This was outlined 50 years ago as part of Anarchist analysis of the system then. Not exactly an easy read, but “the second watershed” can be equated to “jumping the shark” or “enshittification” or whatever other term you want to apply to: a good thing gone bad due to the business owners switching from serving customers to enriching / empowering themselves:

https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality/page/9/mode/1up

The alternative proposed by Illich to “Radical Monopolies” are “Convivial Tools” which empower individuals instead of central decision makers.

I actually tried Tox - maybe 8 years ago now… the real problem with it, or anything similar, is that you need both ends of every conversation to take the trouble to set it up. It was pretty easy to setup, IMO, but… as an example, in 2005 I had an engineer co-worker ask me about “that Linux thing” when I got around to telling him that pretty much everything he used on a daily basis was available in Linux, just under different names than he was used to in Windows “Oh, you mean I’d have to learn different names for Word and Excel and Outlook?” “Uh, yeah.” “Oh, that’s more trouble than I think I want, I’ll just stick with what I know.”

In the 1990s US ISPs would “give you” an e-mail account with their service: you@isp.com. Of course, this is insta-lockin for that e-mail address, you can never port it.

Owning your own domain name and running e-mail service through that worked, for a few years, but the big players have made whitelist / blacklist such a frustrating whack-a-mole game in the e-mail space that running your own e-mail server quickly became impractical.

Shortcut question: What’s a workable federated e2ee solution that’s available today? Quantum secure? Metadata secure?

I agree. Still doesn’t hurt to bring it up on appropriate tangents.

If the receiving entity then ingests all that copyrighted material into its AI, and the AI sends it piece at a time to other receiving entities, that should be the AI infringing on everything it is copying to make its answers.

Doesn’t show on my phone or app store, I’m on Android 15 in the US.

A shorter take: x11 is old, and big, and didn’t originally consider security much at all.

Wayland is newer, therefore lacking some bells and whistles of x11 that some x11 users may still care about, but also designed with more awareness of security issues - making it more extensible and maintainable into the future.

There was a time Wayland wasn’t a great x11 replacement due to its level of development. When it will become the better choice all depends on what kind of user you are, but it seems inevitable to become the better choice for most users in the future.

I have a Pixel 7a on Google Fi service running Android 15 in the US.

I don’t see that app on my list of all apps nor when i search for it in the Play Store.

I have used both, back and forth for years.

Chrome serves me better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone)

They delivered their promise: they were at least not evil, at first.

Too late, they own my soul already. I have successfully resisted Meta, X, Microsoft, and any number of lesser daemons, but the one true G has shown me their light and I am unable to look away.

I’m reasonably happy with XFCE/Xubuntu - it’s not as slick of a desktop as KDE or Gnome, and in some ways that’s a great thing.

Docker in a snap is too meta for me.

Agreed, not a secret, and not wanted. I uninstall Firefox and install Google Chrome from a .deb - disadvantage: you have to update it manually. Advantage: it doesn’t update itself automatically.

Maybe we won’t be guillotining them anytime soon, but we can at least slow their roll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVgNJf6CsBA