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.

Glad to see mention of Oki! Oki is the single most ethical choice. But they pulled out of the US market, sadly enough. The US is no place for ethical products.

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.

The thesis of the article works to fix anti-ebike attitudes. It makes some good points but it wasn’t intended to influence people on what suits them personally.

The shame of it is that a lot of people just read headlines. I sure as hell don’t have time to read every article I encounter. So those who just read the headline will walk away a bit misinformed. OTOH, the click bait actually works to get more people to read the article. It forced me to read it. So it’s hard to say if it does more damage or more benefit overall.

Indeed as someone who straddles two places of living I can attest to that. When living in a relatively flat city I’m cycling everywhere (on e-bike until it was stolen, then on cheap muscle bike thereafter). My other place of living is extremely hilly. Used a muscle bike and quickly said “fuck this, I’m done”. Just like the article said about hills on the trails. And since I cannot justify the cost of an e-bike in that particular place/situation, I do not cycle at all when living there. But if an e-bike had been cost effective I would be getting more exercise in that area.

Anonymity is part of privacy.

Specifically, anonymity is confidentiality of identity. Confidentiality is part of privacy, which is a broad concept. So when a tool or mechanism works against anonymity, it works against privacy. It may not work against a privacy aspect that you care about, but it’s privacy nonetheless.

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.

I can’t watch videos but I will say that my biggest problem with the iME is not the security issue, but the anti-consumer aspect. Intel decided non-corporate consumers (who do not want or benefit from iME) can be disregarded marginalized. So disabling iME is insufficient and misses the problem.

The answer is to boycott iME CPUs. I never bought an intel CPU after 2008. I write this comment from a 16 year old PC just fine. I have pulled some more recent hardware out of dumpsters, ensuring I do not support anti-consumer products.

iME can be “disabled” if you go along with all the hand-waving. The nuts and bolts of it is that the ME /must/ execute when powering on the CPU, but then there is a moment in the boot sequence in which it can be disabled. For some people, that’s good enough.

#YaCy is an open source crawler that you can run and feed Searx with. I recall some searx instances that run their own YaCy. YaCy can also share indexes with other YaCy instances.

indeed. I cannot reach this link from tor:

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html

#DuckDuckGo makes the same claim as well. IMO it’s a great marketing tactic to say “we have our own crawler” to imply to people they will get some unique results-- but I’m not convinced that supplemental crawlers are significant. They are all too happy to rely on the crutch of the search engines they source from.

Mozilla is not in danger so long as they continue to serve Google. You cut 83% of Mozilla’s revenue and I guarantee you there will be problems.

The reason why firefox and chrome work so well, is that they literally have been in development for over a decade.

How can you say they work well?

Basic functionality is still crippled. For example, when images are disabled in Chrome, animated GIFs are still downloaded and played. Chrome does not even have the option to disable animations. When both images & animations are disabled in Firefox, animated GIFs are also still downloaded (wasting the credit of those on fixed bandwidth plans and thus defeating the purpose for those who would use the feature)… but they are simply not played automatically. Great.

These are not just bugs… these are the sort of blunt stark defects that do not reflect the quality of mature projects. I mean shit, still today cannot disable animations in Chrome despite bug report 14 years ago. WTF. That is not “working well” when it can’t do something that basic.

so it’s an obvious choice for academia to teach.

I can’t agree. You could perhaps say Matlab is the default/non-critically-analyzed choice for academia. GNU Octave uses the same language as Matlab. A student who masters GNU Octave will be able to use Matlab just fine.

IIRC, Matlab’s significant difference is Simulink. So if a class actually intends to cover Simulink then it’d perhaps be fair enough for just that class to use Matlab. But even that’s not ideal. Ideal would be the school paying students to add what’s needed in GNU Octave.

Perhaps also noteworthy that Gitea is a fork from Gogs. And AFAIK, gogs is the original work.

Disroot uses Forgejo, according to the forge catalog, if anyone wants to try it out.

It doesn’t matter what that expenditure amounts to. Whatever that figure is, Microsoft recovers it. I guarantee you it’s profitable for Microsoft in the end.

Forking doesn’t imply control.

It does. That’s the reason for forking. You get control. If you don’t, then you’ve done something wrong.

A forked version of chromium would still want to keep up to date with the upstream project.

That’s the choice of the fork owners, because they get control. They can take or leave upstream changes at will.

You seem to view this public option with an unrealistic view of how software development works. Especially in the public sector.

I’ve worked on software projects in both the private sector and public sector.

Somebody comes in with a requirement to do something in the fastest and cheapest way possible.

This reflects an unrealistic view of how public sector software development works. What you describe is how the private sector works. You cannot superimpose your understanding of the private sector on the public sector and assume it works that way.

The engineers go off and fork chromium and simply reskin it because that meets the brief.

It depends on the budget. Public budgets can be tight and they can be loose. It’s a spend-it-or-lose-it scenario. If you do not spend every dime of your annual budget, you get a smaller budget next year. So there’s a unique incentive to spend in the public sector. If (and only if) the budget is tight, indeed they would fork something (not necessarily Chrome).

And that’s merely the start of the project. In software development, we don’t just build something and walk away from it. Especially for government projects - the software is continually under maintenance. So after the fork (if that’s what the budget is limited to) the project does the necessary to meet new requirements as they emerge.

The public sector isn’t going to be interested in trying to make the optimal browser if they are forced to create one. They are going to be interested in meeting the brief in the fastest and easiest way possible.

That’s not how the public sector works. It’s a world of difference between the private sector. What you’re describing is the private sector. Unlike the private sector, public sector workers are not blocked from “gold plating”. Public sector workers have the freedom to produce polished work. Their wages tends to be lower than what they would fetch in the private sector, but what they gain is intellectual freedom and creative license. This is why NASA workers love their work environment and employee retention is high despite relatively low wages.