zizek23

Newpipe and Redreader for reddit are my 2 favourite apps on Fdroid. Amaze file manager is also pretty sleek for an Fdroid app. Dns66 is great for adblocking when you are not rooted. Termux is a must have for those who need a terminal. Osm+ is a decent maps option and Mupdf is a fast and minimal reader for pdf files.

Fdroid is great for open source apps especially when you are trying to avoid shady behavior by apps, but since Android itself is full of shady behavior and dark patterns it's at best a bandage on a severely wounded patient.

This is disingenuous. It's been actively marketed to law enforcement. A product is not created out of the blue with no target market. That's simply not how things work.

And that's whats happening to with a lot of surveillance technology, see Palantir, they are being packaged and aggressively marketed to schools, law enforcement and government.

Taken together these companies are selling and enabling a surveillance dystopia for no bigger reason than personal gain and the people responsible should be called out.

The tech community have become bad actors, and a lot of apologism and hand-waving happens here.

At the moment they are just trading on the reputation of early pioneers who at least professed some ethics and commitment to public good to pretend they are part of the same group.

They continue to posture on public discussions while implementing dark patterns and surveillance as a matter of course in their workplace. This is the fact, the tech community led by SV have sold out and they know it. Their main priority is pretending its not happening or diminishing the consequences.

If there is a backlash it will be well deserved as these people are selling out the rest of the world for profit, greed and personal gain.

The certificate system is broken. Technical people should not be promoting centralization, raising barriers to publishing and empowering middle men. That is not a technical solution, but behavior that favours business and vested interests.

There is now a clear pattern of attempts to raise barriers and cede more control to actors in the middle.

First it was de-legitimizing http, now its standard certs, then it will be 3 years. What's stopping this degenerating into an elaborate 'approval process' from a central authority in a few years which you pay dearly for, all in the name of security?

This kind of control gives some the power and fig leaf of any 'arbritary process' to delegitimize and silence others.

Unity was the first Linux desktop that was polished and had the just works feel about it.

I remember struggling with Linux GUIs since the earliest days of Redhat and we are talking 15 years ago. Unity is comparable to my retina macbook and Win10 desktop. This is not a small achievement. Your grandmother could use it.

Internet opinion tends to be loud but may not be representative when you mix in the vested interests pushing their own desktops, astroturfers and a certain community who think they should control Linux and everyone needs their approval and blessings.

In Unity's case it was this last group with the most vicious reactions. No one can be so bitter about a desktop unless they are vested in something else. I wish Ubuntu hadn't abandoned it.

Taxpayers are on the line for trillions of dollars with socialized risk and yet there are people on this thread regurgitating the same old anti-government anti-regulatory line without any irony. How can you roll back regulations without resolving fundamental questions about risk and 'too big to fail'. With citizens like this who needs oligarchs.

These are the same anti-government folks who will whine endlessly about social services as 'handouts' and 'freebies' and look the other way while trillions go to subsidize the rich and powerful. This is ideology.

Either you believe in democracy or you do not. In a democracy the government is you, not an organization out to get you. Regulations exist to protect the whole from the greed of a few.

This mythical anti-government civilization full of freedom only works in a farming based frontier society that has occupied land and can give parts of it away for free to all new comers, where any government can only take away rights. But that time is long gone.

Silicon Valley and its offshoots are going to become surveillance central. The HQ of a surveillance economy courted by despots at home and abroad. The people working here are going to be the most hated people in the world.

A new narrative about benefits other than totalitarian surveillance is going to be crafted and circulated to provide some sort of ethical fig leaf for employees but everyone involved will know the truth just not acknowledge or discuss it.

Any reasonably well informed citizen intuitively will know this is not the right direction but there is an inevitability about it, money creates its own logic and many have already made their peace with it.

Perhaps open source licenses should prohibit their use for adware, spyware and surveillance.

Apart from a plethora of open source projects to build its websites Google is using Android to hoover user data and open source should not be used to support a surveillance state.

This is a can of worms and probably not enforceable but it's worth it just for taking a stand.

There has not been a bigger sellout in history than the tech community. What makes it insufferable is the posturing and hypocrisy.

Companies like Google and facebook continue to be glorified inspite of their creepy obsession with stalking everyone 24/7 and legitimizing surveillance.

If privacy laws worked it would not come to this. Without regulations depending on goodwill and ethics in the face of greed has never worked. It just leads to a self serving clique who will handwave and legitimize anything for profit.

This anti government narrative is very simplistic. Any large organization is going to have some amount of inefficiency be it government or private.

How does anyone know how inefficient or efficient any large organization is since they are all complex and different? Without transparency and proper methodology identifying areas of inefficiency, drawing sweeping conclusions either way is more an ideological position.

Banks have just been bailed out with trillions of dollars, where is the efficiency. The pharma and telecom industry is routinely exposed for price gouging. And the corruption investigations against private educational institutes has recently been dropped by the current administration. These inefficiencies are simply transferred to the public in higher costs.

There is a bug in human beings, and this is universal. Our expectations from the rest of society and others on ethical and moral issues are gigantic but we just can't give.

We 'empathize', we relate, we cry about suffering in the movies and in the arts, we root for the victimized, but on a day to day basis it all breaks down and we simply do not want to make any sacrifice to make a more humane society come true.

The worse we become the more shrill and desperate our posturing, to try to convince others, but maybe ourselves.

AMD has already significantly disrupted and diluted Intel's hold on the market. They have literally forced the market from anemic 2 core chips on laptops held in place without movement for 5 years by Intel.

And on the desktop to 4 cores as a minimum and 8 cores for performance at a fraction of the price Intel demands. There cannot be more disruption to Intel than this.

Intel's days of micro gains and controlled markets as progress and with it oversize profits are over.

This is a significant misrepresentation of the issue. The judge gave multiple reasons of which fairness was only one.

The other was it encourages strategizing in future lotteries as students will select spots that are 'good trading material' rather than their first choices which would undermine the whole system.

This is just jingoistic scaremongering. These things are not done in the open. Not just China anyone could be doing anything.

Everyone familiar with history knows the consequences of surveillance, most people don't like surveillance but is that stopping anyone?

China is not the one bombing random countries and killing hundreds of thousands of people and setting entire societies back decades. These are crimes against humanity with no accountability and consequences for those involved so where is the ethics and morality? China is not the one who used just discovered nuclear weapons recklessly on a civilian population, not once but twice.

Blanket statement of ethics and morality are meaningless when not consistent with actions on the ground. They merely serve to fabricate a non existent moral high ground whose existence requires a denial and diminishment of one own actions while pointing fingers and demonizing others. Posturing may be fun but ignoring the ethical deterioration in your own society has consequences.