trust that they won’t add any collection without telling people.

It’s open source so you can inspect it. If you don’t know how to do that you can pay for a 3rd party audit.

Also if it were to be found out, even without being open source via some pack inspection (e.g. using a software that checks if data is being sent to a server, e.g. imagine starting Firefox on a virtual machine then checking if any data goes to e.g. firefox.com) and it were to be published then their entire brand would be dead. So rationally speaking I don’t think that’s a worthwhile bet.

FWIW not on income but on top wealth, Musk has $792 Billion (ffs…) so ~$1000B and we are 8.4B Earthlings so ~10B. If we were to spread equality his wealth (which I’m all for) it would “only” gives each of us ~$100. Conclude from that what you will but to me it’s just a reminder of just how many people we are. A lot.

PS: this isn’t about income and it might be totally different there. If you have a better metric and approximation I’d be all ears.

assuming you trust JMP

Any 3rd party security audit that would help on this specifically?

I think that’s precisely what this is questioning : is this helping fund critical FOSS?

What if a fraction of that money instead went to Signal infrastructure? Wikimedia? FSF which initially made GNU PG? FSFE? NLNet which supports Delta Chat? Sovereign Tech Fund? etc rather than individuals?

I don’t think anybody is criticizing that hard working people contributing to a good project are well paid. I believe the question is rather what’s the cost to OTHER projects when there is 1 project, not an umbrella projects which funds others (again like NLNet or the Sovereign Tech Fund).

What model are we reproducing and what’s the risk?

FWIW the question isn’t new. It happens also with Mozilla with the compensation of its C-suite staff, not the “random” software engineer.

Agreed. That being said

• here is a link to an archived copy of it https://archive.is/qO6pe
• I’m a 404media paid subscriber so IMHO it’s worth supporting their proper journalistic work in tech and politics

No and honestly I don’t think it matters. Set the age of your OS to 18 (assuming you are 18) and move on. What’s the issue?

That being said if you are really interested in the topic and use this as an “excuse” to learn check out https://jsandler18.github.io/ and don’t worry if you don’t have an RPi to run it, you can use QEMU. After that you can dig into https://wiki.osdev.org/ really a fascinating journey.

I tinker with VLC using and… so far my “trick” is a bit dirty, namely I don’t “control” it as much as I killall potential running instances then I start cvlc again with the right parameters. If you want continuity though you might not want that.

Note also that if you plan to do scripting check mpv as it’s a bit easier to tinker with IMHO.

Python

Check https://pypi.org/project/python-vlc/ then for Python bindings, that should give you the affordances you need.

It’s not about TomsGuide or OP, it’s about Securitum (who did the audit) and their methodology. If you don’t trust the audit then please out why and we’ll see if they fix the problem. It’s genuinely valuable.

Checkout https://splintercon.net/ and follow the advice given to political dissidents and journalists.

I bet if you replace 3.5mm jack by USB-C and use an adapter you’ll have a lot of choices. Also Qi isn’t efficient so unless you have a specific use case beyond “I just want to drop it on my desk” then relying on USB-C again is better.

… that being said yes I understand but unfortunately one has to fight not just everything they want but a realistic compromise, otherwise you can check https://www.crowdsupply.com/ and if it’s not there propose your own project, maybe there is a market for it.

No idea with whom your arguing as I mentioned both.

If a kid is smart enough to set up a VM like that they are smart enough to deceive adults.

That’s my point of Internet Archive software and emulation section : no need to be smart, open a Web page that provides a VM and voila. You don’t have to do anything hard, only understand the concept and know where to find a VM.

Also if it’s properly all in the browser (no backend setup, no tailscale, which I’m not sure it can be done due to networking, but maybe) then any static host can have it, heck even download a .html and open it would do. In such a situation I can’t imagine it can be blocked/limited at all.

Yes I also would much prefer everything to be done locally and have no 3rd party that ultimately I won’t trust (one just has to look at leaks from large companies to understand why) still “it’s their responsibility” when I tried to demonstrate it’s fundamentally impossible when emulation exists is a fundamental problem.

PS: FWIW https://ktock.github.io/qemu-demo/

In theory yes.

What’s bad though is that it’s meaningless. Sure the OS can say you are 10 years old or 100 years old and you can’t change it… but then you open a page in your browser which runs a virtual machine and that VM now says you are, arbitrarily 50 years old. The VM is just another piece of software but put it in fullscreen (if you want) and voila, you are back to declaring whatever age you want to any application or Web page within that VM. If that’s feasible (and I fail to see how it wouldn’t, see countless examples in https://archive.org/details/software or https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/ even though that’s running on another machine, so imagine that was a SaaS) then only people who aren’t aware of this might provide a meaningful information on the actual age but that’s temporary, the same way more and more people now learn to use a VPN.

now only few do

That’s the one you buy then if that’s what matters to you.

To be clear I’m not saying it’s “easy” or that the situation is “good”, only that there are choices and if we as consumers can support them, and as voted can support politicians that do make legislation to protect them (or at least not make others mandatory) then we are still going in the right direction, even if most people don’t care.

i dont like linux nor use it

What is this? Arguing with a 5yo? No offense but do you genuinely believe “I don’t like X” without even explaining why could lead to interesting conversations? Do better. At least provider argument on why you like Windows (there are actually some good reasons, even for people who don’t like Microsoft) and why you don’t like Linux (there also are good reason).

You’re not actually “intersed” otherwise you’d have at least bothered to link to couple articles, videos, etc arguing either way and would have at least taken the time to write 2 sentences properly.

Blocked as I have to assume it’s either engagement bait or just the laziest person on Earth.

Don’t buy computers with locked parts. Buy computers with non locked parts. Problem solved.

Doesn’t matter, Microsoft already sell computers, i.e. Surface. One can still buy computers from other manufacturers. They can buy an instance of the entire stack (pretty much as Apple did) and there would still be alternatives.

Official link https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at-mwc-2026/

Sure but that’s about 8 years too late https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub#Acquisition_by_Microsoft