Captain Beyond

Apple intentionally makes iPhone-Android interoperability crap in order to sell iPhones. That’s not conspiracy theorizing, Tim Apple blatantly admitted to it.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/7/23342243/tim-cook-apple-rcs-imessage-android-iphone-compatibility

Unironically one of the greatest people in the technology space of the last 40 years, in the sense of accomplishments and impact on the world. I’m talking specifically about the free software movement, copyleft, and the GNU GPL. The world would be a much worse place without those accomplishments. The fact that a lot of his life’s work is erroneously attributed to the kernel guy doesn’t change that.

As a thinker, absolutely brilliant and unfortunately misunderstood. He espouses radical ideas about the relation of users to the technology they use that are still relevant to issues of today (e.g. enshittification, planned obsolescence, surveillance capitalism, and so on). It goes far beyond “you can look at source code to see if there’s bugs or spyware in it.” There’s a reason “Stallman was right” is a meme.

As a leader and a figurehead I’m not convinced he’s as effective. Regardless of the coordinated smear campaign from a few years ago (in which it was erroneously said “he defended Jeffrey Epstein” or “he blamed Epstein’s victim” or some such), he has demonstrated behaviors that alienate people and people who have worked for/with him (e.g. FSF employees and GNU maintainers) have said he is not a good boss. His comment about “voluntary pedophilia” is inexcusable, even though he has said he no longer stands by it. The Epstein association was fabricated from a quote taken out of context, but I don’t think it was wise to even join that discussion. The glibc manual abort() joke incident from 2018 is probably what convinced me of this - not so much that the joke is bad (humor is subjective) but that multiple developers objected to it and said it made them uncomfortable, yet he “pulled rank” and insisted it be left in (although as of now it seems to be absent). I believe his intentions were good (the “joke” isn’t actually about abortion as such, but rather the US government “global gag rule” suppressing discussions of such) but forcing it in against the protests of the community was inappropriate in my opinion.

Overall despite the above I feel he’s done more good than harm to the world, however, I’m not sure how much more good he can do in his position. I feel like the term “Stallmanism” would be an apt term for his thought but because of the above I feel leery associating myself with the guy.

AFAIK on Android it has a hard dependency on Google services. I don’t mind installing proprietary stuff to my work profile for the express purposes of work but that requires modifying my system to accommodate this specific app and that’s a step too far for my personal device. So I use a free software option (Aegis) instead.

edit: if for some reason I really did need MS Authenticator and not any old TOTP app, I would procure a googled device specifically for work rather than install google or microG into my personal device.

It started 40 years ago, when a man was not allowed to fix his printer. We didn’t have the word enshittification at the time but even then it was understood what happens when technology abuses its users in order to enrich its creators.

I don’t care about Linux. I care about freedom. It just so happens that the best free software operating systems are built on Linux, so that’s what I use.

I use GNU Guix System on my desktop, laptop, and server machines. I use LineageOS on my mobile devices, although sometimes I wish I could use Mobian or even Guix System instead. I do have a Pinephone with Mobian but it’s collecting dust and the battery is swollen so I can’t use it anyway. I also have a router running OpenWRT.

I used to use Debian until 2019, Trisquel until 2014, and Ubuntu until 2010. When I was something of a kid I played around with a Knoppix live CD, which was my first taste of GNU/Linux.

It’s a misconception to say that free software is “about privacy.” Many people in the free software community care about having the four freedoms (the freedom to use, share, modify, and share modified copies). We don’t like free software because we think it’s more secure, we like it because it’s free software. Freedom doesn’t need a justification other than freedom itself.

For us, a catalogue offering only free software isn’t an “arbitrary rule” that’s the whole point. If F-Droid carries an app I know I have the four freedoms with that app, because they put in the work to verify that, by building the app according to their (relatively strict, not strict enough IMO) standards. Accrescent and Obtainium fans have different priorities, which is okay, but I don’t understand why they spend so much time shitting on F-Droid and the free software movement.

Security is important in free software, but security in proprietary software is often user-hostile (for example, DRM and WEI). Often times the only way to regain freedom in a proprietary environment is to exploit a security hole, so sometimes we prefer that proprietary software actually not be very secure.

As for F-Droid’s and the free software’s community towards “old” apps, we understand that software does not lose value simply by being unmaintained. Of course, if something is particularly security-critical and/or has a large attack surface (for example an operating system or a web browser). I would stay away from anything unmaintained. That doesn’t apply to all software, though.

The point of free software isn’t security, but freedom. For people who want control of their computing, this is not an “arbitrary restriction” but rather a basic requirement. Just because you don’t particularly care about a concern doesn’t make it “arbitrary.” I’m not a vegan or vegetarian but I don’t complain about the “arbitrary restriction” of a plant-based diet.

My complaint was in the context of someone in a community asking a question relevant to that community, where it is expected the community would have the answer. Telling the questioner snidely to “just google it” trains them to become dependent on the google algorithm, which can show them whatever it feels like at any given time, which may or may not even be the best answer to the question.

I suppose if the community itself has a search engine you could tell them to use that, but better would be to just link them to the relevant FAQ (assuming you don’t have the time or energy to personally answer it).

AI and similar technology but not for the reasons you may think. As we offload more and more of our human thought onto these machines and algorithms we become more dependent on them, in effect we let them think for us. If we don’t control the technology, we let it control us, and by extension we let those who control the technology control us. On some level it feels like that laughably corny Star Trek episode “Spock’s brain.”

For example, every time someone answers a question with “let me google that for you” I die a little inside. Not only does google give different results for each person, what it displays isn’t always going to be the same. You can’t say for sure you’re pointing them in the right direction. We used to have things called FAQ’s, maintained by humans, that were used for this purpose.

This isn’t a throwaway account per se but I do have another account on lemmy.ml for interacting with other communities. This account (and this instance) is focused on free software and free culture advocacy. It’s not really about embarrassing behavior, but more about compartmentalizing interests.

A valid use for a throwaway would be to ask a sensitive question that you don’t want to be traced back to any of your main identities. This would be a question that is asked once, answered once, and never revisited again. There would be no need for it to be associated with any of my identities.

The “only 5%” is what distinguishes it from Chromium, so it very much matters. And, that blog post is what I meant when I said they are actively hostile to the FS movement. Basically, they say users do not deserve the freedom to fork because competitors and Bad Guys can use it - very ironic for a product that is itself supposedly “95% based” on a competitor!

The argument that users should not have the freedom to fork because bad guys can use it is very similar to the idea that users should not have privacy or anonymity on the internet because it will be abused by bad guys (the so-called four horsemen of the infopocalypse).

^ this

“Smart” anything is something of a misnomer as the “smarts” are on some “cloudy” server far away. One can only hope that without the “cloudy” connection the thing will continue to function on a “dumb” level.

“Smart” “phones” are even more of a misnomer since they’re basically pocket computers that happen to have a phone in them. I’ll use them because they can be useful if they do what you want, but I don’t install any proprietary apps.

Unfortunately vivaldi is proprietary and actively hostile to the software freedom movement, but if it weren’t I’d consider it as a daily driver.

In terms of what I use daily

• GNU Guix package manager
• Kate text editor
• Quassel chat client
• KeePassXC and KeePassDX password managers
• GNU IceCat browser (Firefox ESR derivative)
• VLC media player

I’d argue that Stallman’s principal contribution to the world of technology was the GNU GPL and copyleft in general. Without that, neither Linux the kernel nor “Linux” the operating system would have taken off.