Kann ja mal vorkommen. Kann ja mal vorkommen. Kann ja mal vorkommen.

…and - after a communist intermezzo - went full-on fascism too. Same shit, different asshole.

Quelle der Grafik; Datenbasis: CDC

When in doubt, zoom out. Man muss kein Statistiker sein, um aus dieser Grafik seine Schlüsse zu ziehen. Alles, was man braucht, ist ein funktionierendes Gehirn. Ich lasse offen, was das für die im Artikel zitierten Personen bedeutet.

Predatory

I’ve spent some time today trying to come up with a conclusive answer to your question, thinking back on what has and hasn’t worked over the years. Here’s the result.

The tech activist’s guide to persuasion

The following guide is a collection of principles that may help a tech activist grab people’s attention and convince them to make more ethical choices with regard the technology and platforms they use. If, at times, they may sound mutually exclusive and contradictory, that’s because they are. But then again, so are the people they pertain to.

• Keep the user in mind: people use tech because it’s a tool that helps them reach their goals. Hence, make sure you first know their use case and level of expertise and only then decide if and which alternative tool to suggest. Trying something new is a big ask in and of itself; don’t ruin that opportunity by suggesting tools that people either cannot handle or that aren’t helpful to them.
• Call out big tech where you can: by enshittifying each and every single one of their products, it has become incredibly easy to show the average user how careless, incompetent, if not outright malicious big tech corporations act. Call them out on their behaviour wherever you see it. Make people aware how little they are ‘owners’ of a Windows machine when Microsoft can just remotely change settings, force online accounts or break their machines by pushing poorly-tested updates. Make them question how much Facebook helps them connect with friends when all they see there is an algorithmically-driven hellscape of ads and artificially pushed content they didn’t ask for. Call into question the utility of Amazon when pages 1 through 100 are full of sponsored content and cheaply-made crap straight out of China, none of which the manufacturer will be accountable for when they inevitably fray, break or dissolve only months after purchase. Don’t be a dick and go on a long-winded rant about the “evil corpos”, though. Just drop a tidbit of frustration, and let the slow poison do its work. Once you hear somebody say, “Well, what do you suggest?”, that opens up a different kind of conversation which may lead to transition.
• Stress the added value of your solution: as much as we may see intangibles like privacy, control and independence as valuable, we must accept that some (many? most?) people do not share that view. Therefore, advertising an app like, say, Newpipe (an alternative YouTube frontend) as “privacy-friendly” may not mean much to the average consumer. Instead, stress the value the app adds to people’s lives: “Do you want to get rid of unskippable mid-video ads thanks to the built-in adblocker? Subscriptions and playlists without having to log in to Google? Background playback and audio/video downloads?” Now you’ve got somebody’s attention.
• Only contribute value to known good platforms: Yes, I just called you valuable without even knowing you. But you are likely providing value to other people’s lives in many different ways: maybe you’re a passionate hobbyist, showing off your crafty projects online and inspiring others to follow in your footsteps. Maybe you’re a skilled techie providing friends and family with remote support whenever something breaks. Maybe you’ve just become a parent and the rest of the family wants to get updated with cute pics of your kids. Or maybe you’re just a particularly pleasant person that people want to talk to. Whatever the value you provide to others may be, by making this value accessible through known bad platforms, you are increasing the value of those platforms and making it even harder for others to leave them. Why not make it known that from now on, you will no longer show off your projects on Instagram, but on a platform that respects both you as a creator and your followers? Why not ask people to install RustDesk instead of Teamviewer for remote support? Why not let people know that those cutesy pictures of the kids will be shared with everyone interested, but exclusively on a privacy-friendly messenger such as Signal, and people are welcome to join the new family group chat there? If you can, throw your weight and your value behind something that values you, and you might just be able to pull people along with you.
• Share your enthusiasm, not your gloom: with the way our media works (and maybe our psyche), it’s easy to get bogged down in doom and gloom, solely focussing on all the evil shit tech corporations do and how we must protect ourselves from them. That’s not how you inspire people, though. Therefore, where the opportunity presents itself, share your enthusiasm for the awesome solutions you have discovered and implemented. Do tell people about that amazing FOSS app that can bake pancakes and shits rainbows. Show them that self-hosted music server that you’ve set up and that has allowed you to cancel your Spotify subscription for good. Share your appreciation for your new Linux system which breathed new life into a notebook that Microsoft deemed ripe for the scrapyard. They’ll not necessarily want to adopt any of the solutions you’re presenting to them that very same day, and that’s OK. But they will have “heard good things” about something that, up to that point, they didn’t know even existed. And once the time is ripe for them, they’ll come to you for guidance.

