zizek23

Newpipe and Redreader for reddit are my 2 favourite apps on Fdroid. Amaze file manager is also pretty sleek for an Fdroid app. Dns66 is great for adblocking when you are not rooted. Termux is a must have for those who need a terminal. Osm+ is a decent maps option and Mupdf is a fast and minimal reader for pdf files.

Fdroid is great for open source apps especially when you are trying to avoid shady behavior by apps, but since Android itself is full of shady behavior and dark patterns it's at best a bandage on a severely wounded patient.

This is disingenuous. It's been actively marketed to law enforcement. A product is not created out of the blue with no target market. That's simply not how things work.

And that's whats happening to with a lot of surveillance technology, see Palantir, they are being packaged and aggressively marketed to schools, law enforcement and government.

Taken together these companies are selling and enabling a surveillance dystopia for no bigger reason than personal gain and the people responsible should be called out.

The tech community have become bad actors, and a lot of apologism and hand-waving happens here.

At the moment they are just trading on the reputation of early pioneers who at least professed some ethics and commitment to public good to pretend they are part of the same group.

They continue to posture on public discussions while implementing dark patterns and surveillance as a matter of course in their workplace. This is the fact, the tech community led by SV have sold out and they know it. Their main priority is pretending its not happening or diminishing the consequences.

If there is a backlash it will be well deserved as these people are selling out the rest of the world for profit, greed and personal gain.

The certificate system is broken. Technical people should not be promoting centralization, raising barriers to publishing and empowering middle men. That is not a technical solution, but behavior that favours business and vested interests.

There is now a clear pattern of attempts to raise barriers and cede more control to actors in the middle.

First it was de-legitimizing http, now its standard certs, then it will be 3 years. What's stopping this degenerating into an elaborate 'approval process' from a central authority in a few years which you pay dearly for, all in the name of security?

This kind of control gives some the power and fig leaf of any 'arbritary process' to delegitimize and silence others.

Unity was the first Linux desktop that was polished and had the just works feel about it.

I remember struggling with Linux GUIs since the earliest days of Redhat and we are talking 15 years ago. Unity is comparable to my retina macbook and Win10 desktop. This is not a small achievement. Your grandmother could use it.

Internet opinion tends to be loud but may not be representative when you mix in the vested interests pushing their own desktops, astroturfers and a certain community who think they should control Linux and everyone needs their approval and blessings.

In Unity's case it was this last group with the most vicious reactions. No one can be so bitter about a desktop unless they are vested in something else. I wish Ubuntu hadn't abandoned it.

Taxpayers are on the line for trillions of dollars with socialized risk and yet there are people on this thread regurgitating the same old anti-government anti-regulatory line without any irony. How can you roll back regulations without resolving fundamental questions about risk and 'too big to fail'. With citizens like this who needs oligarchs.

These are the same anti-government folks who will whine endlessly about social services as 'handouts' and 'freebies' and look the other way while trillions go to subsidize the rich and powerful. This is ideology.

Either you believe in democracy or you do not. In a democracy the government is you, not an organization out to get you. Regulations exist to protect the whole from the greed of a few.

This mythical anti-government civilization full of freedom only works in a farming based frontier society that has occupied land and can give parts of it away for free to all new comers, where any government can only take away rights. But that time is long gone.

Silicon Valley and its offshoots are going to become surveillance central. The HQ of a surveillance economy courted by despots at home and abroad. The people working here are going to be the most hated people in the world.

A new narrative about benefits other than totalitarian surveillance is going to be crafted and circulated to provide some sort of ethical fig leaf for employees but everyone involved will know the truth just not acknowledge or discuss it.

Any reasonably well informed citizen intuitively will know this is not the right direction but there is an inevitability about it, money creates its own logic and many have already made their peace with it.

Perhaps open source licenses should prohibit their use for adware, spyware and surveillance.

Apart from a plethora of open source projects to build its websites Google is using Android to hoover user data and open source should not be used to support a surveillance state.

This is a can of worms and probably not enforceable but it's worth it just for taking a stand.

There has not been a bigger sellout in history than the tech community. What makes it insufferable is the posturing and hypocrisy.

Companies like Google and facebook continue to be glorified inspite of their creepy obsession with stalking everyone 24/7 and legitimizing surveillance.

If privacy laws worked it would not come to this. Without regulations depending on goodwill and ethics in the face of greed has never worked. It just leads to a self serving clique who will handwave and legitimize anything for profit.

The pentagon recently revealed it can't account for 21 trillion dollars. [1] The 18 US security agencies and military cost vast sums to run. The bank bailouts are trillions more, nickle and diming public services is an ideological position.

Civilized societies see a healthy and educated population and infrastructure as the beginning of building a progress oriented society, market fundamentalists like Friedman see it as an end, a process from which they can extract profits. This is an impoverished self-limiting vision.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2017/12/08/has-our-go...

