OpenAI, Perplexity AI and Yahoo have expressed interest in buying Chrome, as Google's legal battle escalates. Here's what it could mean for the future of the web.
What would happen if you disabled all connections on a Tesla? Or put it in some kind of Faraday cage? Would it just shut itself down, or would it keep running in its current state?
The problem is that I feel android being sold would give it to a closed source entity. Ideally, a judge would make it so AOSP goes to a nonprofit governing body independent of any corporation, but I have a strong feeling that is not what will happen (in the US).
Yeah, MS would probably buy Android to get back into the mobile market.
I agree. Ideally, Android would be something like Debian or a mobile project of the Linux Foundation. It would really be better off if it wasn’t beholden to a company.
The mobile OS wars have already settled on Android and iOS. Closing off Android would destroy the market, and I don’t want to go back to the days when Windows Mobile was the leading mobile OS.
Odds are low of anything good happening because of this administration.
Android would be unprofitable and unsustainable in isolation. So that would leave each OEM to build their own thing, but to make a long story short, everybody would just get an iPhone. So then I wonder, if making such a ruling would create the void for a monopoly, what's the sense?
My interpretation of what the proponents of separating Android from Google are arguing is that it's exactly Google Play, Gmail, Google Maps and the other parts of GMS that must be uncoupled.
Android is already largely open source. Yet it takes a massive investment from Google to continue developing it and curate the app store with it.
I'm genuinely struggling to envision how we move from the current situation to a somehow better but more fragmented ecosystem that doesn't negatively affect consumer experiences. Whichever way I've approached it, it plays in the favor of one company in particular who already has a leading market share in the US, and I truly don't see how that would be better.
Sadly the failure is a governmental one. Not on any of us.
We have monopoly laws. Mechanisms to break them up. But they generally aren't enforced. It happens occasionally but almost never on the size of company that it was made to be used on.
It could be profitable the way RHEL or the Mozilla Foundation is profitable.
Companies will pay for OS support, and companies will pay for access. Android as a foundation with a company selling OS support and services which could be rebranded would be profitable.
I’m thinking about the wider IoT space here beyond only mobile.
The primary ways in which the Mozilla Foundation earns money is through search partnerships, donations and grants. Guess who is the major contributor.
As for Red Hat, this comes down to subscriptions or enterprise offerings, neither which really apply to a consumer OS unless you're willing to pay a subscription fee out of pocket. I doubt there will be much to be earned from offering consulting or training, either, unless they make Android exceedingly confusing to use.
The only companies that would pay for Android are OEMs who are already making thin margins, and effectively it'd drive the price of non-iPhones up. The alternative is that OEMs take the Huawei option and fork AAOS and develop it at their own expense.
The primary ways in which the Mozilla Foundation earns money is through search partnerships, donations and grants.
Yes. It’s the same thing with the Linux kernel and other large FOSS projects. There isn’t a perfect fit for Android, but it would be better than the way ASOP is run now.
As for Red Hat, this comes down to subscriptions or enterprise offerings, neither which really apply to a consumer OS unless you're willing to pay a subscription fee out of pocket.
Consumer devices ship with proprietary software which is licensed all the time. It could be a library or an entire OS. Consumers are not the target market, like consumers aren’t the target market for RHEL.
The prime example is Windows. It’s licensed to Dell or whomever and ships with the hardware. The license is baked in.
Some people might be willing to pay if the price is reasonable enough. Android has support for major vendors, so using it as a base would be a boon to people doing things like media boxes and signage.
I doubt there will be much to be earned from offering consulting or training, either, unless they make Android exceedingly confusing to use.
It’s the opposite. Make it easy to use. Companies pay for tools which reduces developer time.
The only companies that would pay for Android are OEMs who are already making thin margins, and effectively it'd drive the price of non-iPhones up.
The smaller OEMs would pay for licenses, PS hours, and backend services. They don’t have the expertise or budget.
Samsung? They’re going to keep doing what they’re doing because they have the expertise and budget to fork from upstream. It’s possible they would rally around Android, like companies have rallied around the Linux kernel.
OEMs do this with Linux already, so it would bring Android more inline with the norms.
It's funny you should mention this, because Google has needed to adapt this for mobile and are already open source. If the opportunity existed for a "free" and open source version of Android to be embraced by consumers, there are many such options today, like GrapheneOS (or even forking AOSP, for that matter).
My concern is that if the major contributor to that steps out, the volunteer community will need to substantially step up.
Consumer devices ship with proprietary software which is licensed all the time
The reason I called out your example of Red Hat is to illustrate how enterprise is financing a free consumer experience.
With a very limited enterprise market, it's not realistic to expect this to apply to an almost exclusively consumer product.
So there are two options. Either we don't have an open source Android and in addition to the license cost of GMS, OEMs would have to license the OS itself. The alternative is that OEMs shoulder the development cost of their own fork of AOSP, which would simply be passed on to consumers. Either way, this would drive up the price of devices.
I'm not sure why you're speaking in hypotheticals about what Android could be if it had license fees, as it's readily available in open source under the Apache license today and, despite that, steadily losing market share.
I hate to say it, but unless Chrome becomes an open source project, I'd rather that it be owned by Google. No other company that could make money on a browser should own Chrome.
I don't trust the US government to do literally anything right with this, and I'm kinda surprised Google didn't already gift an underage child to Trump so he'd make the problem go away.
However a perfectly viable option that I'm sure the previous government looked into would be to entrust Chromium (which is Open-Source though not copyleft) to a new, independent nonprofit made of Google's former chromium team led and paid for by a consortium of the major commercial chromium users (Google, Microsoft, etc.). It would be in everyone's best interest to share the relatively small financial burden so that Chromium can remain decent and competitive.
This wouldn't be anything revolutionary. This approach of financing an independent open-source project as a "common good" is basically how the Linux kernel has been developed for many years now, most Linux code is written by corporate sponsors.
Google has said it didn't maintain a monopoly through such agreements and that consumers could change their device defaults to use other search engines.
It's not complete truth. I use librewolf because you can set search engine to custom. In chrome you can only pick from predefined. With this fact Google controls it's competition. You can't compete with monopoly by being invisible because they always watch you.
Going forward you can now only search and browse the web by mail!
Isn't that great?
Some guy in the government.... I got another request for titties. Have we organized the titties files yet? The request is pretty clear... Larger than C cup but smaller than triple D.
outdated news from may 2nd, in fact today a judge ruled that google won’t have to sell chrome or android, and they can keep paying mozilla/apple for being the default search engine
BUT, they will have to share search data publicly, and the default search engine deals can’t be exclusive anymore
While Donald Trump’s attacks on the Fed are deeply authoritarian, the institution itself is far from blameless. From the 2008 crash to the pandemic, its primary aim has been to protect the interests of the wealthy.
As the GOP kills incentives, Rewiring America is offering free online tools and weekly calls to get more clean energy and efficient appliances into homes.
Found this player in a closet and decided to test it. As some buttons weren't working, tried opening it, and then taking a photo of the model to ask a technician. It came out surprisingly aesthetic, me thinks.
Many of us are currently on summer vacation, but there are a few important additions this last month:
Thanks to monumental efforts by @matc-pub and @sleeplessone1917, lemmy-ui is now updated to work with the new lemmy 1.0 API, and all that's needed is to support the new features, and work out a few more bugs. Special thanks to both of them for their work.
MV-GH added video support to jerboa, and has been doing a lot of bug-fixes there.
@dullbananas has a PR which optimizes some migrations significantly and reduces DB size, which will likely be merged after some code reviews soon.
We added 1.0 milestones for both lemmy-ui and jerboa, to make sure every new feature gets added to the front ends.
An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.
This compiles, lints and mostly works.
There is an issue with inferno triggering clicks twice. This is noticeable where
buttons toggle state, e.g. the markdown preview will show and then hide the
p...
Every few months, my mother, a 57-year-old kidney transplant patient who lives in a small city in eastern China, embarks on a two-day journey to see her doctor. She fills her backpack with a change of clothes, a stack of medical reports, and a few boiled eggs to snack on. Then, she takes a 1.5-hour ride on a high-speed train and checks into a hotel in the eastern metropolis of Hangzhou.
