Windows 11 is, well, shit. But, Windows is modular, and pretty much everything can be removed or modified with the right tools and knowhow.

Here's a 23 minute special showing how to un-enshittify Windows 11 from stock install to finish, using open source and/or completely free tools.

peertube.wtf/w/pqMrXFbzpJAS4r5…

#enshittification #windows #microsoft #opensource

Today's AWS debacle is the perfect example of the reason why in the last few years I started to be less enthusiastic about Signal, and more oriented to federated or even P2P solutions like XMPP and Jami. I wrote about it already:

gagliardoni.net/#im_battle_202…

Signal was down for few hours today, after an outage that affected AWS:

mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/115…

Let's ignore for a second the blind reliance on AWS or any other cloud provider. In a decentralized system, this would not have happened, or at least it would have not impacted so many users.

Yes, I am a cryptographer myself, I know that Signal's encryption is the best. But encryption is not everything. Availability issues, geopolitical troubles, risk of enshittification, limitations on users' freedom to use and control the software lead to a lack of trust, even in a supersecure solution. And I say that with honest admiration for the folks at Signal, who are doing a great job.

May they prove me wrong over and over again.

#signal #im #aws #amazon #privacy #security #digitalsovereignty #selfhosting #fediverse #federation #p2p #enshittification #xmpp #jami #politics #opensource #freesoftware #libre

Meredith Whittaker

2025-10-20 08:00:15

PSA: we're aware that Signal is down for some people. This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stand by.

Could I have one day, just ONE day where my apple products actually act like the price they cost?

#apple #enshittification

"You need to activate CameraXYZ in the CameraXYZ App before using it for the first time."

WTF?

#enshittification

Everyday I find more ways that the web has enshittified.... To people doing websites: each time you decide to make a popover that is not related to what you user is doing you should how much you hate your users.

#enshittification

Host Europe & DomainFactory are migrating their users' emails to MS 365 – and users are not happy. 🤯

GoDaddy turned trusted German hosters into a textbook case of #enshittification.

Time to switch to truly European alternatives. ✌️
👉 tuta.com/blog/european-web-hos…

Ah yeah why did you remove "favourites" and "people" @element ?

#enshittification

All the dark patterns when you don't have Amazon Prime and order something. No wonder they have to settle 1.5B$. If only other countries followed suit.

#enshittification

I'm going to introduce a new to me concept: #enfascisisation, to rhyme, rather bitterly, with @pluralistic's #enshittification.

Enfascisisation is the process of making a society more vulnerable to #fascism, especially by spreading the belief that the triumph of fascism is inevitable. Thus when the #BBC asks Starmer whether he's happy for his daughter to walk past an asylum hostel, one could say "the BBC is engaged in enfascisisation".

Samsung: “The future isn’t smart. It’s sponsored.”

Samsung fridges now come with built-in ads. Progress, innovation… or just more enshittification?

Fridge: “You’re out of milk.”
Samsung: “Also, here’s an ad for milk.”
Me: 😭

🔗 theverge.com/news/780757/samsu…

#SmartHome #Enshittification #PrivacyMatters #WhyCantWeHaveNiceThings #Samsung
theverge.com/news/780757/samsu…

Samsung brings ads to US fridges

Samsung’s ‘screens everywhere’ initiative is morphing into ads everywhere.

^{Thomas Ricker (The Verge)}

Bluetooth suck, I'll get one of these Lightning to jack dongle.

....

Wait, why do I need Bluetooth?

#enshittification

Apparently medium managed to make the Wayback machine unusable on their site.

#enshittification

"We need to collect all this data to advertise show ou might like"

"Does that mean you'll stop advertising shows I have put on my watch list?"

"No not like that".

"Does that mean you'll stop advertising shows I have already watched?"

"No not like that".

#enshittification

Don't trust cloud services with your creative work.

#enshittification #privacy #infosec #security #cybersecurity #writing #art

Enshittification comes for open source:
Slack is kicking two large open source groups, Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Kubernetes, off of their donated enterprise tier, giving them one week notice to migrate multiple years of data to a new platform before it's all deleted: cncf.io/blog/2025/06/16/cncf-s…

Instead of learning from this experience and not trusting the good will of profit-motivated closed source companies, it looks like both projects will be moving to ... Discord. Because "people know it." Will we never learn?

(Dropped Cory because he's probably getting tons of spam from this. Sorry!)

