skarn

It’s a sign of how bad the situation is that we talk about car repairs in terms of hacking.

Documentation should be mandatory, and DRM on this stuff mostly forbidden.

For the FP4, I think I’m going to go for e/OS, because of the official Android Auto support. I want to degoogle, not root, and most other OSs require quite a bit of mess to get AA to work.

That may be ok for an Arduino, but for a car I’d really like to be able to get support, which may be tough with a smaller provider, unless they really use generic components and document their stuff decently, which I’d really have to be convinced about. And let’s not even get into the software support.

And I write this from my 2yo old Fairphone 4, which I plan to degoogle during the holidays, while I sit in front of my 7yo Thinkpad.

I use Arch BTW.

Edit: And my chinese vacuum cleaner runs Valetudo.

The Chinese ones tend to be less enshittified? Having just recently about how Xiaomi cars disable software updates if you change the headlights, allow me to doubt that.

That stuff becomes a moot point once you have a decently working bureaucratic system (if and when). If you can ask for a digital certificate online, and get it in your email three days later, you’re not too worried about losing a copy.

On the other hand… I swear to you that multiple times, I have had to present “a birth certificate that was less than 6 months old”.

As if the time and circumstances of my birth might have suddenly changed in the last year.

Not quite. The Kodi plugin still uses Widevine. You just don’t get higher quality content unless your hardware is “certified” with some key burnt in at the factory, or some such nonsense.

Wait, what? There are countries that let you have multiple valid copies of the same ID??

Every country in Europe that has vastly better privacy laws than the US, also already has national ID since forever.

Now they even became electronic biometric IDs, and I still don’t need to show it whenever I buy a loaf of bread.

Even if, why would anyone ever want to bother when they could just track your payment cards?

TBF, Germany has been one of the countries often opposing Chatcontrol, so there’s at least that.

Do you have a link for the 5:1 fash vs commie crimes? Not doubting, just want to read more.

As far as I can tell there are two separate worlds, with close to no overlap.

On the one hand the mainstream stuff, proprietary, DRM compatibile, interner dependet, non moddable, no privacy, no way to own your content, tracking you from asshole to appetite, often ad-infested.

Best you can hope for is some Android TV streaming box, but the moment you start to do stuff like root it or unlock the bootloader some streaming apps might decide to stop working, or degrade your quality. DRM-protected streaming services will completely refuse streaming high-quality content to any hardware you really control.

On the other you have self-hosted, often open source, tweakable, local, customisable, technology, compatible with all codecs you want, but functionally blocked from DRM. There is essentially no way to legally acquire video content for the second one. You could get a libredrive compatible BD reader and rip your own movies, but that’s still illegal in many countries, certainly the US, and is a ton of work.

If you have sufficiently powerful hardware, you might be able to stream low-bitrate 720p with software decoding. They won’t serve you better stuff. Anything better than that, you should consider it accidental and likely to stop soon.

Hopefully his 7a doesn’t die tomorrow, and by then Fairphone has managed to put out Something that’s at least reasonably better than 7a.

When I bought my Fairphone, I was simply too fed up with working around the intentional shittiness of the other companies.

I prefer to deal with some technical limitations, than have to deal with intentional ones.

I use Arch BTW.