Pluralistic: It's not normal (14 Jan 2026)

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/

RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115888970296152807

"I know it's out of step with the times, but all I have is ideas that make money, make us safer, make us richer, and make our technology better..." - @pluralistic

Fun fact: This doesn't just apply to Canada. There's a huge pile of money on the table - seems stupid to just leave it there.

#AdversarialInteroperability #tech #business

Adversarial interoperability should be legal. Users should be able to use software on their own devices the way they want to. The tariff wars have opened up a new political opportunity to make that happen. @pluralistic explains it well:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/10/trump-beginning-of-end-enshittification-make-tech-good-again

#BigTech #FreeSoftware #FOSS #AdversarialInteroperability #startups #UserFreedom

Sempre per cominciare bene l'anno vale la pena di ascoltare la conferenza di Cory Doctorow "A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet": https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
tenuta ad Amburgo il 28 dicembre 2025.
Allo stesso link si può leggere anche la trascrizione

#enshittification #CoryDoctorow #AdversarialInteroperability #Internet #GlimpseOfHope

@scuola
@maupao
@informapirata
@devol
@lealternative
@opensource
@openiteste
@lindasartini
@Khrys
@nemobis
@quinta
@G3rt
@lgsp
@DarioZanette
@prealpinux
@fediverso
@RFancio
@kenobit
@alephoto85
@pluralistic

Pluralistic: The mad king's digital killswitch (20 Oct 2025)

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/

Pluralistic: Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall! (15 Oct 2025)

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/15/freedom-of-movement/

One of my favorite examples of #AdversarialInteroperability (as championed by @pluralistic and others): a site pop complains about me using an ad blocker, I put the site into the browser’s Reader Mode, and get around the annoying modal popup.

I didn't realize this until just this morning, but #AdversarialInteroperability and #CounterAntiDisintermediation are related. @tomjennings.tldr.nettime.org.ap.brid.gy @dmytri.to . #FOSS is double-edge, but I am 💯 on standards and portable runtimes (HTML, CSS, JS, #Deno). www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

'IBM PC Compatible': How Adver...

@rl_dane thank you for #NecroReplying, this is still worth discussing! Is there some mechanism with #RCS that enforces which implementations are allowed to interoperate? If it is a standard protocol, it seems that #AdversarialInteroperability should work just fine. Google's implementation is just an app, isn't it?

I'm very impressed with #Murena /e/ OS's updates to Advanced Privacy in /e/ OS 3.0.

Just now, I got a notification about "a new spy in town". An app I installed since the /e/ OS upgrade has made it into the new Advanced Privacy weekly report.

This is really helpful feedback, highlighting ubiquitous tracking.

I minimise my use of apps that are not #FOSS, and rely on /e/ OS to block all known trackers (which it does by default). Often the corresponding website will do as good a job, and Advanced Blocking appears to work for web-based trackers too.

#SurveillanceEconomy #AdversarialInteroperability #InfoSec #Android

In the spirit of @pluralistic’s #AdversarialInteroperability I decided to start monitoring how much time and energy I devote to browsers vs apps on my phone. iOS has a convenient feature for this. If you see a browser or other relatively grassroots tool above dedicated apps, I suspect that’s a good thing…or at least I hope it is :)

For someone who has been an active witness of the early days of the internet, it's pretty surprising to see this person be unenthusiastic about adversarial interop, which is one of the reasons why #Gopher became a huge thing (and also one of the unintentional weapons the web used to ironically kill it), why we have an #openweb today and why it persists despite efforts by the big players to extinguish it. ​:seija_coffee:​

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses
https://boingboing.net/2019/10/02/plug-and-play.html

#AdversarialInteroperability

RE: https://mastodon.social/users/jwz/statuses/113654149217156768

@matthew_d_green

and now #meta is trying to run into the #fediverse with #threads, and do to #mastodon what they did to #myspace in 2010. with the same tactics:

1. a public excited friendly face of #interop

2. drain of users

3. when the competitor is a dried husk, turn around and fanatically prevent any interop with #facebook on any level whatsoever

people need to understand what meta is

and have no illusions about what they have done, and what they will do

#adversarialinteroperability

when it comes to #threads and the #fediverse, people need to understand what is called #adversarialinteroperability

there are stories about how #apple beat #microsoft with the tactic, but it might be more useful on this topic to talk about how #meta killed #myspace with #facebook #interop. interop whose sole purpose, behind the excited "we're working together!" public facade, was to simply drain myspace of users faster:

https://phys.org/news/2010-11-myspace-deepens-ties-rival-facebook.html

#Beeper has called out Apple's doublespeak about user privacy. Group messages that include one non-Apple member revert to insecure SMS for the entire group. #Signal, on the other hand, decided to abandon SMS compatibility because it was too easy for users to erroneously believe that messages were secure. Not allowing iPhone-Android interoperability is not about preserving the customer experience but about maintaining the walled garden. #AdversarialInteroperability
https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-mini-is-back

#AdversarialInteroperability is one of the most reliable ways to protect users from predatory corporations: it's when someone reverse-engineers a product to reconfigure or mod it (interoperability) in ways its users like, but which its manufacturer objects to (adversarial):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/07/blue-bubbles-for-all/#never-underestimate-the-determination-of-a-kid-who-is-time-rich-and-cash-poor

1/

@mostaurelius @blackmastodon
My experience is that bookshop(.)org is receptive to kind, polite feedback if you think the steps above could use improvement. They'll do bookshop outreach if you ask them to, in case you know of an unlisted Black-owned store.

They use browser cookies and affiliate URLs (think of now defunct smile.amazon.com; I'm sure that was their model). Human frailty means you will eventually forget to check. Private browsing, clear cookies, switch device or browser, "*boop* what preferred bookstore?" 😖
I pointed this out via a decent email dialog with #BookshopDotOrg over 12 months ago. The fact that it still works in this deeply suboptimal way is intentional, if only intentional neglect.

Bookshop.org and libro.fm are absolutely part of the coalition in my mind. Both are fantastic candidates for #AdversarialInteroperability — like maybe a #Bookwyrm plugin or #Firefox browser extension — to smooth over the rough edges until they do the work on their end.

#Books #Bookshops #ChooseBookshops

#Musician and #VideoEssay -ist Benn Jordan has named some of his videos in such a way that yt-dlp totally horks on them, because it fails to escape characters that are significant to the OS in terms of filenames AND (I suspect) might be exeucting sub-shells in the background and commands are failing due to special shell characters like ampersand (&) being unescaped.

And if true that this is intentional, I'm totally here for it. And if it's a happy accident that shows me a simple place I can contribute a bugfix / patch to the yt-dlp project, I'm totally here for that too.

ALSO, an excellent video, with an interesting digression about a survey. So much to take in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEO0NVPyED4

#YouTube #AdversarialInteroperability
#BennJordan #Music
#Humming