This anti government narrative is very simplistic. Any large organization is going to have some amount of inefficiency be it government or private.

How does anyone know how inefficient or efficient any large organization is since they are all complex and different? Without transparency and proper methodology identifying areas of inefficiency, drawing sweeping conclusions either way is more an ideological position.

Banks have just been bailed out with trillions of dollars, where is the efficiency. The pharma and telecom industry is routinely exposed for price gouging. And the corruption investigations against private educational institutes has recently been dropped by the current administration. These inefficiencies are simply transferred to the public in higher costs.

There is a bug in human beings, and this is universal. Our expectations from the rest of society and others on ethical and moral issues are gigantic but we just can't give.

We 'empathize', we relate, we cry about suffering in the movies and in the arts, we root for the victimized, but on a day to day basis it all breaks down and we simply do not want to make any sacrifice to make a more humane society come true.

The worse we become the more shrill and desperate our posturing, to try to convince others, but maybe ourselves.

AMD has already significantly disrupted and diluted Intel's hold on the market. They have literally forced the market from anemic 2 core chips on laptops held in place without movement for 5 years by Intel.

And on the desktop to 4 cores as a minimum and 8 cores for performance at a fraction of the price Intel demands. There cannot be more disruption to Intel than this.

Intel's days of micro gains and controlled markets as progress and with it oversize profits are over.

This is a significant misrepresentation of the issue. The judge gave multiple reasons of which fairness was only one.

The other was it encourages strategizing in future lotteries as students will select spots that are 'good trading material' rather than their first choices which would undermine the whole system.

This is just jingoistic scaremongering. These things are not done in the open. Not just China anyone could be doing anything.

Everyone familiar with history knows the consequences of surveillance, most people don't like surveillance but is that stopping anyone?

China is not the one bombing random countries and killing hundreds of thousands of people and setting entire societies back decades. These are crimes against humanity with no accountability and consequences for those involved so where is the ethics and morality? China is not the one who used just discovered nuclear weapons recklessly on a civilian population, not once but twice.

Blanket statement of ethics and morality are meaningless when not consistent with actions on the ground. They merely serve to fabricate a non existent moral high ground whose existence requires a denial and diminishment of one own actions while pointing fingers and demonizing others. Posturing may be fun but ignoring the ethical deterioration in your own society has consequences.

Don't be evil is a pompous statement that suggests more power than they have. Any civilized society with functioning rule of law makes this kind of corporate statement meaningless and delusional.

Unless you are a corporatocracy and the inability of civil society to rein in the surveillance state betrays a fundamental breakdown.

The irony is if this was a Chinese company cooperating with the military on their drone program that is in active service and is killing people in far off lands as we speak there would be a global hue and cry and a frenzy of sanctions and global demonization, often by the same people defending Google now. This kind of brazen hypocrisy is what's wrong with the world today.

You don't wake up suddenly in a totalitarian state. Total surveillance is one step away and once the infrastructure is in place it will be used. Commitment to basic values of privacy and human rights has been reduced to posturing against others and denial about what is happening at home.

Untill there are proper protests and pushback the creep will continue and the useful idiots and the ignorant will continue to muddy the waters and dilute the threat only to slink back into the woodwork once the real consequences become visible.

And with all encompassing surveillance even organizing protests and dissent will become difficult without the kind of sacrifices most people are unwilling to make. Just today there is story of a guy getting a knock on the door from the police [1] a few hours after posting about eating mushrooms on facebook.

[1] https://munchies.vice.com/en_uk/article/gykbe3/cops-show-up-...

Wireguard is easier to configure and use and in my informal tests performed at close to line speed, around 870 Mbs on a gigabit network.

This is extremely fast for an encrypted network given most other solutions tend to take a severe toll on performance often operating at 140/180 Mbs on gigabit networks.

The only drawback currently is it's a kernel module and needs to be compiled, which makes setup across systems a bit involved, however there are ongoing efforts to merge into the kernel.

It's unfortunate innovate open source tools like Wireguard that add a lot of value to networking and clustering are not more well known.

Every single business has associations, lobbies and industry groups.

The power of collective bargaining it seems is understood with clarity everywhere in business. Except when it comes to labour suddenly the waters become muddied.

Propaganda against organizing and unions remain at the level of one bad restaurant or bank discrediting the entire idea of restaurants and banks and people with IQ see this as credible. Yet without collective action it is impossible to stop this kind of creep.

Capitalism and free markets is all about choice but working and a job is not a choice for most people. Surviving is a compulsion not a choice. True choice includes the choice not to do something which is where the economic power of choice comes from.

If all companies in a race to the bottom adopt these practices what choice does labour have and them being forced to accepting these conditions is anything but meaningful 'choice'. It's coercion.

In a previous naive world intoxicated by dreams of global citizenry and humanism it would be easy to get sanctimonious and posture about evil.

