Solutions Must Attack the Problems at their Source

Apr. 13, 2024 [technology] [proprietary]

Is it truly “sticking it to the man” to forge a way to continue to use a product which has had its original user-hostile features mitigated? As a classic example, those who go to lengths to get a Windows binary game running within a translation layer. You have still bought the game, financially rewarding a company that chooses to exclude you and your platform. Okay, what then if one pirates the title? You’re still giving that product your energy, attention and contributing one more active player to the playerbase. Games thrive on social inertia and mindshare.

This dynamic also exists with firmware and hardware. As is the case with products from vendors like Purism and System76. Yes, they’ve ’neutered’ or minimized things like proprietary BIOS and ME firmware. But the entire transaction from OEM supplier, to system integrator, to end user still financially rewards Intel for the continued integration of anti-freedom/anti-privacy features. I suppose that outfits like Technoethic or Minifree are better in that they tap the second hand boutique market. Chips and boards that had already completed their product cycle in the hardware market. Your purchase of such a device isn’t securing Intel additional revenue. It, at worst, keeps the headcount of x86 higher, thus perpetuating the x86 monoculture.

A more optimal way to avoid contributing to a system that hates you (or at least behaves as though it hates you), is rather to make a clean break. Even if that means making some sacrifices. I would hardly call it “winning” to clutter one’s system with container environments and foreign software all for the privilege of further empowering giants responsible for putting you in such a position to begin with. The privilege of forever being treated as a second or third class citizen while you overextent yourself in order to run restrictive, telemetry-addled user-hostile software and hardware. Great deal.

Things that allow you to bypass a restrictive vendor or service, but still leave you sucking at that vendor’s/service’s teat;

Frontends

Ex: Hooktube, Invidious, Nitter, etc
*Author’s note that two of these three examples are already dead

Emulation, virtualization and translation

Ex: Virtual Box, Wine, Proton, Box64, FEX-Emu, Console Emulators, etc

Firmware/hardware

Ex: Dual booting (esp. shared bootloader), secure boot shims, enabling ME HAP bit, etc

Is this all to say these things have no merit? Not at all. Many of these methods are an incredible asset to have up one’s sleeve. I only sense, however, that some miscontrue these tools as invitations to indefinitely construct their entire user space atop of. They should only be used for so long as it takes to locate a suitable libre replacement which stands on its own, and not as an intermediary for running some proprietary protocol or software format. And this is where things become a bit fuzzy.

Is it a true replacement to primarily use peertube instances, when much of the content is simply mirrored from Youtube channels? Is turning to lemmy instances really breaking away from a hostile format, when the “DNA of reddit” still infests lemmy both socially and in its design? What of metasearch like SearX tapping the resources of big tech vendors, inheriting their censorship? Infogalactic, which I link liberally, being a wikipedia replacement but its pages all frozen in time from the date they were scraped from Wikipedia.

Perhaps it can be said that building solutions is truly a gradual effort. Nothing is going to be instantaneously ready off of the starting line. And languishing on half-solutions, I believe, will only hurt that effort in the long term. A part of me secretly yearns for Google to go all out in blocking the likes of invidious and yt-dlp so that finally I can find the motivational power to completely drop the time vampire that it is. Or for the MS-x86 industrial complex to make their big move to restrict “unauthorized” operating systems from running on their captured ISA. For a great bifurcation to finally unfold.