Or by people formerly paying for their internet service with money that should have been going toward food or heat.

Losing the $30 monthly discount could force families to choose between broadband and other necessities,

Exactly.

It’s also important to note that some ISPs created a low-cost service plan specifically for ACP. (It’s reasonable to assume this was possible in part because ACP handled income verification and eliminated the costs of individual billing and credit card payments.) That plan will likely disappear if ACP goes away, leaving poor people stuck paying a bill much higher than the program ever paid.

Joke’s on them. Google locked me out of my account when I refused to give them my phone number.

This seems like a step in the right direction. Much like language translation, doing it on-device is the only way to preserve people’s data agency / privacy.

A good explanation of the different thin film transistor (LCD) panel types:

https://tftcentral.co.uk/articles/panel_technologies

Even if that issue were to be solved, the endless vendor lock-in and deliberate incompatibilities would remain.

I stopped buying Apple products years ago because they’re all about preventing people from truly owning the hardware they buy. Given how effective it is at extracting as much money from us as possible for as long as possible, I doubt that will ever change.

I think it’s time that we move the letter of the law past the requirement to prove harm in cases of encroachment on personal agency. Such things are next to impossible to prove as harmful (especially within a limited time frame) yet the damage is irreparable and can potentially continue forever.

Ham radio is amateur radio. It’s not the same thing as a community broadcast station (and not at all comparable to Twitch).

You got it right. Matrix is decentralized. It’s just not peer-to-peer (although there has been some work toward making it so).

I think more people would understand what you mean if you asked for community recommendations (or space recommendations if you want to use the Matrix-specific term). What Discord calls a “server” is not a server in any normal sense of the word, so it’s going to confuse people who aren’t Discord regulars, especially when we’re talking about a different network that has actual servers and self-hosting support.

I don’t find Unity’s excuses surprising, interesting, or newsworthy.

You log in, confirm it with another device (better hope it’s nearby! That first setup of a 2nd client is a doozy of a feel bad, if it isn’t),

Your devices don’t have to be nearby to verify them. You can enter a key backup passphrase instead.

then a few days later it just stops letting you do anything,

That’s not normal. Looks like you ran into a bug. Did you report it, so it can be tracked and fixed?

I gather from their weekly reports that they’ve been fixing encryption bugs lately, and that the clients now in testing (the Element X code base) seem to have them solved. You might want to try those, or one of the third-party clients.

Federated is a form of decentralized.

Nice to see some of the alternative client apps listed at the end of the article.

I’m especially looking forward to the upcoming new voice chat system: Element Call.

with books, games, movies, and drawings it’s easy to discern fantasy from reality

I don’t think it is easy with movies or books, unless you are certain of the source.

Either way, we don’t have a causal link.

My bigger concern is the normalization of and exposure to those ideas and concepts

The same concern has been behind attempts to restrict/ban violent video games, and films before that, and books before that. Despite generations of trying, I don’t think a causal link has ever been established.

Random bit flips are fairly common on Earth, too. This is why ECC memory should be standard equipment on systems handling data that anyone cares about, rather than reserved for servers.

Activision Blizzard is such an awful company that I stopped playing their games, for ethical reasons. I’m no fan of Microsoft or consolidation, but at least they don’t have a habit of supporting human rights abuses. This acqisition has me considering playing (ex-)Blizzard games again.

Vertical mergers, like this one, can either be good

Do you have any examples?

I see steadily increasing interest in privacy, data security, repairability, and e-waste reduction. The markets for these things may be relatively small today, but they are growing, and open hardware can address all of them.

do you think any meaningful new entries are going to deviate from their playbook?

Curious choice of words. I suppose it depends on how we define “meaningful”. There are measures of success other than becoming a trillion-dollar market capitalization tech giant. There are many businesses that succeed despite being different, in some cases because they are different.

More concretely, we have already been seeing new entries for several years. (Purism and Raptor Computing Systems, for example.) They have thus far been limited in what they can offer, partly due to the lack of truly open and affordable components, and partly because the demand for products like theirs is just getting started. But both of those hindrances are changing.

I think how much this area will develop and grow depends on how we either support it or impede it with obstacles. I hope attempts at short-term defence against a rival won’t lead us to shoot ourselves in the foot.

What paywall? It opens fine for me.

I guess it’s possible that uBlock Origin is hiding an overlay in my browser. This might help you:

https://web.archive.org/web/20231007150508/https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-china-tech-war-risc-v-chip-technology-emerges-new-battleground-2023-10-06/

Why does ARM hardware become obsolete after a few years? Lacking ongoing software support and no mainline Linux?

Correct. (And firmware support.)

What does that have to do with the instruction set license?

Barrier to entry (cost) and license restrictions (non-disclosure) are generally problematic for anyone wanting to ship open hardware.

If you think RISC-V implementors who actually make the damn chips won’t ship locked hardware that only run signed and encrypted binary blobs, you are in for a disappointing ride.

I don’t think anyone expects existing ARM device makers to change their behavior with RISC-V. Rather, RISC-V opens the door to new players who do things differently.