It’s possible Signal could stop distributing the app through the Play Store and Apple App Store within Canada. Signal is likely to shut off all servers they rent that are hosted inside of Canada at the very least.

In terms of them deactivating people’s accounts registered with Canadian numbers that seems less likely to me.

Even if they potentially blocked Canadian IP addresses, Signal already has support for proxies built in and those are ran by diverse people throughout the world. Some individuals host them.

This isn’t exactly the same since each situation with each country is different in terms of the law but Signal is banned in some countries such as Iran, Qatar, UAE and others already and people still use Signal by using Signal TLS proxies, VPNs, and other censorship circumvention tools such as Tor.

They didn’t deactivate accounts after being banned and they still allow phone number registration in those countries.

For Android people could download the apk file from Signal’s website instead of getting it from the Play Store at least.

https://signal.org/android/apk/

While we don’t know with certainty what they will do in each situation the past may be an indicator of what they will do to a large extent. But Signal has never pulled out of a country voluntarily before as far as I know so it is uncharted territory.

I think the intentional deactivation of current accounts is unlikely to happen in this case with Canada.

Yeah that argument is so ridiculous.

You can buy lightly used phones on Swappa for a large discount even when we are talking about flagship phones. There are also situations where someone could be poor but have enough credit to get a phone financed with monthly payments that they can afford.

There are pre paid MVNOs in the US where you can get unlimited talk, text, and on device data, that also includes unlimited hotspot at fairly decent speeds (plus there are ways of bypassing hotspot speed caps, TetherFuseNet is an example open source app) for less than 30$ a month taxes and fees included. For about 30$ a month or so plans exist with QCI priority that are the same priority as premium post paid plans. I have known people who have used their unlimited hotspot as their only internet at home.

Just because some of these people making these types of comments may have a high cell phone bill does not mean everyone else does.

Matrix, it is an open standard and the reference server implementation along with some other server implementationa and the various popular clients are open source. The Element X client and the main fork of it called schildiChat both look a bit like Microsoft Teams. But there are other clients and a company could fork an existing client and customize it to suit their needs or even create a new one if they really wanted to spend the resources.

Yeah someone has to be paying for the phones and internet access, both mobile internet and or home internet or if they don’t have a phone yet, the tablet , desktop or laptop with internet access. It’s usually the parents paying for this stuff.

There are parental controls built into the Android builds of all the various mainstream manufacturers. The main exception might be for example small companies selling phones with custom Android OS distributions or people who install their own where parental controls are not built in, but that isn’t what the vast vast majority of people are using let alone installing on their child’s phone.

There are parental control options built into IOS too. They allow parents to setup a variety of controls.

https://families.google/familylink/

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121

The following article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation cites various research about how a majority of social media use even by people under 13 is often done with parents knowledge and even direct help.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/congress-wants-hand-your-parenting-big-tech

Most Social Media Use By Younger Kids Is Family-Mediated

If lawmakers picture under-13 social media use as a bunch of kids lying about their age and sneaking onto apps behind their parents’ backs, they’ve got it wrong. Serious studies that have looked at this all find the opposite: most under-13 use is out in the open, with parents’ knowledge, and often with their direct help.

A large national study published last year in Academic Pediatrics found that 63.8% of under-13s have a social media account, but only 5.4% of them said they were keeping one secret from their parents. That means roughly 90% of kids under 13 who are on social media aren’t hiding it at all. Their parents know. (For kids aged thirteen and over, the “secret account” number is almost as low, at 6.9%.)

Earlier research in the U.S. found the same pattern. In a well-known study of Facebook use by 10-to-14-year-olds, researchers found that about 70% of parents said they actually helped create their child’s account, and between 82% and 95% knew the account existed. Again, this wasn’t kids sneaking around. It was families making a decision together.

A 2022 study by the UK’s media regulator Ofcom points in the same direction, finding that up to two-thirds of social media users below the age of thirteen had direct help from a parent or guardian getting onto the platform.

The typical under-13 social media user is not a sneaky kid. It’s a family making a decision together.

