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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I didn’t watch the video but I don’t think there is any phone that lets you avoid having your location tracked. If there is wifi near where you want to use the phone, you could run a voip client on on a wifi-only tablet, perhaps.

    I’ve been wondering whether satellite communications gizmos with no GPS allow any type of precise location tracking from the satellite. I’ve been interested in this, which lets you exchange text messages at fairly low cost (about 2 cents per 50 byte unit). Besides possible privacy advantages, it also lets you communicate where there is cell coverage:

    https://shop.blues.com/products/starnote-starter-kit












  • Things just weren’t like that then. Otherwise all PC peripherals would be locked down too, so no device drivers. That was already a problem with cheap windows crap. But the better stuff was documented.

    Maybe there would be no Linux but that isn’t as bad as it sounds, since BSD Unix was being pried loose at the time, plus there were other kernels that had potential. And the consumer PCs we use now weren’t really foreseen. We expected to run on workstation class hardware that was more serious (though more expensive) than PCs were at the time. They would have stayed less locked down.

    Asded: PCs were an interesting target because there was a de facto open hardware standard, making the “PC compatible” industry possible. So again, without that, we would have used different hardware.