FxOS only targeting low–mid-range phones in developing markets only seemed a bit odd. Basically no one had heard of it & these places largely choose used/old version of premium products to buying budget unless they have to. There was hype in the dev community about getting a B2G device, but there was hardly availability & specs were abysmal for an OS running a non-fast interpreted language like JavaScript. Not only that but the marketing was around openness & developer-friendliness—things average consumers don’t care about (even if they should).

Imagine in a parallel universe where the idea was managed properly & B2G left the phone sphere too—where school kids were required to get a FxBook instead of Chromebooks… 😶

A US corporation cornering the market then charging their own fees to use the service (surfing & scraping are basically the same action)? Never seen this before. Sounds uber evil—I couldn’t airbnbelieve it.

This assumes that just since abuse could happen means we should block access for everyone. Folks might make illegal photocopies of books so we should ban libraries. I & others have done general scraping for our own uses that isn’t done in some abusive manner. But to assume a company beholden to US shareholder is going to “to the right thing” would be to go against the history of US corporations.

And you know who is going to be able to afford to do the scraping? Big US-based “AI Bros” that can do it with venture capital preventing the average user or researcher from grepping the net.

They are precisely deciding who can scrape what by sitting in the middle of like 30% of internet traffic & denying access. There is no way to tell if this ‘scraping’ is for research, hobby, commercial, or “AI” purposes; conveniently if it can make Cloudflare money, they’ll let you charge a toll. If Cloudflare cared about AI issues, they wouldn’t be having unpaid users solve/train their hCAPTCHA models just for visiting a site from Tor, a VPN, or even just a non-‘Western’ IP address. The fact that folks/businesses bought into this centralization is frightening—with little open access to information or allowing folks to stay anonymous (whatever their motivation).

Also don’t dare call someone “dumbass” if you can’t be bothered to turn on spell check or understand how commas work.

The gall of Cloudflare to think they can be the arbitrator of scraping… this is what happen when all y’all give a singular publicly-traded, US-based major control of the general internet infrastructure by purposefully letting them man-in-the-middle your production sites. Now they get to sell access to what was once an open internet. Instead every time Clouflare or Fastly go down, half of the internet goes down with them.

Movim is another web UX option (comes with posts + feeds that can easily be crawled as well so you don’t have everything stuck in the black hole of chat).

I don’t mind a ‘phone call’ so long as it isn’t actually using a phone number where ISPs can spy, but using some encrypted service.

Or do the sane thing: close tab on any site that refuses to support Fx

Fuck all CEOs. Stop giving them platforms & celebrity where they get to be the symbol of products/services—which discounts all the labor done into something by the real folks building & making decisions.

That I could prefer: using a remote VM for the work & being able to opt out of a company provisioned device if possibre. It’s much easier to not pollute a VM & you will want to disable it as soon as you are done anyhow to free up local resources/connections.

Thanks for confirming some of my suspicions about how it all actually operates & the reasons for doing so.

I really just don’t like this in principle as it is way too easy to accidentally do private stuff out of convenience on a machine which is why I do like I said with BYOD & will be present for all attempts to troubleshoot a device. I don’t really see a conceptual different in my digital desktop vs. my physical one & I wouldn’t let an employer install a camera at my desk just as much or would I think it is cool for a business to have cameras in the bathroom just because they own the rental agreement. It feels like there should be some form of privacy even in these digital scenarios that never happens & it leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Is there a solution to allowing users privacy in their system or is it only considered fully private property?

Why do IT teams think being able to snoop any users screen is a good thing? Leave folks alone. Get authorized key consent to SSH into their box iff necessary.

This is why I only work with BYOD operations…

We would have that freedom with Android too if those stupid banking apps stopped trying to dictate what you can run on your hardware & Google giving them more features to do so.

Always online with kernel-level anti-cheat has a tendency to not work, but that is probably a red flag since there are thousands of different games you can play that don’t snoop around ring-0

I’m still salty my current laptop is sold at a discount in the EU without a pre-installed OS due to laws in place–but where I am, I had no choice but to pay a Microsoft tax & immediately wipe it. I used to not connect to WiFi & just look around for a few minutes out of curiosity before wiping, but since 11 moved to Microsoft Account + WiFi required & all the telemetry on by default, I don’t even bother with that anymore.

Honestly I think many consumers go buy “computer” & have no concept that it has an operating system or that you can change it.

If you know there is an alternative, then yeah… wtf

Software making doesn’t need to be social media. Sad are the folks that think everything with an account should be Web 2.0.

2.8k seems about the sweet spot on a laptop to be from your face & see no pixels or even have to think about font hinting & the like. The bigger wins are OLEDs for blacks & picking up something with 100% DCI-P3.

This is not so much as an edorsement or recommendation, but you might check out the DAPs by Shanling or Hidiz if you have coin to spare. They use Linux & don’t publish kernel mods, but they do have inexpensive, very small, lightweight options that may fit your needs. I have one & it has a place to have a dedicate device to not chew thru my phone’s battery as well as function as a high-quality USB DAC in scenarios where you don’t have a jack (like my old laptop) or the DAC is horrible (like in my dock for my laptop).

I had an inkling of hope the 5 would bring it back after so many complaints. Instead they launched wireless earbud & doubled down on it. Dead to me too.