But cultural divides are real and are not going away. And these kind of events and stories simply become opportunities to target other countries weaknesses, reassert a jingoistic sense of superiority and perpetuate existing comfort zones.

Or there would be protests daily in western capitals about the sheer unimaginable scale of destruction, devastation and millions of families destroyed and lives lost in the middle east starting from Iraq to Libya and now Syria done purely to further geo-political and financial interests.

But that is handwaved away as 'necessary' somehow. The fact is people don't even care about the poor and suffering in their own cities and countries, so how can they care about an unknown people in another part of the world? It's posturing, China's problems will be only be fixed by those chinese who truly care for their people and country.

Docker based on LXC and added a few things. The fact that they were well funded made outreach easier compared to the open source LXC project and Docker became many peoples first introduction to containers.

Once they got traction they quickly dumped LXC around version 0.9 and created their own engine in GO. All the while misleading and letting misconceptions and plain untruths about LXC being 'difficult', some 'low level tool' or 'bash scripts' spread unchecked by their ecosystem. So the model is not only take open source tech, but bash them in public and forget about giving anything back.

LXC is much simpler to use and understand both conceptually and in practical use. Docker is basically a hijack of an open source project supported by the SV crowd and the level of support and misinformation can be verified by HN posts in the last 3 years. Docker posts routinely clock 600-1000 votes in short periods of time and are full of marketing and misinformation.

That's history but the culture continues. Docker and other related projects continue to liberally wrap open source projects while downplaying them, ie overlayfs, aufs, kernel namespaces, cgroups, Linux networking tools, nginx, consul, haproxy and more. Someone had to create those projects and make them usable. This would not be a bad thing if they actually made things simpler, but they keep adding more and more layers of complexity.

What incentive is there for people to create these high value open source tools if vc funded companies like Docker and corporate funded projects like Kubernetes simply wrap them, downplay them and hog the attention and funding? These kind of projects basically cut the tree they sit on for their own short term benefit.

Let's call it as it is, an entire continent was usurped, a gigantic fertile landmass rich in resources was stolen along with unlimited slave labour and IP from Europe. The consequence is predictable.

Using jingoism to spin this into some sort of exceptionalism celebrates the loot and plunder without a hint of self consciousness or remorse, and cements a barbaric ideology that fuels more indiscriminate global plunder in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

This country worships success. That's the reason Trump won.

Zuckerberg is not only ridiculously successful but touches everyone's life everyday and people may feel an intimacy that doesn't exist.

Without being judgmental just looking at the dynamics he is going to win.

And apologists assuring people there is nothing to get worried about, dismissing concern as conspiracy theory and demanding 'concrete' evidence of wrong doing.

Given recent history skepticism must move to these individuals and their motives.

Won't they simply purchase what does have more influence in our lives then?

Not saying your point is invalid but in the same context Google has access to all your stuff, including correlations to your mobile and location information and is not afraid to share it, as do others ie ISPs, possibly Microsoft.

So for browsers controlling meta data on user end has limited value without rules and laws around user data.

The thing with Duckduckgo is the choice has to be ideological or you will do a search again on Google again just to ensure you are not missing out.

This is Google marketing and brand perception at work because Google results of late, 3 years, have been unimpressive and you have to sift through pages of useless links and content to find any relevant information beyond the usual suspects one already knows, so their intensive spyware operations doesn't seem to help search quality.

It's surprising there are not more experimental search projects. One would have expected a steady stream of regular attempts but not a single credible effort exists. There was once an alternative search project called Cuil that just seemed to fizzle off.

Bitcoin can't die as it never succeeded. All the disingenuous claims made by early adopters have fallen through. Decentralization, control, anonymity, easy transactions, transactions costs, currency? How can something that has no use have value?

Proponents continue to build castles and waste electricity hoping people bite so they can profit. But the game is over.

Money is a social tool based on consensus, and today democracy and accountability, that has evolved with human societies however imperfect it may be. At least societies can exercise some control over governments.

Why would anyone give up this hard won rule of law and accountability to private individuals operating out of self interest peddling illusions about some imaginary 'freedom'?

It's the Internet that enables communication. Families and friends would be able to communicate once the Internet became possible whether Facebook exists or not. People would be able to use and get value from the Internet whether Google exists or not.

These companies add value but they are not the Internet. If they didn't exist the Internet will continue being useful.

What they have been able to do is inject themselves into communication pathways, provide a network effect in the case of facebook to leverage social curiosity about others which in the larger scheme of things is not important, and now sit on tons of data which has zero value to users and thus does not enhance communication in any way, but helps advertisers.

That deal may be over but Mozilla still gets money from Google for search. Why is user advocacy so low key and half hearted, this being just one of them. What do they have to lose?

They have consistently thrown in the towel while diluting the very things that users would choose them over Chrome for.

There are many ways to exert influence in this world. Mozilla is in SV and is very much part of the culture and ecosystem. We need genuine alternatives and activism against entrenched interests.