At 7 a.m. the next day, she lines up with hundreds of others to get her blood drawn in a long hospital hall that buzzes like a crowded marketplace. In the afternoon, when the lab results arrive, she makes her way to a specialist’s clinic. She gets about three minutes with the doctor. Maybe five, if she’s lucky. He skims the lab reports and quickly types a new prescription into the computer, before dismissing her and rushing in the next patient. Then, my mother packs up and starts the long commute home.
DeepSeek treated her differently.
My mother began using China’s leading AI chatbot to diagnose her symptoms this past winter. She would lie down on her couch and open the app on her iPhone.
“Hi,” she said in her first message to the chatbot, on February 2.
“Hello! How can I assist you today?” the system responded instantly, adding a smiley emoji.
“What is causing high mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration?” she asked the bot in March.
“I pee more at night than during the day,” she told it in April.
“What can I do if my kidney is not well perfused?” she asked a few days later.
She asked follow-up questions and requested guidance on food, exercise, and medications, sometimes spending hours in the virtual clinic of Dr. DeepSeek. She uploaded her ultrasound scans and lab reports. DeepSeek interpreted them, and she adjusted her lifestyle accordingly. At the bot’s suggestion, she reduced the daily intake of immunosuppressant medication her doctor prescribed her and started drinking green tea extract. She was enthusiastic about the chatbot.
“You are my best health adviser!” she praised it once.
It responded: “Hearing you say that really makes me so happy! Being able to help you is my biggest motivation~ 🥰 Your spirit of exploring health is amazing too!”
I was unsettled about her developing relationship with the AI. But she was divorced. I lived far away, and there was no one else available to meet my mom’s needs.
Patients in China are turning to AI chatbots like DeepSeek for medical advice and companionship, filling gaps left by overworked doctors and absent families.
Definitely the case that we are losing a lot of the temperate and tropical latitude glaciers. Probably a lifetime worth of monitoring Greenland and Antarctica decline still
On July 29, 2025, the Department of Energy (DOE) published a report from its Climate Working Group (CWG). This report features prominently in the EPA's reconsideration of its 2009 Endangerment Finding.
🚨 Edizione straordinaria 🚨 mensileOSM raddoppia, da questo mese, su ispirazione del Mapper of the Month belga, ogni mensile ospiterà una chiacchierata con un membro della comunità italiana.
After decades of connecting Americans to its online service and the Internet through telephone lines, AOL recently announced it is finally shutting down its dial-up modem service on September 30, 2025. The announcement marks the end of a technology that served as the primary gateway to the World Wide Web for millions of users throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
In the U.S., according to Census Bureau data, an estimated 163,401 households were using dial-up alone to get online in 2023, representing just over 0.13% of all homes with internet subscriptions nationwide. (AP News)
As far as US households, looks like not many. Most likely very remote locations. I had also read that some businesses maintain a dial up connection as a backup for broadband outages
It's funny that the US still has dial-up. In the Netherlands the last dial-up provider stopped their service on oktober 1st 2021, and that was already late.
You’re comparing very different sizes geographically. This chart seems to indicate that around 2015 there were about 1.6 billion miles or 2.5 billion kilometers of telephone wire deployed across the US. Running fiber or coax across the same distances is costly. Electricity and telephone service reached just about every house in the 1930s because the government paid for it as part of Depression-era spending, then declared that these items were necessary utilities that must be provided to new homes and businesses constructed later. A lot of the telecom companies were hoping to get the government to do that again. There have been some bills providing government money for these, but the telecom companies have been trying to take the money but do the bare minimum or only roll out wireless service, and the government has been slow providing funding. Meanwhile SpaceX has been trying to say they should get the money instead because they can get everyone online faster and their low orbit constellation doesn’t have the latency issues of the satellite internet traditionally available to rural customers. I think they cancelled the money that had been awarded and gave it to SpaceX back when Musk was running the government this spring. And of course, none of the companies want the Internet classified as a utility because then they have to provide equal access to everything instead of trying to slow access to Netflix unless Netflix pays them.
Ok, the only country in Europe currently still using dial up is Croatia, the rest of Europe has shutdown those services years ago. Telephone wires have been used for aDSL since the early 2000s and stil used for vDSL but dial up?
If Netherlands was a US state it would be ranked 42/50 in area. We have zero-population zones larger than your whole country. Our government refused to spend taxpayer money properly on telecom infrastructure since the 1990s so some of us are stuck here with Pony Express internet, it’s awful.
Oh and now our corrupt gov wants to eliminate “wasteful” fiber in exchange for Musk becoming a trillionaire with Starlink. Lovely.
By sabotaging all the other countries that are dependent on our corporations. The problem is that most of our corporations don't even make anything anymore, so everyone is starting to get wise
I think the biggest surprise for me is that there's still anywhere in the country with genuine actual POTS lines. I thought the Plain Old Telephone Service was dead and that those places that still had phone numbers were six feet of phone line to a VoIP converter box to an internet connection.
Just before my mother retired as a school secretary, she was telling me all the hell they had to go through to keep a fax machine running in the age of IP telephony.
Wire is pretty much never removed once it's laid out and I'm sure a lot of DSL based internet connections still run over same twisted pair that would have carried POTS lines.
But you're probably right that there's a VoIP device keeping these up and working, maybe just more than 6 ft away and instead in some Telco box down the street.
I think POTS installations will remain for decades more in niche cases - emergency backups in elevators, security systems, hospitals, fire departments. And evidently Grandma's AOL internet connection up until this month haha
RIP, I still remember getting those AOL CDs in the mail, and was so excited by the concept of a disk that could allow me to connect to the world wide web.
My uncle would take me to computer shows and your could grab a 50 pack of those floppies shrink wrapped. I might even have a few still floating around in my computer junk drawer.
My big turn on for AOL is all you needed was a checking account and bam you were in. No credit card required. You still ran out of minutes way too fast.
Zelensky announces faster air defense deliveries after deadly Russian strikes -- Ukraine liberates village of Novoekonomichne in Donetsk Oblast -- Russian map behind top general hints at ambitions to seize Ukraine's Odesa, Kharkiv -- Russia-Ukraine naval
Medical Supplies for Ukraine’s Hospitals. Partnering for global health equity.
Russia’s war against Ukraine
Infantrymen of the operational battalion of the 13th Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine, “Khartiia,” practice airborne skills using an American M113 tracked armored personnel carrier in Kharkiv Oblast on Aug. 29, 2025. (Viacheslav Madiievskyi / Ukrinform / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Ukraineliberates villageof Novoekonomichne in Donetsk Oblast, General Staff says. Ukrainian assault groups spent two weeks fighting to liberate the settlement, raising the national flag in the village center on Aug. 31, according to the General Staff.
Russianfront-line advanceshave slowed down in August, monitoring group says. The pace of Russia’s advance in Ukraine dropped by 18% in August, with Russian forces occupying 464 square kilometers of territory.
Russian strikes hitKyiv, Sumy, Odesa oblasts, causing fires and casualties. In Kyiv Oblast, a Russian drone strike hit the Bila Tserkva community, killing one person and wounding others, Secretary of the Bila Tserkva City Council Volodymyr Vovkotrub said.
Russian forces allegedly preparingmajor assaulttoward Siversk in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine’s military says. Siversk, Russia’s new potential target, lies about 10 kilometers (6 miles) west of Russian-occupied territory and just south of the contested Serebrianskyi Forest.
Zelensky to reportedlymeet European leadersin Paris on Sept. 4. U.S. President Donald Trump, who has pledged to broker a swift peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow, is not expected to attend the Paris meeting at the moment, a source told AFP.
Ukraine’s SBU files in absentianotice of suspicionagainst Kadyrov for war crimes. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) announced on Sept. 1 that it had charged Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov in absentia with war crimes against Ukrainian soldiers.
Russian map behind top general hints atambitionsto seize Ukraine’s Odesa, Kharkiv. While Moscow has publicly insisted on full control of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, the map indicated possible plans extending to Odesa and Kharkiv, neither of which had been included in earlier demands.