Respectfully, this is a bit more nuanced than that. There are free VPNs ran by non profits supported fully by donations. Yes somebody is paying for it but it’s people donating to the services.

For example there is an open source application called Bitmask that has 2 VPN providers by default, Riseup VPN and the Calyx Institute.

You can download the Bitmask app itself or download the RiseupVPN app which is based on Bitmask but just pre configured to only use that single Riseup provider.

https://bitmask.net/

https://riseup.net/en/vpn

I just installed Windows 11 not too long ago (maybe 4 months ago) on a computer and it worked without even using the command to bypass it I am pretty sure. I didn’t use Rufus or any special option prior to writing it to the flash drive. All I did was disconnect an ethernet cable and install and at some point it just gave me the option to bypass the creation of a Microsoft account. I remember there used to be a special username and password you could use that would bypass it too but I didn’t use that as far as I can remember. I may have possibly tried entering random info until it failed enough times that it allowed me to do it but I’m not sure.

Idk why my experience is different from what some others are reporting. I am pretty sure I didn’t have to put the command in or do anything too special other than disconnecting from the internet and maybe possibly trying a couple of times to login till it failed multiple times but I don’t remember if I did that. Obviously since it would have been disconnected from the internet logins to a Microsoft account would not work anyway but it might have still asked me but I just remember at some point it just gave me the option to create a local only account.

I used Windows 11 Pro.

I didn’t put in a product key when I installed idk if that would have made a difference but that’s one aspect I can think of that might be possibly different from some people’s installs so I figured I would at least mention that even if it probably makes no difference. I know Windows can read the product key from the motherboard but in my case I installed it one of my computers that was bought from a linux hardware vendor so it would not have come with anything like that. (I know blasphemy hehe but I needed Windows for something Windows specific that has anti virtual machine detection too and many of the computers in my house are from linux hardware companies to support the linux ecosystem).

Edit : So someone I know said that if you use Windows 11 Pro there is a way to use an option for setting up for work and a domain that it will prompt you to create a local account. Maybe that is what I ended up doing that made the difference that made it so easy to bypass the Microsoft account.

I have never used a Windows machine with a Microsoft account for my own personal use, only if it was somebody else’s PC that already had it. I just keep it disconnected from the internet during setup and it eventually gives me the option to not use it with a Microsoft account.

There is a command to disable the account setup too but I have only used that once. The disconnecting from the internet trick works for me.

I mostly use GNU/Linux for my own use but on the rare occasion I setup Windows for someone else or need to use it, I just disconnect it / don’t connect it to the internet before setup.

Edit:

The reason bypassing the forced account with up to date Windows 11 was still so easy for me is likely because I used the Pro edition and possibly may have used the setup for work feature when I installed it recently.

I have ARFID and struggle with low appetite in general. I somewhat frequently eat like the equivalent of 1 days worth of calories over like 2 or 3 days but I try my hardest not to have that happen. There are times where it has been 1 days worth of calories over more days to the point where I lost a dangerous amount of weight.

This whole ignorant boomer logic of “they will eat it if they are hungry enough” is just some bullshit these people say because they don’t have the critical thinking skills to question things they have been taught by their parents. In some cases it can lead to significant health consequences for their children.

I know it isn’t as simple as just saying you shouldn’t feel embarrassed but you can’t help that your having these struggles with eating. These people who say these comments like you were talking about on Facebook likely would not even be able to function as well as you are with the struggles you have. This would especially be the case if they somehow switched lives with you for a time but didn’t have the coping skills you have been forced to develop over a lifetime of dealing with this. These people have limited empathy for other people’s situations.

Does anyone who has been to a store where something like this has been implemented know if this is at least likely to help with accessibility such as say a button to make it read the price labels, maybe larger font options and or a QR code to scan or various other options like that etc?

I know this would likely vary by manufacturer of these digital price labels. But if they are going to be switching to them I would hope that at least a side benefit would be increased accessibility for customers with disabilities.

I did see a post on reddit talking about how the OP actually found them harder to read but that obviously depends on the person.

