Pawlicker's Blog

Random musings about fedi, tech, and internet culture

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2026-10-27 05:16:59 UTC

The importance of alternatives and FOSS
If you’ve been paying attention to world news lately, you probably know about the Brazilian election this year. It’s a very “sus” (for the lack of better term) election, where Lula won yet again under questionable circumstances (poll closing times, the right winning the first election merely weeks ago, the “runoff election” system that’s ripe for rigging, Lula jumping up millions mysteriously). Regardless on if you feel it was fair and square and his loyalists voted him in or if it was rigged, the damage has been done. It hasn’t been taken well, the stock market in Brazil has triggered emergency halts in trading due to collapsing so hard, and others are dreading another 4 years of hell.
But perhaps the biggest issue for the average online user, discounting the economic situation that I hear is terrible (with high taxes), is the fact that video chat on Discord will be gimped for 4 more years as users have to use VPNs to use video chatting.
In fact, it’s only going to get worse. Lula is making vows to regulate social media platforms, meaning sites will gimp themselves for Brazilians. A lot of countries that are harsh on speech end up developing their own local alternatives to Western companies to control speech, as can be seen with China’s entire market or Russia and platforms such as vk or MAX.
It’s not even just a “shithole country” thing either, as Western “democracies” love to push age ID laws, backdoors in chat apps to stop criminals, and spyware everywhere. People distrust their own governments so much that they would rather take their official enemy spying over them over the USA, just because China has no power there.
So it’s important to some degree that alternatives to Discord, Telegram, Windows, and whatnot exist. Unfortunately it seems as if these projects keep getting dogged down with drama, lack of focus, and outside factors. I’d like to talk about why these are important with important reasons for why these projects need to exist.Good things never last
To start it off, I’d like to talk about something that seems to be the cycle in tech. Someone comes out with a really cool product or service and everyone is using it. Then out of nowhere, things go south. New updates and versions are awful, management doesn’t know what the users want, management sells out to another company who wants the patents, it gets shut down, the list goes on and on. If it’s FOSS doesn’t matter, as some of these issues can happen to either one.
Case in point: Microsoft Windows has been falling apart for a while. Windows 10 and 11 are notably buggier than Windows before 10 was. Every time you search Windows 11 on the news, there’s always some news report about bugs or how you’re getting screwed by Windows.
Or Discord for that matter. Discord has entrenched itself as the “everything” chat app in a way with communities built upon it going back 10+ years even, to the dawn of Discord. There are Discord servers where there are vast amounts of technical knowledge and info, locked away behind the app. It’s also what your online friend group uses to keep in touch. It’s also no longer the same app or community it was circa 2015-18.
Nowadays it’s known for age verification (ironic given that random Discord admins ask for your ID), bans for no apparent reason, and having some of the most caustic communities on the internet. Back in the days of 2015-18 (when the internet was better) it was the place to be online. You really had to have been there when nobody took it seriously, and now it’s an infinite drama pit of bans and chat feuds. But it gets worse, try joining a major public Discord for say an emulator and you will be asked to verify a phone number.
Why did Discord get so big? Because the cycle played itself out with Skype previously, as Skype ran itself into the ground before becoming irrelevant…and Microsoft deprecating it for Teams.
Of course, this is where the appeal of FOSS and hosting your own stuff comes into play. Hotline might be a dead protocol, and yet there are still people hosting servers and running their own clients to this day. Because it was something anyone could host, even when the mothership had long departed anyone can host it to this day. The same goes with old online games with dedicated servers or direct IP connections, you can play something like Madden 08 on the PC without EA’s servers by directly joining games.Government/external pressure
On top of this, corporate platforms and software always have to obey the government where they’re at, and will happily cave faster because they would rather keep it going than go down in a fight. This is why platforms have age ID rules, geolocked features, and geolocking. On the other hand, advertisers and payment processors can also tilt a platform to do what it wants. YouTube ended up doing this, and the reason the site is a censored shell of its former self is because they keep caving to advertiser pressure. Say too many swear words or cover controversial topics and you’ll get demonetized if not banned.
When Twitter was bought by Elon Musk and relaxed rules, they did not cave and as a result the only ads you see on Twitter are for weed, supplements, nicotine pouches, AI girlfriend/anime simulator apps, and smaller advertisers who don’t care about Elon. Elon has “fuck you” money, Google runs YouTube at a loss and has to make up the money for hosting infinite videos somehow.
It’s even worse if you piss off the payment processors. Matt Mullenweg, current owner of Tumblr, won’t roll the site back to the “old days” pre-porn ban because he’s worried about the power they have. He’s not the only internet person to have the same opinion, as Josh of the Kiwi Farms has talked about the same thing. Think of payment processors as the final boss of free speech and the internet with regards to what you can and can’t do online. If they’re mad, they will make sure you can’t earn a single cent. They will make sure that you obey every single ToS and if you break the ToS of say Visa, you’re done.
