what is this take based on? there’s a direct line between “we want this shit done” and “judge rubberstamps order”? no process, no interview, no hearing, no nothings? medieval courts maybe worked that way, no system of government I know of nowadays does.

I imagine they got courts and lawyers and motions and hearings and stuff over there, even if the fight is doomed you need to show your teeth once in a while. and what’s with the proton employee reviewing whether there were “explosives” and “guns” involved, naturally based on super-reliable evidence, what the fuck is that?!

and alla that aside, why do they have payment and user info on file, for what fucking purpose? there’s either user privacy or there ain’t. and them folks are in the “ain’t” camp.

article in case you can’t read it: lemmy.ml/post/44086795 edit: better link in a reply.

proton coulda put up a fight, a loud one, for optics sake if nothing else. rolling over on any (and by implication, all) request should be the last straw in their long line of snafus; by way of “death by a thousand cuts”, I would never entrust them with anything of importance.

signal demonstrated that you could decouple payment info from user data and a shop that touts the privacy part of their offerings coulda at least mimic such a thing.

edit 2: fuck any and all pay-with-crypto shills and the horse they rode in on.

I’m saying I’m not gonna use it as an email provider, as in pen a love letter to to sydney sweeney, reminding her of the shit she promised me in my most recent dream and she’s kinda tardy so what’s up with that and so on.

I am gonna use it as a transactional email inbox, as in “you registered to yadda-yadda here’s shit you’re never gonna read”. and if in the process of using them it turns out they’re a buncha good folks, maybe I’ll elevate out reationship.

the trackings and whatnot are a) blocked by a buncha filters, b) gone when I close the tab with their url, c) they don’t get my PII, and d) they don’t get to store anything on my hardware.

way worse shit out there.

what I said in the first sentence - I am assuming we’re in an adversarial position. if I know you’re out to fuck with my shit, guess how much of my shit I’m gonna entrust you? the equivalent of junk mail.

now it’s possible them guys are good people and whatnot, but until that is established beyond a significant threshold, any and all such providers get zero of my trust up front.

two issues with the thing. it necessitates buying shit, however inexpensive; woulda preferred repurposing existing hardware. and, it’s got practically no privacy baked in as it’s constantly blasting out your hardware ID; at least such was the state last time I took a look. the mentioned alternatives look good, I’ll check those out.

I know nothing about these services but intuitively this shit rings true:

• the whole setup is kinda unfalsifiable - who’s to say how many of them “brokers” are out there and if they contacted all of them and what the outcome is/was
• advertising all over the place implies a scammy business model; life’s too short to figure out what the scam exactly is
• related, almost every piece of shit advertising all over the podcast world turned out to be a piece of shit
• the threat vector of you voluntarily supplying them complete and detailed personal info (so they can find you everywhere) cannot be overstated
• they’re motivated to keep you on the hook for a long time; it’s not a pay-once thing, it’s a subscription thing - alarm bells should be going off
• finally, paying for that looks to me like them going to the “broker” and divvying up the cash, if not outright being their affiliate

same way how you don’t send “unsubscribe” proof-of-life to spammers, I’d stay the fuck away.

I automatically assume I’m in an adversarial position vs such a thing and don’t care what kinda shit they try to pull - they’re met with the full arsenal of privacy enhancing tools at my disposal.

as for me, an email provider that asks for no backup email or other verification methods can come useful in everyday life, thanks for mentioning them.

don’t like the email domain, the UX is nothing to write home about, and they’re obnoxious with the upsale pitch, but with a few tweaks here and there this can be useful for signups, transactional emails, and the like.

TIL neocities is a thing

I’m telling you how things are, you’re listing things you wished to be true. and that list will get accomplished by deus-ex-machinas, what’s the big deal… install it on a loose device you got and try using it for a day or two.

you don’t see what the big deal is? you’re in a UX that was tweaked and polished for decades, and you do it almost subconsciously, whilst walking, dodging pedestrians, doing other shit, etc. this thing is in its infancy and pretty far from usable by even tech people for everyday shit, let alone normies.

the apps aren’t handling the vertical UI gracefully or at all. like, plasma’s settings UI doesn’t collapse the categories so you can’t interact with it. Gnome’s toggle switches only recently started reacting to touch. OSKs are now at least somewhat usable but still nothing compared to android keyboards. none of the navigation gestures you got muscle memory for work here. that’s just the system’s UI, before you even attempt to run apps that don’t know that 300% zoomed-in, vertical UI is a thing.

the stuff you mention are so far off on the things-to-fix list, might as well not be on it.

this is a glorious platform and I love using it; but people expecting this to be a replacement for android is bordering on delusion, no such thing exists nor is it really in the works.

really glad to see someone finally making a distinction between pixels and the rest, had about enough with the graphene/pixel pushers. also didn’t know eOS (not typing up them slashes) has a web installer, albeit only for a handful of models; hopefully that will expand. eOS to lineageOS would be like ubuntu to debian, making the thing more useable for a newb and every stride in this direction helps.