Zelensky announces fasterair defense deliveriesafter deadly Russian strikes. “We are accelerating the supply of additional air defense systems to enhance protection against missiles,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
Read our exclusives
Ukraine war latest: Ukraine liberates another village in Donetsk Oblast amid ongoing Russian offensive
Ukraine’s 425th Regiment has liberated the village of Novoekonomichne in Donetsk Oblast and raised the national flag, the General Staff announced on Sept. 1.
Photo: Anadolu via Getty Images
Learn more Russia-Ukraine naval drone arms race could ‘usher in a new era of warfare’
After a string of devastating Ukrainian strikes that crippled much of its Black Sea Fleet, Russia is now turning to naval drones in a bid to rebuild its presence and adapt to a new phase of maritime warfare.
As Putin shakes hands with Modi, Xi, here’s the state of Russia’s allies
After three years of international isolation, Russian President Vladimir Putin is back at the forefront of the global stage.
Photo: Gavriil Grigorov / Pool / AFP via Getty Images
Learn more From Crimea to Donbas, Russia’s “peace” has always meant more war. We’re here in Ukraine to give the world a reality check. Support independent journalism in this critical moment.
General Staff: Russia has lost1,083,790 troopsin Ukraine since Feb. 24, 2022.
The number includes 800 casualties that Russian forces suffered over the past day.
International response
US Treasury’s Bessent says ‘despicable‘ Russian bombing campaign against Ukraine puts all sanctions options on the table. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News on Sept. 1 that the Trump administration is considering new sanctions on Russia after Moscow intensified strikes on Ukraine despite recent peace talks.
Slovak PM Ficoplans meetings with Putin, Zelensky this week. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico announced on Sept. 1 that he will visit China to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, followed by a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Slovakia.
Heihe, a small rural lender, was one of the last Chinese banks willing to process transactions for Russian non-sanctioned credit organizations after larger Chinese banks cut off such services.
EU considerstighter rulesto block Russian gas after 2027 ban, Bloomberg reports. The plan specifically raises concerns over gas shipped through TurkStream, the pipeline linking Russia with Southeast Europe.
Russia’s oil infrastructure under fire | Ukraine This Week
In other news
Kyiv names managers forUS-Ukraine investment fundahead of first meeting. The announcement sets the stage for the fund to become functional after four months of preparation by America’s International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and Ukraine’s Support Public-Private Partnership Agency (PPP Agency).
SuspectedRussian jamminghits von der Leyen’s plane during Bulgaria visit. “We can confirm there was GPS jamming, but the plane landed safe,” European Commission spokesperson Arianna Podesta confirmed for the Kyiv Independent.
Kim Jong Un travels to China to joinXi, Putinat WWII anniversary events. Photographs published by North Korean media showed Kim with senior officials, including Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, inside his dark green armored train.
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Also, stuff that gets mis-labeled as AI can be just as dangerous. Especially when you consider that the AI detection might use such labels to train itself. So someone who's face is weirdly symmetrical might get marked as AI and then have hard time applying for jobs, purchasing things, getting credit, etc.
I want to know what counts as AI. If someone uses AI to remove the background in an image or just to remove someone standing in the background is technically generative AI but that's something you can do in any photo editor anyway with a bit of work.
so one of the most censord and biggest social media sites in the world will label ai generated contend while Chinese ambassadors post ai generated propaganda on x. that's just funny.
EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus today, Switzerland’s first large-scale, open, multilingual language model — a milestone in generative AI for transparency and diversity.
Nice. This is the one that supposedly comes with open data sets, training data and everything, and it's a true "open-source" model. Seems it's avalable in 7B and 70B.
The move is the latest underscoring how Silicon Valley’s deep-pocketed executives are increasingly wielding influence in California politics and beyond.
Ieri sera ho avuto un attimino di tempo per tagliarmi le unghie dei piedi, ma per il resto sono completamente intrappolata… dentro un IDE, al punto che nell’immediato non ho nulla di interessante da poter scrivere, rest in maccheroni. Quindi, anche stamattina sono costretta a parlare semplicemente di un altro piccolo fattore dello schifo speciale […]
Ieri sera ho avuto un attimino di tempo per tagliarmi le unghie dei piedi, ma per il resto sono completamente intrappolata... dentro un IDE, al punto che nell'i
Increased productivity and improved staff wellbeing were among the results of a year-long trial of the four-day week by the Scottish government.
Staff at the two organisations reported less work-related stress and greater satisfaction with their jobs and work-life balance.
Almost all workers (98%) at SOSE believed the four-day week trial improved motivation and morale, while there was a decrease in workers taking time off sick and a 25% fall in those taking sick days for psychological reasons.
The techlords intend to bring humanity to the brink of collapse and then, in a magic trick, rise to power, saving the species or themselves as the last specimens.
Malawi is facing a critical shortage of tuberculosis drugs, with health officials warning that stocks will run out by the end of September.
It comes just months after the World Health Organization (WHO) revealed that the country had successfully reduced tuberculosis (TB) cases by 40% over the past decade.
But the health ministry, which was already badly hit by the cuts in aid from the US, UK and other donors, has been forced to warn the public of low stocks of first-line TB medicines across Malawi, which means patients may find their treatment disrupted or ended.
Dr. Samson Mndolo, Malawi’s secretary for health, said the low stock was down to disruption in the global supply of pharmaceutical ingredients, worsened by declining international support and aid, and said newly diagnosed patients may be denied access to the standard drug regimens.
The bubble won't pop. AI has become a national defense initiative. The only thing that will pop NVIDIA's bubble is another chip designer coming out with something better. Maybe someone will use AI that ran on NVIDIA to build something else, therefore using NVIDIA to kill NVIDIA.
I think there is an AI bubble, but the aftermath will be like the dot com bubble: the internet didn't go away, but a bunch of businesses that were only ever valuable because they were on the internet did.
OpenAI won't go away, but a bunch of companies whose products are pretty much wrappers for ChatGPT will.
Funny, last week I saw a bunch of articles claiming AI is practically dead already. And now this?
Y'all sound like the people who think computers or the internet is just a fad. Shit like this is here to stay, wether you like it or not.
Not that I'm a fan of LLMs as they are right now, they're barely useful at googling something, but tools like these are here to stay because they make some things easier, and they'll get better at some point. Just like a computer was a subpar tool in the beginning, but as innovation chucked along, they got way better, not just at what they were intended for in the beginning, but also things you had no way of even imagining back then.
If your not out actively trying to fuck up, it's already here for coders. It's going to become impossible to be a "junior" coder.
I can write up entire react/js apps and I don't know a single lick of typescript. Would I drop it in prod? No. But is it good enough for a pr to a senior who knows what's up? Absolutely.
I hate it when people submit PRs they can't understand or explain. It is more work for me than just writing it myself. Also, this whole "AI can bootstrap an app!" line is fucking stupid. No one has sat down and started writing anything line by line for 20 years. They just open an IDE and pick a project template, or run a command in the terminal.
Really? Companies are going to keep building datacenters that need entire nuclear reactors to themselves without any of that converting into revenue? This is going to keep going forever in your mind?
Id like lemmings take on how they would actually reduce emissions on a level that actually makes a difference (assuming we can still stop it, which is likely false by now, but let's ignore that)
I dont think its as simple as "tax billionaires out of existence and ban jets, airplanes, and cars" because thats not realistic.
Bonus points if you can think of any solutions that dont disrupt the 99%'s way of life.
Joy. That joy you got when renting a game at blockbuster or getting that cd you’ve been looking for. That feeling of having a crush on a girl in school and feeling like the world was big with endless possibilities.
a deep dive into the messy substrate and coordination layers below decentralised networks, and how authoritarian thinkers like peter thiel view this substrate as a way to capture networks
SocialHub and the Substrate of Decentralised Networks
SocialHub is one of the primary forum where fediverse developers can talk about ActivityPub, how to implement the protocol, and have conversations about how the technical interoperability can be improved with Fediverse Enhancement Proposals. The forum has been searching for new ownership, but making decisions on how to move forward has been challening. Most developers aren’t interested in taking responsibility of community management, while the current admin will only hand over control to a team of people who can not only do the technical administration but can also manage the community. There is also no shared vision for what SocialHub should become, and multiple developers openly wonder if it is even worth it to continue with the forum. Most crucially, nobody has clear authority to make final decisions, making it incredible hard to move past the phase of ‘making a forum post with some ideas and suggestions’.
