This is why I’m so disgusted every time someone says “republicans and democrats are basically the same”, which I most often hear from Europeans.

Hence why we need a public option.

from the article:

Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display Your non-personal data for its business purposes.

Holy shit. I wonder if HP is feeding customers’ data to an #AI machine to exploit in some way. It doesn’t even seem to be limited to what people print. HP’s software package is probably not just a printer driver. But even if it is, a driver runs in the kernel space, so IIUC there’s no limit to what data it can mine.

First and foremost, #HP is not an option for anyone who boycotts #Israel. And even neglecting that, HP is still the least ethical of all ink suppliers.

from the article:

Prices range from $6.99 per month for a plan that includes an HP Envy printer (the current model is the 6020e) and 20 printed pages. The priciest plan includes an HP OfficeJet Pro rental and 700 printed pages for $35.99 per month.

So the 20 page deal probably reflects the consumption of most households that print. That means the cost ranges from $7—35¢ per page. You must print 20 pages to reach 35¢ pp. A library would likely charge ~5—10¢ pp flat. Print shops tend to be cheaper than libraries.

The 700 page deal amounts to $36—5¢ pp. So you have to print exactly 700 pages to get a good price. Everyone who does not print exactly 700 pages every month for a span of 2 years will get screwed.

One of the most perturbing aspects of the subscription plan is that it requires subscribers to keep their printers connected to the Internet.

Bingo. It’s not a “smart” printer, it’s a dependent printer.

Glad to see CFPB might be growing their balls back after Trump neutered them. When Trump was in power the CFPB took no action on complaints of unlawful conduct and seemed quite inactive.. as if to just be managing their own office (like the EPA).

That’s a great move. Instead of trying to regulate the baddies just offer a more honest, transparent consumer-respecting option from a public service that respects people’s privacy (CFPB does not block Tor, unlike #CreditKarma and #LendingTree).

I would love it even more if they would also enable people to deselect banks they want to avoid, such as the shit banks on this list:

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/usa_banks.md

You’re referring to anonymity, not privacy.

Anonymity is part of privacy; not a dichotomy.

Sign-up still requires a phone number… -.-"

Thanks for the warning -- that was my first question. It is my top reason (among many other reasons) for avoiding Signal.

Checkout Matrix/Element or Session,

All 3 of the sites you linked are Cloudflare sites (thus antithetical to privacy). Yes, I know you can use some of that tech without touching CF, but when they run CF websites it reveals hypocrisy & not understanding the goals of their audience.

We can make some headway by pushing govs to adopt OSS. The Italians have a law “public money → public code”. The whole public sector including public schools should be switching to open source. And part of that would compel contributions of some form. Whether it’s code contributions or payment for support. People should be demanding that their tax revenue is not wasted on software that does not enrich the commons. With profit-driven corporations it’s always a game where a number of variables have to be just right for the company. But the public sector is very much overlooked.

I recently looked at a Danish university and was disgusted with what I saw. They used MS Office and Google docs, and students were pushed to use those tools. They used Matlab not GNU Octave, because that’s what they saw industry using. Schools should be leading industry, not following it.

Think about it from a manager’s position. If they pay something for nothing extra (donate), they won’t last long at the company. They are attracted to 2 benefits:

• shedding liability for problems by outsourcing
• special pampered treatment (again via outsourcing)

Corps love commercial software because managers whose neck is on the line can point the finger away from themselves if something goes wrong with it (or so they think… which is what matters in the end anyway). They tend to consider FOSS when there is a fall guy. So e.g. they hire RedHat. But as I think the article mentions, that money doesn’t trickle down from there.

We used a FOSS compiler through a separate contract. The company paid a high price for pampering by the compiler supplier. And the support was magnificent. We got the “pro” version (which for the most part was just a newer release than the version in the commons & perhaps a few extras that were just more of a luxury). But it was really about the support. Anyone on the team could file a ticket with the compiler supplier. Not just for bugs and enhancements, but if something was unclear, or if we needed to know how to do something. They always responded well, gave tips, advice, and workarounds, and if there was a bug they fixed it and we got the fix quickly. They never dropped the ball. Our bugs and enhancement requests would then make it into the core product that benefited the commons. It was a good arrangement.

Then you consider our most heavily used FOSS tool apart from the compiler: emacs. We had an internal team who compiled it and injected our internal mods to customize it for the org. Not sure if any of our customizations would have value outside the org or if that team did PRs.

In short, it’s not enough to just maintain the code and hope for donations. You need to offer a support package that gives 1st class treatment to corps who would pay a premium for it. I’m not sure if the emacs project offers anything comparable to the compiler we used, but I could see the folks I worked for signing up for something like that.

I’ve not been tracking them because I tend to only collect dirt on the greatest of evils. What comes to mind:

• default search engine: Google (this is what that Google money is for officially)
• Mozilla gave the boot to a lot of plugins and imposed some kind of control-freakish trust mechanism. Plugins/extensions were evicted from the plugin repository and they made it hard for plugin creators to distribute their plugins. I lost several very useful plugins when Mozilla took this controlling protectionist stance.
• MAFF ditched. Mozilla abandoned a good format for archiving websites. I had a lot of content saved in *.maff files which Mozilla dropped direct support for and at the same time they blocked MAFF plugins.
• Without Firefox, Google would be easily targeted with anti-trust actions. Google props up Mozilla just enough to be able to claim they have “competition”. Google can be most dominant when it has a crippled competitor under its influence.
• Google killed the free world JPEG XL format. When a browser as dominant as Chrome withholds support JPEG XL, there is then no reason for web devs to use that format. Google did this because JPEG XL competes with a proprietary Google format. Firefox does not support it out of the box either, likely because of Google’s influence. Firefox users can enable it by going through some config hoops, so if Chrome alone did not kill it, that certainly would.

I vaguely recall a slew of Mozilla actions that were anti-thetical to privacy and user interests which caused me to move them from “a decent browser” to a “lesser of evils”. Hopefully others have better records of Mozilla’s history.

update May 2024

• Mozilla uses data abuser Cloudflare for their exclusive access-restricted blog
• Mozilla has decided to add more tracking to their browser to collect people’s search activity.

First of all Cloudflare does not disclose to excluded communities why they are excluded. This non-transparency keeps the marginalized in the dark about both the technical criteria for exclusion and also the business reason for exclusion.

Why I personally have been excluded is irrelevant trivia. The full extent of CF’s exclusion is unknown but it’s evident that at a minimum these groups of people are excluded:

• public libraries
• Tor users
• VPN users
• CGNAT users (often poor people in impoverished regions whose ISPs have fewer IPv4 addresses to allocate than the number of users)
• people who use scripts to access web resources (and interactive users who merely appear to be bots by using non-graphical FOSS tools, blind people IIRC as they are not loading images)
• all people with a moral objection to exposing ~20—30% of their web traffic (metadata & payloads both) to one single centralized tech giant in a country without privacy safeguards.

I personally experience exclusion by all of the above except CGNAT.