#enshittification

CNCF Slack Workspace Changes Coming on Friday, June 20 | CNCF

The CNCF Slack workspace will be converted from an enterprise plan to a free plan on Friday, June 20, 2025. This will have implications for how Slack works for…

^{Katie Greenly (CNCF)}

This is not a joke. It’s a look at the future.

#Capitalism #Enshittification

In a move that surprises absolutely noone, GitHub now requires users to login in order to browse public repositories (including open source projects). After a few (~10) requests, you get blocked (I can confirm). In order to fight AI scrapers, I guess.

So, GitHub decided to blanket-limit access to open source projects as a defense against the very scourge that they(r parent company) unleashed on the world.

I won't be hypocrite: it's a bit embarrassing, but undeniably satisfying to say "told you so". I moved away from GitHub long ago and I moved all my stuff to Codeberg instead. And so happy I did!

Next step: radicle.xyz maybe?

github.com/orgs/community/disc…

#github #microsoft #openai #codeberg #ai #ml #llm #enshittification #foss #floss #opensource #radicle

Oh look! It's Monday.

ArsTechnica: HP printers stop working with HP toner due to update

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/0…

#printers #enshittification

Firmware update bricks HP printers, makes them unable to use HP cartridges

HP already has a reputation for breaking printers with updates.

^{Scharon Harding (Ars Technica)}

today is officially *THREE* weeks until the submission deadline for Good Internet magazine!

Good Internet launches in May 2025. it's a volunteer-run, not-for-profit print and digital quarterly magazine for personal website owners and those interested in using the internet as a means of self-expression, art, and recreation.

🔍 we're looking for 1,500-4,000 word articles about anything related to that!

you could write about:

* #internet history
* personal #websites
* #accessibility on the #indieweb
* finding inspiration for a #blog
* #webdesign trends
* running from the #enshittification of the #web
* lessons or post-mortems from #webdev projects
* news or overviews of #opensource projects

if it relates to hobbies on "this side of the web," whether you call it the #smallweb or indieweb, we probably want to run it!

you can have your article as low-media (meaning only text and images) or interactive, where you code an entire webpage to help tell your story.

if you're interested in learning more, you can sign up for our email list for when we launch or you can check the submission guidelines @ goodinternetmagazine.com!

(please boost if you can! ❤)

More "enshittification". This time from Amazon. Amazon is pulling a Google, killing off popular services. Evidently, I have until 25th February to download my 708 books that I have purchased from them. After the 25th you can no longer download YOUR books for backup or transfer via USB

Good job I did this 2 years ago eh? Buy the books from elsewhere.

goodereader.com/blog/kindle/am…

#enshittification #amazon #books #bookstodon

Amazon Is Not To Be Trusted Anymore With Their Kindle E-reader - Good E-Reader

Amazon has a long and storied history of discontinuing services that people use. Last October, the company announced that in February 2025, they were

^{Michael Kozlowski (Good e-Reader)}

I randomly stumbled across the answer why #BambuLab #3dprinting is blocking #internetarchive:

Someone on #Reddit complained about #BambuLab changing their warranty after they bought something and refusing service based on the new "terms". They used @internetarchive to prove that the change was made.

So obviously #Bambu did the right thing.. and blocked the #Internet #Archive...

It's not #enshittification if you do it from the start? :p

A propos of nothing, is there a way to verify since when #BambuLab has been blocking @internetarchive ?
It appears to apply to all of *.bambulab.com

Try it for yourself: web.archive.org/web/2025000000…

I have never seen this in my life.

I can think of very few things that are less trustworthy than blocking @internetarchive

Anyway, archive.is exists, so I did a thing:
* archive.is/NAIsu
* archive.is/fjmTe

#enshittification #3dprinting

One of my mantras is "when people tell you who they are, believe them".

Or don't, but then please shut up when the leopards eventually eat your face.

#BambuLab #enshittification #3dprinting

As expected, #BambuLab released the standard corporate press release

1. All those things we just invented as the criticism we didn't do
2. Sure, you can use "developer mode" and lose our support
3. We tried to work with others, and it's their fault they didn't do it fast enough and by our rules
4. Everyone else is at fault for this misunderstanding though we might have contributed in the slightest of ways
5. "I am sorry that you are upset"

blog.bambulab.com/updates-and-…

#enshittification #3dprinting

Updates and Third-Party Integration with Bambu Connect

Setting the Record Straight About Our Security Update

^{Spaghetti Monster (Bambu Lab Blog)}

Problem with that is (besides occasional bugfixes), most people including myself would see #curl to be functionally complete and anything "nice to have" would be considered not worth the balooning in #complexity and #size.