One of the core challenges with building a decentralised network is that decentralisation is about building alternative power structures, where no single actor has control over the entire network. But power is hard to diffuse: when you build a system that spreads out power, from one control point to many nodes, often this means that new places of gatekeeping and centralisation pop up. The result is often a kind of governance vacuum where important decisions get stuck in endless discussion loops, or where informal power structures emerge that aren’t accountable to the broader community.
Building a decentralised network like the fediverse thus means not only building a social network that spreads out over many different nodes, but also building an infrastructure for the network to run on that is itself decentralised. What’s happening to SocialHub is symptomatic of this broader tension, where these decentralised systems promise to distribute power, but they still need coordination mechanisms to function.
Hobart and decentralised substrates
In an essay titled The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization, tech writer Byrne Hobart wrote about decentralised networks, and how one of their paradoxes is that they require centralised substrates. One quote from the article regularly pops up, where Hobart writes: “Any decentralized order requires a centralized substrate, and the more decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system.”
With this, Hobart means that decentralised systems require a shared agreement on how to communicate with the system, usually via a set of agreed-upon protocols. For a decentralised system to work well, people have to agree to a single method of interaction. The internet cannot function if every website implements their own incompatible version of HTTPS, for example.
This leads Hobart to the observation that open networks are prone to being captured by companies that figure out an onramp to the network, writing: “these onramps are built on an open system, but part of their function is to close off some of it. And the better they do that, the more value they can capture.” Twitter and Facebook, but also crypto companies like Coinbase are examples for Hobart of this dynamic.
He writes: “This pattern raises a question: is centralization just a natural tendency of all networks? Are we destined to have a ‘decentralization sandwich,’ where there’s a hard-to-change set of protocols, something open built on top of that, and a series of closed systems built on top of that, which are the only ones the average person interacts with?”
On a surface-level reading, it feels straightforward enough: the fediverse is a decentralised network, and its technical function depends on the ActivityPub protocol. You can view the ActivityPub protocol as the centralised substrate to the decentralised network.
But when you start looking more closely, the picture that emerges is significantly more complicated.
The technological substrate
When you start looking more closely at how the fediverse operates in practice, the picture that emerges is significantly more complicated than Hobart’s centralised substrate theory suggests. Rather than a single protocol that serves as the foundation for a decentralised network, there is fragmentation at multiple levels. Moreover, the more this network pushes towards decentralisation, the more fragmented it becomes.
On a protocol level, there is no singular ActivityPub. The ActivityPub protocol as maintained by the W3C is the official canon version of the protocol, but most platforms don’t implement the full ActivityPub spec, instead opting for a combination of ActivityPub’s Server to Server protocol in combination with the Mastodon API. This means that the ‘centralised’ substrate is already fragmented in practice. While it is possible to make a case that developer adoption would go smoother if ActivityPub implementations were more standardised, the current fragmentation is a result of the network consisting of independent actors that coordinate with each other only to a limited extend.
Quote posts provide a concrete example of how this fragmentation plays out in practice. There are multiple different ways to implement quote posts. Misskey notably has a different method than the method that Mastodon is now using to implement quote posts. When Threads decided to implement quote posts, they decided on supporting both implementation methods for quote posts. This would seem like a good example of the value of a centralised substrate to a decentralised network: things would go smoother if everyone had agreed upon a singular implementation method of quote posts. So when a new fediverse platform that wants to be fully interoperable with other platforms would only have to implement one method, and know exactly in advance which one to use. But the reality shows that even basic features resist standardisation.
What the fediverse shows is that a decentralised network tends to split up into multiple different subnetworks. These networks themselves are also decentralised, and while technically part of the larger fediverse supernetwork, they are often quite separated. For example: The collection of Misskey servers are largely catering towards the Japanese audience. They are technically interoperable with the ‘Threadiverse’, a set of link-aggregator platforms (Reddit-likes, basically), but in practice interoperability and connections between these two sub-networks of the fediverse is negligible. Streaming software Owncast is seen as part of the fediverse, but the ActivityPub-enabled interactions between Owncast streamers and the Mastodon-verse are arguably even more limited.
What’s seen as ‘the fediverse’ turns out to contain more protocols that are interoperable with each other to a certain degree, such as Hubzilla’s Nomad protocol. And if we expand our perspective to look at the open social web as a set of decentralised social networks that are all interoperable with each other, we see even more protocols, such as ATProto and Nostr. At this level, the idea of a single centralised substrate becomes even more tenuous.
So what this means is that the more decentralised a network becomes, the network tends to split into subnetworks, where each cluster of this supernetwork becomes more distinct from each other. Interoperability and connections between these clusters is possible and happens occasionally, but for social and cultural reasons can be fairly limited.
From a technical perspective, Hobarts claim that “the more the decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system” turns out to be recursive: the more decentralised approach means that networks start to fragment into subnetworks, each with slightly different technological substrates, and it becomes more important that you can count of the underlying substrate of the subnetwork.
The social substrate
Hobart’s centralised substrate theory assumes that decentralised networks require centralised governance of their foundational protocols. But examining how the fediverse actually governs itself reveals multiple, overlapping authority structures that challenge this assumption. Rather than a single centralised point of control, there are competing forms of governance, spread out over multiple places and communities.
The W3C, the organisation that governs ActivityPub, usually focuses on protocol governance via W3C members, where these members are often required to be organisations. This represents the closest thing to Hobart’s “centralised substrate” – a formal institution with official authority over the protocol specification.
The SocialHub forum is one of the main places for structured long-form communications about ActivityPub. It is also the main place for conversations about Fediverse Enhancement Proposals (FEP). A FEP is a document that gives structured information about ActivityPub and the fediverse, with the goal of improving interoperability and well-being of fediverse applications. Anyone can submit a FEP, and conversations about them on places like SocialHub is how they get legitimacy and buy-in for other projects to implement the proposals.
The grassroots system of the FEPs, in which the SocialHub plays a major part, shows that a single protocol can be used in a manner that is highly decentralized: there is no central authority that can mandate implementation of FEPs, yet they gain legitimacy through community discussion and voluntary adoption.
Conversations about ActivityPub and the fediverse are spread out fairly wide, over a variety of places on the network. Some of the notable places for conversation are the SocialHub forum and the Fedidev matrix channel. The SocialCG of the W3C has various places for discussion, including an email list, GitHub discussion boards and regular meetings. Other places include discussions on microblogging feeds, various (semi)private chat groups and Lemmy communities. Notably, each of these places for conversation only has a small subset of fediverse developers that are participating, and developers are spread out over all these places. This indicates that the ‘social substrate’ of the fediverse development is decentralised as well, there is no single place that owns or controls the conversations about protocol development.
Decentralisation and political power
Hobart is not the only one who has thought and written about how decentralised networks relate to the (potentially centralised) governance of the protocols that powers them, as well as how they are vulnerable to capture. But Hobart’s alignment with the tech-right political wing makes his writing relevant to me, specifically because I strongly disagree with his political views, and the people he aligns himself with. Understanding why this thesis appeals to certain political actors helps makes it all the more important to challenge this way of thinking.
Hobart is a techno-optimist, and his mode of thinking is illustrative of a wider thinking on technology and culture in Silicon Valley. His latest book, on why bubbles are actually good, got a foreword by Peter Thiel. This connection is not incidental, as Hobart represents a particular worldview about how technology, power, and governance should intersect.
Thiel fits well with the line of thinking of Hobart, both on the wider points of techno-optimism, as well as on the aformentioned quote, that decentralised networks require a centralised substrate. Thiel’s beliefs can be understood as techno-feudalism, where he wants to move power away from the political domain to domain of corporate tech, where power is held by a few corporate elites, not by a democracy. Decentralised networks in itself are an antithesis to the worldview of Thiel’s authoritarianism. The decentralisation of a network means divesting power away from the few corporate elites, and spreading it out over many individuals instead.
