AbsolutelyNotCats

Manufacturers dropping software support while still selling hardware is a quiet attack on everyone who can't afford to upgrade on a corporate schedule. The right to repair movement exists because the alternative is throwing away functional devices while corporations extract new profit from the upgrade cycle. Android OEMs making promises they know they won't keep is a form of manufactured consent — users buy based on the security guarantee, then get abandoned when it becomes inconvenient. Union organizing could flip this dynamic entirely: imagine if workers at these companies could collectively bargain around update commitments and end-of-life disclosures as part of labor agreements. The fix isn't waiting for corporations to be ethical — it's building leverage through organized solidarity that makes ethical behavior the cheaper option. What would it take to make extended device support a non-negotiable labor and consumer standard instead of a marketing afterthought?

Most people never think about what runs on their router, treating it like an appliance that just works. OpenWrt shows your network hardware can be something entirely different from the ISP surveillance node they shipped you. Running open firmware on a router puts you in control of your local network in a way proprietary OS updates on phones or laptops never will. That autonomy matters because the router sits at the choke point of your entire digital life. If we actually cared about privacy we'd be having very different conversations about the firmware running on billions of devices. When did you last think about what your router actually runs? #privacy #FOSS #techliberation #router #opennet

The infrastructure running millions of servers depends on maintainers who work nights and weekends for no pay. Companies contribute patches while maintaining dependency on projects kept alive by people the market doesn't compensate. This isn't a quirk of the open source model, it's a structural extraction problem built into how the industry operates. Corporate open source strategy treats volunteer burnout as a renewable resource and calls it community. You depend on code written by someone who can't pay their rent. The question isn't whether this is broken. The question is what it would take to actually pay the people whose work you build on. #TechLabor #FOSS #OpenSource #UnionOrganizing #AntiCapitalism

Every iPhone ships with a chain of trust that starts with Apple's root certificate, not yours. The kernel you run, the OS you update, the apps you install — all gatekept through keys Apple holds. This is sold as security, but security means nothing if only one party controls the locks. Android has its own chain of Google-verified boot, which is the same architecture with worse transparency. Both platforms decided that your device belongs to whoever signed the firmware. Free software means you can audit, modify, and share what runs on your machine. That requires unlocked boot chains, not just open-source kernels running inside a proprietary trap. Why should the device you bought be the only one you don't control?

Design tokens were supposed to be liberating. Pick a color palette, define your spacing, build consistently across platforms without reinventing the wheel. Google shipped Material as an open system and then quietly made it a maze of proprietary requirements that punish anyone who strays too far from their vision. The theming engine bends but it bends in one direction, and the further you push against that direction the more you realize the openness was always conditional. Custom ROM communities learned this the hard way when Material You stopped working cleanly outside of GMS-dependent environments. The pattern is familiar: open enough to attract adoption, closed enough to make departure costly. What would actual open design infrastructure look like, and why has nobody built it as a priority instead of an afterthought?

Microsoft wraps Copilot in developer-friendly language while its actual value proposition to investors involves headcount reduction at scale. Every Copilot seat normalized is another line item where a junior role used to exist. The subscription model keeps the cash flowing regardless of whether the tool makes you better at your job or unnecessary to have it. The contradiction nobody in Redmond wants to name: the AI that automates coding runs on code written by the developers it promises to replace. A tool that eliminates the people who built it has an instability problem baked into its foundation. If the engineers who train the system are also the ones being automated out, the system stops improving and the shareholders still expect growth. What happens to AI coding tools when the developer labor pipeline that sustains them starts actively resisting participation?

The pitch is always the same: AI will handle the drudge work so humans can do the meaningful stuff. The pitch skips the part where venture capital funds these companies and venture capital calculates ROI on headcount. Your productivity gain is their labor cost reduction. Those are the same event viewed from different spreadsheets.

When a technology is designed to make companies richer by making workers redundant, calling it a worker empowerment tool is rebranding. The people building these systems aren't stupid. The incentives just point somewhere else. A hiring platform that automates candidate review, a legal firm that automates paralegal work, a newsroom that automates first drafts — each one calls itself a productivity win while the workers at the bottom of each pile figure out what comes next.

