This creates a single backdoor for all sign-ons on your phone.

Don’t do this to me, man. Don’t bring real shit into my escapism. 😣

When I saw this on a custom ROM, it was basically the same thing, but said that my financial institution or whoever had admin access to my phone, including seeing texts and everything else, until my phone was paid off. Still not sure why that was there in a custom ROM, but I ended up not using it.

Huh. I hadn’t thought about that. That’s not a bad point either.

Why would Reddit ban it? It’s an easy way for them to collect users’ IP addresses for their corporate overlords.

“No.”

For some reason, I now have the urge to bury you in wet shady soil.

Problem is that one day, it will. I’m old enough to be able to see the difference in how much freedom has been lost online.

It’s not impossible. North Korea exists. There’s nothing stopping the rest of the world from adopting the same authoritarian regulations and technology bans.

That’s why people need to be involved in their governments; elections, local regulations, and what have you. It’s easy to complain that things aren’t perfect, or that you don’t like any of the options; but being part of the process, long term, is the only real way to fix that. The more people that give up and say they don’t care, the faster corruption infects everything and ruins what good is there. And trying to be clever and say that “one side is just as bad as the other” is not only a selfish lie people tell themselves to feel better about not doing anything, but it actively helps the authoritarians claim power.

The only thing that staves off corruption and authoritarianism is when the people being governed get involved and stay vigilant. Even small things like school board elections matter down the road.

You want to have a free internet? Then vote in school board elections. Seriously.

It already is. For example, it’s basically impossible to run your own email server these days, because most big email providers just block residential IPs to reduce spam.

Lots of ISPs block or heavily filter things like torrents.

Your ISP might decide you having a personal server at home is against their terms and force you to make a business account. They don’t want people uploading, only downloading.

Some countries are trying to weaken or ban encryption across the board.

And this is only slightly related, but things like websites that let you watch movies or shows are dying. They either all share the same server for video, or they just copy the files from each other. If you find one and watch a video with a little glitch, you’re likely to find that same glitch in all the other websites too. Think things like TV logos, audio suddenly changing language for a few seconds, scan lines on old VHS or TV recordings, etc… There used to be a lot, but now all the small players are being sued or shut down, and only the largest ones are still alive. The noose is tightening.

God, I only use Ublock Origin on Firefox. No TOR, VPNs, or anything like that.

Despite that, there are a handful of Google-related websites like Virustotal that now permanently trap me in repeating captchas. Youtube will occasionally decide to block my IP entirely for a week.

Let me tell you, this shit doesn’t make me more inclined to disable ad blocking. Instead, I’ve starting finding alternatives and using a sandboxed vanilla Chromium for problem pages.

Don’t forget Nintendo.

Step 1 - Push people to piracy.

Step 2 - Complain to lawmakers about rampant piracy.

Step 3 - Get governments to outlaw and shut down piracy sources, compatible technologies, and generally force more authoritarian standards and laws.

Step 4 - P2P starts to die. Piracy starts to condense around large hubs.

Step 5 - Make money suing the only large hubs of piracy that still exist, and shut them down.

Step 6 - Profit from lack of competition and ability to force DRM into everything.

I’ve also heard it described by the Puzzle in a Thunderstorm gang as someone being so blind and unwilling to acknowledge their privilege that they claim everything good that happens to them is literal magic. Their problems can be solved by social safety nets and coincidence, but get attributed to their “positive thinking” altering the fabric of reality to benefit them.

Fair enough. I was just thinking of more “high level” stuff that’s easier to disassociate from simple physical mechanics of cells and stuff. Trying to avoid the low hanging fruit in my examples, and all that.

Agreed. So far the only things we know of that don’t seem to have detectable causes are virtual particles and maybe radioactive decay, I think?

If you mean that we make cities and culture and science with our minds, then yes.

If you mean we control reality by squeezing our butt cheeks real hard and wishing for parking spaces, then no.

Most of the time I hear this, it’s stupid people promoting the second.

I wish I could go back in time and slap whoever invented the phrase “nothing to hide.”

I’ve never heard of this company before the past week, and I’m seeing it everywhere now. I’m also really annoyed with this trend of companies appropriating random fucking words instead of using actual names.

As cool as the technology is, I wouldn’t trust Starlink to handle my breakfast order. It’s leadership is corrupt, arrogant, and evil. You can find all sorts of news stories about it online.

Rethink for Android is an app firewall, DNS solution, and ad/malware/spam/etc blocker.

Might be worth giving a try.