MPAA asked github to purge a torrent tracker site repository, which again, they complied with immediately, even though the offending data would have been an active site’s database of torrents. A lot of work went into those projects, and they both respect your privacy and your freedom.
And while there’s currently a phone duopoly, we can’t neglect that this can happen in desktop software too. Github is owned by Microsoft. So Microsoft isn’t above trying to stop you from using stuff you could previously use. They’d likely be limiting windows users to the microsoft store if they could get away with it (like they did in windows mobile). If nothing else it’s probably cheaper to curate a repository than it is to tweak the OS every time a program does something unexpected with the system in order to work, so if anything, windows’ ability to run software downloaded from wherever is just a relic of the age where we usually got software on CDs. But hosting the repository comes with liability to advertisers demands, copyright holders, and appeasing the mainstream media. You can see them trying for this with windows 10x, which is only available on devices that come with it pre-installed for now. I suppose that’d mostly be tablets and those 11.6" cheap laptops schools buy in bulk.
But many have speculated that eventually 10x will be the only version of windows you can get, or at least “features” from 10x will start to creep into windows 10. So windows users also should be concerned about involuntary software removal. Those who play games should already be aware of the dread of disappearing software, although usually that’s because the game servers go down and the game stops working even though it really didn’t need to.
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‘Parler Tricks’ were you trying to pun’ the shit out of Big-Tech with the choice of words there ?
i’m not complaining. i feel it’s only natural to feel frustrated by current events (that WE, as in the collective we, have been encouraging for DECADES now.)
people should really use every opportunity they get to take stabs at proprietary software and organize fundraising campaigns for donating to free-software developers/companies (SPCs hint-hint) …
proprietary software/services/hardware should have NO place when it comes to the general PUBLIC … but it has it’s uses in other instances … people should become more aware about how software is written and distributed
precise and clear information should be made available about PUBLIC internet infrastructure with gov. legislation to enforce non-compliance and deceit if a private server-farm somewhere lies about it’s use of hardware+software combination. this is in relation to the way Amazon reacted last week … and how people are looking for ‘greener’ options elsewhere …
Yes, while the article wasn’t about Parler but instead the larger issues, once that pun entered my head for the title I really had no choice but to use it, which then meant referencing Parler at the beginning and then adding magician puns to the headers of the rest of the article.
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