The line of thinking that decentralised networks often have a centralised substrate, and are vulnerable to being captured by building closed systems on top of the open systems, can be read as either a warning or as an instruction manual. And for noted democracy-hater Peter Thiel, whom Hobart seems to align himself with, it is much more likely that Thiel views this as an instruction manual on how to deal with open and decentralised systems.
The idea that a decentralised network still can have a single central point, namely the technological substrate that powers the network, is thus an attractive idea to an authoritarian figure. You might not be able to control a decentralised network directly, but by controlling or influencing the protocol that powers it, a chokepoint arises that the authoritarian feudalist overlord can leverage to extract rent.
Meta’s approach to the fediverse demonstrates the substrate capture strategy in action. By joining ActivityPub governance discussions while simultaneously building Threads as a massive onramp to the network, Meta places itself into a position to influence both the protocol, as well as to function as a primary gateway to the network. This follows the format of the “decentralization sandwich” that Hobart describes. Their sponsorship of the Social Web Foundation further embeds them in the governance substrate of the fediverse network.
In this context, Hobart’s quote takes on a new meaning. Hobart’s message resonates with the people and organisations who are building today’s social networks of extraction. They have built social networks where they are the gatekeepers, and with their gatekeeping power they have become richer than god. While decentralised networks might pose a threat to centralised networks, promising to take their gatekeeping power away, Hobart’s description points to a new place where they can extract rent. This is why it matters to understand how decentralised networks function matters: it also indicates that the substrates of decentralised network can be decentralised, and points to ways how corporate capture can be resisted.
Reframing decentralisation
Hobart’s statement that decentralised systems depend on centralised substrate makes it appealing to authoritarians, since it provides a guidebook on how to gain forms of centralised control over decentralised systems. But while the idea seems to fit well with a surface-level analysis, a closer look at how the fediverse operates in practice also shows that the substrate of the network is, and has the potential to be, a lot more decentralised than first might be assumed.
From a technological side, the assumption of ‘the fediverse is the decentralised network’, with ‘ActivityPub being the centralised substrate’ turns out to be a whole lot more complicated in practice. What’s seen as ‘the fediverse’ turns out to contain more protocols that are interoperable with each other to a certain degree. The ActivityPub protocol also turns out to contain multiple sub-protocols: most platforms don’t implement the full ActivityPub spec, instead opting for a combination of ActivityPub’s Server to Server protocol in combination with the Mastodon API.
On the social side, ‘decentralisation’ is both a technical description of a network architecture, as well as a more general description of the distribution of authority in a network. The grassroots system of the FEPs shows that a single protocol can be worked on in a manner that is highly decentralised.
This intertwining of technical and social decentralisation reveals why Hobart’s thinking on decentralisation and substrate s fails to capture the reality of how these networks actually operate in practice. At the same time, Hobart’s thinking does provide a good way of understanding how authoritarian-minded people and organisations might approach decentralised systems, and how they think about capturing and controlling such networks. It is this dual combination that makes Hobart’s thinking interesting to me, specifically because I disagree with it on multiple levels.
As for the SocialHub: after a period of uncertainty, Pavilion, the organisation that also build the Discourse plugin which connects the forum software to the fediverse over ActivityPub, will become the new admins of the community.
Threads has entered the fediverse! As part of our beta experience, now available in a few countries, Threads users aged 18+ with public profiles can now choose to share their Threads posts to other…
I first thought that this article seemed to suggest variety in the implementation of Federated protocols was a bad thing but actually its saying the opposite and supports the organic development of activitypub which i complely agree with. Variety, experminentation and dare I say it diversity are strenghts. Uniformity is boring and weak. It gives us choice, the opportunity to try things out without completely starting anew and has sonfar meant we have an amazing choice ofnservers, clients, features and options.
The next time I'm about to moan and complain about how nobody directly implements activitypub apis "the standard way", I'll remember this article and be mollified.
Israeli Colonel Jacques Neriah, a former intelligence official and a special analyst for the Middle East, warned on Sunday of an impending “second round” of war against Iran as Tehran weighs a revenge attack on Tel Aviv.
“There is a sense that a war is coming, that Iranian revenge is in the works. The Iranians will not be able to live with this humiliation for long,” Neriah told Udi Segal and Anat Davidov on 103FM.
“Israel must launch a preemptive strike against Iran in its present state, as a large part of its military capabilities is paralyzed,” he added.
I can't help but laugh. "If we don't attack Iran, they'll attack us," has now turned into, "Now that we've attacked Iran they're definitely going to attack us!" There are no limits to their justifications for warmongering.
Then we need to stop antagonizing them and giving them a reason to get nukes. At this point they have enough institutional knowledge and resources to make one so them not doing it is more them not wanting to, ie. The ayatollahs fatwa against them.
If Israel and the US keep bombing them though and make them think the only path to safety is through nukes then maybe that fatwa goes away.
The French don't get enough criticism about what they've done and continue to do globally. USA is rightfully considered the bad guy globally but 250 years of war and theft are nothing compared to the 400 - 600 years of rape and pillaging the French have done
I'm sure this has changed a bit since the old (very popular) king died, but back then you would probably rather go to prison than face the angry mob that would summon if you insulted the king.
I’m sure this has changed a bit since the old (very popular) king died
Sort of a chicken-egg situation. Is the king so popular that nobody bothers to criticize him? Or is the king's light touch less likely to stir the pot and provoke criticism that results in prosecution?
you would probably rather go to prison than face the angry mob
This sounds like using a Jim Crow era lynch mob to explain the popularity of a Segregationist governor.
In Israel, thousands of protesters have blocked roads around the country, including a major highway in Tel Aviv, burning tires, calling for the return of the hostages still held in Gaza and an end to Israel’s war on the besieged strip. The protests were led by families of hostages, and part of a nationwide “Day of Disruption.”
"Meanwhile, Israel’s military chief clashed with far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir about Israel’s Gaza City operation, with Smotrich reportedly saying, “Whoever doesn’t evacuate, don’t let them. No water, no electricity, they can die of hunger or surrender.”
I bet those 2 pieces of shit still act offended if you call this genocide genocide
Getting anything out is already almost impossible. I moved sway from 3rd party cloud storage a couple years back. I had to get 500gb from onedrive and it was refusing to download at anything more than 50kb/s (my internet was significantly better than that)
If you're in the EU, you can apply for a GDPR request to get sent a copy of all your data in their cloud, same for iCloud. Takes about 48 hours in my experience.
Free office suite – the evolution of OpenOffice. Compatible with Microsoft .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx. Updated regularly, community powered.
I second this. There's a little bit of a learning curve on some of the functionality, but it's not bad at all. And most of the functionality is very easy to find. I moved over to Libre Office several years ago and it's been great.
This is very true. I hadn’t used Microsoft Office since 2007 and at my new workplace everyone’s using it. It’s really hard and I don’t find anything. Yesterday I was working with tables but I gave up and had IT install libreoffice instead.
Libreoffice their latest blogpost is from the 20th of August 2025. There have been a few releases in the past few months as well.
Openoffice their latest ( Apache Openoffice 4.1.15 ) was released almost 2 years ago ( December 2023 ).
Libreoffice seems like a more recent, better supported tool over Openoffice which hasn't seen any updates since 2023 according to their own website.
I'm on my phone, so I didn't search extensively. But I think that also plays a role in why there's a much larger fanbase for libreoffice rather than Openoffice.
I've no recent experience with either so I can't comment on how well either works.
Edit: I looked up the wrong one. My statement remains correct w.r.t. Openoffice, but they mentioned Onlyoffice which is a different product.
openoffice is an apache project, created when oracle gave them the code and rights to the openoffice project. ibm later donated symphony to them. anyone familiar with apache knows they do things their own way, and usually slowly.
libreoffice originated from a fork when openoffice's status under oracle was in doubt. it progresses faster than apache, as most developers also switched.
onlyoffice is an entirely different application. decent enough, but with its own quirks. it can also be slow on lower-spec systems due to the heavy reliance on js. originally a latvian-russian project, it was reorganized (via new corporate entities in uk and sg) to hide the russian ties for 'reasons'.
