lizzy مثلية الله ☭  Oct 16
i think at some point we need to recognize that the deliberate oversimplification of technology and our understanding of and interaction with it is an integral part of what keeps people dependent on tech corporations; that real software freedom is impossible without education and media literacy; and that labeling people who promote ways of using technology that enable & encourage actual comprehension and choice as "elitist" is an active attempt at keeping the general public in their dangerously uneducated state.

the easiest way to keep people subservient is to keep them dumb. knowledge is power; and we should have power over the tools that we spend the majority of our waking hours with instead of them having power over us.

RE: https://circumstances.run/users/davidgerard/statuses/115383414643559768
Show threadkittysol ~ $
@[email protected] yeah, with windows/chromeos etc. being dominant in schools, people grow up with locked down proprietary interfaces that are "easy to use" (i have my own thoughts on that)

if we could get linux in schools and people learn to use that, eventually workplaces will change as well.

on the topic of the FSF phone though, i don't think they will get very far. with the FSF they seem to take a very hard stance on no blobs at all, which means modems just won't work (from what i know most places require modem firmware to be signed and tested because of radio laws)

I wish instead of them focusing on doing it all again they would just promote something like postmarketOS, it does nothing good if they keep putting down other projects
Oct 16 at 12:35pmWeb
Show threadlizzy مثلية الله ☭  Oct 16
@kittysol iirc they want to reverse engineer and replace the blobs and ultimately even if the project isn't very usable in its upstream form that doesn't mean it won't benefit the ecosystem or that there can't be downstream forks with blobs.

it's about funding i think, not just publicity, so I don't think promoting something else would be good enough. besides that, you need good lawyers if you're gonna reverse engineer blobs, it's a legal grey area. I work for wine where we have a strict policy of never reverse engineering microsoft code and sticking to clean room practices only.
Show threadaOct 16
@kittysol @lizzy the librephone thing isn't about "doing it all again", it's not about "no blobs", it's about making libre blobs possible

> Librephone is the FSF's project to free up those blobs. This project's goal is not another Android distribution, but a long-term project to better understand and reverse-engineer the nonfree blobs used by virtually all SoCs made today.

-- https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/librephone

these are very much complementary things and not conflicting with each other
Librephone — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

Show threadkimaprOct 31
@a @kittysol @lizzy what even is a “libre blob”? i thought the whole idea of blobs is that they are binary code not available in their source code form. If a blob was truly free it would not be a blob any more, it would be just source code