I couldn’t understand Microsoft’s motivation here at all, until this reminder (from the linked article):

This development doesn’t bode well for Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, who saw the company miss the platform shift to mobile devices and tablets and desperately wants to avoid chalking up another failure in yet another momentous platform shift.

it makes so much sense to me now

emphasis on “desperately” for sure

it’s a shame because there’s legitimately good technology for blocking advertising in Brave, there’s just so much else that is questionable/indefensible

https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/ :)

it’s a good point about pessimism, I should try harder to not spread it

you’ve put together a pretty useful table there!

RE voting with our wallets, I was mostly referring to this: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-13-consumption-choices-marginal-benefits-66edd5d9a82e

there’s the lockdown or similar feature at the phone level in Android and iOS

if you’re in a situation where you don’t want someone to access Bitwarden, then you probably also want to stop them from using your browser with all the cookies and logins it currently has

so temporarily block all biometric access on your phone in such cases, and merrily enjoy biometric access when you’re physically safe again

on Android, it’s Power + Volume-Up, then Lockdown

Use one service for one thing, so that when it gets disabled, only that one thing is affected.

https://ignorethecode.net/blog/2025/06/11/stop_uploading_your_data_to_google/

oh, sorry, now I understand the question

yes, devices available in CrowdSupply tend to philosophically align with my values: owner is in charge, no subscriptions, cloud connectivity is not a thing or completely optional, schematics are open, drivers are open, etc

so they aren’t usually interfered with at a functionality or technological level

but they’re popularity and availability are subject to interference: we’ve already had multiple governments ban or consider banning the Flipper Zero for various reasons

and we have various media codec patents and DRM requirements that prevent truly open devices from being able to be used for popular purposes like streaming video content which pretty much guarantees that only industry-approved devices will ever gain wide distribution and popularity

I don’t think it’s too tin-foil hat to suggest that if a truly open device did gain popularity somehow, that we’d see IP lawsuits or import restrictions or mandatory modifications (e.g. countries attempting to mandate a government-operated surveillance app preinstalled on over smartphone)

seems good?

I bought my Precursor on CrowdSupply :)

I’ll probably buy more stuff in future there

and I’m also a big fan of https://mntre.com/ although I’m waiting for the next model that’s currently in development

what’s frustrating is that we can’t really vote with our wallets, and any right-to-repair or consumer-is-in-charge movement is going to be limited by intelligence agencies, corporations like John Deere, Apple, and the entire entertainment industry

really, unless it’s a Precursor-style open chip and able to be verified by the consumer that it hasn’t been tampered with, then we’re already putting an awful lot of faith in the primary CPUs in our systems, anyway

• https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor
• https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-xous-a-pure-rust-rethink-of-the-embedded-operating-system

there’s also so much mistrust of TPMs that every verified damage wrought by them ought to be very well documented by now

TPMs are certainly worthy of our vigilance, but it seems like we should be spending more energy pestering CPU and GPU vendors for better behaviour

i’ve been pretty disallusioned with Mozilla leadership

i’ve jumped back to Chrome for the time being

i’ll be moving to servo/verso as soon as it meets my needs

to help communicate and troubleshoot what is broken here, we need to think of Wayland as a protocol just like HTTP is a protocol

saying “Wayland broke X” is like saying “HTTP broke X”, which is possible but not likely to be what you’re actually trying to say

rather, we need to be talking about the implementation(s) of the protocol, not the protocol itself

e.g. “HTTP broke X” -> “Google Chrome broke X”

e.g. “Wayland broke X” -> “GNOME broke X”

does changing to a different dark vim theme help?

hmmm, I’d consider Apple and Google to be roughly equal in terms of general overall evilness these days

they both donate to support fascism and genocide, remove anti-fascism apps and anti-surveillance apps from their stores upon government request (even when not legally required), spy on their users, etc

and their software/products seems to be in the final phase of enshittification

the fact that GrapheneOS exists and works on Google hardware at all seems like a plus in Google’s column, however it’s only necessary because default Android/Chrome are not allowed to go so far as to protect users from surveillance capitalism (so it’s a plus only necessary because of a negative)

unless there’s a specific measure where Google does significantly worse?

thanks, i hadn’t actually heard of ntop / ntopng before!

i believe ntopng works everywhere independent of whether calico is installed or not (and even calico is a Kubernetes-compatible and Kubernetes-optional system, just like ntopng)

but, calico whisker displays networking information made available by the rest of calico, so it’s able to give you a live display of when a firewall rule managed by calico is allowing or blocking traffic

i think this particular feature is absent from ntopng, but i could be wrong

yeah, when I say “far far too long” I think I’m on roughly the same window of time there 🫂 that said, still manage my nftables firewall on my other systems with firewalld and those concepts of zones has never really clicked in my brain

i did try cilium first, but it currently doesn’t work on Raspberry Pi 4B nodes: https://github.com/cilium/proxy/issues/1027

and now that my understanding of calico has improved, i appreciate that it works outside of Kubernetes, too

No, unfortunately

We (staff) asked for this, or some similar change to our contracts, and leadership refused

Our contracts/agreements currently state that any IP created in the course of doing our jobs or involving any employer-supplied equipment belongs to the employer

Leadership says they won’t enforce this for dotfiles and other small personal non-competing code, but they also refuse to put that in writing :S

That said, most of us have tweaked our dotfiles, etc on work laptops for years and we’ve never had problems, so far leadership has kept their word

Try and get your employer to offer and agree to GitHub’s BEIPA:

https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement

I’ve ordered one of the new Pebbles, but in the meantime, I have a PineTime: https://pine64.org/devices/pinetime

I’ve even given some to nephews and nieces because they are durable enough and so affordable that we don’t need to worry too much about them

This probably depends on what you mean by “smart”

In the old days, dumb phones were defined as devices that shipped with a set of features with users generally being unable to add new features themselves

And smart phones could be extended by users because they allow installation of apps, etc

But I don’t think this applies to smart watches: it seems like the difference here is that a smart watch goes beyond “dumb” by having phone/internet connectivity to display more than just times and dates