They’re kind of already is. It’s the free and open source community.

The problem is phones are actually incredibly impressive pieces of hardware and the fact that we can Mass produce them has diluted that opinion. I’m actually to look into building my own phone and I wanted to have at least some near-flagship specs. I know how to design my own circuit boards and get someone to print them. But acquiring CPUs that perform at least 1/4 as well as Pixels or iPhones is objectively not possible, these companies have deals with manufacturers for exclusive products. And even if you could these chips are so precise you will never be able to figure out the signaling yourself.

Maybe things have gotten better now that we have ai and you don’t need to be any sort of expert in anything you just need to be good enough at decision making problem solving and communicating to acquire the skills and knowledge to work on these chips. And by the time you’ve done all the work and acquired all the hardware you might have spent close to 3 to 5K on a device you could have just bought for $800. All for what, to circumvent privacy breaches that should be illegal in the first place?

And that’s the root problem we’re trying to solve. Another symptom of these companies being able to engage in the bad behavior that they do is that they gain the ability to overvalue themselves. There should be no safety or privacy concern when engaging in the purchase of any device for the same reason that people should not fear food poisoning every time they go to the grocery store.

That’s what the regulators are for. This is a legal issue not a technical one.

But the only underlying cause for why we’re not regulating tech companies is because fear of privacy violations is not reducing market activity. Apparently people are still going to use their phones even if their phones are listening to them having private conversations. Apparently people will still buy shit off of their phones even if their phones are going to use that data to show them ads.

Apparently the harm of your privacy being breached does not hurt enough to prevent you from doing good things.

Now if Android takes away my F-Droid, Tasker and Termux I’m gonna throw a fit. That’s not privacy that’s self-determination, I bought an Android because I can customize it to be as low friction for me as I need, if my phone starts giving me friction then we’re going to have problems.

This has got to be some sort of psyop

That almost feels analogous to the world burning… like this is going to sound a little macabre but are you really expecting 2026 to be better? If so can you articulate why??

When I read about this I’m always brought back to the conversation of “internet as a public utility”. I hope it’s cool if we can take a tangent.

See unlike any of our other utilities like natural gas electricity water and sewage, the only thing that could potentially give any meaningful information about us is our sewage, and the government already tests sewage for diseases. If we allow the government to “sell” us our internet they would basically be able to know everyone we are “talking too”. Also how could we ever have enough regulatory oversight to protect everyone on the internet. Symmetrically if the government wants to have so much regulatory control over our internet it should maybe pay for it.

Like I wouldn’t mind even paying another 50 bucks a month extra for “private internet” just so the government can have their free and regulated “public internet”. Or would I (⁠・⁠–⁠・)⁠ゞ?

There is a metadata protocol called opengraph, it’s how apps get the information to display a rich preview. Basically the app takes the link as it’s written in the SMS message or Twitter thread and then it tries to fetch that page and then read the open graph metadata from inside. That should give it enough to show a title description and a background image, considering the web developers implemented opengraph.

If Google is planning to use their own servers basically as a proxy then all this means is that the opengraph rich metadata is going to be a little more stale than if the app just fetch the page and generated the rich metadata itself

If you go to the complaints section, it’s a form that sends a letter to your local state representative

Exactly that, if I change a pixel then the cryptographic signature breaks

The NFTs tried to solve this problem already and it didn’t work. You can change the hash/sig of a video file by just changing one pixel on one frame, meaning you just tricked the computer, not the people who use it.

Why are these apps being distributed on app stores

Why are these apps not PWAs with an app store deployment wrapper???

I almost feel like the compromise we will eventually land on is that if an OS maker like Microsoft wants to continue advertising on your OS they have to take some liability for its security.

Does anyone vaguely remember those internet licenses from that Star Trek DS9 episode when they went back in time but it was the near future from the 80s perspective meaning that it’s actually today?

We’re going to have internet licenses soon

I feel like literally everybody knew it was a bubble when it started expanding and everyone just kept pumping into it.

How many tech bubbles do we have to go through before we leave our lesson?

This is so lame for the arch community, like I use arch btws are supposed to be the most hardcore power users and they bugged a dev that badly! I don’t know how many tutorial I saw about compiling arch and building everything yourself into a minimal setup.

You can’t give me shit for using Manjaro for as long as I did, GLAD I LEFT.

Okay I don’t want to directly disagree with you I just want to add a thought experiment:

If it is a fundamental truth of the universe, a human can literally not program a computer to be smarter than a human (because of some Neil deGrasse Tyson-esq interpretation of entropy), then no matter what AI’s will crash cars as often as real people.

And the question of who is responsible for the AI’s actions will always be the person because people can take responsibility and AI’s are just machine-tools. This basically means that there is a ceiling to how autonomous self-driving cars will ever be (because someone will have to sit at the controls and be ready to take over) and I think that is a good thing.

Honestly I’m in this camp that computers can never truly be “smarter” than a person in all respects. Maybe you can max out an ai’s self-driving stats but then you’ll have no points left over for morality, or you can balance the two out and it might just get into less morally challenging accidents more often ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. There are lots of ways to look at this

Realistically speaking it feels like this is the one thing AI won’t be able to replace. Celebrities are already fake enough as it is, imagine an AI generated celebrity LARPing as a real person that no one ever sees outside