The OS was renamed at some point; the first versions of the Unix/NEXTstep-based OS made by Apple were named Mac OS X, then at some point they switched to “OS X” (which hardly anyone ever actually said), then at some point to “macOS”. So it’s somewhat silly that they are separate lines and I don’t know what the difference is on that graph.

except that laws about social media usually target any online service regardless of technology

I don’t see Tor solving the problem of I.D. verification on social media, for example.

It does by disguising the location you’re accessing the website from, which may or may not have such laws.

Wie meinst du Teilabschnitt? Du kannst und sollst auf jedem Weg (way) eigene Tags setzen. Wenn die Straße noch nicht da in getrennte Wege geteilt ist, wo sich die Begrenzung ändert, musst du das eben zuerst machen.

I was wondering how much closer it can get than it is now… then I noticed the date.

not wrong though, we are lucky that the apparent sizes of the moon and sun are as close as they are on Earth :D

In principle yes, because the government has the authority to legally punish people (with fines, imprisonment, even death), private companies do not…

But your specific example with Palantir is a bit weird because Palantir, as I understand it, is mainly in the business of data analysis for governments, so that is an example of government spying, not corporate spying…

Followup question: Is there an overview of which VPNs can be used with third party (FOSS) clients and which not? I don’t currently use a VPN except a corporate VPN, but may change that in the future.

By that logic they would have to ban all public domain code.

It’s also not always true. Unmodified AI output can’t be copyrighted, but if AI was only used as a tool and there is still significant human input, e.g. because the AI output needed some manual editing afterwards, it is copyrighted.

That’s the one, thanks. I thought this happened much earlier than 2013 for some reason.

Wasn’t there a long time ago a genuine bug report in Mozilla’s bug tracker reporting that the source code was publicly available and this was insecure? I can’t quickly find it because I can’t think of good search terms…

I think that has happened before, though?

Finding restaurants can be done with the same OpenStreetMap-based apps as navigation. I use OsmAnd all the time to find out where restaurants are.

But OpenStreetMap doesn’t have a review functionality, nor is it trivial to add one from an external site to one. Apparently there have been efforts in this direction, but I don’t know a lot about them: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Reviews

So I don’t have an answer for reviews. But the review databases that currently exist are a manipulation battleground which people should take with a grain of salt anyway.

Of course those would be good things. It still doesn’t sound like priority #1 when it comes to software freedom alone especially in a world where smartphones are mostly not open systems designed for installation of any new operating systems.

Are they planning to license it as free software?

Linux is already the most common kernel in phones in 2026. In this case we really have to distinguish between Linux (incl. Android) and GNU/Linux.

And given that AOSP is already FOSS, it doesn’t exactly sound like a priority to reinvent the wheel of a FOSS smartphone OS.

Huh? I don’t know where you get almost any of these ideas from…

As for myself, I thought of the Internet as a much bigger deal when I was mainly on small independent forums. I’ve never participated very much on any corporate social media except maybe reddit, but even on reddit I know I am one of millions.

That is not new. They’ve been doing that since the 2000s.

The way I understand it is that there are at least two reasons, maybe more:

• Google (like all tech companies) uses a lot of open source software internally, so benefits from it being improved
• Google wants to train possible future employees

Not everything Google or other big tech companies do is necessarily bad; we should be taking advantage of the good parts of what they do.

What about that?

You see, I grew up in the era of “You” being Time Person of the Year: https://time.com/6258607/you-time-person-of-the-year-2006/

I don’t see why, 20 years later, I should now think that the same phenomenon is a bad thing, but maybe you can explain that to me.

Your post contains zero examples of anyone telling anyone not to read newspapers. The Mélenchon example (according to your own words!) is him pointing out that voters already don’t read newspapers, not that they shouldn’t. The Musk examples are about one specific newspaper, and even there he isn’t telling us not to read it. (FWIW, I would never have known or cared about any of these examples before reading this post.)

So what exactly are you trying to tell us with this post?

I don’t know a lot about French politics and have no opinions about Mélenchon, but if he said something to the effect of “we are now in the great era of social media”, then I agree with him on that. It is, in my mind, enormous societal progress that lots of people now get their news from other ordinary people on websites/apps (“social media”) in addition, or even instead of, legacy media which sees it as its job to enforce an “Overton window”. It’s democratization of knowledge and information sharing, why should I think that is a bad thing?

It’s kind of ironic that you’re posting this to a social media site, TBH.