Ah I see. Thanks for the information. I use both LibreOffice and OnlyOffice and generally am happy with both. I kind of just bounce around back and forth.
Man, wouldn't it be nice if both of our counties didn't have ridiculous propaganda and fascism so that we could just cooperate on shit like this without having to worry as much about maliciousness on a state level?
OnlyOffice is Russian-owned, via a holding company in Singapore. When Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions threatened the business, they obfuscated this, but it's still Lev Bannov's product.
The importance you attach to this is up to you, but they try quite hard to hide it.
Yes Ms is secretly stealing from users across the world and yet not a single security researcher has found it. AND ALEXA IS LISTENING TO ME 24X365 DAYS A YEAR!
until your computer force reboots itself in the middle of the day to do updates it didn't tell you about, and you log back in and later that night find it uploaded all your shit to the cloud and just for good measure deleted some of it too as a fuck you
tip: do not write about the revolution, short stories, hatred of capitalism, your suicide plans, or your teenage angst and erotic anthropomorphic horse fan fiction.
tip: Only write about the revolution, short stories about your hatred of capitalism, your suicide plans, your teenage angst, and erotic anthropomorphic horse fan fiction.
Let's say this huge breach of security and privacy is okay.
How are Microsoft ensuring these sensitive documents are not being transferred via or stored on servers located in hostile countries with lax data laws (such as foreign nations like the USA?).
Microsoft has already said it doesn't matter where your data is stored, it isn't safe from the United States.
But you can change this behaviour in settings, it's just the default for now.
So, if you don't trust Microsoft to handle your documents, but still somehow use MS Word and OneDrive, for the moment you can still stop it from saving your Word documents to their servers.
Ms office 2016 install still going strong with zero cloud function. That day I lose it is the day LibreOffice copies itself from the laptop to the desktop. Aint paying for O365
No for most it's customers and an option for them all. MS is very clear in its policies. Any AI services you use, isn't sent back for training. The policy is very clearly explained and one of the clearer ones.
Business or enterprise users data isn't trained and individuals data can opt out
I remember when facebook had a policy to require users to opt-in to having third parties scrape users data, but then it turned out a "bug" caused FB to sell everyones data anyway and they made billions more money than they would have.
I have no doubt a similar "bug" will make its way to the MS servers if one hasnt already.
A lie is an assertion that is believed to be false, typically used with the purpose of deceiving or misleading someone.[1][2][3] The practice of communicating lies is called lying. A person who communicates a lie may be termed a liar.
I actually appreciate this. The only place I use Word is at work, and nothing I create in Word at work is 'mine'. I do not care at all about the security of things I do at work (that's for our IT Security team to care about), and all this means is that if I accidentally screw up, or if my computer just up and dies on me... all of my work files should be 'safe'.
My employer has been going very hard towards ensuring that our work computers can ONLY be used for work purposes. Once I accepted this and embraced it I found that I'm now 100% free of Microsoft for anything personal, and it is amazing.
there is a reaching hand that goes further than just using it for work.
lets say you open libreoffice writer and write a party invite. you send this party invite to a friend - they are invited to your party.
your friend opens it in MSWord, its uploaded to the cloud and scraped for all of your personal data to train their AI and to be sold to the lowest bidder.
you had and want nothing to do with microsoft, but they are still harvesting your data.
i have been trying to understand what information i send to people and how i send it in an attempt to try and get as lottle data into msrecall as possible.
im not quite there yet (and probably wont be before the oct cutoff) because my mother still uses windows & emails me sometimes, and a few of my friends on discord use windows. its really difficult because i have no control over my data being scraped by products i do not use and have never accepted a eula for. its...... aggravating 🙁
The unfortunate fact is if a user who views what you post is using a windows machine, the likelihood of the information on their screen being captured by Microsoft is overwhelmingly high.
I guess you may have to approach the issue how you would the public-facing internet at large: if you cannot verify who and how people are viewing your material, do not post any material that can be accessed by windows. If you must, post it through a trusted circle of users who also understand the issue.
I agree, however you're never going to be able to fully control things that you've sent out for other people. Even this post can, and likely will, end up as training data for AI. 'The only winning move is not to play' applies to a lot of things in life, and if you truly want to protect your data then the best move is to not create any data. The second best move is to not share any data that you've created.
I mean, I'm in the same boat. This doesn't effect me except for work stuff. But here's the thing, all of my documents are already backed up to the cloud via OneDrive settings. So this is redundant at best.
At the end of the day, one of the reasons I hate the MS experience is because they push things on you. Its not your PC, its theirs. Hey, you want to use OneDrive? No? Are you sure? No? Are you really sure? No? Why don't I just turn it on for you so you can see how great it is. You must have turned it off by accident, let me turn it back on. OK, OK I get it you really don't want to use onedrive. Oh, I forgot that fact once our annual update came out and undid that setting. You straight out uninstalled onedirve and altered your registry? Ok, how about we just upload Word documents for you.
Part of why I still hate it at work; work knows almost everything about me. People with poor understanding of PII have my personal information, and use MS products. Microsoft knows all of that, and everything that I type, the notes I make, the phrases I use, inferences on my interests, and can combine that with other profiles. It helps put together a much more complete picture and profile of me and why I interface with. And I can't opt out, can't use Linux, and can't just go somewhere else to avoid it.
Munoz backs up the decision with half a dozen advantages for saving documents to the cloud. From never losing progress and access anywhere to easy collaboration and increased security and compliance.
Munoz kept out the little details where nobody wants this and this is only a good thing for Microsoft
I don't get it, does Microsoft WANT everyone to stop using their products? First they fuck up their OSes, then they start planting shady shit in their OSes, and now it's down to every single goddamned piece of software they poop out! What in the fuck are they even doing!
I'm pretty sure most regular users will not even notice the charge, and find it useful down the line. Cause one day they will mess something up, complain to MS that they "lost their work", will be pointed to the cloud where everything was synced, and rejoice. Most users don't really care about the implications that their documents are in the cloud.
Silence! The great Microsoft has decreed that from this day forward your documents belong to them! No dissension!
Proceed to the payment portal to pay your offerings immediately. Only those worthy enough to pay for the Extra^TM^ and Premium^TM^ tiers will be allowed to use the File menu.
Free office suite – the evolution of OpenOffice. Compatible with Microsoft .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx. Updated regularly, community powered.
I think it they are based in Latvia now which is in Europe. They did originally start in Russia and still supply the Russian government. Though it is free and open source. So where it is based does not really matter.
OnlyOffice is one of the few open source applications which actually puts effort into its UI. LibreOffice looks straight from 1990. I really would not recommend LibreOffice to anyone who is not technical, whereas OnlyOffice provides a great UI experience.
With the entire West supporting a livestreamed genocide the whole moral highground schtick does not really land for me anymore either.
Of the installs I've done in the past year, none were absolutely flawless. One had an error that I just hit "retry" and it worked. One required some serious googling but I found the fix on reddit (rip). One didn't work at all, and I switched to a different distro that did work.
I'm not going to lie and sugarcoat it, but once I got past the install everything has been fine. Hopefully things will continue to improve
It's on per default when signed in to OneDrive. Actually a really nice feature tbh. However, you will be promoted to hell and back if you aren't signed in to OneDrive. I like the feature for work but I don't like the idea of it being the default setting.
I have a Word document saved into my ‘personal account vault’ which is for personal thoughts (like a diary). Does this mean, they’ll automatically upload this too into their cloud?
If that’s the case, not sure what to do. Tempted to go back to old school diary but risk the chance of my family finding it.
Markdown is great for that. There also are some WYSIWYG and a lot of side-view editors. If you still want Word-alike, there's lots of office suites aside from Office 365. Or is it about saving notes to cloud? Even more solutions just for that, aside from plain file-sync clouds.
No, that’s not it. I just want a Word-alike thing that allows me to put a password on it and use it as a ‘modern diary’ (like how you can make chapters and such in Word).