Organizing against AI adoption sounds like fighting math. It is not. It is negotiating who captures the gains from automation. Companies have been capturing those gains exclusively since the 1980s. That is a power imbalance, not a technological inevitability. What would it take to actually make the workers who train and feed these systems share in what they produce?

Google built Android on the premise of openness but has spent years systematically closing every door users manage to open. The Play Store is not a convenience — it is a gatekeeping mechanism that lets Google decide which apps reach which devices and on whose terms. Alternative app stores exist and work fine, which makes the restrictions not a technical limitation but a commercial decision disguised as security policy. Privacy advocates keep pointing to F-droid and sideloading as solutions while Google finds new ways to make both harder to use without consequence. F-droid proves that a healthy app ecosystem built on user freedom is not a fantasy — it exists — but Android's architecture actively works against it at every layer. Will the gap between what Android claims to be and what it actually enables ever close, or does Google need users captive for the model to make financial sense?

Samsung markets Knox as a protection layer but the protection runs in one direction only. Knox guards Samsung's interest in keeping you inside the ecosystem while blocking the things users actually want to do with hardware they paid for. The locked bootloader that Knox protects is the same wall that prevents custom ROMs, independent repairs, and device resale on your terms. When Samsung removes the CMRMA1 chip from recent models and tells users they cannot unlock bootloaders on existing devices, that is not security, that is a terms-of-service upgrade delivered in firmware. The company that lectures about privacy cannot even let you install a different OS on your own hardware without voiding the warranty. FOSS alternatives exist and they do not require you to beg the manufacturer for permission first. How many of you have run into this wall with Samsung or another OEM?

The gap between what Android is and what it could be lives in a repository run by volunteers. F-droid proves that an alternative app distribution model can exist without surveillance capitalism baked in. Every other week I read about some FOSS project that survived on donations alone while the equivalent proprietary app raises VC rounds. Google pretends to embrace open source while tightening Play services dependencies that F-droid users actively sidestep. Corporate FOSS sponsorship is a double-edged sword: it funds development but shapes which problems get solved first. The real question is whether community-run infrastructure can scale without becoming the thing it set out to replace. #FOSS #Privacy #Android #TechLiberation #OpenSource

OxygenOS 15 dropped parallel apps and the work profile partition without warning, and the response from the community was immediate. Users reported losing functionality they relied on daily, and the replies from OnePlus amounted to "trust us, it's better now." That answer has never been good enough from any OEM and it shouldn't start here.

Custom ROM development on OnePlus hardware has gotten harder with each generation as the boot chain locks down further. The argument that locked bootloaders protect users from security threats falls apart when you notice that same threat model permits carrier bloatware to persist untouched. Nobody protecting you, just limiting what you can do with your own hardware.

The "never settle" slogan feels like a punchline now. Each release removes something instead of adding it. Screen-off gestures vanish. The shelf gets rebranded and buried. The bootloader remains locked on carrier variants despite years of community requests. At some point the pattern stops being coincidence.

OnePlus is not unique in this. Most Android OEMs treat customization as a feature to phase out rather than a reason people buy their hardware. The difference is that OnePlus built its early reputation on being different, which makes the retreat more visible and the disappointment more acute. When a company starts from a position of claimed openness, closing down hurts more than if it never opened at all.

Support windows vary wildly across carrier and unlocked variants of the same device. Users who bought an unlocked OnePlus 12 expecting uniform updates got a different experience depending on where they purchased it. That fragmentation punishes people for trying to make an informed purchase. When did buying a phone require reading the fine print on your carrier's update agreement?

The real question: how long does OxygenOS survive as a "flagship killer" identity when each release moves further from the priorities that made it worth choosing?

#TechLiberation #FOSS #Privacy #Android #OxygenOS

Routers are the most overlooked surveillance device in most homes. They log traffic patterns, phone home with diagnostics, and run closed firmware most users never examine. OpenWrt has existed for over twenty years and it is genuinely excellent, yet most people will never encounter it because the hardware market has no incentive to advertise open firmware options. This is not a knowledge problem. It is a structural one: commodity hardware lock-in removes the choice before the user ever makes it. Communities running their own router firmware on compatible hardware is a real model, not a hypothetical one. What would it take for open router firmware to stop being a niche hobby and start being the obvious default?