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- cross-posted to:
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The UK government is giving Apple and Google three months to build on-device scanning infrastructure. This isn’t about child safety; it’s about the end of private devices and the death of the “nothing to hide” fallacy.
There was never a better moment for linux to shine than now. C’mon smart people, do something for the dumb stupid generic user. An actual good usable linux distro for phones, bring back firefox os.
What the hell is this take. Firstly your cooling the average user dumb which is just kinda rude and untrue, Also developers are working really hard to build the best possible Linux experience for everyone. how about you actually chip in before shaming them for not working hard enough. And Linux is already user friendly enough for most people, arguably more user friendly than windows. People just want to stick to what they know, also vendor lock in, and most people don’t know how to install Linux and will just use the default operating system. I don’t think Linux devs can do anything to fix any of those problems.
Pay them. I’m sure they’d be happy to do it inexpensively if they can live off their labor.
Maybe so. Maybe so.
But I’m not so sure there is a long term tech solution. It’s a political problem. Ultimately, if the gov requires let’s say a trust attestation for the use of web sites, they will have to comply, or leave the market. Sure, you can run Linux. But now you can’t use it to bank, to shop, to access gov services, to pay your bills… If they push hard enough, even mundane shit like get a weather forecast or w/e. Google would already love this. It locks everybody in.
A gov can make life VERY difficult for noncompliance, by leaning on the things you want to do. Sometimes, a site that isn’t local like a bank can say, fine, we’ll leave that market. But the bigger the market, the less they wanna do that. What happens if the US follows the UK into this? And then Australia or Japan piles on? Plus, some things are local by definition. Like your bank. If it’s required to block non-trusted (I threw up in my mouth a little bit…) devices, it will have to do that.
I’m not sure Linux can save us. Maybe it can buy us a little time. But in the end, this needs a political solution. Not a tech one.
There will be two forms of the internet. One will be the clearnet, where everything is monitored and controlled, and the other will be Tor and I2P, where you still have freedom to be an actual person. Also, mesh networks like MeshCore and Reticulum.
The internet can be gated because it requires you connecting to central infrastructure and a central operator has to assign you an address where something like reticulum requires no central authority because it’s based on public-private keys and so anybody can connect to the network permissionlessly
problem is most smart people are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to work for big tech. If open source can start paying developers the same then we’ll start to see competition
I’d argue that everything big tech produced in this last decade with all that expensive workforce is somewhat unnecessary. If I have a 2026 Linux computer with the capabilities of a 2016s win/mac, I am totally fine and I can do everything I want to do with it.
Story about that. A while ago I sent a $$ contribution to an OSS author who’d built an app I liked for Linux.
He wrote me back. He said mine was the only donation he’d got in the past 2 years.
That’s the life of many OSS authors. And yah like you say, the top programmers can go get 1-300K’s of dollars or euros or w/e working for big tech.
Many core linux contributions in the kernel or w/e do come from highly paid programmers at big tech co’s. So there is that. But run of the mill programs and apps that are still useful day to day, many of those are done for no money.
The number of apps people created to make something more convenient for themselves and then decided to share with the community is very high.