FriendOfDeSoto

I can’t remember. As you can tell from my lengthy historical summary, I’m old enough to use that as an excuse.

I have recorded songs off the radio onto cassette. I have made mix tapes. First off records, later CDs. There was a general trade going on at school among friends. Somebody would get a new album on tape or on CD and when the owner had listened to it enough times it would make the rounds so people could record it for themselves. Musical socialism.

I have made Minidisc mix tapes as well. I went as far as recording concerts from VHS onto Minidisc. Adding track names was harder than T9 texting and took fucking ages.

I ripped and burned CDs, some of them are still stashed away in an attic somewhere.

I don’t remember the infancy torrenting service that we used around the turn of the century. It wasn’t Napster. I also made mix tapes of downloaded songs onto CD. To play more easily because there weren’t any iPods yet but everyone had a stereo.

Now I stream the music I used to steal. Can’t feel great about it because I know the artists get next to nothing for it.

I miss having a good stereo. Now it’s crappy phone speakers or compressed Bluetooth shit.

This post’s headline (not Wired’s) is a tad misleading. Even the Android without Google Services still comes from Google originally.

I appreciate the air of publicity this story brings.

You probably can’t trust your password manager if it’s compromised

In other headlines: water is surprisingly wet.

Yes, you must have missed it. And so it begins.

Google is moving to make Android less open source. I’m not sure more devs following suit is going be good for them or their users. The G doesn’t give an F.

What we need is an OS fork that gets maintained. If not that, some other workaround that fools the Google servers. Because you can bet money that nobody made from flesh and blood is going to look at this inside Google.

Maybe devs can band together and form Middle Finger Corp. and designate one willing person as their contact to serve as registered dev for a gazillion apps. Follow the letter of the law, not the misguided spirit of it, in a manner of speaking.

If you are sitting on a mobile OS and you were afraid to fail like Windows, maybe now is the time to give it a go?