You now have to deal with the infinite friction and pain of using crypto to take payments, which only really works if you’re an online casino because people want to gamble anyway. Of course, Matt would be better off if he only allowed drawn NSFW, but even in that situation payment processors would demand that you can’t post something they don’t like (as seen with Pixiv, Patreon, etc.)Backdoors and privacy
The reason Linux is so popular among both the privacy crowd and the absolutely paranoid is that Linux doesn’t have open backdoors (exploits don’t count). Windows has had allegations of them, but in 2026 Microsoft helped the feds deanonymize a user using Windows user IDs. This was something to do with Microsoft account logins, and if you use a Microsoft account you should assume you’ve been deanonymized. Oh and by the way, Windows 11 keeps blocking bypasses for logging in to Microsoft with each update and it’s a cat and mouse game (unless you install 23h2 or something and use the old bypass trick).
The same goes with Android and Google Play. Privacy conscious people will oftentimes run forks of Android such as Graphene to have a more secure phone (or as secure as something that uses the public cell network can get) and get away from Google.Something gets abandoned
Another reason why things can go downhill is when software gets abandoned. In this day and age, every skid has access to an LLM and knows the “right terms” to bypass any “guardrails” and “safety checks”, or runs their own uncensored model. They can find novel exploits and bugs in what you’re running that you never cared about.
Case in point, October 2026 has been called by Wikipedia “Black October” due to the fact that a lot of serious exploits have been found in this month alone. Most notable of these was a PHP exploit that took much of the internet down for patching, but also there was a cert compromise (because the private key was literally the number 4) and an exploit in Node.JS. These are in actively managed software stacks.
Now imagine pointing an LLM at some old host running some old OS. You can guarantee that there will be exploits found in it. Even 15 years ago, I remember reading online about people on vintage computing forums saying to recover passwords from AIX using old CVEs, and an AI will probably do that for you automatically.
Recently poa.st was hacked in this manner as well, the owner was running a server he could have sworn was updated but one server was running an old version of XZ with the infamous XZ backdoor found in 2024. LLM tools found it and the hackers got in.
But even pre-AI this has happened. Call of Duty in particular has been plagued with RCE exploits everywhere, that can plant malware on your PC by being in the same lobby as other people. On consoles, there are so many ways to cheat online as well to the point old CoDs are unplayable. The only Call of Duty title actively being patched from this era is the PS4/5 version of Black Ops 2. Otherwise, you need to use third-party fan patches on the PC versions like IW4x or Plutonium to ensure you can play online safely.
Or if you wanted to host some old version of forum software to run a site “like in the old days”, you’ll be dealing with tons of unpatched exploits or a hard-dependency on say PHP 5. I knew people who did this and their site lasted a week or two before being hacked. This is also how 4chan got hacked; they ran old versions of FreeBSD and PHP, and got hacked via an old version of Ghostscript. I’ve even had this myself: when I’d run a specific server for an old Source 2006 engine mod I would be DDoSed until I took the server offline. The only way you can host an old website is with numerous patches, like what SomethingAwful does with its hacked-up 2000s era forum software.
The silver lining with PC games is that if it has a community, people will find workarounds for these exploits.Making an alternative needs to be taken seriously
The big problem and what I was getting at this entire time, and what I want to address is that making an alternative to “big tech” and companies that shaft you has to be taken seriously. A lot of times when I run into these FOSS clones of major projects, they’re not taken seriously at all.
When Donald Trump came into office a second time and instantly waged trade wars, there was a big thing in Europe about having a plan B, or “tech sovereignty”. The idea was smart on paper, have your own alternatives decoupled from a country that might or might not turn on you. They don’t want the plot of Homefront 2 to happen where North Korea uses a kill switch on the USA’s tech. The difference is, when there’s nothing forcing you to act (such as social media bans or sanctions like with Russia and China), there’s no motivation to make something functional.
Take Matrix for example. Someone I knew from the past decided to try to get me into Matrix, and what I found was pretty sad. There was some of the same Discord behavior on these groups, invite-only public groups that have you request to join, among other things. There was serious lag, and I was told that e-mail signups on his instance are restricted to the big providers and some privacy-centric ones due to having illegal image spammers using the network. I saw error messages, join failures, and groups taking forever to join. I even saw a chat group doing the Discord thing of “you need to show us a censored ID to join with the group name written next to it”.
Hosting a server on Matrix is also a disaster, as it can bloat up fast as you run it. It will also be slower than the mothership matrix.org server as well.
But don’t take my word for it: a Politico article about the EU trying to use it had people saying it was “worse than Teams”. Imagine something so awful that you’d rather use Microsoft Teams of all things for communication! Of course, the one guy defending it unironically said “microslop” and it was obvious that he was using it for political reasons.
XMPP is also a patchwork of clients, servers, and half-baked standards. You can’t use calls in MUCs, and another server I’m in has calling greyed out. Not even all clients support calls properly. The big XMPP implementations are using it as some backend software that you don’t normally know about, and it definitely is less of a technical nightmare than Matrix is from using it.
Then there’s Linux, where there’s a big war between the Wayland and X11 camp going on. Wayland is supposed to be more secure and fix screen tearing, but X11 lets you do things Wayland lacks such as screensavers and screen locking, pop up video playback, and window positioning. It’s a petty feud between two groups that “know best” as they’ve lost the plot of trying to dethrone Microsoft.
