Same with MacOS and iOS. They’re doing the same shift Apple has done over the last 25 years. Build on open-source, and slowly pivot to closed-source binaries. The perception of openness lags for a very long time until people finally realize it has just become more proprietary limited crap.
Stupid manufacturers. Would be a non-issue if you could just slide open the battery door, pop it out, and recycle it, like we could over the last 2 centuries. (The D battery was introduced in the 19th century).
They can run the model locally on the car’s onboard NPU/GPU, so every time the driver asks the car a question, the model can take compute away from the car’s driving software. “Hey, Tesla, why are trees green?” Dashboard goes dark, car drives off road
Although to be fair, they already do that last part.
Bluetooth and WiFi can be tracked as well, even with “anonymized” WiFi MAC addresses.
While I have my own comments to the contrary elsewhere, I’m also in agreement that everyone should arm, which is also contrary to me 8 months ago. The military aren’t cyborgs and hopefully wouldn’t kill their own people, other countries would step up if our country truly tried to kill us, and if we dropped a nuke on ourselves, everyone’s dead across the planet anyway.
The numbers don’t look good, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to live and be free, if we can’t escape. Even escape isn’t an end, per se, if the evil spreads, it will eventually be everywhere, and no nation will be safe. Might as well destroy the cancer before we need chemo.
And a fraction of Earth’s habitability for the power wasted.
@kescusay@lemmy.world don’t you go giving me a safe place to catch my breath as the US falls apart! (Kidding, if that wasn’t apparent.)
Firefox can be installed from Mozilla and managed by Obtainium. Much better option all the way around.
I’m looking forward to 10 years from now, when this new novelty called, WRITING YOUR OWN SHIT (and reading it!) comes back into prevalence, and everyone thinks it is such an original idea.
(If we, or the Internet, are all still around then, anyway.)
Government was trying to kidnap a guy in a Colorado town, there’s an emergency response network to shut those shits down, and they did. The government morons retroactively tried to claim he was wanted for terrible crimes he did in Italy and was from El Salvador. Of course, there was no record of this being true in any of those countries, even the FBI’s most wanted list was devoid of this supposed bad guy. (I’m sure they’ll be sure to create fake dossiers in the future.)
Now, because of that, all the news was polluted with “These people did bad and stopped the FBI from doing good,” when the headlines should read, “Hero Activists Save a Person from Treasonous Thugs Violating the Constitution.” The government will probably refer to the news articles as circular logic proof that it was real at some point.
Troubling times, they’ve always lied, of course, the lies are just so much more toxic nonsense and there is less desire than ever to pursue facts or truth, as long as the evil deed is done. America is cooked.
Send help, or set up refugee programs, everyone else, we need it
Especially when it involves modems. Qualcomm had a vice grip on them for so long, and still mostly does, so there’s little competition, and no good competition. They make great modems, but they’re also a US military contractor and can’t truly be trusted. Competition, is also generally good.
In the context of basic communications, market share really shouldn’t. Phone calls are a standard, SMS is a standard, MMS is a standard. RCS should equally be a standard, along with IMS video calling that has been in the 3GPP spec since Rel99 (that’s 1999). Flip phones in the early aughts could do video calls (in Europe) way before FaceTime was a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye. Every phone right now could do out of box voice call/video call/text/picture messaging regardless of platform, if the cellular standard bodies would grow a pair.
Problem is, companies like Apple and Google became huge, unregulated, and monocultured.
How we humans allowed something as basic as communication to be put behind walled gardens is just a failure of humanity.
There is no technical reason. The carriers/cellular industry gave up on their efforts to push RCS and let Google own it all for the most part, and with it, everyone lost openness.
It’s also why Samsung Messages is on a slow burn EOL. The Samsung/Google partnership had Google encourage Samsung to drop their RCS support and just push Google’s app, after Google decided to sunset the openness of the messaging API. Third-party SMS apps will all slowly die. Probably also partly why Signal dropped SMS support. It was around the same time.
Android’s weird changes are nothing but badness, and will likely get worse. Hopefully the open OS community can start focusing more energy behind alternative mobile OSes that aren’t dependent on a corporation.
