@sunzu @dvdnet62 Oh come now. If there’s one thing Mozilla doesn’t need anyone’s help with, it’s shooting itself in the foot with its own gun.

Now excuse me, I have some Pocket articles to read on my Firefox OS phone…

@makeasnek On a broader note, I think possibly the best approach for decentralised, open-sourced web search might be an evolution on the SearXNG model.

At the top of the funnel, you have meta search engines that query and aggregate results from a number of smaller niche search engines.

The metasearch engines are open source, anyone with a spare server or a web hosting account can spin one up.

For some larger sites that are trustworthy, such as Wikipedia, the site’s own search engine might be what’s queried.

For the Fediverse and other similar federated networks, the query is fed through a trusted node on the network.

And then there’s a host of smaller niche search engines, which only crawl and index pages on a small number of websites vetted and curated by a human.

(Perhaps on a particular topic? Or a local library or university might curate a list of notable local websites?)

(Alternatively, it might be that a crawler for a web index like Curlie.org only crawls websites chosen by its topic moderators.)

In this manner, you could build a decent web search engine without needing the scale of Google or Microsoft.

@makeasnek @schizoidman YaCy is still around.

And https://searx.space/ is an open source metasearch search engine with many instances. (Try https://searx.be/ if you want to test it out.)

SearX/SearXNG allows you to aggregate results from a number of different search engines. You choose which ones, and they’re stored in your browser without setting up an account.

@Dymonika @MossyFeathers I’m guessing you’re overseas?

Super fund, short for superannuation fund.

Basically, in Australia 11% of wages are automatically deposited into a compulsory retirement savings account, known as a superannuation account.

A superannuation fund is a financial institution that manages these accounts.

More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia

@LostXOR @yogthos @NoIWontPickAName @technology There’s a few other steps they could potentially take.

The first would be to block any financial institution in the US, or that deals with the US, from sending any payments to or from ByteDance’s accounts.

They could also freeze any assets currently held by US financial institutions.

Second, if they can get Apple, Microsoft, and Google on board to help do their bidding, they could pull the ByteDance app from the Apple and Google Play app stores.

That includes removing it from any apps where it’s already installed. Globally.

They could also request that TikTok is removed from Google and Bing search results.

On top of this, they could do what you suggested, and ask ISPs and mobile carriers to block domains and IP addresses used by ByteDance.

And the US could apply diplomatic pressure on other countries to implement similar financial and ISP-level blocks and bans.

So, potentially, it’s also blocked in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and elsewhere.

@crispyflagstones @yogthos Someone is named @dansup who also created @pixelfed, the app is called Loops, you can follow his progress here: @loops

@Naich @ardi60 Totally agree.

I mean, Windows is just such a weird proprietary distro.

It doesn’t use the latest Linux kernel, or even a mainstream POSIX-compliant alternative like BSD. Instead, you have a strange CP/M-like monolithic kernel — I think they used to call it DOS — that’s been extended to behave more like VAX and MP/M.

It also doesn’t use either X11 or Wayland as a display manager. Instead, you have an incredibly unintuitive overblown WINE-like subsystem handling the display.

Because it doesn’t use Linux, Wayland, or X11, you are limited in the desktop environment that you can use. There’s really limited support for KDE, despite the best efforts of volunteers.

Instead, there’s a buggy and error-prone proprietary window manager that ships with it by default. A bit like how Canonical tried to ship Unity as it’s default desktop environment with Ubuntu.

And confusingly, they’ve named that window manager Windows as well!

That window manager lacks many of the features an everyday Gnome or KDE user would expect out of the box.

It also doesn’t ship with a standard package manager, and most of the packages ship as x86 binaries, so installing software works differently to how an everyday Linux user would expect.

There’s also only one company maintaining all of these projects. It insists on closed source, and it has a long history of abandoning its projects.

And sure, if you’re a nerd who’s into alternative operating systems, toying with Windows can be fun.

But if your grandpa is used to Linux, frankly he’ll be utterly bamboozled by the Windows experience.

I’m sorry to be glib, because Windows does have some nice ideas.

But.

Windows on the desktop just isn’t ready for your average, everyday Linux user.

#Linux #Windows #PC

@mcSlibinas @etbe Worth noting that in the six months after Apple releases the thinnest, best iPhone ever each year, it would receive several million two-year-old iPhones as trade-ins.