To them, it’s not about dethroning MS. It’s about declaring yourself the king of open source or something. In fact, I see that with many of these projects. Petty drama and infighting is everywhere, and the reason people like Lunduke get so much engagement is because he’s made himself the Keemstar, Asmongold, or Jerry Springer of FOSS.
The same goes with abandoning projects and projects made by grifters. Much of the hate for AI comes as a result of nobodies who want to make some “Discord alternative” (as an example) that’s obviously vibecoded and has few people using it. There’s also a trend where actual grifters and those writing software in protest will abandon their project after a while. Case in point, Wayback was made solely as a petty response to people who wanted XLibre in certain distros and it’s barely getting updates while XLibre (despite constant drama within and around it) is updated much more frequently.
I feel as if all this petty drama and fighting as opposed to “making shit work” is moving people away from “the goal”. The goal should be to make alternatives that are on-par if not better than what you want to use. It shouldn’t be solely to get yourself in the history books or famous online.
Discord is so big because it works and people use it. Windows is so big because software and games are tied to it, and there’s no real alternative (though EAC and Fortnite are coming to Linux soon and business software usually doesn’t whine about VMs). Social media sites are so big because they work with little friction (and people use them). Desktop Linux, despite its flaws, has also gotten use because it supports enough hardware for the Average Joe to browse the web on. Meanwhile the ChromeOS and Android OSes built on Linux “just work” for most people.
This is what I’m getting at here. A major country is going to be forcing Discord to geolock features at best, and the alternatives are so lousy that people would rather use a VPN to get the Real McCoy instead of using the FOSS alternative. The alternatives need to kick themselves into gear and make themselves relevant as opposed to existing solely to be on some FSF “approved alternative” list. It can’t just be a pet project for when the time comes, it has to actually work.
In fact, this is something the FSF of all people really tries to push even if it’s futile with the state of FOSS. They try to market alternatives, but them merely existing is only half the battle. The other half is making sure people can use them, because much of the world is like Ellen Feiss was in the Apple ad: just a normie who wants their PC to work. Just like the EU Element Pro example, they will switch back if this unfamiliar app is buggy and offers nothing Teams doesn’t. Apple on the other hand had it right under Steve Jobs: they knew people will eat up an unfamiliar OS if it doesn’t go BLEEPBLEEPLBEPLBEBPLEBLPBELP like their PC did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c72d4-LpilM
https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/image.png?w=525

2026-07-14 22:37:06 UTC

The death of flash was the death of a culture
In 2021, Adobe would essentially make the case for preservation and open sourcing software by activating the killswitch in flash. For infosec graduates pumped out at universities en masse, this was the best thing ever as all they saw in Adobe Flash were security holes. For everyone else online, this was a painful experience. By 2021, flash was really dying out at this point as the rise of mobile forced everyone’s hand. At one point the internet ran on it, big name websites ranging from video sharing sites such as YouTube to chat sites such as Xat or Tinychat used it, video was archived in the “flv” format, and entire ecosystems of animations and games ran on it.
But there was enough shit that still ran on it that I remember doing the “on computer training” (mostly on how to sell crap) for a wagie job and it was all written in flash. Oh and I had a shithead manager who wanted it done by so and so. Flash suddenly stopped working on the thin client we had been doing training on. I whipped out my old ThinkPad T43 and completed it at home, and watched with amusement as another new hire was wondering why the training wasn’t working.
In the 2010s, Apple declared Flash dead, and the entire industry followed Apple (but not before everyone made jokes about how iOS didn’t support it when the internet ran on it). Adobe did too, they didn’t want to fix security exploits so they killed it off by infamously coding in a kill switch in the later versions that would activate in 2021. Instead, it was replaced with HTML5 which was promised as a fix for every flaw Flash had, and fixed few of them. It was being billed as faster and more secure back in the day, and you were told to switch to it despite many developers not wanting to. Everything people bitched about from the Flash era is still there minus the plugin part. Websites are slow, you need the latest browser, and there’s still exploits (but now it’s in Blink/Webkit/Gecko instead).
What nobody seems to grasp in this argument is that the death of Flash was the death of a culture. Now sure, Flash is still kinda around in some form as Adobe Animate. It’s still a backbone of the Western animation industry, to the point that when Adobe tried to kill it the backlash was so intense within that scene that they reverted it.What we lost
The big loss with the death of Flash was the culture around it, simultaneous to the deaths of the surrounding scenes that used it. Probably one of the final nails in the coffin for the online use of Flash, even after websites that tried to keep the flame lit switched to using the HTML5 clone Ruffle, was when 4chan sunsetted the flash animation board after the big hack a while back. It’s old, it’s dead, who cares, we don’t want to maintain another exploit vector. While swfchan is still around with a “rain” animation over it referencing this, there are barely any new flash animations or games being posted.
But most importantly, Flash was unique. Similar to other products such as MASL or Panic (for the X68k only) in Japan, you could cram special computer animations with audio into small files that could be shared over the slow internet connections of the day. Also just like Hypercard and Shockwave/Director, it was designed to make multimedia experiences easy to develop. What made Flash unique at the time was how it stored images: as vectors instead of rasterized.
