Microsoft repos were silently added to Raspberry Pi OS earlier this year, ostensibly "in case anyone wants to use VSCode" and definitely not just as a super shitty way of adding telemetry to every Raspberry Pi OS install without asking the user if they were cool with this.

If I buy hardware, it's mine, and I'll figure out a way to take ownership of the hardware I've been sold. One way or another, every artificial limitation shimmed into in every piece of hardware goes down in flames.

I interviewed at Doordash when they were just starting. I think I would have been like employee number twelve or something. To this day, I have not interviewed with a founder that repelled me more.

I think "unwitting mule" is something been happening for thousands of years, just with different tools.

This is the crux of the issue. I have spent a lot of my adult life in places that would horrify the average westerner. The root of the problem in recognizing what could go wrong with this stuff, is never having been exposed to a jurisdiction of political power which is run by murderous psychopaths outside a rule of law that benefits anyone but the psychopaths. Of course "authorities" will always continue to push boundaries and seek to embiggen the largesse of their power, but we in the developed world are so lucky! Most of us here on HN have won some sort of cosmic lottery with odds more infinitesimal than any other lottery that could ever exist. But an unfortunate side effect of never having been exposed to the various hazards of human civilization that almost every other human before us has endured, is not having built up any "ideological antibodies" against these sorts of things.

I've seen comments on Youtube that seemed shocked that Youtube could trace comments to an IP address! We are deep in it now, approaching a point where the barrier to entry to understand how the technology functions is too much even for capable specialists to fully comprehend the rampant abuse happening at this very moment. How often do we as technical people find out about some new god damned thing some god damned tech company is doing to steal our data or otherwise exploit us as "customers"? And even people who are technically capable of grasping the depth of the power of this technology are still busy hammering away on their keyboards to make it more powerful, having never had to worry about violent psychopaths with political power. We are creating a truly terrifying nightmare of brutal suffering for our grandchildren or their children.

Anytime anyone leans on the old "think of the children" meme, it should immediately raise suspicions about intent.

Decentraleyes is also very helpful on the privacy front. It will cache commonly included libraries like jQuery from various CDNs like Cloudflare, preventing them from tracking you across the internet. ClearURLs is another one that I install on a freshly-opted-out Firefox, to avoid those ubiquitous tracking parameters in various URLs.

I am genuinely curious: Was this at least partially in response to the bots over the weekend spamming "JOIN #LIBERIA ON LIBERIA.CHAT"? Because that probably didn't come from libera staff or even from the libera network, for that matter.

No. It's a response to people trying to leave. The spam bots wave were probably done by the same people doing that for ages (the pedo spam and so on).

You can't answer that question any more than I can. This is a question for Andrew Lee.

I actually can, because (1) freenode mostly had good anti spam software since a while and (2) rasengan and his staff clarified it’s about people moving.

I've been trying hard to keep people from making rash decisions about moving, since I have read enough to know that there is some amount of duplicity on both sides of this split, and we were playing a waiting game for the truth to come out and help us make a more informed decision. I do not support morality police, and all we had to do was wait out the momentum. There was some censorship on libera, but what you have done here has made all of my efforts to aid Freenode totally indefensible. You have made a grevious strategic error.