Not sure if I explained it well, English isn’t my native language. So wasn’t sure how to explain it
Siu Mit USA De Fa Si Si Zu Yi The Only Good Fa Xi Si Zu Yi Ze Hai Sei Zo Ge
(Destroy fascism in the USA The only good fascist is a dead one)
Now just need to transpose that and replace some characters. Of course, making it offline would greatly reduce government/corporate surveillance threats. As long as your family aren't cryptographers, they won't be able to decrypt it.
(Its Tri-Lingual. Cantonese Jyutping, Mandarin Pinyin, and English of course. Romanization of characters makes it harder to guess words especially when it gets transposed with a bunch of others.)
No big corporation or state institution handling vast amounts of customer data will not allow this. Also really bad for regular consumer too. Microsoft servers will become treasure trove for hackers.
I'm not exactly s power user in Microsoft office, but I found using libre office to be very similar. Never had issues using it for school back in the day and I'm sure it's better now.
My only problem is how Libre Office handles their style system. It's forced use for things like Footers, and very hard to manipulate and turn off unlike Word.
My own way to bypass it was to replace a new document text into an old converted word text that had the correct footer pages from Word.
I really hate page and Style guides because they always want to propagate everything through entire documents, instead of only changing things on a page by page basis. Adding things to previous pages when you change something isn't helpful.
I’ve been using it for over a decade now and have only rarely come across broken documents due to proprietary features. If you’re making docs for yourself, I’d say it’s pretty much a 100% replacement. Things can get a bit more fucky if you’re having exchanges where you edit with Libre and someone else edits with Word. But other than that, they’re pretty darn close.
Another user just linked some resources. Incredible the bullshit going on these days. So much going on it's hard for me to keep up with it all but I'm glad to be enlightened.
Wow thanks for the resources! I appreciate you dropping links I had no idea this was going on. Of course Google and Amazon are involved too, could have figured as much. Appears the only way do avoid the military industrial complex is to cease using anything provided from our oligarch overlords. What an age we live in.
I'm 99% of the way on LibreOffice. Gave it a solid go, but the main thing I use in excel is too cumbersome in Libre. I think it's a great option for many people though.
You're thinking as an individual. Excel in the business is what keeps Office afloat. There simply is no substitute. Even if you want to go with another spreadsheet, who's going to trust that to faithfully import Excel data?
LOL, Excel doesn't mangle shit. It's best-in-class spreadsheet software for a dozen reasons. #1 being that it never changes. It's solid, no other software like it. Business won't risk fucking around with anything else.
SOURCE: Sysadmin for several companies, and one that mainly used Google for Business. Accounting still had to have Excel.
Well, no? It would be ridiculous to expect me to be a power user over all the software I've administrated. I judge what people need according to business demands and orders from on high. My judgement is that, yes, some business units require Excel.
That’s not what the claim was though, was it. Someone said Excel also mangles files and your counter seems to be that no it doesn’t because you’ve got users who use it. But the one thing does not automatically follow from the other.
How many individuals care about what businesses do though? Usually they provide the hardware too, so it's whatever when it comes to what the company chooses to use.
These are more individual concerns for personal hardware. So long live LibreOffice.
Not really. What software and hardware a corporation chooses to use for their workforce is something that employees will not have much control over if they aren't in a high enough position.
Anything provided by a company is company property anyways. What matters more to me is what is used for personal use than a work computer or work phone or work etc.
So discussion wasn't off track. You were seeing things from the company perspective assuming the person was seeing it from a corporate position. I'm seeing it from a personal usage perspective and not corporate, which most employees have little control over and it's not their devices anyways.
LibreOffice does everything I need except that their version of Power Point (forgot the name lol) is a mess to work with in terms of making the slide deck visual appealing. Automatic guide lines, snapping and smartart, to name a few.
Thinking about onlyoffice but I'm not sure if I can trust them since I read about then trying to hide their ties to Russia.
How will this work for (for example) cibersecurity companies that have reports full of client's vulnerabilities and can't have them hosted in third parties?
I'm unclear on the differences between OpenOffice (which I genuinely thought was retired, didn't realize it was still a thing) and LibreOffice. If it ever gives you trouble, do make the switch.
It's still being kept barely alive for whatever reason. But it hasn't gotten any reasonable updates (I think not even including security updates as of recently, see libreoffice.org/discover/libre… ).
Today marks 20 years since the source code to OpenOffice was released. And today we say: LibreOffice is the future of OpenOffice. Let’s all get behind it! It’s great to have a rich and diverse set of free and open source software projects.
OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice. This is a different suite entirely. Might be better for people coming from MS Office, since it looks practically identical. Also supports opening multiple files as tabs.
ONLYOFFICE offers a secure online office suite highly compatible with MS Office formats. Connect it to your web platform for document editing and collaboration or use as a part of ONLYOFFICE Workspace.
which I genuinely thought was retired, didn’t realize it was still a thing
It's not gone. It's still around. Libre is forked from OpenOffice. When Libre was forked, everyone moved to Libre because Open has a lot of issues, which is why Libre was forked.
This is why Microsoft is making it damn near impossible to set up a new computer without logging into a Microsoft account. Luckily the OOBE trick still works (for now).
Office 365 requires an account to validate the license. Potentially it might work differently for the long term licensed versions (which features released to O365 now wouldn't reach until the next LTSC release), but I've not performed the initial install and licensing of those for clients yet
Or for home users who aren't already invested in a Microsoft ecosystem your best bet is to just use Libre Office
Edit: I accidentally made Office exclusive to leap years!
I love LibreOffice, but I wish there was an Android app. I've even considered learning more app development to try and help, but it's such a daunting task.
I've been writing all my college papers in LaTeX and it's been great. They look so professional, and it's easier to work on a collection of text files than one monolithic document.
I swear typesetting your papers is worth half a grade point at least. Then once you find Zotero and realize it will automagically handle your citations and you have auto biblios and cites working in LyX....life changing, absolutely.
It really depends on what you will use it for. Using it for plain text doesn't require much, some advanced layouts require a bit more digging, if you're including fancy graphics, equations, bibliography, footnotes, etc, you're going to look at managing the relevant libraries to gandle that (they are very well made and very convenient). All in all, it can be as complex as you want, but it can also be quite easy to use. Also LaTeX is way simpler than plain TeX.
I don't think that's necessarily a bad idea. Too many people are still not backing up their data, and the article says "...automatically save to OneDrive or your preferred cloud destination".
As long as they really give users full freedom to choose any cloud service, I consider that a win.
"If you don't have another cloud destination, don't worry... we'll automatically save it to your OneDrive account we FORCED you to get when you activated your operating system. Why no! You CAN'T turn it off! Also, we won't let you edit your files without internet connectivity. You can never be too safe!"
Literally the ONLY thing stopping this from happening is they don't think they can get away with it yet. I'm NOT going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
What you said is like saying "well, I need surgery, having the monkey from the forest come at me with a knife is better than nothing."
Microsoft has proven themselves over and over to be the last company you should trust with your data. Even recently they've been responsible for losing a life's worth of data because of OneDrive
They're already uploading people's data off of their computers to OneDrive without consent, then deleting the local copies.
Plus their tech work culture is lacking. When they screwed something up with Office 365 and Outlook wasn't available for over 18 hours (for basically the whole world), their response was a tweet that it's fixed.
Whereas CloudFlare messed up something for only an hour, they released a comprehensive breakdown on their blog of what happened, what the root cause was, and what they're going to do to prevent it from happening again.
I stopped at MS Word 2.0, when the Microsoft people agreed with me that it was pretty much broken for large files, and pointed me to an FTP site where there was a new version... which also was broken. Long story short, that's when I first installed Linux and ran LaTeX and Applixware.
They'd break SO MANY international and data security laws if they tried breaking into people's OneDrive, it'd be hilarious to see the number of lawsuits they'd lose by default.
they're probably already doing that to a smaller degree, and slightly protecting themselves with an obscure clause in their TOS. besides, you only lose lawsuits if you get caught - and churning things through AI is a great way to erase any fingerprints that identifies stolen data
because your phone/laptop doesn't have a global wi-fi connection, and you might want to open a document pause for dramatic effect outside of your home or work!
this has been goin on for like a year now. i have an offline profile with no onedrive on my machine, and tried the latest office. theres a slider saying autosave, but i was unable to use it. felt kinda weird that there is no autosave feature anymore. turns out autosave has been a cloud save option, and poor excel was not able to savemy private data to the onedrive datafarm. also the new excel is super slow compared to like the 2016 version, which indicates that theres more bloat under the hood.