As a result, if you weren’t jerry rigging Flash to do rasterized art or as a ghetto interactive video player (as some flashes did, for example a 3d video where clicking let you “switch scenes”), you could have entire animations in a few megabytes. In the late 90s, the entire internet was stuck on dial-up still. When DSL connections were a thing, that “1 meg” connection was still only 120 kilobytes a second. Internet that slow nowadays is what you expect to find at a fast food restaurant using the cheapest Spectrum plan with every employee watching TikToks on the free Wi-Fi. Even right before COVID in my area people are still stuck with DSL (his area still uses copper lines in 2026), and an online friend of mine a state over is still stuck with it!
But back then, that was the best you had in my area. Flash was perfectly optimized for a slow internet connection. On top of that, it was easy for someone who was more artistically inclined and less technologically inclined to fiddle with. It spawned a new generation of animators online, and many of them would go onto either animation jobs, become big on YouTube, or even making their own shows.
But what is most important is the file size. Anyone who has tried to run a video sharing site knows that the biggest issue that isn’t an issue that requires a law firm to handle is with video sizes. Video files are massive, and even though new algorithms like AV1 or H.265 are designed to cut down on space, not every device supports those. Oh, and you have to save multiple versions of the same file for each client and device.
Case in point, a famous flash animation was the “Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny”. The Flash file is only 3 megabytes and is rendered in real time in 4k. A YouTube upload is going to be massively larger. Sure, the audio is very “crunched” but it will load on your DSL connection, or dial-up if your parents are broke/don’t know anything about PCs.
Another cool thing about Flash is that just like a lot of viral file formats, the files were distributed as “.swf” files. Similar to how MP3 files or Panic animations could be spread around through file sharing methods, .swf files could be endlessly rehosted and shared in numerous places. While Newgrounds was ground zero for all of this in many ways, people could host files on their own sites or share them elsewhere.
Just as iconic is the game library flash had, all in your web browser.The games
What really made Flash stand out was the game library. Everyone had Flash installed, and compared to some of the slow messes like Java or Shockwave that took forever to start up, Flash would start up fairly quickly. What is most important though is that Flash had this thing called “Actionscript” that was a scripting language for developers to code their own games on.
As a result, Flash would become the iconic gaming platform of the 2000s if you were stuck with web browsers. If you didn’t know about Newgrounds, you’d know about sites like Miniclip, AddictingGames, and more. The important part is the virality of the flash platform, as all Flash games were .swf files they could be endlessly shared across the internet. Everyone, everywhere played Flash games. It could have been some quick tie-in game for their favorite TV show or toy line, or elaborate games that took over the internet. You played Flash games at one point, even if you played them on the WORST school computer of all time.
They were compact, fun, and addicting, but most notably got past web filters. If one site was blocked, you’d share the site that wasn’t. It was fun. But most importantly, it was a high-water mark of creativity and probably one of the last eras IMO in which people wrote games for the internet.The problem was Adobe (and there’s no replacement)
The problem with Flash boiled down to the fact that it was a closed “standard” made by a single company, who had all the keys to the kingdom. While Java as a web-browser standard is dead and never gained the popularity of Flash, Sun open sourced it in 2006. Even with Oracle up to their tricks years later, the OpenJDK distributions are really popular and don’t have the same licensing drama. Unlike Flash, Java survived. In fact years afterwards, one of the most successful online games in history (Minecraft) would be written in it as a standalone game.
Flash did not. Flash was closed source, made by a company who ignored the effects of Flash on the ecosystem of the internet (other than “We’re making money” and “it’s not worth it anymore”). When Adobe decided to can flash, they coded a killswitch in and flipped it. They didn’t open it up, and in the end it died off. Ruffle would then boom in popularity as an emergency way to make content work in modern browsers and mobile.
The big problem is that HTML5 games just aren’t the same. On paper, HTML5 is way better than flash. It doesn’t need to deal with the cruft of a plugin, and with WASM it can do a lot more. Something I like to show people as a great tech demo is a Doom 3 port to WASM with the entire demo loaded in it. Back in the day Flash games were popular and animations and all, but nobody would have expected you to be able to play AAA games in a browser.
There are two problems with HTML5 games though. The first is that it lacks the virality of Flash games. HTML5 games have to be zipped up beforehand, and you can’t easily rip and share a HTML5 game like you could a flash game. On top of that, the bigger problem is that there’s a lot of issues with creativity.
The flash game ecosystem was loaded with creative games made by artist types. HTML5 games on the other hand don’t have the same ecosystem as Flash games did. A lot of the big HTML5 games I notice are “.io games”, usually designed for multiplayer as easily sharable games. Maybe it’s a sign of the times, as people would rather develop games in Unity/Unreal, and a lot of game developers seem to have forgotten the era of playing games on a shared PC from a browser.A change in culture as well
The animators survived a bit longer too, but it depends on if you can go viral. Lately there’s been a revival in online animation with certain animators getting big online and people wanting to make the next Amazing Digital Circus or Hazbin Hotel. But there was a whole dark age for like a decade on YouTube after all the flash ones moved over, in which they were beholden to the sudden and out-of-touch ToS changes. Namely, YouTube had a problem with “reply girls” in which egirls with big tits would make low-effort reaction videos videos that would flood the site and with breasts as the thumbnail.
