Notices by Ellie, Witch of the Diode (ellied@sleeping.town)

In any case, I think it's really, really important that we remember our values in the free tech scene. Money doesn't dictate whether or not someone should be allowed to have access to technology. People are not owed money just for owning things. Corporations will try to make us think otherwise, but we have to reject that when it comes. We can stop computer tech from being nothing more than a tool for the wealthy classes to maintain their power, but only if we stick together.

It'll get much harder, especially for folks who aren't very tech-literate, but that means we just need to focus that much more on improving tech literacy, particularly in underserved communities. Eventually we'll learn to stop relying on corporations and start relying on each other. I hope so, at least.

The next decade is going to be a rough ride for a lot of reasons, but I definitely believe that we're going to find ways to pull through. They'll take customizable and repairable off-the-shelf hardware from us, but we'll just make our own. They'll take user-controlled operating systems from us, but the free ecosystem for that is already quite well-established. They'll take the free and open internet from us, but we'll find ways to tunnel through and build around.

I feel like almost every new security-related "innovation" these days is nothing but a user freedom-suppression measure with a weak positive spin on it. Every basic authority a user is supposed to have over their own personal property is being turned into a Harmful Behavior that Compromises Security. The Google/Microsoft/Apple platform "developer" "communities" are swallowing it all whole, of course.

USER: hey, my boot partition ran out of space during an update. How do I recover my system?
MOST DISTROS' COMMUNITIES: you'll need to reinstall your kernel package and bootloader. check out this wiki page for how to do that.
ARCH LINUX COMMUNITY: if you don't know how to do that it means you didn't pay attention when you installed the system, so you're clearly not smart enough to use Arch, get lost

"are you a 1337 h4x0r?"
"no, I'm a 1773 h3x4r."
"a what?"
"we're like the 1337 guys, but instead of being all edgy and leaking people's private data, we help people modify their equipment so it behaves how they need it to behave, and install solar-powered wifi hotspots in poor neighborhoods"