I saw something about how there will be an LED light that will light up to help store employees find items faster for tasks such as online ordering. I wonder if this will be something customers can use too?

https://aira.io/walmart-us-wide/#%3A~%3Atext=Walmart+today+officially+announced+they%2Cblack+pants%2C+and+purple+shirt.

I know Walmart recently launched free Aira access using a geofence. It is a visual interpreting service which uses your phones camera so that someone can help you shop if you have a visual disability. But it would be nice if these digital price tags had some extra options too for people who don’t want to download that app or maybe cannot very easily because they have a phone such as a GNU/Linux phone where idk what the status is of Android compatibility layers or maybe even a dumbphone if they are someone who prefers that or are older for example.

It would just be nice if we at least got an accessibility benefit out of these digital tags too.

Invidious like the open source youtube frontend ? /joking

https://invidious.io/

I have been saving up for a router and wanted to support a company that sells devices that are compatible with as much open source software as possible.

This really sucks. If I had known this was going to happen randomly I would have prioritised saving up faster and just not spent it on other things. I had no idea I needed to prioritise this.

But like I say frequently about the US. It is a very prohibitionist country. You never know when the next thing you do or use will be criminalized or prohibited. Then you will be at risk of being arrested and in some cases even sent to a literal for profit private prison ran by a place like CoreCivic. It is fucked up.

Even if I were to get a router from a foreign manufacturer now, it likely won’t be legal for me to actually use it. The FCC could at the very least fine somebody depending on how this order will be enforced.

There is also possibly going to be a risk of it being seized at the border.

Who knows how this will even be enforced since the vast vast majority of consumer routers are not even made in the US. I don’t even know of one truly made in the US. But a router from a foreign open source focused company will likely be considered even more of a “foreign manufacturer”.

It only takes a single determined kid really as long as they can explain to their friends how to do it and their friends are capable of or able to install some software or boot into a live USB OS for example.

A lot of the various censorship circumvention software is designed to be fairly easy to use. I first learned about Tails when I was like 14 or so because I was being abused for being suspected of being LGBT by my parents and also for various other things such as being autistic and having other disabilities and they were abusing me for things I could not help. So I needed a way to ensure that I would stay protected from their potential digital snooping so I could get support online, talk to my online friends because I had nearly no irl friends and the very few I did kinda have just took advantage of me and bullied me most of the time.

I also needed to be able to rapidly destroy everything I was doing by pulling out the flash drive wiping the RAM and shutting down the PC. One of the somewhat common use cases for Tails is people under domestic abuse situations they are unable to escape from.

There is a reason why the Trevor Project, a mental health support site for LGBT people has an emergency mechanism for quickly leaving the site while your in the middle of a conversation with a counselor or just browsing the resources too.

https://www.thetrevorproject.org/research-briefs/mental-health-among-autistic-lgbtq-youth-apr-2022/

But regardless after I learned about stuff like that I also helped an online friend from another school access content using bridges as well. I helped another friend at some point too though in that case basic web proxies were enough. Though the latter person I guess was not really a great friend since he only really wanted to talk to me when he needed help with things like that.

Psiphon, another censorship circumvention tool is also fairly easy to use and works on mobile and desktop style OSs.

On my phone I used the Shelter app to create a work profile with a separate password from my devices regular password.

I used various apps like Tor Browser, Orbot, and other free and open source apps such as Bitmask that come with 2 free VPN providers.

In some cases Tor may not even be blocked or if it is you can try obfs4, Snowflake proxies, Meek, and Webtunnel bridges to access it for example.

Also a friend could run a private bridge for you from their home if they are tech savvy and want to help you. For obfs4 for example, out of a lot of services someone could self host, that is relatively easy without as much knowlege required as self hosting something more complex.

Wireguard is relatively easy to self host once you become accustomed to how to configure it. SSH is even easier than Wireguard IMO though Wireguard tries to be as easy as SSH there are a few issues that can happen with Wireguard that need more troubleshooting sometimes compared to SSH. SSH can be used for tunneling traffic and you can set your web browser to use it’s SOCKS port.

So if you can find a friend with an ISP that isn’t doing the filtering who can self host something or if a person can access Tor, Psiphon or a VPN particularly one with a variety of anti censorship options this type of network censorship isn’t going to be trivial.

