Yeahhh, unfortunately I have friends that I can't talk to anywhere else and won't move. I'm not in the UK so it's not an immediate concern but it seems to slowly be coming for everyone

Probably tbh

Thanks, that is indeed dystopian

This is basically the same argument that caused the libreboot vs gnuboot thing and I just personally don't get it. It seems to me like the FSF is letting perfect be the enemy of the good. Having a FOSS driver isn't something to be celebrated it's something to be punished if the firmware isn't also FOSS. Yes, ofc, FOSS firmware is better than closed firmware, but when almost no modern hardware has that as an option, it's not even something you can really vote on with your wallet unless you just run ancient hardware all the time.

It matters because for me, a good chunk of the FOSS benefit is the auditability of code. Being able to make changes is nice and that's the freedom bit, but being able to audit it is also a huge benefit. If the code is not running on the main CPU then the driver on the main CPU can contain possible exploits of firmware using the IOMMU etc so it becomes more tolerable than a closed source driver. Basically a firmware vulnerability effectively becomes a hardware vulnerability as opposed to a driver running with full kernel privileges and no oversight or containment.

If I'm not mistaken doesn't the firmware in question get uploaded to the device in question and run on said device not the host CPU? Those devices are already closed and often already running proprietary firmware. I don't really understand the war against uploading blobs to them? I love FOSS and more power to anyone who wants to do this but it seems excessive.

That makes more sense and is...even worse tbh because that's actually enforceable and so obvious I don't know how I missed it. That would also probably impact Tor since those IPs are already heavily reputation damaged. The stuff governments have been pulling recently is just insane

So what do you propose? Just not using a VPN? If you're that worried you can run a second public VPN on top of your private one. The point of the private one is to avoid ISPs outright blocking known major providers.

As apex32 pointed out, it isn't about logging, it's about your ISP either ratting you out or outright blocking the domains and IP blocks of major providers and that's why I said you can setup your own. Ofc even hosting one yourself your ISP can probably still determine you're using a VPN through traffic analysis even if you're using TCP 443 to blend in but it makes it harder.

8 phone cores are not 8 laptop cores which are not 8 desktop cores but if it meets your use case that's cool. I need more compute then that myself

Graphene scoped contacts would probably fix this

I'll be honest, I don't get the point of this feature. It's nice for beginners or for writing small, quick, programs...but for the overwhelming majority of all java code I don't see it being useful

Yeah, they should publish on f-droid or direct APK as well

EDIT: Just remembered the new android "feature" that restricts what apps you can install from off the play store to Google approved ones...still worth doing for those of us on AOSP OSes