archchan
A post from the reddit thread on this that led me down a "dark" (double pun in this case) rabbit hole:
Larry Ellison is either independently coming up with, or stealing, an idea from an authoritarian freak named Curtis Yarvin. From an article about his ideology:
Each patchwork would be ruled by a “realm”: a corporation with absolute power. Citizens would be free to move, but every other realm would also be ruled by corporate governments with chilling impunity. For example, Yarvin says the tech overlords of the San Francisco realm could arbitrarily decide to cut off its citizens’ hands with no fear of legal consequences—because they’re a sovereign power, beholden to no federal government or laws.
In “Friscorp,” as Yarvin calls the San Francisco realm, an all-seeing Orwellian surveillance system would enforce public safety: “All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is, and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both.”
Yarvin is a thought leader who influences many of the most powerful people in the world (and also a couple elected politicians).
Larry Ellison basically floated the idea of an AI surveillance panopticon several months ago.
Ars Technica: Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior, says Larry Ellison
It's the details that make up the whole picture.
As an isolated situation, the renaming thing may be stupid and not worth giving any credence. Energy can be spent resisting elsewhere in more useful places. However along with the rest of the actions of billionare corpos that kissed the ring, it's part of the overall trend with devastating consequences. Bullshit details shouldn't be ignored, but acknowledged as "they're fucking us from all directions right now and waging war on reality, and we really should stop letting them".
No one else did it, so someone has to...
.world straight up blocks /c/piracy and "preemptively" blocked hexbear.
If he doesn't walk, bust him out by force.
Anything that uses FCM doesn't get push notifications. That's most of them. Very few apps work fine, others I have set up to use UnifiedPush. Unfortunately Proton Mail requires manually checking. I've not had any issues with location.
I've had one app straight up refuse to work at all and others that throw up an "enable Google Play Services" at every launch (dismiss it and it still works), but it's nothing critical so I don't care. Most of my apps come from F-Droid anyway. I haven't had enough time without the play store to see if other apps trip the play integrity api stuff. Even if it did I don't care.
But apps can't hijack my entire screen anymore, battery life is improved, naturally privacy and security as well. No more "update available" pop-ups on app launches or that pop-up to scan all apps that I kept having to decline. No more anxiety from waking up to a bunch of marketing notifications. There's also just the plain satisfaction of being free.
Google has Android by the balls but I'm so jaded and done with this corpo hell world shit to put up with even their privileged system apps anymore, even if it's less convenient. Maybe Linux phones will become viable.
Chaotic good
It feels good to say that I've been rid of Google for a while. They can shove Play Serives and Store too.
It was only his 200th week he just needed a little time to get used to the job /s