They are the 6th biggest contributor, and Spain has considered doing similar and they’re one of the big five. It might actually change something since money will matter the most, and enough countries are dropping out that they may not have enough contestants to run the semi-finals. There’s rumours that Italy, Germany, and Britain may withdraw if Israel is kicked out though. Maybe we just won’t have a contest next year, and after the bullshit of the past two years I’m completely fine with that.

I think a lot of non-techie people only know signal from the Trump admin using it illegally earlier in the year. In a lot of people’s minds because of that they think Signal = insecure because they don’t get the nuances of why using it in that specific context – on personal phones, using a third party app, with a random journalist in the mix – was bad, but that for most people it’s still one of the best options. WhatsApp on the other hand has a lot of marketing around it and if you didn’t know that Meta is Facebook I think some people wouldn’t even realise who the owners are.

I saw it mentioned in this Cory Doctorow article a week or two back about some of his issues with bluesky, but he mentions here that the cost has came down from tens of millions a year down to tens of dollars a month

Hadn’t heard of wafrn until seeing it on f-droid this morning but I might give it a try, a tumblr-like platform would be nice since tumblr seems to have given up on using ActivityPub.

+1 for Navidrome. As simple as pasting the album into the directory and it sorts the rest. I use subtune on my phone to access it and it works great.

The tech secretary is the biggest idiot in our government right now which is really saying something. He doesn’t have any professional experience with technology, gets his policy ideas from asking chatgpt, accused anyone who opposes the online safety act of being a paedophile, and when a constituent sent him emails about Palestine he had the police raid her home at 4am.

I’ve tried tailscale and cloudflare tunnels in the past and ended up just using PiVPN to set up a WireGuard VPN on my Pi5. Tailscale for some reason was very slow for me, and cloudflare tunnels have a 100mb limit iirc which isn’t ideal for streaming. PiVPN is quite straightforward, it sets everything up for you and all you have to do is forward a UDP port. That was the bit I was most worried about, but, unless I’ve misunderstood something, because a UDP port will just ignore invalid requests to the outside world it will appear closed so it’s not very risky. It then generates a key for each device which you can scan from a QR code onto your VPN client. I have my phone set to auto-connect to the tunnel when I disconnect from my home wifi network and the tunnel is fast enough that I’ve accidentally turned off my phone’s wifi connection before and streamed a TV show through the tunnel over mobile data and not noticed any difference in speed.

That’s good to hear! I’ve ADBed almost all of the Google & Samsung stuff off my phone already so I’m well used to fighting with Aurora to download certain apps by now. Nearly all my apps are from F-droid as well so that will make the transition a lot easier, and I do a lot of self hosting so I’m not relying on any proprietary services that are going to demand play services be installed. Balatro on my steam deck already steals enough of my time, so honestly if my phone won’t let me install it that’s probably for the best.

Going from One UI 6 to One UI 7 on a Samsung has made me very excited to go get a used pixel or fairphone and install a custom ROM instead. Absolutely abysmal update.

I think it would be great if at the next protests the crowds were filled with these nonsense t-shirts and signs to waste the police’s time. It is completely legal to protest a proscription order so I don’t think they have any legitimate grounds to arrest anyone. And if they do, they look very silly.