At this point people will move to MacOS or Linux because so much damage to their brand can’t simply be ignored anymore.

By itself DNS can tell a pretty detailed picture about you and what you do on the Internet without the need for SSL inspection or other deep packet inspection techniques.

Even as a licensed ham it's getting increasingly difficult to even get hardware that allows utilization of frequencies I'm duly licensed to transmit on in the 2.4 GHz band. Short of building and designing your own transmitters it's become impossible to repurpose hardware like it was before. Our club has aging M2 Rockets from Unifi that were modified for this use that are now decaying and dying. It's unfortunate too because once these stop working that's it. A few club members have been championing GLiNET but same problems. They are relying on older models which weren't as locked down and already show signs of suffering the same fate as the Rockets.

The other more compelling reason why people would have a rooted phone is to run ROMs that may still be providing OS support where the stock OS has been abandoned or EOL'd by the developer.

Having an unlocked bootloader at the minimum would be required in those scenarios. It actually saves hardware that still works from ending up in landfills.

edit: spelling

Most people will not use a browser that can't open youtube videos and they know and exploit this with extreme precision.

Yes. I tried using Chrome on Linux just to watch movies that I purchased on Youtube at HD/4K and watched as the stream was limited to 240P. IMHO regardless of what Google says in their ToS they have already broken the trust agreement by not providing what I paid for. Regardless of what the studios want, all this does is push me back towards piracy because once again the industry fails to understand that piracy is a accessibility problem, not a financial problem. If I pay for 4K then regardless of where I want to watch that movie it better be in 4K, that's what I paid for. Google hides behind their ToS to get around the fact that they sold me a product then failed to deliver.

> ChromeOS gets 1080p/4K not because it has massive market share but cause the hardware and boot chain are locked down by the almighty Google.

ChromeOS is based on Gentoo Linux underneath just very stripped down and Googlefied. It's the same BS that Bungee pulled with Destiny 2 and Linux. If you so much as dared to run Destiny 2 on Linux you would be banned. Stadia used Linux but because Google controlled the platform they allowed it to be played there.

These are the games they play to make other platforms that aren't MacOS/Windows appear like they are incapable but in reality it's just corporate greed and grift.

Edit: and I'm not on some cheap MVNO, I'm paying over $80 a month with AT&T on their post-paid plan. The phone gets unlimited data but any other device I may need to share that connection needs to be as efficient with bandwidth as possible. Only Firefox and derivatives provide proper ad blocking at this time.

I think their logic is a bit wrong here. Microsoft is a "trusted" entity. Trust doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and even they had to roll back their AI ambitions after seeing the lackluster adoption rates of people using their AI features. The trust part just doesn't matter. It's the principal that we've had browsers for over 20+ years and we never needed AI in our browsers. I would quickly abandon Firefox for an alternative in a heartbeat that doesn't include AI in it.

The uncomfortable truth for all these companies though is that most people simply do not need AI in the places they are shoving it into. Like why does notepad need AI?

Start voting with your voice and your (digital) feet. Don't be sheeple. Keep the Internet weird. It is not on us to censor ourselves to protect the feelings of snowflakes who get all bent out of shape because of something someone said.

The final say may ultimately come from the Cox vs Record Labels case from 2019 that is still working it's way through the appeal courts.

If the record labels win their appeal, anyone who helped facilitate the infringement can be brought into a lawsuit. The record labels sued Cox for infringement by it's users. It's not out of the question that any ISP that provides Internet connectivity to Facebook could be pulled in for damages.

For Meta these two cases could result in an existential threat to the company, and rightly so because the record labels do not play games. The blood is already in the water.

So to make it painfully obvious for everyone here, if your first thought is to make:

A Facebook Group

A Discord server

A Subreddit

(Insert other walled garden here)

You aren't solving the problem and you won't get anywhere close because these platforms will shut down your group for ToS/AUP violations before you even get close to enough people to spur any sort of action. If you cannot self-host, find someone who knows how or take this opportunity to learn how.

And, if you honestly need any further evidence of this censorship taking place, X (Twitter) heavily demotes any posts with links to Bluesky and Facebook was just caught not even a few days ago blocking links to Distrowatch. Now this is just the surface, what other stuff have they blocked and we've not heard of because it wasn't a high profile target like Distrowatch?

There are standards for a reason [1] and if you break them, no matter how good your intentions you are in the wrong because you've changed the expected behavior. Full stop.

The Internet works because everyone has agreed to follow standards. If Google woke up one day and decided that every IP address that ended in an odd number would receive a captcha every time they searched people would understandably get pissed off. Well ISPs have thousands of IP addresses so for the convenience of the user it's the ISPs that need to assign their users IP addresses ending in an even number so that they can search without captchas, right? No!

Same thing here. Just because Microsoft and Google benefit from economies of scale and have many users does not give them a pass to break standards whenever they see fit. There is a reason why we have RFCs and mailing lists to have these sorts of discussions.

edit:

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8058

Our only way to ensure survival on and off the planet is to mimic their actions (in this case pollination) to ensure that if we do manage to push more and more species to extinction we have options for being able to continue after they are gone.

I say it is no different than the people who are claiming they don't care. They absolutely do care, but at this point, saying "no" makes you the odd one with obviously something to hide, so they do this from a place of duress.

Unfortunately, I feel we are not too far from people finally snapping and going off the deep end because it's so pervasive and in-your-face that there is seemingly no escape left.

It's one thing if you're trying to make sure that maintainers are actually reviewing code that is submitted to them and fully understanding "bad code" from good but a lot of open source projects are volunteer effort and maybe we should be shifting focus to how maintainers should be discouraged from accepting pull requests where they are not 100% confident in the code that has been submitted. Not every maintainer is going to be perfect but it's definitely not an easy problem to solve overnight by a simple change of policy.

Definitely they could have worded that better to make it not sound like they had been intentionally contributing bad code to projects. I'll update my original post to reflect that.