#Android is dead and we’d better all leave the ship before it sinks entirely. Earlier this year #Google already took bold steps in moving the development of several AOSP components behind closed doors, removing the open-source foundations of the project one component at the time. Options to unlock bootloaders on Android devices are also narrowing down. Xiaomi removed the ability to unlock the bootloader entirely in MIUI in August (after months spent making it ridiculously difficult), same for OnePlus, Samsung did so in July, and probably Google devices will soon follow suit. And let’s not mention the nightmare of the Play Integrity API that forces all Android developers to register through the Play Store and use Google’s signing keys, even if they don’t intend to distribute their apps through it. Sure, officially Google has taken a step back and has pledged to provide a way for developers and power-users to bypass those restrictions. But we can all expect it to be a cumbersome and change-prone process filled with ridiculous amounts of frictions at every step - and I wouldn’t even expect such a morally bankrupt company to keep maintaining this “sideloading” option. Google once competed with Apple for customers. But in a world where Google walks away from the biggest antitrust trial since 1998 with yet another slap on the wrist, competition is dead, and Google is taking notes from Apple about what they can legally get away with. And the EU, the biggest opposer of its anti-competitive acts, is also becoming softer with Big Tech - both because Vestager has left the job, and because being soft with trillion-dollar monopolist tech titans is seen as a sign of being “technologically competitive”. Your best bet is to purchase a Pixel 9a now, before more manufacturers decide to block bootloaders, and immediately flash it with #GrapheneOS. The long term plan would instead be to throw all of our efforts and energies on Linux phones. The folks at GrapheneOS are doing an amazing job and fighting against all kind of pressures, but at some point we should probably all just acknowledge that anything that is tainted with Android, or runs on a device intended only to run Android, is a liability, and we should no longer build solutions on top of hardware and software that we can no longer trust. Sailfish, PostmarketOS, UBPorts, MeeGo or whatever comes next must succeed. No matter the cost.

What are your feelings about Coinbase’s new x402 initiative? From a strictly technical point of view, this was long overdue. I stated multiple times my support for a proper implementation of the HTTP 402 status (Payment Required). This status was introduced in the specs in the 1990s, with the idea that at some point the Web will have figured out a standardized way to process payments. 30 years later we’re still talking about it, so something clearly didn’t work. Intermediaries proliferated in the vacuum of standards. Instead of a simple HTTP-based mechanism to process payments we ended up with Stripe, Adyen or PayPal hooking us to their proprietary and mutually incompatible APIs and taking relatively large commissions just to move money from A to B. And that ended up negatively impacting the economy of the Web too. Micropayments and pay-as-you-go plans could be very common today. But they are not because fees on micro-transactions aren’t profitable, hence online services have more incentives in locking people in you-can-checkout-any-time-you-like-but-you-can-never-leave subscriptions with monthly/yearly amounts that can absorb the merchant fees. So I’m all in for a proper and long overdue HTTP 402 implementation. Especially when implementing it is as easy as adding 3 lines of code to your application. But, on the other hand, I also believe that the job of pushing for new standards sits squarely within the fields of open committees and consortia like the W3C, ISO and IEEE. Not within the field of a single company. And I also believe that Coinbase’s involvement means that this will be limited (at least for the foreseable future) to crypto wallets. So yes, we really needed something like this, and we needed it yesterday. But the way it’s been implemented and advertised points more to a failure in the right way of standardizing common engineering resources (through multilateralism, RFCs and votes) than to the actual merits of Coinbase.

A quick heads up to our wonderful #GazaVerified donors: I have been receiving many calls from our friends in Gaza in the past few days that donations are slowing down and they often don’t see a single donation for a 5-7 days. While I understand that the requests for support can be quite overwhelming (especially now that we have almost 90 registered accounts, and not many regular donors), I also believe that maybe we can solve this all together. When I look at how much is being collectively donated I actually don’t see that amount going down. The same goes for the avergage daily per-campaign amount. But that amount isn’t fairly distributed throughout all the campaigns. As I speak, the mean daily value raised by a campaign is around $80. Which would actually be quite helpful to cover many of a family’s necessities (it’s $560/week). But as I speak only 13 campaigns are at or above that mean value. The remaining 75 are all below - and way below in some cases, the tail of the histogram is very long. With 50 campaigns right now below the $200/week threshold, and 25 collecting less than $100, of course many of our friends are right to say that they are not getting enough support. I know that it’s hard to try and sustain so many people in desperate need, I know that adding more campaigns over the past few days has probably made some donors feel more overwhelmed. And of course it’s entirely up to you to decide who you donate to. But when I look at the numbers, I see the potential for us to give most of our friends a good $500/week baseline to go through this hardship. All together we’re already donating more than $3000/day: that’s wonderful, and that’s a great show of humanity and the power of mutual aid grassroot campaigns! Maybe we just need to try and distribute that amount more fairly. Or more and more of our friends in need may start feeling left behind. As a reminder, you can use the archive campaigns dashboard to check the campaigns that are not receiving enough funding (simplified version made by @npub1qg48...augv here), or follow @npub10cpv...6srt to get notified 3 times a day of which campaigns aren’t raising enough funding. (p.s. The notebook I used to generate these statistics is freely available here)

If you wanna know which countries on earth embody the worst conceivable evil, look no further than those who didn’t approve the UN resolution against torture: US (against) Argentina (against) The Zionist shithole (against) Russia (abstained)