• I mean, does curl need to be able to do #BitTorrent (magnet:), #IPFS (ipfs://) or god forbid #blockchain (i.e. #EVM) support?
• Do you really want to integrate @torproject / #Tor support natively into curl when using #HTTP (localhost:8118) and #SOCKS5 (localhost:9050) #proxy allows for the same and doesn't necessitate having to handle and ingest Tor arguments as well??

In fact if #toybox didn't have a #wget implementation that I could use for OS/1337 I would've merely chosen tiny-curl -o as a global alias or if #tinycurl wasn't an option, curl -o instead.

• Maybe someone who wants to have said functionality like tor support built-in will go and IDK make i.e. #[url=https://infosec.space/tags/neocurl]neocurl[/url] or sth. along those lines or build something like #[url=https://infosec.space/tags/ethcurl]ethcurl[/url] or #[url=https://infosec.space/tags/tor]tor[/url]curlor #[url=https://infosec.space/tags/ipfs]ipfs[/url]curl or whatever...

That being said I am glad curl isn't solely maintained by you but has other contributors (give them a shoutout!) but I also am glad you maintain that vital software that most "#TechIlliterate #Normies" most likely never heard of but propably use on a daily basis as part of all the #tech they use to #consume media with...

• I consider curl to be "the #vim of downloaders" (tho that's kinda insulting and limiting since curl is more than just a downloader and more intuitive than vim) with wget being "the #vi of downloaders" (tho wget is even simpler to use than vi)...

Either way, curl is awesome...

#OS1337 #Enshittification #Bloat #Bloatware

Set aliases globally for all users

I have certain paths, which are too long to type, so I need to wrap all those in one script as alias and source that script to my existing package code. These should set alias permanently over that

^{Stack Overflow}

Really interesting interview on Volts.wtf with @doctorow - Can we avoid the enshittification of clean-energy tech?

volts.wtf/p/can-we-avoid-the-e…

They cover a lot of really interesting aspects of #ClimateChange, technology and #OpenSource. There are so many good innovators in the clean tech space, yet even with good motives, the incentives can drive towards #enshittification.

Can we avoid the enshittification of clean-energy tech?

Cory Doctorow describes how software platform technologies go wrong and what it might look like when our homes and vehicles are on those platforms.

^{David Roberts (Volts)}

I love the irony here

#enshittification

The ultimate #Google self-own: Google's AI Overview result of "enshittified google" that includes "AI Overview" as an example of enshittified Google.

#enshittification #chatbots #selfown @pluralistic

So, have you ever thought your devices were listening to what you were saying, and then ads for that thing would show up...and all the pundits kept telling us it was coincidence and we were just seeing patterns because people seek patterns?

Yeah...naw. @404mediaco in their tradition of breaking all kinds of news, would like to tell you that you're not insane, and the pundits were wrong.

404 brings receipts: Cox Media Group (CMG) says it can target adverts based on what potential customers said out loud near device microphones, and explicitly points to Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Bing as CMG partners.

MindSift boasted about targeting advertisements by listening to peoples’ everyday conversations through microphones in their smart speakers.

Here's the deck, read it for yourself: 404media.co/heres-the-pitch-de…

(free signup may be required, iirc, but if you've got spare change, consider subscribing too. They're doing yeoman's work out here on the data front.)
#Enshittification

Here’s the Pitch Deck for ‘Active Listening’ Ad Targeting

404 Media previously reported Cox Media Group (CMG) was advertising a service that claimed to target ads based on what potential customers said near device microphones. Now, here is the pitch deck CMG sent to prospective companies.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

There are parts in the #Cricut Maker 3 that cannot be accessed without breaking plastic (red box) - like these screws (blue arrow) on the lid.

The iFixit article is not correct because it’s glued - it cannot just gently be pried off.

I am never purchasing a Cricut again. This is extremely anti-repair. #RightToRepair #enshittification

"Apple made a fateful decision that mobile-phone internet should be app-centric, not browser/website centric. Then Android copied their mistake."

Many interesting things in this article, but this is one particular gripe I have about today's Internet. I will go to so much unnecessary trouble just to avoid using somebody's app.

tumblr.com/accordion-druid/685…

#IndieWeb #Enshittification #Web3 #SocialMedia #Blog