#Google is a malicious actor that operates in bad faith when it comes to #Android #sideloading, period. All of its “but user security…” arguments are bullshit. They are still acting in bad faith when, after a lot of pressure from developers and power users, they say “ok, we’ll still allow sideloading - but we’ll put a lot of friction and dark patterns in the process to make sure that more casual users won’t be tricked into installing malware“. That high-friction process to prevent casual users from installing malware through APKs downloaded from random sources already exists. It’s a simple toggle in the settings of every app called Install unknown apps. When anything other than the Play Store tries to install an APK, a warning will be prompted unless the toggle is off, and the risks are already stated clearly. Is more friction required? What else do you want to add? An app-per-app cryptic adb command? More warnings and more toggles? If that is the case, could Google to share some data about the impact of malware installed through sideloading - and after the user explicitly enabled Install unknown apps for the malicious source? I am not keen to accept any “but security…” statements without such a hard evidence. Without such data, I will keep believing that Google is simply trying to put alternative stores out of business (and, if Apple was fined for this very reason, then it’s time to fine Google too), get to sign every app out there with their own key, and know the identity of every developer out there just because it’s profitable data to sell. Nothing less. Nothing more. Boring oligarchic surveillance capitalism enforced by boring ads and data brokerage companies. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2026/01/24/really-dangerous-google-changes-android-for-all-users/

“The #AI revolution can’t happen if we all don’t believe hard enough in it” sounds like the motivational speech you’d hear from a cult leader rather than in #Davos. And perhaps the current vision for AI outlined by American Big Tech starts to have more the features of an oligopolist cult rather than a genuine technological movement for human progress. Just because #Satya and his friends have invested trillions to build a new shiny toy, it doesn’t mean that we’re all supposed to use it, that we’re all supposed to use it the way they want, and use only the version of the toy that they have built. Technological progress happens when many competing implementations and visions are tested by consumers, when consumers have options and when they have the final say. Not when a billionaire says from a stage that we should all believe in what he has built. Even a libertarian here would probably acknowledge that this doctrine of coerced induced demand is exactly the opposite of what capitalism is supposed to be.

The Irish Times

AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns

Big tech boss tells delegates at Davos that broader global use is essential if technology is to deliver lasting growth

(Archived version: https://archive.is/0VrLp)

To any #Linode customers out there: stay as far as possible from the London (EU-West) data center. Some of you may have noticed yesterday that many of my services (including my personal website, my Akkoma instance and even the Gaza archive) have been offline for a couple of hours. Already for the past 3 days I’ve been experiencing issues with my Linode nginx gateway running in London (and I’ve experienced intermittent connectivity issues with that node a lot over the past couple of years, especially after Linode was acquired by Akamai). When the gateway can’t communicate with my home network over VPN, any services it exposes aren’t reachable and you get Bad Gateway errors. So this is how my day went yesterday: I noticed for the 3rd day in a row connectivity issues to my Linode (but this time much more severe, and they were not transient). I filed a support ticket to Linode with a tracepath output from my network already showing the root cause (a back-and-forth loop between London and Amsterdam that shouldn’t have been there): $ tracepath fabiomanganiello.com 1?: [LOCALHOST] pmtu 1500 1: _gateway 0.990ms 1: _gateway 0.772ms ... 10: ae3.r22.ams01.mag.netarch.akamai.com 11.603ms asymm 9 11: ae1.r22.lon02.mag.netarch.akamai.com 18.534ms 12: ae24.r01.ams01.icn.netarch.akamai.com 9.094ms asymm 8 13: ae7.r22.lon01.icn.netarch.akamai.com 17.209ms asymm 11 14: no reply 15: no reply ... Too many hops: pmtu 1500 Resume: pmtu 1500 Their support gaslighted me into all kind of alternative bullshit - “you’re on a shared CPU, perhaps you’ve got noisy neighbours?”, “could be it that there are some services respawning a lot on your machine?”, “could it be that you don’t know how to manage bridged interfaces and promiscuous mode, and after 12 years spent operating this server now everything is suddenly breaking?” I lost my hopes of getting any decent amount of technical support from those folks and just went down my own way - purchased another Linode in Amsterdam, and spent the whole day migrating everything (DNS, mail server, XMPP, Gaza archive…) out of London and to Amsterdam, on a very wobbly connection to my old Linode. By the time I was done (about 3:30 AM) I decided to take a look at the ticket I had opened and I found a “Connectivity Issue in London“ alert. No communication from the technical support - just a badge randomly thrown there on the page reaching the same conclusions I reached, from the outside of their network, about 12h earlier. Guess what? Soon afterwards connectivity to my old Linode resumed as if nothing happened, without actually me touching anything on my Linode. But in the meantime of course I had already wasted a day migrating everything out of it, while their technical support was throwing some “did you turn it off and on?” bullshit at me. To be clear, I’ve been a Linode user for nearly two decades and I’ve never had a single issue with machines running in German or Dutch data centers. But London is a dumpster fire and you should not host anything there if you care about your users and your sanity. And the technical level of their customer support is also something that has been consistently declining over the years. (Reminder for me: use Terraform for these things. Just because a server has been running for 12 years it doesn’t mean that the moment where you need to migrate out of it won’t come. And you should make sure that when it does you have the least amount of error-prone manual actions to take as possible).

