Third party apps: "OK. We'll show ads. Muted. Behind a black overlay. If we really can't find a workaround."
All this ado about "woke" this and "woke" that by the snowflakes... Pathetic.
If Ridley Scott released Alien today snowflakes would have a complete meltdown—imagine that, a black man and two women (neither of whom look like teen anime waifus, the horror!) in a cast! And the roles were written as gender neutral, for crying out loud!
"How do I compromise with someone who wants to put me standing at a wall and shoot me? Stand sideways?"
The perfect catch-22. Carrying a smartphone? It will be seized, searched and used against you. Not carrying a smartphone? This fact itself is used as evidence against you. This is something straight outta NKVD playbook, Beria would be proud.
Stupidity. Stupidity never changes.
"Xitter". It pronounces almost like "Shitter".
Or many service providers competing on price, quality of service and features, not competing on exclusivity like they do now.
Like grocery stores. Imagine if only one chain has the exclusive rights to sell potatoes and another one has rights to pasta. They can ask whatever price they want, because what you gonna do? Go to another store to get your 'taters cheaper? Hah, you'll cry and you'll pay what we ask! (BTW, growing your own potatos and sharing them with your neighbor infringes on our rights and is illegal. We'll sue you to oblivion if we catch you doing it.)
Prime example that for a publicly traded company the people buying the products are not customers for whom to create value, but a resource to extract value from.
Shareholders are the real customers for whom they create value.
High-speed school-to-prison pipeline. Because inmates=free labour and prisons are for-profit. Gotta get 'em kidz institutionalized as early as possible!
Probably it doesn't quite count as a gadget, but repurposing my old PC as a home server. Firstly it makes a great mass storage solution making all my media accessible from any device, no matter what architecture it is and what apps it can run. I also self-host Home Assistant, Syncthing, Radicale, Navidrome, Jellyfin and UrBackup. The ten years old 2 core Pentium with 8GB of RAM can do it all, it's much cheaper to run than half a dozen subscription services and I have total control over my data and privacy.
Home Assistant. If you ever want to do home automation properly, this is the way. Works with pretty much anything—Zigbee, zWave, BT LE, MQTT—while keeping things manufacturer agnostic, local, private and highly responsive (your commands don't need to go through some server 3000 km away and won't have ugly 1 second latency as a result).
DAVx⁵ and Radicale to sync contacts and calendars between devices without snooping middle-men.
Syncthing to sync any files between devices. Works remotely, too, thanks to Syncthing relays.
Navidrome for your personal music streaming service.
Debian, Docker, Docker Compose and Portainer as the backbone to run all your services.
And many others.
Considering that Russia is regularly commiting cyberattacks at it's neighboring countries, what the fuck do they expect? That we're going to let Putin's forces hack away at our critical infrastructure with abandon? What a bunch of clowns🤡