which is ironic considering Meshtastic is better than this shit tbh. VC just hard forked it and set it down the great path to enshittification

shit is so fucking insane, hard to believe. not gonna help us trans folk with the whole “this is just a mental illness” look either, especially with the “correlation is causation” attitude running so rampant these days.

honestly I get popping off once in a while but the reasoning is poor in this case. they could have done something more actually effective with all those resources and shit, why this?? I mean, I totally get cultism - I spent 16 years in a cult. but ugh what a waste.

can confirm, I’m running GrapheneOS right now with F-Droid and some extra repos as my only app store, it works fine for me. but I don’t use banking apps (web browsers do fine for that), and I’m using a de-Firebase-d version of Signal (Molly F-Droid) so no issues so far with no GMS and no SafetyNet.

edit: I should add that a new GrapheneOS update just released, this is in the release notes:

• disable anti-competitive code being injected by the Play Store into apps choosing to enable “App integrity > Automatic protection” when there’s a valid Play Store source stamp signature (proving that it’s an unmodified app from the Play Store, so we aren’t disabling an integrity check) since it prevents using the apps on GrapheneOS when apps also choose to enable “App integrity > Store listing visibility” with either the “Device integrity checks” or “Strong integrity checks” values enforcing having a device licensing Google Mobile Services and running the stock OS (circumventing this is protected by the DMCA exemption for jailbreaking)

so it looks like the devs are actively working around this issue and making changes to allow those checks to pass even without the ROM licensing GMS.

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Cory absolutely cooks every single time without fail. I’m also a huge fan of how he really doesn’t budge on the point that corps are at fault for the enshitternet - I’ve followed him for years and that has always been his central point, or at least one of them. 10/10 writer and speaker too

my tiny rural hometown in the middle of fucking nowhere southwest United States got 10Gbps fiber to every home in the town last year, and 1G fiber in 2021 as a result of Biden’s infrastructure bill. that fiber cost $45/month for 1Gbit with no data caps - before that, the best we could get was 50Mbit on rickety wireless service. Genuinely changed my life - being able to homelab (more) reliably got me into networking and pays my bills now. I hate how this new admin is so fucking myopic, or worse, malicious

I’m not going to nitpick you on your politics since that’s not my strong suit. However, as someone who’s worked 4 years in rural networking and infrastructure as everything from tech support and customer service to engineering and field repair:

ISPs will never install 100G+ fiber circuits to cities 100+ miles from their nearest drop on a whim. They absolutely need a market that (1 needs internet and (2 can afford it. otherwise they’re gonna waste money if they can’t recoup the costs. the thing Trump is rolling back is the thing that helps to guarantee* that ISPs won’t kill themselves trying to make infrastructure work.

and yes, of course Spectrum and Comcast could do it and be fine, but because of our dear sweet “free market”, they don’t give a fuck about these small rural places because at their scale (read: monopoly) there’s no reason for them to. This means it’s the little guys - actual small business ISPs, that are gonna be pulling conduit and standing up switching and line cards and distribution backbones and applying for construction permits and FCC licenses for spectrum with the money that comes from programs like these

The little guys can’t do rural builds otherwise because it’s too cost prohibitive without a way for people to pay for the service - too risky.

The big guys won’t because they don’t give a fuck. And if they do complete a build, the service is fucking garbage because they literally leave the infrastructure to rot while saying they’ll be sure to send a tech to look at it, while paying that tech 5 pence and an “atta boy” to fix a rotting mess of cable that should have been decommissioned 20 years ago. edit: semantics

Usenet and IRC are fucking awesome. I wish we could have kept them around - with some added TLS sure but the experience on modern machines is incredible and it sucks that it’s not still mainstream.

see, some days I’m happy that I didn’t grow up on the Internet and on IRC, and some days (today) I’m sad that I missed these bits of internet history. God I love this so much