Kyle Rankin @kyle@librem.one

It's worth noting that the lawsuit here isn't about the fact that Google collects all this data, but that it does it using metered cellular data.

"The device, stationary, with all apps closed, transferred data to Google about 16 times an hour, or about 389 times in 24 hours. Assuming even half of that data is outgoing, Google would receive about 4.4MB per day or 130MB per month..." #privacy https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/14/google_android_data_allowance/

"Hackers intuitively understand something many computer users don’t--ownership is not about possession, it’s about control...The illusion that Apple users have control over their computers was briefly disturbed this week..." https://puri.sm/posts/apple-users-got-owned/

I just keep imagining the epic sword battle between Google Reader and Orkut... In the end the life force of all Google products end up feeding Search, the only immortal.

What if the real Highlanders are Google Product Managers? #therecanbeonlyone

I took a nice break over the summer and did some light reading, but it's time to dive in to Volume II.

Sparsebeard the pirate!

Check out the Halloween surprise I found underneath my sawhorse!

Update: I just trimmed this to shape it and remove the neck beard and it's not too bad. I may just let it fill in a bit and see what that looks like...

I was inspired to expand this into a full article to give myself a bit more space to talk about the issues:

https://puri.sm/posts/the-general-purpose-computer-in-your-pocket/

I was planning to grow out some stubble as part of my Halloween pirate costume. My son informed me (a bit too late) that he would prefer it be a full beard, so I'm going as Sparsebeard.

Microsoft got in antitrust trouble for bundling IE for free w/ Windows to compete with Netscape.

Now imagine Microsoft controlled whether Netscape could be installed or updated on Windows, and blocked them, and you are closer to the current situation with phones.

One of the neatest tricks Big Tech ever pulled was convincing people that phones weren't general-purpose computers and should have different rules than laptops or desktops. These rules conveniently give the vendor more control.

Now these rules are moving to laptops and desktops.

It's been long enough now that we are back to the pre-golden era world where people don't understand the risks of vendor lock-in and proprietary protocols. To me this means there's an opportunity for a new golden era, if we can get people to appreciate why the "freedom" part of FOSS is so important.