So you could theoretically reflash several million units of nearly identical hardware with embedded Linux (or QNX), remove the batteries (and screens?).

You would then have several million near-identical motherboards ready for second life embedded in appliances or sensors.

@mcSlibinas @etbe Really good point.

The development time and cost is an overhead. That’s divided between the number of units you produce.

If the programming costs are $100k and you produce one unit, then that unit costs $100k.

But if you flash the same software on to 1 million units, then it’s just 10 cents per unit.

Worth remembering that millions of people junking their two-year-old iPhones and Samsung Galaxies at roughly the same time.

I think the broader underlying issue is that our economy is optimised for labour productivity, rather than making the most out of finite environmental resources.

It really should be the other way around.

@ordellrb @eugenia The other place the motherboards of old phones could be repurposed is in embedded processors.

Most home appliances feature embedded processors and motherboards these days. Many commercial and industrial buildings and structures feature a range of embedded sensors.

In many cases, a repurposed three-year-old or even six-year-old iPhone or Samsung Galaxy motherboard is overkill in terms of being capable for these kinds of applications.

Especially if they’re reflashed with an embedded device-focussed operating system, such as QNX.

Instead of making new motherboards for embedded devices, why not repurpose old consumer tech instead?

@cosmicrookie @ardi60 “Why does this bloody thing keep asking ‘a/s/l’ and ‘Do you want a NSFW roleplay?’ even when I tell it no?!?!”

@zenkat @technology Totally agree.

But.

It’s a surefire way to get yourself in that mess in rapid time, when you otherwise wouldn’t.

@pixxelkick @ardi60 Well, if anyone wants to buy it for that purpose, then I just hope they remember to screen out the more NSFW parts of Reddit.

Otherwise, their bots are going to start giving some rather unfortunate responses to customer questions…

@zl2tod @danielbowen @technology And it’s now confirmed by The Sydney Morning Herald: https://www.smh.com.au/technology/identity-of-third-party-who-brought-down-optus-network-revealed-20231114-p5ejy1.html

@Epsilon It’s not, but it’s the one many first-time Fediverse users coming across from Twitter end up on. (Much like how many users coming across from Reddit end up on Lemmy first.)

Then the jump from Mastodon to Calckey/Pleroma/Frienica/Pixelfed/etc in many cases comes later.

@duncesplayed @Anticorp Or, as some people said at the time: “Windows '95 is Amiga '87.”

@HughJanus Then that checkbox will appear one morning then.

Either way, it will almost certainly use Meta’s existing ad platform. They won’t create a separate one for Threads.

It will most likely be opt out.

And given how Elon has scared off many big advertisers, as long as Zuck maintains a decent number of MAUs, then I foresee Meta quickly gaining more revenue than Twitter.

@HughJanus @cyrusg On the revenue front, it’s worth noting that all of Meta’s social media apps basically share the same ad platform.

Every business that advertises on Facebook or Instagram (and there are many) already uses that ad platform.

I think a lot of social media marketing managers are waking up one morning discovering there’s a new checkbox that’s suddenly appeared in their Meta for Business ad campaigns.

Along with being able to select their ads appearing on Facebook or Insta, there’s now a checkbox that says “Threads”.

And, knowing Meta, it’s on by default.

If the ad manager doesn’t notice it, boom, their brand’s ads are now appearing on Threads.

Given how much fashion brands love Instagram, my guess is that there’s a lot of shoes and handbags being offered on Threads.

On the other side of the coin, given the number of brands that have abandoned Twitter, I can see how Threads could very quickly win the battle for ad dollars.

@darkkite @maegul From the outside, it also seems like there was some corporate politics involved.

Apple was making its comeback thanks to Mac OSX, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.

Samsung was toying with its own OS (Tizen), apps, and online services (Bixby).

Google responded by toying with hardware itself, including Glass, Nest, and at one point even buying Motorola.

So it looked like all the big tech companies were going to try to copy Apple by trying to own the full tech stack.

The then-CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, responded by trying to reposition his firm as a “devices and services” company. So he ended up with the XBox, Zune, Kinect, Kin, and Surface.

Then he went all-in with a takeover of Nokia.

Soon afterwards, Ballmer stood aside, and Satya Nadella took over.

Satya wanted to reposition Microsoft as a cloud-first company, competing against Google and AWS rather than Apple.

He kept the XBox and Surface, let the rest bleed money for a couple of quarters, wrote off their value as a loss, and then killed it off.