YouTube’s response was to change the algorithm to prioritize “Time Watched” over views and engagement to try to clamp down upon these channels. Those uploading short videos got burned by this, and they ended up promoting other kinds of clickbait videos. By pushing “time watched” over clicks, animators who made short videos got burned at the expense of other channels. Those who made slop video essays were rewarded, along with other styles of clickbait.
By the 2020s, this change had become so blatant that when MrBeast (the top guy on the site) had his production style guide leaked, one of the top metrics for his videos was “Average View Duration” or viewer retention. His mass-produced video style is engineered around this as one of the core metrics. Having tons of people watching your videos at once means that many will click on them. It’s the same reason why bodycam channels are so huge, they’re 20 minute videos ranging from the gamut from public freakouts to Liveleak level horror, and yet people want to see the dumpster fire which means they win the algorithm.
In a way, maybe it wasn’t solely Flash dying out that caused these trends, but it sure accelerated them. YouTube definitely burnt animators and trends left flash games in the dust. The end result is that there’s a huge void of games that are as creative as Flash games were back in the day.
Nowdays, only the animators care about Flash/Animate (given how many piracy tutorials exist for old ones), and lately the craze is to use Blender for 3d. Just like how the move from 2d to 3d in studios made 2d very “unfashionable” (especially once TV shows began to look like 3d movies and not like early CGI music videos and Bowling Alley animations, I remember being blown away when the Penguins of Madagascar looked exactly like the movies to me) the rise of Blender has made 2d animations seem outdated to many. Especially since people can make stuff like that Pixar/Dreamworks movie that was never made.
It’s very interesting to see where the future is, but given I’ve seen revisionism on Flash I think it’s important to remember that it was yet another huge culture snuffed out by the centralization of the internet and being tied to a company that doesn’t like its userbase.
https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/image-4.png?w=525

2026-06-07 23:21:08 UTC

The sad state of iOS fediverse clients
I haven’t written a post on the fediverse in a while for many reasons. In all honesty, the fediverse is at the stage where it’s not really growing, and if anything, it might be slowly shrinking. Many of the e-celebs have gone to greener pastures for more clout, namely X/Twitter and Instagram, while the Mastodon side of the network is competing with Bluesky on who can build the more optimized hugbox. I try not to look at whatever the Mastodon side is getting up to because it always involves their server admins and userbase trying to mimic the worst features of Bluesky. By that I mean reply gating (disabling replies Bluesky/X style, many Mastodon users want this) and quote gating (disabling quotes) under the guise of “SOME REPLY GUY MADE ME FEEL A CERTAIN WAY ONLINE“, wanting centralized blocklists under the guise of “think of the children/protected groups”, and more network breaking features.
I’m getting old and burnt out, I could care less about what goes on in the Mastodon side of the network 9 times out of 10 these days. I don’t want to participate in a social group where the entire social contract is “don’t make me feel some type of way” only to find groups vanishing from my list because of some silly feud nobody wanted to talk to me about. The Mastodon side of the fedi is for the people who feel some way about replies, and I am not that demographic. I’ve also seen how it inevitably ends up, Bluesky is doing so badly that they’re trying to ape Reddit now. On top of that, its failed to influence the public because of its containment site feel, and the Mastodon side of the network I feel is the same way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KKbdErJkiY
To me and others who still use the fedi, what keeps it around is the “small forum” feel it has, and the ability to avoid the speed gif posting horde or endless grift culture war on Twitter. That’s honestly why I still use it, I know people there.
But at the same time, sometimes it’s impossible to avoid everything wrong with the internet and a community. If you go to any nerdy place like an arcade or con, you’ll see “those” flags everywhere and some 6 foot guy towering over you wearing an egirl outfit. If you go into the tech field, you’ll find some Red Hat developer gimping X11 and telling you that the fork is done by “fascists” and manufacturing fud that would make 00s Microsoft look like a joke. If you download a program that’s Free and Open Source, there’s no managers telling the internet tough guys to knock it off. Go to any furcon, and you will see flags and posters in the windows. Maybe plushes.
Which leads me to the topic of this post: the sad sad state of iOS fediverse clients.Why would you buy an iPhone anyway?
Lately, some people I know on fediverse have been moving towards buying iOS devices, and they’re not alone. A 2023 post on XDA-Developers (a site that used to be known for Android hacking when that was allowed) was lamenting how iOS won over the casual users. Part of this has to do with the fact that green bubbles (texts from Android) give women the ick. There’s surveys and weird ads from phone companies seething about this. On top of that, iOS devices are a status symbol for some people. Even if owning an iPhone with a cracked screen is the phone version of a clapped-out Nissan with missing bumpers and dents, iPhone users will rather own that then dare touch an Android phone.
I remember a story an IT guy told me about one such Mac user back in the day. He was given a PC to do work on, and he demanded a Mac. When his Mac was delivered, the IT guy was shocked to discover that he hadn’t even set his PC up to merely check his e-mail. That’s right, this guy would not even bear the shame of having to check his e-mail on a PC like a filthy plebeian. The difference between now and then, is that now iPhones are the “default” phone for numerous people, with Android being in the realm of “weird tech nerd” and “broke people”.