I alternate between mobian and postmarketOS every coupla months, to be up to date on the state of it. I have a fast device, lotsa RAM, lotsa fast storage, switch regularly between various UIs (phosh, plasma mobile, etc)

“up to speed” is such a huge, immense, and moving target that I can’t fathom the funds and dev efforts needed to get there. e.g. the plasma team has their hands full with bringing desktop plasma up to speed - 6.6 was a gargantuan effort; when you throw the mobile UI in the mix, it makes the goal exponentially farther away.

when you consider that Linux-on-Phones (just had a mental flash of Russ Hanneman saying “Radio-on-Internet”) isn’t one thing, there’s a bunch of dev efforts, some on bare-metal, some halium based and the various UIs (gnome, phosh, plasma mobile, sxmo, etc) that all pull in different directions, solving the same thing independently, wasting time and dev efforts.

so this thing becoming an alternative to an OS that was worked on for close to two decades by the richest people on the planet - that simply isn’t on the horizon, becoming an android alternative is pretty far, far away.

now, if you think of this as your linux laptop with a touch interface in your pocket, you’re closer to what this thing is and can do.

I am the first to pile on shit on people who are like buy new stuff, but in this instance, yeah, get a $20 laptop with a busted screen or sumsuch, install debian, and use it normally (docker compose).

you need the least amount of movable parts in this setup and yours is just too off kilter for a server.

you are still buying stuff you dont need to and they are not cheap by any metric. $200 for a phone with a degraded battery that was rubbed all over, spat on, taken to the shitter, and dogknowswhatelse is not cheap, by any metric.

a year ago, $50 could get me a Poco F1 or Oneplus 6/6T, SDM 845 with 8 GB RAM. full lineageOS and postmarketOS support. nowadays, same money can get me something like a Poco X3 Pro, SDM860 with 8 GB and 256 GB storage. insanely powerful platforms, that’s what I’d buy if I had to. but I don’t gotta, the latest lineageOS runs on my shit.

first of all, posting this here is kinda pointless, ain’t a soul here that doesn’t know about this thing. second, no ill feelings about madame V., the world is better with her work in it, but this ain’t the audience for it as her work is kinda superficial and, again, directed at a different audience.

third and final, fuck grapheneos. fuck the pixel. and fuck google. and fuck the premise that the only way you can escape their clutches is buying new shit.

if you think this thing is a good idea, that’d be as if linux can run only on a couple of the most recent thinkpads and nothing else. would you still be into it? I know I wouldn’t be.

gOS is the easiest to get onto hardware and that’s why this thing dominates the youtube slop sphere. you try to make flashing lineageOS into a coherent video, you’d lose all of your audience, presto.

for the 99,9% of us that ain’t a buncha jason bournes on the run from 5eyes and friends, lineageOS is plenty fine and secure as is.

not dealt with such a thing, but a decomissioned phone or laptop is the most obvious solution. they come with batteries, have seamless transition between power and battery, and you’re reusing shit nobody wants no more.

laptops you can get cheap when they have like busted screens and any reasonably modern (like decade old) can operate in sub-5W territory; coupled with a good battery, that should provide you with tens of hours of battery powered use, and you can expand that, with powerbanks and such.

alternatively, a cheap phone that can run postmarketOS or mobian. even lower consumption and more options to extend power availability.

jellyfin has the option to host your books, and with the OPDS plugin you can pull books directly off the server with compatible readers (koreader, moon+, etc), no need to copy things around manually.

my point is, we have already examples with years long headstart that shoulda replaced the unrepairable solutions - framework and fairphone. this thing is only relevant if it can replace existing solutions, like the current crop of use-once-then-throw-away printers.

them two demonstrated they didn’t even make a dent in the market, they just made the famous xkcd comic afresh relevant.

we don’t need a $1000 repairable framework; it’s repairable only with expensive framework shit that isn’t globally available, and - save for RAM, SSD, Wifi - is proprietary. so that whole “repairable” thing is just academic, and more of a sales slogan.

what is globally available are hundreds of thousands of discarded thinkpads, infinitely repairable machines of superior build quality, with cross-generational parts compatibility available worldwide that can be had for cheap. only thing is, you can’t make tonsa money from that.

we don’t need a $700 repairable fairphone with the same premise - only fairphone parts that with shipping cost stupendously - when there are millions of competent discarded devices that can be had for less than 10% of its price and whose parts are globally available for pocket change.

so, to apply this analogy, we don’t need another printer when there are oceans of discarded tanks in the form of old deskjet and laserjet printers, made in the olden times when planned obsolescence was just bad business; wanna opensource something, do it with the most common breakable parts.

as I’m writing this, I’m looking at a HP Deskjet 1280, a 20-year old fucking tank made outta steel and hard plastic that’ll outlive us both. its cartridges are forever refillable and the only thing that breaks here are some rubber bands that cost pennies.

finally, printer demand is in sharp decline, and thankfully so. reams of paper being daily wasted on nothing by businesses around the planet should soon be a thing of the past.

I am illustrating how two decades old stuff is still usable and you’re being obtuse.

molly (a signal fork) allows linking phones and tablets as secondary devices