I knew Harry Vanderspeigle was real!
That’s their hope. The administrations of some governments are purposely doing moves to embolden terrorism, embolden racism, embolden hate. Then when someone with the wrong skin color does something terrible, they can say, “see? War were declared.” Let the wartime profits rain in!
Jewish people are great, the people of Israel seem to be smart and clever, their engineering seems first-class. Their government? Up there with the USA Federal government on the list of terrible things that need to go away.
Another route one can go that takes a bit of work is Obtainium. Hand-pick the apps you want to show up and feed their GitHub, F-Droid, etc. links to manage them. Since F-Droid has some issues with how they build packages, it can be used sparingly but not avoided then.
Go app by app until your dependence on the Play Store goes away. Then disable or uninstall (probably can only disable on most phones, I’ve seen anyway) the Play Store completely. Slow way to gain independence from crapware. You can then export your Obtainium config to a JSON file to import on future phones/other phones so you don’t have to duplicate the work.
Some bonus points, the non-Play version of one app I use shrinks from 120MB to 30MB when all the Google dependencies are stripped. You also gain back functionality like full filesystem access and other things Google forces apps to remove from the Play Store flavor.
More freedom. Faster apps. Less overhead. Less Google crap. Not a big scary transition.
They probably also likely removed it, because if you open your browser’s debug window, it identifies clearly that T-Mobile is the backing carrier, not “the big three carriers” like they claim. It’s T-Mobile’s classic MVNO coverage map, if one is familiar with it (which will include possible roaming on other carriers, so they’re not “lying”…)
That coverage site is also running on a very old system, IIRC, so good luck finding an engineer that still works there and knows how to fix it to “update” the gulf.
(Cell nerd deets, Mango-Mobile is using Liberty Wireless as their backing MVNO, which is an MVNO on T-Mobile’s infra. Liberty was also already terrible. MVNO’s are virtual cell carriers that live on real ones. It is NOT using Verizon, AT&T, or even Dish, except possibly in the case of roaming agreements.)
T-Mobile also use Muskrat’s Starlink as their mediocre sat-to-cell service, and they also leveraged Mango’s position in his first term to push through M&A’s to acquire 5G spectrum to artificially accelerate/cheat past the others. John Legere fans, cover your ears, he actually went to Mango’s FCC quite a bit to get this going.
tl;dr: probably a good idea to add T-Mobile to the boycott list next time one’s looking for cell service. (As well, any T-Mobile MVNO like Mint, MetroPCS, etc. Here’s an MVNO List that can be sorted by host network.)
He gained access to a trove of government data that he Starlinked back to his lair. He got more government military contracts and he got the FCC to revisit a bunch of hardline fiber broadband that will now end up going to Starlink or T-Mobile home broadband, as T-Mobile seems to be pretty ingrained in his money camp. Why give America fiber when you can deploy wireless affected by all sorts of extra physics problems? He also likely got a pass to keep poisoning communities with his AI datacenter running on a fleet of unfiltered backup generators.
He wanted money and access, and to feel special, like all of their types do.
While this was an inevitable move, it makes me curious if they are hitting a point where Gemini is becoming so integrated in all their software stacks and they’re just insanely paranoid about any precious “AI” code leaking that they just decided to close the gates early.
Probably for the best long-term. Having this weird dependency on the generosity of a corporation was always a liability. Whatever comes next can hopefully avoid it.
Hopefully someone like the EU, to combat ewaste, eventually requires all hardware manufacturers to sell their mobile hardware with bootloader/firmware flashing unlocking requirements. The work then will be for the community to write support for all these various makes and models of device, but the endgame being actual device freedom. Although with the world seemingly leaning hard into Authoritarianism and Fascism, it might not end up being the right time and freedom will remain underground.
A pity too, all phone hardware at its core is generic ARM computers with various devices connected to fairly generic interface busses. They just encrypt bits of code so the sauce to make things work is hidden.
It is more that they couldn’t figure out how - but they keep on slowly removing bits of all three and making all of them act the same way, so eventually they will be one bloated monolith if they continue down this path.