@npub1cmjh...cvkp is urgently looking for a new campaign manager. The previous campaign manager unfortunately closed the fundraiser with no notice and stopped answering his messages. If someone could help facilitate transfers to a friend in #Gaza so he can cover the basic necessities for him and his family please reach out to him. @npub1nlt7...6r6x @npub120ds...3fvu #GazaVerified #Palestine #MutualAid

Mastodon

Soboh Ibrahim (@Sobohs@mastodon.social)

@fabio@manganiello.eu @irix@cloudisland.nz No, I haven't found a manager who has a dream. And there's no one who can create a campaign.💔💔💔

The flood of #enshittification that #Broadcom unleashed upon #VMware and its customers after acquiring it, and its seismic waves in the whole IT supply chain, are a testament of how bad managers who seek for short-term revenue hikes without thinking of the long-term are a cancer, and walking ticking bombs for the tech industry.

Dell wants £10m+ from VMware if Tesco case goes against it

Exclusive: Retail giant's disty, reseller, and vendor all say they can't and won't sell

We all know what Broadcom did to VMware after acquiring it. VMware was turned overnight into Broadcom’s cash cow, they hiked prices by 3x in some cases, scrapped perpetual licenses, forced all customers into more expensive subscriptions, said that they only wanted to focus on the most profitable customers and fuck everyone else, all while worsening customer support and providing literally zero added value and features to the product. Basically a parasitic acquisition solely focused on sucking all the vital lymph out of another product - pure Oracle textbook. When you play such stunts with individual customers, unfortunately, it works most of the times. Individuals don’t have much leverage, nor choice if there is too much concentration in a certain market. They may complain, but often they swallow the bitter bite. Things are different when you play them in huge corporate products that are an integral part of the IT infrastructure we all use. It turns out that among the businesses who were disgruntled when Broadcom suddenly cancelled their VMware perpetual licenses there was Tesco. But Tesco didn’t acquire VMware licenses directly from Broadcom, of course. They acquired them through a reseller of hardware and software licenses - Computacenter. So Tesco sued them instead for failing to provide them the licenses that they were contractually bound to provide. Computacenter, on its hand, didn’t acquire VMware licenses directly either. They were provided with the Dell servers they sold, as Dell was an authorized VMware reseller. So Computacenter sued Dell. Dell, on its hand, says that it has no fault if Broadcom has suddenly changed VMware’s pricing model, and that they are the ones who broke contracts with the whole downstream supply chain. So Dell sued Broadcom. And there we go. A chain of 3 lawsuits between 4 giants across the whole IT supply chain in order to call a parasitic company accountable. What a mess. But I guess that the manager who proposed to squeeze annual recurring revenue got his/her fat quarterly bonus home after things seemed to work for the first year. This is also your daily reminder that as a sysadmin you must use only FOSS products supported by the community and by strong foundations - and contribute back to them once their success becomes your success too. Enough with the “but stability - but support - but licenses - but my manager” corporate bullshit. The cost of writing your own little qemu CI/CD pipeline to spin up your virtual machines is much lower than the risk of your corporate subscription getting suddenly enshittified by chains of wrong financial incentives at any place in your upstream supply chain, and having to spend years of tears on expensive long-chain lawsuits. And, even if things go bad, the cost of migrating out of proprietary and non-standard implementations is usually much higher than the cost of migrating to a compatible fork.

Periodic reminder to my American friends justifiably disgusted by this descent into fascism that they won’t get rid of them through courts or by voting them out. That option is long overdue. When fascists reach the point where they can get away with shooting at anyone they like on the street, and rather than being called accountable they can frame whichever narrative they like and keep harassing the victims, and even their kids in school, the bloodshed of civil war is the only way out. Agree with at least a dozen of your neighbors to surround any ICE vehicle that enters your neighborhood with shotguns. They can’t shoot you if you ambush them, surround them and shoot them first. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/16/renee-macklin-goods-sons-minneapolis-charter-school-receives-rightwing-attacks

To our friends in #Gaza: if you have received a message from @npub1ghsy...s8pe with a notification of suspension PLEASE do not click on it and report the account. It’s a scammer pretending to be an account of the main instance’s staff, and the link in the post is likely to install malware on your device. cc @npub1jvas...72tw @npub1qg48...augv #GazaVerified

After 2.5 years a feature on top of my wishlist is finally coming to #ntfy 🎉

GitHub

Update/delete notifications · Issue #303 · binwiederhier/ntfy

A similar issue was open a while ago, but it didn't get traction for some reason. The ability to update notifications is so far the only feature th...

ntfy will soon provide the ability to update and delete notifications. This solves many use-cases that so far forced me to piggyback on non-open solutions like Tasker on Android, or implement my own Java intents: Notifications with progress statuses (the same notification can soon be updated with the new state, rather than creating a new one) Media notifications that change when the track or the playback state changes (but the impementation of Android media notifications is still missing from ntfy, I’ll probably take a look into it at some point) Notifications that can be automatically dismissed when they no longer apply The discussion has been very productive and has gone a long way since my initial proposal. The proposed implementation exposes updateable notifications as sequence IDs on a given topic: # Create a notification with sequence number 1 on $topic curl -d "created" https://ntfy.sh/$topic/1 # Update the previously created notification with a new value curl -d "updated" https://ntfy.sh/$topic/1 # Delete the notification curl -X DELETE https://ntfy.sh/$topic/1 The custom X-Sequence-ID request header is also supported. If you want to test the new API (note that it may be still unstable and subject to change) you can compile ntfy from the 303-update-notifications branch. If you would like to join the discussion, feel free to comment on the issue.