There is also DNS tunneling and a variety of other methods.

Edit: The last thing I will likely say in this particular comment is that people should really consider who they will be condemning to a much worse situation than they are already in by supporting stuff like this and these privacy invasive age verification tools.

Here is additional info about who these types of bills will impact harshly.

"Age-verification mandates most harshly affect people with disabilities. Facial recognition systems routinely fail to recognize faces with physical differences, affecting an estimated 100 million people worldwide who live with facial differences, and “liveness detection” can exclude folks with limited mobility. As these technologies become gatekeepers to online spaces, people with disabilities find themselves increasingly blocked from essential services and platforms with no specified appeals processes that account for disability.

Document-based systems also don’t solve this problem—as mentioned earlier, people with disabilities are also less likely to possess current driver’s licenses, so document-based age-gating technologies are equally exclusionary."

“For many LGBTQ+ young people, especially those with unsupportive or abusive families, the internet can be a lifeline. For young people facing family rejection or violence due to their sexuality or gender identity, social media platforms often provide crucial access to support networks, mental health resources, and communities that affirm their identities.”

"According to a groundbreaking study by Chapin Hall of the University of Chicago, LGBTQ+ youth are 120% more likely to experience homelessness than their peers. And, while LGBTQ+ youth make up only 7% of the total U.S. youth population, they comprise an astounding 40% of all young people experiencing homelessness in the country.

Often times, youth who make their way to Covenant House do so bearing complex histories of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. LGBTQ+ youth are further traumatized by rejection in their families, schools, and communities due to their gender identity or sexual orientation. This abandonment leads to no support system, putting LGBTQ+ youth at greater risk of exploitation, human trafficking, physical violence, and suicide"

“Platforms that rely on AI-based age-estimation systems often use a webcam selfie to guess users’ ages. But these algorithms don’t work equally well for everyone. Research has consistently shown that they are less accurate for people with Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Southeast Asian backgrounds; that they often misclassify those adults as being under 18; and sometimes take longer to process, creating unequal access to online spaces. This mirrors the well-documented racial bias in facial recognition technologies. The result is that technology’s inherent biases can block people from speaking online or accessing others’ speech.”

“Age-verification systems are, at their core, surveillance systems. By requiring identity verification to access basic online services, we risk creating an internet where anonymity is a thing of the past. For people who rely on anonymity for safety, this is a serious issue. Domestic abuse survivors need to stay anonymous to hide from abusers who could track them through their online activities. Journalists, activists, and whistleblowers regularly use anonymity to protect sources and organize without facing retaliation or government surveillance. And in countries under authoritarian rule, anonymity is often the only way to access banned resources or share information without being silenced. Age-verification systems that demand government IDs or biometric data would strip away these protections, leaving the most vulnerable exposed”

Also the perspectives of young people are almost never considered in these conversations which is why I am glad the Electronic Frontier Foundation actually took the time to ask when KOSA was being considered but these comments in the following link apply to a lot of these other forms of legislation too.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/thousands-young-people-told-us-why-kids-online-safety-act-will-be-harmful-minors

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7vje365rno

This is probably the report they are talking about.

Trigger warning because there is a graphic picture and descriptions of multiple graphic situations.

Anecdotally my parents use linux because of me using it on my computers too and one nice thing about it is that they can have a consistent UI. The kind of changes that happen with at least some well established desktop environments and window managers are not nearly as radical as when Windows changes where things are at in their UI. There might be some UI tweaks here and there depending on your choice of desktop environments but I don’t use rapidly changing DEs on their PC. With some of the simpler well established DEs it isn’t typical that there will be a change so dramatic that you have to relearn how to use it like with Windows 8 or something. There are some such as GNOME that have undergone some heavy changes in the past but you can choose to use simpler ones like say LXDE or Cinnamon.