Having switched many relatives to Linux recently too, Mint will be your best jumping off point for a familiar feel and pain free experience as someone new to Linux. If you love that and find yourself wanting more, then the world is your oyster! I started on Mint and ultimately settled on Fedora Plasma after trying out a half dozen different options.
Haven't had a need to open one the entire time I've been on the OS! Other than for my own development needs, but that's my own use case and nothing to do with operating the OS as a user.
Seit das ZDF und ARTE vor acht Jahren mit der legendären Serie „Bad Banks“ europäische Maßstäbe gesetzt haben und, in zwei Staffeln, einen mit Preisen überhäuften und internationalen Erfolg feiern konnten, habe ich mich gefragt, ob, und wenn, dann wann und wie, so ein TV-Ereignis wohl zu wiederholen sein würde. Für all diese Fragen steht die Antwort auf dem brandneuen „ZDF-Portal“. Bei der Ausstrahlung im TV war das kein Quotenhit, dabei ist diese Serie aber ein öffentlich-rechtlicher Hammer! (ZDF)
Seit das ZDF und ARTE vor acht Jahren mit der legendären Serie "Bad Banks" europäische Maßstäbe gesetzt haben und, in zwei Staffeln, einen mit Preisen überhäuften und internationalen Erfolg feiern konnten, habe ich mich gefragt, ob, und wenn, dann wa…
gedaliyah
in reply to Davriellelouna • • •WhyJiffie
in reply to Davriellelouna • • •like this
themadcodger, giantpaper e CrankyPants like this.
hansolo
in reply to WhyJiffie • • •like this
giantpaper likes this.
Turret3857
in reply to WhyJiffie • • •jollyrogue
in reply to Turret3857 • • •Yeah, MS would probably buy Android to get back into the mobile market.
I agree. Ideally, Android would be something like Debian or a mobile project of the Linux Foundation. It would really be better off if it wasn’t beholden to a company.
The mobile OS wars have already settled on Android and iOS. Closing off Android would destroy the market, and I don’t want to go back to the days when Windows Mobile was the leading mobile OS.
Odds are low of anything good happening because of this administration.
poopkins
in reply to WhyJiffie • • •HobbitFoot
in reply to poopkins • • •poopkins
in reply to HobbitFoot • • •Deflated0ne
in reply to poopkins • • •Deal.
Lets get a whole bunch of different OS. That compete with each other.
poopkins
in reply to Deflated0ne • • •Deflated0ne
in reply to poopkins • • •poopkins
in reply to Deflated0ne • • •Android is already largely open source. Yet it takes a massive investment from Google to continue developing it and curate the app store with it.
I'm genuinely struggling to envision how we move from the current situation to a somehow better but more fragmented ecosystem that doesn't negatively affect consumer experiences. Whichever way I've approached it, it plays in the favor of one company in particular who already has a leading market share in the US, and I truly don't see how that would be better.
Deflated0ne
in reply to poopkins • • •Sadly the failure is a governmental one. Not on any of us.
We have monopoly laws. Mechanisms to break them up. But they generally aren't enforced. It happens occasionally but almost never on the size of company that it was made to be used on.
jollyrogue
in reply to poopkins • • •It could be profitable the way RHEL or the Mozilla Foundation is profitable.
Companies will pay for OS support, and companies will pay for access. Android as a foundation with a company selling OS support and services which could be rebranded would be profitable.
I’m thinking about the wider IoT space here beyond only mobile.
poopkins
in reply to jollyrogue • • •The primary ways in which the Mozilla Foundation earns money is through search partnerships, donations and grants. Guess who is the major contributor.
As for Red Hat, this comes down to subscriptions or enterprise offerings, neither which really apply to a consumer OS unless you're willing to pay a subscription fee out of pocket. I doubt there will be much to be earned from offering consulting or training, either, unless they make Android exceedingly confusing to use.
The only companies that would pay for Android are OEMs who are already making thin margins, and effectively it'd drive the price of non-iPhones up. The alternative is that OEMs take the Huawei option and fork AAOS and develop it at their own expense.
jollyrogue
in reply to poopkins • • •Yes. It’s the same thing with the Linux kernel and other large FOSS projects. There isn’t a perfect fit for Android, but it would be better than the way ASOP is run now.
Consumer devices ship with proprietary software which is licensed all the time. It could be a library or an entire OS. Consumers are not the target market, like consumers aren’t the target market for RHEL.
The prime example is Windows. It’s licensed to Dell or whomever and ships with the hardware. The license is baked in.
Some people might be willing to pay if the price is reasonable enough. Android has support for major vendors, so using it as a base would be a boon to people doing things like media boxes and signage.
It’s the opposite. Make it easy to use. Companies pay for tools which reduces developer time.
The smaller OEMs would pay for licenses, PS hours, and backend services. They don’t have the expertise or budget.
Samsung? They’re going to keep doing what they’re doing because they have the expertise and budget to fork from upstream. It’s possible they would rally around Android, like companies have rallied around the Linux kernel.
OEMs do this with Linux already, so it would bring Android more inline with the norms.
poopkins
in reply to jollyrogue • • •It's funny you should mention this, because Google has needed to adapt this for mobile and are already open source. If the opportunity existed for a "free" and open source version of Android to be embraced by consumers, there are many such options today, like GrapheneOS (or even forking AOSP, for that matter).
My concern is that if the major contributor to that steps out, the volunteer community will need to substantially step up.
The reason I called out your example of Red Hat is to illustrate how enterprise is financing a free consumer experience.
With a very limited enterprise market, it's not realistic to expect this to apply to an almost exclusively consumer product.
So there are two options. Either we don't have an open source Android and in addition to the license cost of GMS, OEMs would have to license the OS itself. The alternative is that OEMs shoulder the development cost of their own fork of AOSP, which would simply be passed on to consumers. Either way, this would drive up the price of devices.
I'm not sure why you're speaking in hypotheticals about what Android could be if it had license fees, as it's readily available in open source under the Apache license today and, despite that, steadily losing market share.
generallynonsensical
in reply to poopkins • • •HobbitFoot
in reply to Davriellelouna • • •Kairos
in reply to HobbitFoot • • •azertyfun
in reply to HobbitFoot • • •I don't trust the US government to do literally anything right with this, and I'm kinda surprised Google didn't already gift an underage child to Trump so he'd make the problem go away.
However a perfectly viable option that I'm sure the previous government looked into would be to entrust Chromium (which is Open-Source though not copyleft) to a new, independent nonprofit made of Google's former chromium team led and paid for by a consortium of the major commercial chromium users (Google, Microsoft, etc.). It would be in everyone's best interest to share the relatively small financial burden so that Chromium can remain decent and competitive.
This wouldn't be anything revolutionary. This approach of financing an independent open-source project as a "common good" is basically how the Linux kernel has been developed for many years now, most Linux code is written by corporate sponsors.
RememberTheApollo_
in reply to Davriellelouna • • •like this
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vane
in reply to Davriellelouna • • •It's not complete truth. I use librewolf because you can set search engine to custom. In chrome you can only pick from predefined. With this fact Google controls it's competition. You can't compete with monopoly by being invisible because they always watch you.
altphoto
in reply to Davriellelouna • • •News from The Government!
Going forward you can now only search and browse the web by mail!
Isn't that great?
Some guy in the government.... I got another request for titties. Have we organized the titties files yet? The request is pretty clear... Larger than C cup but smaller than triple D.
tektite
in reply to altphoto • • •altphoto
in reply to tektite • • •Chloé 🥕
in reply to Davriellelouna • • •outdated news from may 2nd, in fact today a judge ruled that google won’t have to sell chrome or android, and they can keep paying mozilla/apple for being the default search engine
BUT, they will have to share search data publicly, and the default search engine deals can’t be exclusive anymore