But with this in mind, Android had some cool features, like being able to run custom ROMs, run your own APKs/software, and being cheap. The problem is, you can’t run custom ROMs on your own Android phones anymore, and trying to find one that can is like hacking a game console. “Okay, you need THIS version, and it’s gotta be running a firmware before 3.55 (and you can’t downgrade it), and it has to be THIS revision, and it can’t be the Verizon model, and you have to do this song and dance to unlock the phone’s bootloader (NOT the SIM slot)” is a common thing I hear on forums.
Now you need to buy a Pixel (and not the Verizon model), load a custom ROM on it, and then you have spotty access to banking apps (only if you install Google Play Services). Load any other custom rom like LineageOS or GSI roms, and you will lose access. You’ll also have to really play around with crazy stuff like Magisk if you want to root your phone and whatnot. Gone are the days of buying a $150 Chinese octa-core phone and rooting it with Kingo.
Android phones are still cheap new, but I think a lot of people end up buying used iPhones anyway. To add to that, older iPhone models seem to get cleared out through Straight Talk around here, and if I had $200 I could buy an iPhone 13 locked to them for a cheap development device, new even. Or I could get some refurbished iPhones from Micro Center, or if I’m really desperate buy an iPhone SE.
But more importantly, the big deal breaker for many is that Google is deciding to kill Android as a free OS. Google is going to lock down running unsigned APK files, unless you either do some crazy ritual involving waiting 24 hours, or using ADB to load the APK file. While websites are complaining and protesting, I know that what’s going to happen is Google will stick their fingers in their ears and not be able to hear you. Soon, installing APKs on your phone will be to normies the same thing as a bad hacking scene from a movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25XyWhfpSiM
Essentially, what this means is that Android is just an iPhone where you’re chasing different methods to run your own apps, where you don’t have any of the social credit iPhone users have, and you can get them for free with a new line at the MetroPCS store. There’s also a very real bugginess on Android phones that seemed to get better for a while, only to get worse again with a perceived notion that in the Apple world, it “just werks”. Naturally, this stuff is making some people reconsider Android.
But either way regardless on your stance on the iOS issue, there’s an elephant in the room: all the iOS Fediverse clients SUCK!The dire state of iOS fediverse clients
My mom’s iPhone SE2 data quit working for a while until I reloaded iOS completely, so I decided to try using it with some fediverse clients to experiment as people I knew on fedi had decided they were going to get iPhones. I had no idea how bad things on the iOS side were until I tried it.
When one searches for fediverse on iOS, one will find official apps for PixelFed and Mastodon, some Lemmy apps, Metatext (which is abandoned), and an app called Ice Cubes which apparently doesn’t work on anything but Mastodon for the most part.
Metatext seemed to work when I was messing with my mom’s old iPhone SE2, but it had another issue. Metatext is straight up abandoned. While it means the instance I’m using likely isn’t blocked, it did have an instance blocklist for some older instances. On top of that, there’s a fork called Feditext…but it’s only in Test Flight and has an even larger blocklist hardcoded into the app as a bloom filter.
In 2023, I had no interest in iOS, but I made a post about the problem with this blocklist and what this behavior means for open source. Essentially, the post was about the internet tough guy I saw FOSS having at the time. I think everything I’ve said there is true, with the exception that things are even worse than I had imagined back then.
The other problem is that in the realm of Apple, somehow everything has to cost money app wise. While on Android you might just see ads or a donation box, on iOS you see apps where you have to pay money to upload an image to a post or create a poll. Yes, you read that right, you need to pay for basic features that everything includes. So you’ll waste your time downloading and logging into an app that is pretending to be free.
There are also quite a few Misskey specific clients on the app store. If your instance runs Misskey these might be good, but there’s a HUGE problem here. Misskey does NOT use the same API as Mastodon instances. Most fediverse servers will implement a variant of the Mastodon API, but vanilla Misskey doesn’t. Only forks based on Calckey/Firefish do, such as Sharkey.
On top of that, with how the Mastodon API is set up, many apps will break in different ways when run on instances emulating the API, such as Pleroma or Mitra. This is a huge problem with Pleroma in particular as Pleroma implements features such as emote reacts and it’s own special chat system.
With how dead iOS fediverse apps are, it seems as if the only real way to use the fediverse on iOS is to use whatever web client there is. Web clients are jankier, slower, and buggier than using a dedicated app in many cases from experience. At best they’re jank that only works on Mastodon, at worst they’re written by people who will sabotage their software to own an enemy and gain upvotes on their 6-user instance. It might not be as bad as XMPP clients are on iOS, but it’s kinda bad. The bigger problem: the Apple Taxes
But there’s one other problem stopping development of better fediverse client, the multiple taxes Apple imposes on developers. Everyone knows about the best-known Apple taxes: the fees on microtransactions and the $99 a year fee needed to publish iOS apps. But there’s a lesser known one that’s just as nasty.
With Android, aside from the long-standing lax attitude towards development (that’s soon to die like Custom ROMs did), there’s also the fact that you can download the SDK and run it on any old PC. With the iOS world, you need to buy a supported Mac. Apple also doesn’t play around, not only do you need one running a supported macOS version, but there’s also no more hackintoshing. Even if you did hackintosh a mac with the “turn an Optiplex from ewaste into a Mac” guides from Tonymacx86 back in the day, Apple also blocks you from using developer accounts with one.