They mostly use the web browser anyway so it isn’t like it was a really steep learning curve. Since they switched to linux the amount of help I have had to give them has decreased. If my parents did more advanced tasks they would need to learn some new ways of managing their computer yeah but for them they just browse the web, use Libreoffice and use the printer mostly. Even before they switched to linux I had them using a bunch of open source cross platform software for years before that which did help the process go smoother but Libreoffice for example has a similar UI to the classic Microsoft Word so it was not like it was a huge learning curve.

I do their software updates but me doing software updates has just been me typing “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get full-upgrade” and restarting. If there ever was a problem I would have to fix it but I would have to fix it if there was a problem with Windows too. I find linux to be easier to fix than Windows and the error messages to be easier to figure out. Overall the switch has gone well and there is less I have to worry about.

We usually have the christmas parties at my house and I am able to go to my room. I would be a lot more anxious if I had to go somewhere else to a party that I could not go away from. I always dread having to go out for other parties.

I was harassed and stalked by people on reddit targeting people in disability related subs especially in the autism subs. I reported them and their sockpuppet accounts and nothing was done because reddit sent a message saying that it did not break their rules. When I told one of the stalkers alts to leave me alone several times I was flagged by a bot as harassing them. I appealed it but reddit did not care.

Another time I suggested to someone a telemedicine quit smoking service may help them and that was being flagged as “unauthorized transaction of prohibited goods”. They banned me for 7 days. They never even told me what comment I made but that was the only comment I could think of that might have caused it. Reddit themselves advertises these very same telemedicine clinics and you have to go through a doctor to obtain any medication, I was not sourcing any products. I sent them an email basically begging them to tell me specifically what I said that was wrong but they never replied. I said at the end “How am I supposed to learn from this if you won’t even tell me what comment was against the rules and clearly explain it to me?”. At least on most lemmy instances there is a modlog with what comment broke the rules and specifically why.

Meanwhile I see tons of subs and users doing way more than what I did. This coupled with the fact that I am part of the blind / visually impaired community and reddit banned the third party client I was using that had far better features for disabled users really turned me away from wanting to keep posting on reddit. Their global moderators and a lot of the subreddit and chat moderators are sometimes just straight up evil people who don’t care about actual victims of abuse and harassment. I have begun to really limit my use of reddit because of this biased behavior.

The Pixel is a good phone to test the latest android features for development purposes. I would imagine to some degree they are trying to target developers interested in testing software by offering the ability to unlock and relock the bootloader. This fosters a vibrant developer community and encourages innovation. Certain things can be tested in an android emulator but it helps to have a real device to test as well.

Pixels often ship with hardware features that other phones later include. For example Pixel 8 was the first phone with hardware memory tagging extensions and if developers wanted to test that feature they would buy a Pixel first and then use that experience with the devices their company is manufacturing. Pixels are often released with new android versions that implement android features and APIs the way they were intended to work. There have been cases of OEMs releasing devices with broken implementations of standard android features.

Pixel was the first phone with Strongbox as well. Additionally, It was the first android phone with satellite connectivity.

It also attracts the segment of the market that just enjoys modifying their phones as well. So basically they are targeting the power user community and developers. Despite the Pixel having the ability to install custom verified boot keys and custom OSs, Google knows that very few users use those features so it does not cut into their Play Store and Play Services market share very much.

The legacy SafetyNet check bypass may not be around much longer especially because hardware based attestation will be gradually replacing it.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/111504057847795464

Below is a guide for app developers who want to support third party OSs in a way that does not rely on Google. Most apps work on GrapheneOS just fine already but there are some banking apps and NFC payment systems that do not.

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-guide

Schools even have Cellebrite devices now, that is how prolific they have become. GrapheneOS has a duress password to wipe the phone and you can block all data or even power to the USB port while the phone is running. If you blocked all power to the USB port while the phone is on the only way to charge it is if it is fully turned off putting your encrypted data at rest. You can just disable data on the USB port options menu in GrapheneOS if you don’t want to completely turn off the whole port.

You probably already know this stuff I was just mentioning it for people reading this comment section. :)

https://duck.ai/

You can use self hosted AI like others have mentioned but you can also use DuckDuckGo’s proxy service to access some cloud AI providers. It works over Tor Browser in “Safer” security mode as well for increased anonymous access.

https://www.torproject.org/