Most western governments look at the ability of some of the more authoritarian places ability to just snap there fingers and make the entire internet go away with great envy.

You mean an LLM that doesn’t have the ability to understand context fails to make decisions that require context to do properly? Shocking /s

Then those EU firms should immediately make getting out of anything and everything Microsoft a top priority. As a US citizen, all our government and companies understand is personal profit and personal data hording. So make it hurt where they will feel it.

Petitions like this are meaningless unless they come with a viable solution to the duopoly in payment processing that is Visa and Mastercard.

It doesn’t matter what Valve agrees with, if they want to survive as a business they have to ultimately do what the only 2 companies that handle the payment processing tells them to do.

No one loses control of the D like Riker.

I miss the days of boring US politics

How very Reagan of them

We have location sharing enabling via Find My since everyone but me uses Apple. I don’t think my wife ever uses it and I only use it as a means of checking they seem to still be alive when they are otherwise late to somewhere they planned to be if I get worried about them.

In years past I would just call them, but this way is less actively intrusive. But people that use it as a spying tool have issues.

Let me know when it is discovered that they in fact replaced MS Recall with their own version that was scraping your data in yet another sketchy attempt to make money.

Tells you that the guy behind it is causing some folks in the halls of power to get some uncomfortable questions.

If ad networks weren’t the number 1 way to get malware installed on your machine, didn’t slowly take over the dedicated space for the actual content of a website, or put pressure on the websites in question to only publish things inoffensive to the advertisers maybe adblockers wouldn’t be such an issue.

If your site can’t exist without being a cesspit of annoying and useless infomercials and a deployment mechanism for malicious code injection then your site should not exist.

Not too many people had an issue with static banner ads back in the day after all except greedy website operators and advertisers.

I use whatever the latest Ubuntu LTS is on my desktops and usually laptops (besides my Macbook) at the time, and whatever the latest stable Debian release is at the time on my home lab servers.

I am very much a utilitarian and function over form kind of person so I choose what I do because it is the best fit for the problem I was trying to solve, usually with little thought to looks or UI design. I find I don’t really care so much how something is done on a given platform, just that there is a way. As a result stuff like theme options, dynamic wallpapers, etc are not something I really care about. I have been using the same black image as my wallpaper on every computer I have used for at least a decade now for example. I arrange the UI in whatever way I feel is the most functional for me within the constraints of what the platform supports out of the box. Meaning I couldn’t care less for stuff like the old school Window blinds program and what not.

Ubuntu over Windows because I wanted to get away from the ever increasing ads and general slop that Microsoft was putting into Windows while still retaining some support for gaming(thanks to Valve and Proton) and building my own systems.

Debian on servers over Ubuntu or something RPM based because Debian stable is rock solid and will run whatever you put on it without issue in my experience.

My mother uses something similar to keep track of her passwords for everything. While I prefer a password manager like Bitwarden or Keepass. I would rather her use a note book like this over something like Google or Apples password managers.

Or even worse, the same password for everything.

If it is a Qualcomm variant for the US, nope. Samsung does not allow bootloader unlocking on those anymore. I think some enterprising people have found unpatched exploits that have allowed some models to be unlocked and rooted. But it is sadly not a common thing with those anymore.

The Pixel is the most friendly to the custom rom scene these days. Although with the recent changes to purging the device tree’s from upstream AOSP, I’ve read that Google is starting to make it much harder to use as a practical feature on the Pixels as well.

I didn’t so much pick Lemmy and the Fediverse over Reddit as I did decide to start participating in it in addition to Reddit.

As for why I chose to do that it is down to liking the general technical concepts around Lemmy and the Fediverse. I consider them more future proof than a single monolithic thing like Reddit. Lemmy and the Fediverse are not so bound to large financial interests that will prevent it from evolving and answered to the desires of its users.

But I have to say I do wish there was more diversity of subjects that got wide attention on Lemmy. From all of the servers I have browsed around it seems to be very slanted towards political topics which is not what I prefer to engage with much online if I can help it.

Not to say there are not communities on Lemmy for lots of technical topics, they are just not as “busy” as they are on Reddit. As a result to do spend more time on Reddit still because those type of communities are still larger there and current events on tech get talked about there more often or first.

Willfully breaking an NDA with one of the most litigious companies in the world for what is essentially fake internet points is a bold strategy Cotton. Doesn’t look like it is going to work out for him.

The stuff you are complaining about are not only not in your control on either platform but are the result of deals between carriers and OEMs, not technical options or limitations of the OS imposed by the OEM post sale. Which is what I was talking about. Your options for getting rid of that carrier junk also expand greatly with ADB.

Additionally the iPhone comes with tons of pre-loaded apps included in the OS image that someone might not want as well (Stocks, Numbers, etc). It is just that it is Apples apps and for some reason a lot of people have a blind spot when the bloatware is coming from the OEM themselves. Some of them not completely uninstallable either, like the calender app if I remember right. The UI says “uninstall” but if you go to the App Store to reinstall it there is no download or install time, the app just instantly “installs” and reappears in the app list. In other words it was still on the file system the entire time, just like Androids disabled apps.

You can, but it is a pita. Having to buy dev certs and sign the .ipa file, etc. But technically, if you really want to, you can.

The reason is that PC is made out of standardized plug&play components that you can make generic OS image for.

Yep, given the history of consumer technology as a whole it is really more amazing that the standard PC became a thing more than it is that people put up with what phones are today.

We all really owe a lot of gratitude to Phoenix for reverse engineering the IBM BIOS back in the day, and going to court to fight the IBM copyright lawsuit that resulted, as well as Compaq and all of the other IBM compatible clones.

I wouldn’t praise Apple too much. They are the poster child of “our way or the highway”. At least Android, to be fair that has more to do with the original roots than Google being a good guy, you nearly always have options to turn this kind of thing off even if the OEM doesn’t want you to. If Apple doesn’t give you a toggle you are usually SOL.