Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.
As someone who was born before the age of surveillance capitalism, I can tell you we’ve hit that level a long time ago. Anybody who thinks society has been running normally for at least the past 15 years is too young to have known what a normal society is.
To evade taxes of course.
Have you ever asked yourself how it’s possible that ALL the fucking ultra-rich almost without exception do philanthropy?
It doesn’t make sense: most of those millionaires and billionaires are psychopaths who essentially don’t give a shit about their fellow man, acquired their wealth by exploiting and shafting others for the most part, and don’t give a shit about how that makes them look: why on Earth would any of them do philanthropy, let alone all of them?
It only starts to make sense when you understand philanthropy is yet another tax loophole.
I would suggest we give him the 3,000 acres of Lana’i he doesn’t own, so the entire island belongs to him, then strand him there forever.
I have been hating this man’s guts since the mid 90’s and somehow it never lets off. Most hateful people manage to become a little bit more likeable as they age. Even this disgusting piece of human refuse Bill Gates might pass for a somewhat okay human being if you wilfully overlook why he truly does philanthropy.
But Larry Ellison? Hell no. He never changes. he’s just consistently the worst year after year, decade after decade.
What if you don’t want a Pixel? Or a Fairphone? Or one of the very, VERY few cellphones that you can install a deGoogled OS on?
There are precious few ways of escaping the Google monopoly. I own a Fairphone running CalyxOS, and it happens to be the phone I want because of its excellent repairability. So lucky me. But if I didn’t want a Fairphone, nor any Samsung phone, nor any Chinese cellphone, and certainly not a fucking Google phone - because I’d rather cut off my left nut than give Google money to escape Google’s surveillance, that’s just too rich for me - then I’d be SOL.
My point is, if you refuse to be Google’s bitch, Google backs you into a corner. Just because you’re happy with the corner doesn’t mean you’re not stuck in a corner.
Google “might let me” do something…
If that doesn’t summarize everything that’s wrong with this fucking monopolist, that controls YOUR device that you paid with YOUR money but ultimately isn’t yours to do as you please, I don’t know what does.
The only thing that makes Google a bit tolerable in the mobile space is Apple, because Apple is even worse. At least you can (still) sideload stuff in Android - although Google is about to make that impossible very soon too.
Fuck the monopolists.
Runbox, a privacy-focused email provider out of Norway. Our family has been using it for years with zero issues. The prices are very decent.
It’s a problem if you need a fucking banking app for example, and the bank won’t let you sideload it and you’re running a deGoogled OS. Then you suddenly need a backup phone with the full surveillance Android just to do banking.
I’m not talking about the poor: as you say, they’re tired and the assaults of ultra-capitalism are relentless.
I’m talking about the middle class which, in the eyes of the ultra-rich, is just as insignificant as the ultra-poor, and is really only a few paychecks away from the same fate.
Middle class people happily ignores the fate of their fellow man in the street, bow their head and say nothing, believing if they don’t make too much fuss, the ultra-rich will maintain the status quo and they won’t do too badly.
That’s us. WE should pick up the pitchfork. We have the energy and we have a good reason, because really, we’re just slightly better than the poor and we pay a lot more taxes than the ultra-billionnaire sumbitches. But we don’t.
And poor people still die homeless in the street.
You’d think pitchforks would sell well. But apathy seems incurable, as people appear to have internalized staggering levels of inequality as a fact of normal life.
Someone is making money off of the surveillance and that someone knows someone else in the board of education. That’s why it exists. It has nothing to do with sudent safety.
I trust my kids to mostly only use the devices how I say. The security is mainly to keep their mum happy
It sounds like you should simply trust your kids and convince your better half that she should do the same.
If there’s one thing I learned both as a kid and as a father, it’s that restricting kids’ access to computers - or anything really - just doesn’t work: software solutions that exist for that purpose are almost always defeated by kids, who are reliably more clever than the adults who try to restrict them, and only exist to falsely reassure their parents.
If you’re serious about controlling your children’s cellphones, I’d suggest buying them Linux phones, or phones that you can install a mobile Linux distro on: nobody makes Linux apps, so good luck getting malware or shitty social media apps on them. And of course, you can keep the root password to yourself and set up your kids as non-privileged users.
Either that or feature phones - if you truly hate your children.
No device made to kill a human is humane
Yes but some are more inhumane than others. That’s why the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons exists, which lists the following protocols:
Thermite is a protocol 3 weapon. So again, while I understand that Ukraine is desperate to defend itself, using that stuff is not great.
I would cancel and tell the restaurant why.
Businesses need to know why they lose customers, because if enough of them report the same reason, they might do something about it.
I hate Putin and any Russian war sympathizer as much as the next guy, but…
My grandfather got a white phosphorus burn during WW2. He told me it was the most terrible pain he ever felt in his entire life, you can’t extinguish it, and he wouldn’t wish it on his worst enemy. I heard the same kind of stories from people who got napalm burns in Vietnam.
I’m pretty sure thermite munitions are in the same category of basically inhumane weapons regardless of the circumstances, right up there with NBCs, mines, napalm and white phosphorus, and I can’t say I fully side with the Ukrainians on this one. I mean I understand why they do it, but I also remember my grandfather’s leg and the horror of what he told me.
Free software (not open-source, it’s really free software that’s important) that depends on a single for-profit vendor is not free.
MicroG is open-source but it’s not free. It fails to address two problems:
I don’t think OP cares about getting the source of the apps they run so much as the apps being free-as-in-libre in his original question. Many people mistake open-source for free software and MicroG is not truly free.
MicroG works well if you let it leak some data to Google.
I would like a free-as-in-free-from-Google Google Play Services reimplementation that lets me use any app that depends on it without hitting any Google server.
Google Play Services
Here’s a little story that shows how much society has become dystopian:
Back in the 90’s, I worked in France for a while. When I was there, a case was brought up against the state that had violated a CNIL rule: some dude was cheating on his taxes by claiming he lived at some address. Tthe French fiscal administration sued him because they obtained a file from the electricity company and another from the water utilty company showing that the consumption of both electricity and water were so low it wasn’t consistent with the dude actually living there.
The case was thrown out, the dude walked and the state was fined because it had violated a rule that clearly stipulated cross-referencing files for the purpose of extracting secondary information that wasn’t available in each single file was a violation of privacy and civil liberties.
I shit you not. This used to be a thing.
Can you imagine this today? All the Big Data sonsabitches cross-reference billions of files ALL THE TIME and nobody bats an eyelid anymore.
If you’re old enough, you remember sovereign states taking privacy seriously. If you’re not, you don’t. And that’s how Big Data gets away with what they do today because fewer and fewer people remember a time when it was unacceptable.