Oh, and newer macs can be iCloud locked just like iPhones infamously have been, and a lot of eBay listings for a suspiciously cheap mac will say “IC locked”. Those macs are merely parts donors at that point. Anytime you bring this up, Apple fans will also tell you to Give It Back. This also serves to keep the prices of used Macbooks up, as an unlocked one is worth more by far. Unlike a PC with InTune on, you can’t just install Linux or use offline setup to bypass it. That smug face is looking at you, saying in an Andrew Tate voice “YOU’RE BROKE!“
On top of that, as Mac SSDs are soldered, a used Macbook will have an unknown amount of life remaining on an SSD. When a Mac SSD dies, your shiny Macbook goes into the dreaded DFU mode. Imagine having to go through all this soldering nonsense for an NVME you could buy at a Micro Center.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrg7nPG6_UU
So to even develop for iOS and not gamble with a used Mac, you need to either buy a Mac Mini for $500, $600 for a laptop (in June 2026 prices), or pay money to use someone else’s Mac.
This major problem means that so far, iOS Fediverse app development has been in the hands of whoever can afford a Mac (or is given it by work). This also means it ends up in the hands of specific crowds, hence the blocklists baked into the software that you see Android apps without.
This means for the most part, until things change iOS clients are always going to be in a weird purgatory of broken jank at best, and unusable for anyone except Mastodon.social (and their allies) at worst. But do you think the person with omnicause stickers on a Macbook is going to care?
Of course, with the $599 MacBook Neo and more people on the network using iPhones, maybe there will be a motivation to improve. Who knows.
#ai #apple #apps #fediverse #iphone #pleroma #tech #technology
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2025-05-28 05:26:20 UTC

When rot is worse than a shutdown: The sad state of PC Call of Duty
Recently, a post I made discussing how games like Counter Strike or UT99 still are either playable or have communities went viral. I had many interesting responses to it, and while there were some weird comments many did grasp the point: older games were more moddable and some studios actually care about devs. Maybe I should have put “Multiplayer” in the title because old single-player games literally can never die as long as a single copy exists and is playable/preserved in some way, and there’s a computer out there that can run it (or there’s interest in writing an emulator to do such even if the hardware no longer exists or is rare, as with the Konix Multisystem or 3do m2.) In fact; as translations of games for Japan-only platforms such as the NEC PC-9801 or Bandai Wonderswan have shown, sometimes emulation can unlock a new audience for said games.
What also was mentioned was stuff like Stop Killing Games, something I 100% agree with as many AAA games either choose to force part of the game logic online, or have modes locked behind internet connections. While this trend wasn’t new (TGM: Ace needs a XBL Gold account for many modes while PSO on the OG Xbox needed a gamertag to play offline!), it’s ramped up with the rise of “cloud” stuff for online gaming. The Crew is a notorious example, along with NFS 2015, but even Call of Duty Zombies needs online for major functions of maps to function such as locking easter eggs behind a connection and this interesting video I found recently demonstrates this.
But what could possibly be worse than an online shutdown? What could be worse than a game that requires online connections to play either due to arbitrary restrictions the developers coded in or “cloud” connections? It’s a game that is literally unsafe to play online and I don’t mean that in an exaggerated way either.Call of Duty and a brief history of the technical flaws
Call of Duty is a very weird franchise in many ways. It’s what happens when a company who only cares about money hits it big, only for the cracks to show quickly despite its popularity. Call of Duty is a very popular franchise and while part of this has to do with FOMO, the Xbox 360 era (and maybe some of the early next-gen games) held up well in theory.
The difference between Call of Duty and other games I mentioned in the last post, is that Activision absolutely hates their fans on a level only surpassed by Nintendo (in the legal department), without the excuse of having a record of making solid games like Nintendo does. The other difference is that Call of Duty is released in a yearly model reserved for sports games; with every year having a new title released. In fact, the exes for newer Call of Duty titles will have names like “cod23” or “cod22” for their exes and folders; literally being the release year. On top of that, the schizophrenic “3 development studio” model (where every year another dev releases their title) and pursuit of money has led to some very bizarre decisions that are inconsistent from game to game. Due to this, the Call of Duty playerbase is fragmented among different games that people like in particular. Some people like the WWII titles, others like something from the “golden age” of 360 titles from CoD4 to BO2, others like some of the Xbox One/PS4 era titles such as AW, Ghosts, and BO3, and others like the newest CoDs made after MW2019 acted as a reboot of the franchise (sometimes nicknamed the SBMM era).
While many of the core gameplay elements are there, the gameplay elements have shifted so dramatically between titles (think like Sonic or Need for Speed) that each person has their own individual game they love. In an ideal world, this would not be a problem. In fact for older titles like CoD1, 2, 4, and World at War on the PC, there’s even a server list one can use. Players essentially control that game to some degree, as these titles were PC focused games.
