As much as I love Cory Doctorow’s work, this is a stretch. The crack in the door only comes once everything supporting the consolidation and oligarchy of the tech industry comes crashing down. The broligarchs have their contingency planning in place already, so a crack in the door might exist one day, but it’s going to take a lot more than EFF and a few niche rights groups to make any change there. The tech money is digging in, and doing so in ways that are edge cases for even digital rights groups.

The post-WWII order is gone, the post-Cold War model of economics is over, and the post-9/11 surveillance state is now wearing a mask with hoses that feed it super-strength drugs. It’s that the costs of the old bargain are double for everyone that isn’t a FANG, and now gone for them. Just like the Western economy, it’s bifurcating towards different planes of existence that know of each other but barely interact IRL. Which is not sustainable, but for how long we’ll wobble, it’s hard to say.

Digital rights and privacy groups need to be proactive and demonstrate uses cases for both, and make use of them while expecting the non-sustainability of the current system to one day give way to something new.

So step 1 is, for now, strap the fuck in and get your house in order. Build skills, teach others. Step 2 one day is going to be on the heels of massive cultural and political change.

A few weeks ago I dealt with my deceased Grandfather’s computer. He passed 12 years ago and once Grandma passed, there was no reason left to shrine it all off. He was a prolific artist. Played the piano, French horn and oboe. Painted, did etchings and lithographs, drawings.

He filled up the HDD on his first PC, a 2006 Dell Optima IIRC, and was on his way to filling up a spool of CD-RWs and his 2010 Dell Inspirion when he passed. Pulled the hard drives and connected them to pull what was on there. One part the mind of an artist - folders of 200 pics of clouds and rocks and mountains, paintings and works from the 60’s and 70’s propped up in the front yard (great light!), random pictures of cacti. Then, the mind of a grandparent - my cousins as babies, my youngest aunt younger than I am now writing this, baseball games and holidays. Most taken a decade closer to Gene Ziegler’s words than today. Saved and copied and backed up and copied again and uploaded for one more incarnation.

you may as well reboot and go out with a bang

I mean…I’ve very nearly been killed enough times that most of the time I just consider every day a bonus. Kind of the same thing, but not quite.

I’ll get downvoted for this, but use Claude for Linux troubleshooting, not ChatGPT. It’s much better at both Linux and PC troubleshooting. Also, are you sure that your refurbishments are compatible with the board and remaining components? Might be worth trying to do a Windows 10 install (don’t actually install, just go through the steps) just to see if you get a GUI from that process.

Also, check and take this to LinuxMintForums.com as that’s more specialized. But try and get more info before you go over there. They’ll want full details.

Please cross-post to a privacy community. Ultimately, this sounds like it’s going to produce a situation where a dumbphone that allows for hotspots and them a smartphone without UPI or a SIM and with a VPN are a workable solution.

The fact that this isn’t considered outright fraud is disturbing. This person OWNS the device, yes? They’re not leasing it.

FFS, this should be illegal.

three times a year.

WTF is up with MS doing this rate limiting? I just learned that Win11 will lock you out of your own machine for 2 hours if you restart too many times, like if you have a dualboot and are doing something that requires restarts to resolve.