461–470 of 907 posts
I'm going to say something that probably will get me down votes: Why do we have to beg Google to keep Android open? Seriously. So many open source projects have risen out of real and concrete needs and successfully made their way into our every day lives. A new platform needs to rise that breaks out completely from Google. I've given PostmarketOS a go (with a PinePhone) and while today I can't say it isn't a daily dr…
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> "just use a second phone" cannot be the answer because 99% of people will just scoff at that. Here we are talking about installing PostmarketOS/Linux on a smartphone. The next milestone is not to get everyone on it. First we need a base of early adopters that are willing to use it despite the drawbacks. The more user those alternatives will get, the more they will be developed, the better it will get. Sure, for the…
Why postmarketOS and not Mobian?
Back in the 2007 or when it came out in Sweden I bought the iPhone and started developing for it. This was cool, new and exciting and it was fine as long as my company was paying the $100 fee every year. But then I switched jobs and worked at a company which produced mostly open source code. Suddenly I would have to pay $100 every year just to be able to put my own software on the phone ... This is why I switched to…
Ironically, somewhere around 2014, Google was doing the exact same style "keep Android open" campaign, recruiting developers around the world - including me, to help lobby for keeping Android "open" and tell the horror stories of issues that random OEMs caused by forking Android, breaking compatibility and security. Made sense to me at the time and they were really into "Android should be open source" vibe, so I supp…
The only remaining good thing about Google is their Project Zero. They have become the same shit as every greedy company.
I'm going to say something that probably will get me down votes: Why do we have to beg Google to keep Android open? Seriously. So many open source projects have risen out of real and concrete needs and successfully made their way into our every day lives. A new platform needs to rise that breaks out completely from Google. I've given PostmarketOS a go (with a PinePhone) and while today I can't say it isn't a daily dr…
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Websites as platform can't solve a problem that's social in nature - that it's allowed and accepted for organizations to have such excessive, invasive levels of control. The parties I accuse of driving this problem didn't suddenly go rogue when smartphones happened. They always wanted this level of control (and much more) - they just couldn't get it until relevant technologies matured enough. I'm not speculating here…
> clear example > several countries Doesn't name a single one ...
Brazil is another example - ironically, the software suite that's commonly required for banking is named after the capital of the country I live in :).
Some quick searching now also flags Slovenia and Serbia as places where some banks require custom desktop (or even Windows-specific) software to access banking services.
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> So many open source projects have risen out of real and concrete needs and successfully made their way into our every day lives. Ironic because the foundation of Android itself is built on open source.
Most if not all large, successful open source projects are funded by commercial interests, not just consumers. The resources it takes to maintain something like Android far exceeds what can be funded solely by donations and volunteers.
Right, the key point here is most of the fundamental projects were never commercial in origin and had grassroots community or academic roots. Android is built on top of a student's hobby Unix clone.
> The resources it takes to maintain something like Android far exceeds what can be funded solely by donations and volunteers.
Um, no duh a corporate project requires corporate funding. Android was never a grass roots community effort.
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What about when your smartphone is required to verify your identity so you can work / earn a paycheck? What about when it's required in order for you to engage in commerce? We're headed down a very slippery slope and the destination is a very dystopian reality where those in power can prevent someone from participating in society on a whim. I believe the destination has previously been described as the beast system o…
We're already there. Attestation is not in your phone, but in your ID card. European passports and ID cards carry biometric data of your face, so you can be computationally verified. I'm aware of this slippery slope for a very long time, esp. with AI (check my comments if you prefer). On the other hand, I believe that we need to choose our battles wisely. We believe that technology is the cause of these things, it's…
I totally agree that changing the hivemind's mind is the only way to preserve these freedoms.
Is anyone making any progress on this? Beyond the FSF, noyb, and hn lurkers?
This is likely the result of one of the most idiotic and bad rulings to come out of recent tech lawsuits. It's so painfully brain damaged and yet somehow has seemed to largely fly under the radar. Google was found to have a monopoly on android with the play store (even though you can side load other stores), Apple was found to not have a monopoly with the app store. OK. But that is not the really bad part, the really…