Since at least half of the population has been forced to live in tents, every rainfall in #Gaza has become a tragedy. Every time it rains the timelines for many of us become a never-ending stream of sorrow, pictures of suffering kids, flooded interiors, damaged belongings and broken tents. This will be the unfortunate reality for a while. Until the Zionist entity is either forced to rebuild what it destroyed, or let them at least escape to safety - and it’s unwilling to do either of these things at the current state. It shouldn’t be just on a handful of us to support the desperate requests of these people who have already lost everything and who keep being humiliated for no fault of theirs. I ask as many as possible among my followers to support them. Even $5 on a couple of campaigns can make the difference. They have all been verified. We’re also tired after months of humanitarian support to have to prove that all of them are actually people in Gaza. We volunteers are also drained. Please just do the right thing and support them, instead of asking us every time “how do I know that it’s not a scam?” I need to take a step back from donations for a bit because sustaining dozens of campaigns every day, even with small amounts, is no longer sustainable. But I’m sure that many among my followers have a big heart and will provide these families with the support that they need. Among those who need more urgent support (please feel free to add anyone I missed, I’m only posting here the most recent mentions I’ve received today): @npub14vl3...4eu7 (link) @npub1mlnv...qll7 (link) @npub1hegm...dyw4 (link) @npub155xn...fhjt (link) @npub1drm7...463y (link) @npub182kp...x0sj (link) @npub1899l...2n0m (link) @npub13qcf...kpxj (link) @npub1552z...yugq (link) @npub1gp72...qrp2 (link) @npub1s9st...xykt (link) @npub1vel8...dyeu (link) @npub1y5de...2qg2 (link) @npub1ccck...z9k5 (link) @npub1079r...0902 (link) Please don’t leave them alone, and don’t leave us alone to support them ❤️

Happy birthday to my favorite neighbour (November 24th, 1632 - February 21, 1677) The home of #Spinoza was probably in the same block where I live, or the nearby church of Moses and Aaron. Nobody knows for sure because he was kicked out of Amsterdam for heresy, and nobody bothered to ever pay homage to his home, or even put a memorial plate, like we did with all the other fathers of Western philosophy. The Portuguese synagogue that he used to attend, the one that eventually pushed for his exile for daring to criticize centuries of blind Jewish dogma, is still standing here near my house. He was harassed both by Jewish and Christians during his life for daring to read their sacred text from a rational perspective. He was simultaneously accused of being an atheist and a pantheist obsessed with god. When I first visited the Waterlooplein area in Amsterdam I was confused. I could clearly see Rembrandt’s house always surrounded by tourists, but I couldn’t see any tourists around Spinoza’s house. Actually I couldn’t even see Spinoza’s dwellings anywhere. Then I discovered that the place where he was born was most likely unceremoniously flattened when the church was built (or perhaps it was on the very grounds where my house currently is). And all we’ve left of one of the greatest and most influential thinkers to ever live is an ugly statue on the other side of the square. Because those who dared to be heretic four centuries ago don’t get the luxury of having their memories preserved even today, even in a progressive place like Amsterdam.

A quick heads up to the #GazaVerified donors: the Chuffed campaign that supported Mai (@npub1n5h6...wpx7) has apparently been taken down by #Chuffed with no notice. While we try and get an explanation from #Chuffed (and why they take down verified campaigns while leaving scam campaigns like this online for months despite the reports), Mai desperately needs funding for her, for her family of 10 and for the 20 kids that she supports daily. I would usually advise our friends from Gaza to use Chuffed/GFM campaigns over private donations for reasons of transparency/traceability, but circumstances are quite extraordinary in this case, so please donate to her PayPal account while we try and either get her Chuffed campaign restored or create a new one. (cc @npub1qg48...augv @npub1n33c...fu06 @npub1uc0x...3krp)

A quick reminder to our friends in Gaza: you don’t need to explicitly mention the new bots in your posts 🙂 @npub1ur6k...mnde will automatically boost your posts, even if it doesn’t follow you or you don’t mention it (it fetches the posts directly from the archive) @npub10cpv...6srt only sends periodic updates about under-funded campaigns and doesn’t boost statuses Also both of them are bot accounts so none of us monitors the notifications. You can still mention us directly though - just be mindful not to abuse mentions. @npub1ur6k...mnde belongs to all of you. It’s a booster always at your service. If you post mindfully, without sending too many messages to a lot of people, then the bot won’t be spammy either, and a lot of people may follow it. Those are all people that will see your calls for help and are likely to donate - even if they don’t follow you directly. We’re in this together and we can make it work better together ❤️

How wealth inequality naturally spreads in an unconstrained market The affine wealth model originally proposed by Bruce M. Boghosian in 2016 is an agent-based stochastic model to analyze #wealth distribution under different wealth tax regimes that has always fascinated me since I first read about it in an old issue of Scientific American. I like it because it takes political opinions and fluffy back-of-the-envelope economic models out of the equation and it replaces them with a quantitative model that analyzes how a market is likely to behave and how that ends up impacting the wealth owned by each agent in the simulation. In this notebook I’ve tried to provide a visual representation on top of the thick math of how these agent-based simulations run - where each pair of agents at turns transacts a fraction of their wealth with each other, a simple simultation of a free market. It’s appalling how quickly you see wealth concentrate when no wealth tax or other rebalancing acts are at play. The first graph is literally the most striking falsification of the “wealth naturally trickles down in a free market” hypothesis. And it’s also appalling how even a basic wealth tax can bring back fairness. And how easy it is to fine-tune it to nudge wealth distribution towards your goal. https://notebooks.manganiello.tech/fabio/wealth-inequality.ipynb

The banality of evil