The latest #YouGov poll shows to what extent the worst rightwing propaganda has created an artificial urban/rural divide that has convinced many that large (and mostly liberal) cities are unsafe places because of their diversity. Not only Americans have been convinced that #London is a decadent cesspit ruled by a Muslim bringing in the Sharia. But even in the #UK 61% of those interviewed consider it an unsafe place. Segmented by political affiliation, it ranges from 43% of the LibDems who find it unsafe, to a staggering 85% among Reform. The more rightwing the party, the more likely it is to cultivate fearmongering against large liberal cities. Segmented by age, those in the 25-49 bracket are slightly less likely (57%) to find it unsafe than the 65+ group (65%). But what’s really staggering is the London vs. rest-of-UK divide. Apparently only 34% of the Londoners find their city to be unsafe. Half of their Welsh cousins (66% of them consider London unsafe). And, with a murder rate in 2025 of 1.1:100,000 (one order of magnitude lower than large US cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, and the lowest in the past 11 years), Londoners probably have a point. Sadiq Khan has proved that you can make a city safe without terrorizing its citizens with paramilitary squads that operate above the law: that’s a big wrench thrown in the fascist doctrine of authority through fear. Londoners feel more safe than ever in their own city. But everyone else, including some who have probably never even been there, feel entitled to think otherwise. Those who are most scared of diversity are often those who have never experienced diversity.

A quick communication to our wonderful friends in #Gaza. A few of you may have experienced limitations/suspensions on your accounts, especially on the main instance. First of all, I want to reiterate that this isn’t anything personal against you or a sign that @staff is not sympathetic with the #GazaVerified initiative - they’ve shown quite the opposite so far. Actions against accounts are only taken when several reports (usually for spam) are received and the moderation team is left with no choice. However, these restrictions are usually lifted when we talk to instance admins and explain them the situation, and those of you who are impacted pledge to use mentions more responsibly. Mastodon is still a platform that welcomes you, and we’ll make sure that this will keep being the case. Second, a common message I’ve heard in your appeals is “but we only tagged our friends and people sympathetic with our cause“. After so many reports, I started finding it increasingly unlikely that any of us would ever report you for spam - and repeatedly. So I’ve taken a closer look at some of the lists of users that some of you commonly tag and I’ve started to notice some patterns that may explain the reports (or at least some of them). Unlike centralized platforms like X or Instagram (or even Bluesky, where most of the people are on the main server), instances matter here. So my username (@fabio@manganiello.eu) is different from @fabio@mastodon.social, or any @fabio@something.com. Those are different people with accounts on different servers. I’m bringing mine as an example, but I have noticed several occurrences where some of you probably tagged people by typing @username, saw a couple of options in the dropdown, and unsure on who is the right one you included a few of them. When you send that message, those people will get a notification - and they may not be me nor any of your friends. If someone keeps getting notifications from strangers to donate to an initiative they’ve never heard of, and without any way to tell if you’re genuine or not, after a few times they may simply report you for spam. And that explains limitations and suspensions. So please, when you send messages that include many mentions, always make sure that the handles you have included match those on our profiles. That may prevent a lot of unsolicited notifications to people who may not be very sensitive with your calls for help. Finally, we do our best to boost your voices, and we’ll keep doing so. But we also want you to have your own voice heard on a social media platform that is actually open to listen to you, with no need for our boosts. If you build your own following then you won’t need a few of us to boost your posts - people will follow you because of what you say or show to them. I built the @gaza_verified_accounts bot exactly to boost your voices, so anyone who follows that bot sees all of your posts, even if they don’t follow each of you individually. If you post your genuine stories that actually move people, then that bot is likely to be followed by many - and your own voices heard by many. One last thing, you don’t have to tag @npub1ur6k...mnde or @npub10cpv...6srt explicitly. Those are automated accounts and I never check their notifications. It isn’t easy for me to deliver these messages by the way. I can only imagine in a remote corner of my mind how tough things must be for you. I can only imagine how I would behave on the Internet if it was my own life to be in peril, and if I had to fight for basic necessities on a daily basis. I feel like I shouldn’t be here preaching technical details about social media or netiquette to people literally going through hell. But I’m here to make sure that your voices are heard, that they touch as many people as possible, and that they keep being heard. Stay strong, we’re on your side ♥️ @npub1qg48...augv @npub120ds...3fvu