🚄 All aboard the #HackerTrain to #FOSDEM !! 🚃
Going to #FOSDEM2026? Thinking of going by #train?
Would you like to meet other hackers along the way?
Join us on the https://hackertrain.
Good catch @aral! #Google does like free and open source, but only if they can exploit it.
Quote: "Google believes that open source is good for everyone. By being open and freely available, it enables and encourages collaboration and the development of technology" –@fosdem
#Google #politique Extrême-droitisation de la Silicon Valley : Désormais, par défaut, les outils de collaboration en ligne de Google affichent un avertissement si les échanges parlent d'identité de genre. urbanists.social/@markstos/115…
I'm a Google Workspace admin, and a team member sent me a screenshot showing that a message they wanted to send was being blocked because it violated an organizational policy-- which was news to me-- I hadn't put in place to block messages based on their content.
Turns out Google Workspace now warns by default when the message content mentions gender identity.
And let’s not mention the nightmare of the Play Integrity API that forces all Android developers to register through the Play Store and use Google’s signing keys, even if they don’t intend to distribute their apps through it.
Sure, officially Google has taken a step back and has pledged to provide a way for developers and power-users to bypass those restrictions. But we can all expect it to be a cumbersome and change-prone process filled with ridiculous amounts of frictions at every step - and I wouldn’t even expect such a morally bankrupt company to keep maintaining this “sideloading” option.
Google once competed with Apple for customers. But in a world where Google walks away from the biggest antitrust trial since 1998 with yet another slap on the wrist, competition is dead, and Google is taking notes from Apple about what they can legally get away with. And the EU, the biggest opposer of its anti-competitive acts, is also becoming softer with Big Tech - both because Vestager has left the job, and because being soft with trillion-dollar monopolist tech titans is seen as a sign of being “technologically competitive”.
Your best bet is to purchase a Pixel 9a now, before more manufacturers decide to block bootloaders, and immediately flash it with #GrapheneOS.
The long term plan would instead be to throw all of our efforts and energies on Linux phones. The folks at GrapheneOS are doing an amazing job and fighting against all kind of pressures, but at some point we should probably all just acknowledge that anything that is tainted with Android, or runs on a device intended only to run Android, is a liability, and we should no longer build solutions on top of hardware and software that we can no longer trust.
Sailfish, PostmarketOS, UBPorts, MeeGo or whatever comes next must succeed. No matter the cost.
It looks like Samsung has silently removed the option to unlock the bootloader from One UI 8.0 onwards as it has been reported by some users in the forum (here, here). By reversing the Settings...
In January 2023, @pluralistic used the term "enshittification" on his blog, pluralistic.net, to describe the deterioration process of the TikTok network.
Enshittification consists of four stages:
1. Platforms are good for users
2. Platforms abuse users to be good for business customers
3. Platforms abuse business customers to keep all the profit
I'm a Google Workspace admin, and a team member sent me a screenshot showing that a message they wanted to send was being blocked because it violated an organizational policy-- which was news to me-- I hadn't put in place to block messages based on their content.
Turns out Google Workspace now warns by default when the message content mentions gender identity.
Powering NATO's digital modernization and protecting alliance data with Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped BRUSSELS and SUNNYVALE, Calif., Nov. 24, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Google Cloud today...
The only flavour of decentralisation there’s no room for at FOSDEM is the kind that won’t speak at a conference that allows itself to be sponsored by, and thereby whitewashes, a surveillance capitalist like Google that is complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
Gemini AI needs to be disabled on Android or it will override your privacy settings and gain full access to your texts, calls, and WhatsApp - even if you’ve turned off Gemini Apps Activity on your phone.
The company sent letters to #Apple , #Google , and #Microsoft pushing for an alternative way to keep minors from viewing #porn , as #US and #UK laws have caused its traffic to plummet. #privacy #security
#google: The AI we are putting into all of our products cannot be trusted, but it also can't be turned off #microsoft: Windows 11 is now an agentic OS, and what that means is it can install malware
Gemini AI needs to be disabled on Android or it will override your privacy settings and gain full access to your texts, calls, and WhatsApp - even if you’ve turned off Gemini Apps Activity on your phone.
Imagine being one of the most valuable companies on earth, making billions thanks to open-source software like #ffmpeg, without contributing financially to it, without contributing to its codebase, and even expecting those unpaid volunteers to fix bugs for you in a timely fashion as if they were your own employees.
Imagine contributing to a huge piece of software like ffmpeg that works behind the scenes on literally any device that can either play, record or transform media, a project that has become a critical piece of our digital infrastructure, and doing so unpaid, uncredited and stressed out by companies that make billions thanks to your work.
This is the current state of open-source today.
A bunch of burned out, unpaid and uncredited volunteers building free stuff in their spare time that trillion-dollar freeriders feel entitled to use without contributing back.
ffmpeg developers are right. Either #Google contributes back, or th
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Imagine being one of the most valuable companies on earth, making billions thanks to open-source software like #ffmpeg, without contributing financially to it, without contributing to its codebase, and even expecting those unpaid volunteers to fix bugs for you in a timely fashion as if they were your own employees.
Imagine contributing to a huge piece of software like ffmpeg that works behind the scenes on literally any device that can either play, record or transform media, a project that has become a critical piece of our digital infrastructure, and doing so unpaid, uncredited and stressed out by companies that make billions thanks to your work.
This is the current state of open-source today.
A bunch of burned out, unpaid and uncredited volunteers building free stuff in their spare time that trillion-dollar freeriders feel entitled to use without contributing back.
ffmpeg developers are right. Either #Google contributes back, or they won’t even look at their bugs anymore.
And, in an ideal world where free software licenses weren’t written by good Samaritans, either trillion-dollar companies contribute back, or they shouldn’t be allowed to use free software for profit.
20 years ago I used to have discussions with fellow engineers whether open-source would have won over commercial software.
Now I can firmly say that open-source won. There’s no doubt about it. Linux, Apache products, Python, ffmpeg, curl etc. power all of today’s technological stack. But it’s not the win that I expected. It’s the kind of win that happened because corporations realized that open-source is just a way for them to cut on internal engineering costs.
Gmail doesn't just offer to write your emails for you, they actually do it, and it's up to you to delete the text it wrote. Hard to make a screen shot to demo without revealing personal i…
