actually it isn’t Stallman’s quote.

That’s interesting; thanks. (I found one claim that it comes from 4chan.) But it doesn’t really make a difference.

We are all in Stallman’s debt for his foresight and work on Free software, and especially for the GPL. Even so, I find this particular self-promotion campaign to be overreaching, unnecessary, tedious, and shrill.

So no, I will not call it GNU/Linux, except perhaps in a tiny minority of cases where GNU is actually present and clarification is actually needed.

People who interject with or insist on it are just adding noise to the conversation.

The point of CSAM scanners is not to protect children, but to circumvent due process by expanding warrantless surveillance. That is antithetical to FOSS.

So, in a word, no.

https://openwrt.org/supported_devices

Most of us over at [email protected] seem to agree that the author is either trolling or picked the wrong dump stat for an aspiring game critic.

I wrote a more detailed response over there.

I’m glad to see Yahtzee is still doing actual critical reviews. There’s a shortage of that these days.

So telling people any TV they buy at Costco does this is just spreading FUD.

Nobody has said that.

Phenylephrine.

You’re just giving the same companies even more money when you buy their much more expensive “dumb” digital signage products.

No, I am not.

(And even if I was, it wouldn’t boost the sales numbers of spyware products, encouraging more of the same.)

Nobody’s been able to show me

If you don’t want to believe it’s a problem, I don’t expect anyone wants to waste their time trying to change your mind.

(Jay did report seeing examples in the wild, though.)

I wonder why they assume democracy is fueling the problems we face, rather than, say, late-stage capitalism or plain old corruption.

“Democ­ra­cy is the worst form of gov­ern­ment, except for all the oth­ers.”

Is it just me or is it really fuckin’ easy to not connect your TV to the internet?

I prefer not to reward corporations by buying equipment with built-in spyware.

(Also, “easy to not connect” depends on whether the TV nags you, or disables features, or uses any open wi-fi it finds, or includes a cellular or mesh modem.)

Running unauditable code is always a risk.

Consider an alternative to virtualbox, like QEMU/KVM with virt-manager.

Both brands are still doing it, so I’m still not buying.

Sigh… maybe next year.

This has nothing to do with compromise,

Clearly.

they just don’t want to deal with this many bot accounts.

Whatever excuse they might have doesn’t change the fact that they are extorting phone numbers from people.

And will surely be on F-Droid when it’s ready, just as their previous apps have been.

No, Element X is an upcoming reference client for the Matrix chat network. They have been appending X to the name of their experimental clients since long before Twitter rebranded.

with no user benefits for this extra complexity,

This is not true. One of the benefits I’ve enjoyed greatly is being able to point a group of non-techies at a URL and have them up and running, with fully encrypted channels, in less than 5 minutes. Another benefit is chat history across multiple devices. There are more.

with only a single entity […] being in charge

Also not true. It’s an open protocol with a well-defined process for contributions. The original authors certainly have influence, but I haven’t seen any gatekeeping there.

of developing both the client and the server.

There is no single client or server. There are multiple clients and servers (with varying levels of resource usage) from multiple developers, and the available options continue to expand.

I’ll grant that XMPP is a simpler protocol, especially in its minimal form without the various XEPs that are needed to even approach a comparison, but it also doesn’t accomplish as much. That’s not a “red flag” for Matrix. Also, this article is specifically about a new protocol.

I am happy to self-host XMPP accounts for a few hundred people, family and friends and to no longer have to do it with Matrix.

Yes, your case is an example of a small community with an informed and involved admin, which I pointed out in my original comment. XMPP can make sense there (I’ve done it too) but it’s a niche within a niche. It doesn’t address the problems that Matrix solves.

Can confirm.

Google locked me out of my account for not giving them my phone number. Even though I used the correct password. Even though I verified myself through the recovery email, which has been the same for ages. Even though I wasn’t using a VPN or connecting from a public network. Even though there was no reason to think my account or credentials were compromised.

They are, in fact, extorting phone numbers from people.

Thankfully, I don’t depend on my google account for anything, but I’m still stuck receiving spam forwarded by gmail, because I can’t log in to turn off forwarding. (I’ll probably have to filter it out at some point.) I honestly hope they just delete my account after some months without a phone number.

This particular issue is important enough that I’m glad they did it. We needed somebody to do it, and if that means a tiny bit of funding was diverted from browser work, I think it was more than worth it.

(Also, the Mozilla Foundation is not the same as the Mozilla Corporation.)

Should I presume Mazda and others that are not listed are doinga good job?

Doubtful. Absence from a list like this usually just means that the people investigating had limited resources, and therefore chose a representative sample instead of doing an exhaustive survey.

If this report gets much attention, it would be a good opportunity for any car makers that do well on privacy (if they exist) to start boldly advertising it.