Did people call RCS open source? I’m not a huge follower of the standard, but I don’t think I ever heard that said. In fact, I’ve heard people complain about not just the proprietary encryption but lack of E2E and carrier/Google control.

Its only advantages are that it is better than SMS and supported by the carriers, Google and Apple sometime this year.

It’s a shitty standard but given how shitty SMS is, I’m willing to hold my nose and jump in.

That hasn’t been a concern for me since the early days of the modern smartphone era. But I can see it being an issue for older phones with worn out batteries or something.

Piracy is whatever. Using an old school ass MP3 player in 2023 is unhinged though. I’m sure their phone can do whatever that MP3 player can do just as easily.

I already cancelled my subscription. I’m going to the subscription hopping plus piracy route now for D+.

With Chromium being increasingly the only supported browser we soon won’t have a choice which browser to use for certain websites anymore (e.g. Firefox).

That’s where I disagree. I think that if we do get an internet where Chrome is the only option and it sucks, we’ll get another browser option. Firefox for example went through a few years of being a bad browser but it has gotten past those hurdles. People are lazy and change is slow, but once it starts I think it is unstoppable.

I’ve never really understood this argument. The history of browsers shows that a browser choice screen isn’t necessary. IE used to be dominant until it started sucking so much that people looked for alternatives. For a while that alternative was Firefox, then Chrome came along and people moved to that.

I think the problem for alternate browsers on PC is that all browsers are good enough at the things most people care about that they don’t look at alternatives anymore. Most pre-built computers come with Chrome pre-installed and if it isn’t, people seek it out on their own to download it. More savvy users know about Chrome’s issues, but those aren’t issues users really care about.

What does need to be addressed is how iOS and Windows either don’t really allow you to use another browser, or make it difficult to switch. iOS needs to allow other rendering engines so alternative browsers aren’t just a skin over Safari and Windows needs to stop with preventing users from changing the default browser for things like widgets.

Besides the listed examples from the article, what would be the impact for normal to even hobbyist root users? It seems like this is a good idea to prevent modification of legit certs and allowing certs to be updated remotely.

As touched on above: if you’re configuring your own system CA certificates on Android right now for debugging, reverse engineering, testing or research, that option is going away in Android 14, and presumably all future versions too.

Not just living in the US. I’m thinking they’re on some legacy plan where just using mobile hotspots were extra.

On my kind of old t-mobile plan, I can use hotspot. And when I was a grandfathered Verizon plan I could use it too. Same with the MVNO I played around with a few months ago.

There are limits though, which is BS. But just using it to get through a temporary residential internet outage is included in a lot of plans in the US.

I already cancelled my Disney+ subscription earlier in the year. I’m just letting it ride out. After that, I will either do the subscription hopping thing where I only sub when something I want is airing, or just add Marvel stuff to my piracy rotation.

The difference is that you need to subscribe to multiple services now to get everything you want, instead of just one.

They did list one specific example of text wrapping which is apparently a two step process on Photoshop and twenty steps in GIMP. Probably an exaggeration, but the sentiment seems to be that it isn’t just different, its worse.

Dealing with differences is fine, but things that are more difficult or require more steps is a problem that should hopefully be fixed.

I use PIA, and so far torrents still work. It sounds like the film studios are going after smaller VPNs or VPNs that make it obvious that they’re piracy friendly.