beefee

A service that requires a telephone number simply shouldn't be called an Internet service. It can't be used purely over the Internet.

Telephone numbers are fundamentally incompatible with privacy. Signal's leadership knows this, but they don't appear to care.

Me too. Several teams are trying to land grab by "wrapping" Nix with extra stuff.

But as good as flakes are, they still have big problems. flake.lock size explosion, UI hassles, no cross compiling support.

Please put your apps on F-Droid.

Here are some reasons.

1. Cost. I'd rather not pay for hardware and software I won't use.

2. Environmental impact. Unused and unwanted hardware is waste.

3. Unauthorized users connecting to WiFi. TVs are often in common areas. The settings menus have no authentication. So an unauthorized user might connect the TV to a WiFi network.

4. Automatic WiFi connections. TVs might connect to open or partnered WiFi networks without telling the user. Hard to know without an audit.

5. Accidental WiFi connections. Settings menus might be unintuitive (or deceptive) enough to trick users into joining WiFi networks accidentally.

6. Future data leaks. TVs might be recording data and saving it to internal storage. The next owner of the TV could connect it to a network, and years of stored data would be leaked. Again, hard to know without an audit.

Will any of this be available on Linux or owner controlled systems?

Please, stop using phone numbers. There is no reliable way to hold a phone number. The messaging protocols are insecure. If your service uses phone numbers or SMS, that means it's not secure or reliable.

I was never even able to sign up. "Customer service" just repeats the same thing on a loop.

Tech companies will slowly put themselves out of business with fraud detection algorithms.

I wonder how hard it would be to have my personal residence classified as one of these protected places. Incorporate some kind of business or non-profit, make sure it shows up the right way in Google Maps, then enjoy freedom from Google surveillance.

The loss of pay phones over the last 20 years is a loss to society. We used to have widespread access to cheap and anonymous emergency calling.

The services I interact with that support WebAuthn usually only allow you to register one key. Backup and recovery is a confusing puzzle for most of these services.

This is an important document and the best piece of writing I've ever seen on the topic of systemd.