U.S. diplomats can suck a fat, sovereign one.

I’m not surprised Denmark would be the first European nation to ditch American software, and I applaud the decision.

Yet, what I’m missing any mention of in the article is a commitment by Denmark to give back to the project(s) through either financial or code contributions. The degree of sophistication FOSS projects have reached based on donations and volunteer work alone is staggering. Think what they could become if states were to invest even a fraction of the money they used to give to MS into these projects - maybe in the form of “feature bounties” to incentivise development of features needed in public administration. (A man is allowed to dream, right?)

Tbh: while I try to use/buy European products where I can, sometimes it’s not practical (for lack of European manufacturers in a certain sector) or can’t be attributed properly (because some products, such as free software, do not have a fixed “origin”). A lot of what I do can be more broadly described as “flipping off fascism”, i.e. adopting products that are produced in democracies or compatible with democratic values.

Given this broad definition, here’s a brief run-down of my 2025:

• immediate termination of Amazon account in early '25 and switch to Galaxus (Swiss), among other European online shops.
• bought Toshiba HDDs (JP) instead of my usual WDs and Seagates (both U.S.)
• switched about a dozen people and a company over to Linux (Mint)
• expanded homelab services to allow others to ditch big tech offers.
• growing determination and courage in others to switch away from harmful and/or hostile services, leading to the termination of several paid big tech subscriptions.

It’s gonna happen for real this time. Cryptocurrency NFTs AI and cryptocurrency will upend the market with how incredible they have been.

You forgot the Metaverse. (Like you should.)

it won’t happen again.

Not to him, no.

I’d fork this just to name it more appropriately: “Glasshole radar”

They found out the hard way that abuse is only tolerated if you have passed a certain wealth threshold.

Wow, thanks for the detailed answer! I’ve heard of ntfy, even considered running it in order to get notifications from my server. I guess you’ve given me new incentive to look into it more!

Appreciate the call to reason. Yet, though this may have been sharply worded, insulting it was not.

I don’t need payments to work, I’ve never used Gmail, and most of my apps are FOSS ones off FDroid. But banking apps must work, and so do push notifications. The latter are my biggest issue: afaik, they run through GCM (part of Play Services), and you won’t get any unless an app has implemented an alternative listener (Signal does), which comes with more battery power draw. (How) do push notifications work for you without microG and Play Services?

For anyone else coming here, thinking, “Please, please, let this incoherent brain fart be satire” - it isn’t

Variante für Leute mit hohem Sicherheitsbedarf: KeepassXC (PC) bzw. KeepassDX (Android) + Syncthing. Durch Syncthing wird die Passwortdatenbank genauso zwischen Geräten synchronisiert wie mit Nextcloud. Aber: Das Ganze geschieht (bei korrekter Konfiguration) peer-to-peer über das (W)LAN und nicht, wie bei Nextcloud, über öffentlich zugängliche Server.

I used to like the Pixel a line, which clocks in at around 370 EUR / 435 USD for a new 9a where I live. My next one’s likely going to be a FairPhone though, because fuck Google (and it’s a European manufacturer).

To be fair, it’s built on top of LineageOS (credit where credit is due).

This should have many more upvotes. The security incidents quoted at the start of this article have no relation to its actual topic, i.e. the hypothesis that there may be increased fragility of supply chains as a result of AI adoption. While it’s plausible this may happen, the article makes it sound like this has happened when it clearly hasn’t. In other words: it’s little more than “hurr, durr, AI dangerous”.