Don’t see why not. You can download a database of hashes and compare that locally. Granted, those hashes aren’t “free”, but that’s due to the legal status of such material. The principle itself - comparing hashes - can be foss.

Yea people can look into the algorithms to see how they work and circumvent etc., but that’s no different than with… Anything else. If someone is motivated enough to distribute the material, they’ll make their own network. Foss doesn’t make any difference here.

I use Session Messenger, on the Oxen network. Love it on principle even tho the implementation is a bit lacking in places.

And there’s Tor… Which is what it is.

I find 95% of foss software to be better than the commercial alternatives, and I’m not joking. As for bugs, foss devs are usually faster to respond to bug reports and user requests too, unless it’s some mismanaged behemoth like Mozilla.

Thing is, commercial software can use the money for advertising and marketing. Foss, especially of the free to use kind, usually only spread by word of mouth, and even that only within the foss communities at first.

Let’s not get into examples, because I’m sure we can always find examples for every case and it often comes to specific preferences. My general point is, that people who think free has to be crap, and commercial has to be good, are categorically wrong.

It’s in fact backwards: if you do something only for money, you’re incentivized to do the least amount of work either for maximum effectiveness or to give yourself time to do stuff you actually want to do.

It seems like most FOSS I’ve seen is a free, buggy, alternative to mainstream software, which resolves a problem the user had.

I don’t know what kind of sw you use, but usually I find Foss software to be sleek, functional, fast with good support and updates, while commercial software is ridden with ads, trackers, bloat and bugs. Exceptions on both sides but the notion that free software is generally worse is categorically incorrect.

Everyone can contribute, but how do they make a living?

So first not everyone can contribute. Usually people who also use the software and have personal (or monetary) interest in it, contribute.

And why does everything has to be about monetisation? Yes, both people and gigantic corporations make money off foss in various ways, I’m sure others have explained that already. But people also do things for other reasons than just money.

But I’m just baffled how people so often declare that foss can’t work or that it’s qualitatively worse, even though the entire planet has been dependent on foss for decades.

No, just because someone sells something directly, doesn’t mean it’s inherently better.

I’d guess different setups both of the phones and accounts. For example if one has enabled Google location in settings, and stuff like location sharing isn’t disabled, the phone will be pinged much more often. Same if you have office documents on cloud, synchronisation with phone book and stuff like that.

And yea it makes sense that an account that’s more active is of more interest to ping more regularly. Maybe also for security too. Tho I don’t know if it has to be an actual conscious decision by the designers of the systems or just some AI algorithms doing it.

There are a lot of phones that have some of the features - Sony has punchless displays, some cheap phones have headphone jacks, all the Motorolas have two SIMs, some phones have SD cards in shared slots, Pixels and some others have unlockable bootloaders, it’s just basically impossible to get one with all of this…

My bad here, I didn’t mean AAC, but ALAC (lossless) and other Apple’s own mp4 variants. Indeed not sure how’s the support in core Android, although I’d guess ALAC should be since it’s part of mp4 specification.

I haven’t goofed around with it in a while, but some ~10 years ago when I was doing tech reviews I was looking into ALAC quite a bit and was surprised how nice it is, and apparently easy enough to implement that even lots of hardware devices supported it without even advertising it. Also 3rd party audiobook players can often deal with Apple’s audiobook DRM.

Basically, Apple did surprisingly well with audio formats while also supporting some open formats (at least in hardware), so maybe that’s also a reason why I’m not so adamant about formats being 100% free from the start, as long as they get the codec ball rolling.

But again it’s been 10 years since I was looking into this closely so I’m very fuzzy on the details.

Screen with no holes, physical dual SIM cards and mSD card, headphone jack, somewhat trustworthy manufacturer with no ads and bloat, easily unlockable bootloader. There should still be one German-made phone that still has all that and some more, if it still exists, although if I ever get to getting a new phone we’ll probably all be using brain implants so it may all be moot by that point. Don’t worry about it, I’m not looking for recommendations or anything, I know everyone thinks my demands are crazy.

Well this was a 150 € phone when new so that’s a pretty different category than what you’re looking at. I wouldn’t be surprised if 32b was still a thing in the cheap Chinese phones.

If I ever get a chance to replace it, it will be extremely tough because it has a bunch of things which are indispensable for me that newer models simply don’t have.

Not for a while, I have an oldish Motorola with Android 9, probably one of the last phones with 32b OS

(Don’t anyone dare tell me to “upgrade”)

Okay

I only use Bromite at this point for some streaming stuff which don’t work so well on FF based browsers, and Mulch always pauses playback when minimised… Bloody annoying. I didn’t want to use Brave, but I guess I might have to try it.

Can’t use it as I have a 32bit phone and the dev refuses to provide a 32bit binary (and won’t explain why, referring to some nonexistent past discussion)

Ugh, flashbacks to KDE 4…

Guess it’s time to finally retire Bromite

Aye so bottom line, we’re stuck with what exists until new formats are forced upon everybody… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ed:

was under the impression raw was universally supported

Raw isn’t a format, it’s supposed to just be unaltered stream from the imager, so every camera model is unique in that regard. But DNG is a way to describe that data so it’s more readable to programs unfamiliar with the specific model. And well, some makers prefer to use their own proprietary models.

Although it’s gotten better now that nobody buys standalone cameras so the makers can save money by not developing their own software.

Ed2:

none of apple’s formats are supported outside of apple devices (and i guess itunes for windows)

Actually AAC is mostly Apple’s format and support for it is pretty great. I’m not super familiar with the details but it sounds like a similar situation as with webp.

I only really watch foss stuff, which should be exciting, but I get tired as it’s always much of the same news:

• a new private messenger (like we don’t have 500 of those already)
• a new app/program/distro that does the same thing as 10 other ones
• a “simple” app/program that doesn’t do much of anything, just like 10 other ones of the same kind, will get 3 updates and then die
• something for the terminal for terminal nerds that could really use a gui but shutup you dirty normie
• a library that sounds cool but nobody except maybe some corporation will ever use it
• announcement of a complete rewrite, which means we’ll never hear of the project again

So I’m not exactly thrilled about anything either, tho for every different reasons

It’s gonna be funny if i15 becomes the bestselling iPhone due to USB-C. And shareholders will be like dude, these open standards actually sell, just go with them next time instead of all the proprietary shit

Sadly no, but if you have a browser open, you can use emojipedia.

¯\_ (ツ) _/¯