In 2009 however, Call of Duty on the PC would suffer a blow it would never recover from. PC Modern Warfare 2 was a straight up console port, with no mods, dedicated servers, LAN play (which was still on consoles), or similar. It was a giant middle finger from Activision to the PC audience, showing they were no longer their audience but rather the Xbox audience was. CoD on the PC would now be a matchmaking-based shooter, relying solely on VAC and maybe reports to get cheaters banned as opposed to the model of servers that worked. There were boycott MW2 campaigns that worked to varying degrees of success, and while people bought it initially over time interest waned. There were projects to replace the Steam matchmaking system in later PC Call of Duty titles with a server list like AlterIWNet, FourDeltaOne, and later IW4x/Xlabs. Every single one of them was shut down except for IW4x, which was designed with redundancy in mind for if this were to happen. Years later, these projects would gain more importance but keep this in mind.
Anyhow, back to 2009. Call of Duty MW2 launched and the cracks began to show. See; Call of Duty has this thing where they would reuse code all the time. The engine of CoD (at least for this era) is based on a heavily modified id Tech 3 engine, which CoD1 ran on. Call of Duty 2 and later titles for a while would run on descendants of this engine (to the point of still using Radiant), and even BO6 has the id Software copyright notice.
Still; the biggest problem with Call of Duty especially early on is the fact that the engine was not very locked down. The sole layer of security with older Call of Duty titles was if the platforms were secure to begin with. The Xbox 360 would get blown wide open with the JTAG hack of 2009, and the PS3 would follow not long after in 2010. VAC on the other hand was a total joke on the PC and there were bypasses being made and allegedly even ways to get other people VAC banned. Call of Duty’s high profile, lack of security (many “mod menus” were fancy GSC (the CoD engine scripting language) scripts), and desire for anyone to “get good” with cheats led to a period in which every Call of Duty title on every platform was “hacked” to death. It’s not uncommon to join a MW2 lobby in the current year and end up with hackers and mod menus, and don’t get me started on the infamous BO2 theater mode exploit years after launch that would run GSC scripts on unmodified consoles.
Activision tried many things to stop the modders on different titles that were new, but left the old ones to be abandoned and overrun with skids. This is maybe because they wanted people to plunk down $60 on BO2 if you wanted your CoD fix but didn’t want to run into xXBluntSmoker420Xx’s Wicked Sick Mod Menu being in use. As these older titles aged, Activision just abandoned them as they continued the eternal war on cheaters on newer titles with better security models. At least in a new CoD title the worst you’ll deal with are aimbotters and similar, which sounds crazy if you didn’t play these titles.
So you might be thinking, what’s the worst that can happen from a cheater on 360-era CoD? On a console, the worst that’ll happen is you’ll get “deranked” and find yourself unable to play online unless you jump into someone’s mod lobby or something to fix your rank (sometimes people have reported having corrupted files that cause an instant crash on Steam). The second worst thing that’ll happen is that your console can get frozen up and you have to reset it, and the third is that some kid will DDoS your internet connection.
On the PC, it’s so much worse it’s unreal.RCE Exploits in your games? It’s more likely than you think
When Activision switched over to a mix of Demonware and Steam for Call of Duty’s network backend on PC, they had no idea of the can of worms they were opening at this point. There were the usual console exploits like mod menus mixed with VAC disablers and whatnot, but the worst was yet to come. In the late 2010s, people began to report having malware installed on their PC from playing Call of Duty titles. This wasn’t just some stuff that a CoD player was saying because he was mad online, oh no this was very much real. There are multiple
different
CVE entries from this period relating to Call of Duty. One of these would be documented by Call of Duty mod developer momo5502 and others, and by the time he wrote about it this exploit was floating around the CoD modder community for a while. This exploit used crafted packets in particular, while another exploited Steam’s auth and another exploits party joining commands. There are more exploits that haven’t had CVEs or only had patches for them, like one for MW3 and the MemberJoin call.
Now I’m no programmer or professional pentester, so I’m not going to talk about the nitty gritty that’s already out there since at least the PoC for one now-patched exploit is on the open internet and it’s safe to assume that other exploits use variants of this. But the crazy part is, all the code reuse bit them as it wasn’t just an exploit for one game but literally years’ worth of titles. There are recent reports on Steam forums of people getting malware dropped while playing Call of Duty titles on the PC version. In fact, this was talked about all the way back in 2018 (after at least one of the exploits was released) with a viral Reddit post by one such person having a RAT planted on his PC thanks to packets targeted towards him. But if this sounds like a “fake” story; this has happened to top streamers playing the game to the point YouTube videos would come out about this scare.
It got to the point where in 2023 Activision had to make an emergency patch after PC players were getting exploited en masse on Modern Warfare 2 thanks to a worm targeting the game to the point Kotaku and others picked up the story. A Steam user even discovered strings relating to modded lobbies in the malware itself.
Essentially; Steam-era Call of Duty titles are vulnerable to some serious exploits that allow your PC to get hacked by someone who wants to take control of your PC and in one dramatic example, a self-spreading worm. Usually this targets streamers, big players, or anyone who makes a skid feel angry online. The exploits are real, and while it’s debatable on if the stream video is kayfabe for clicks or not, the point is Steam-era Call of Duty titles are not safe to play online on the PC in their unmodded form.Mods to the rescue?
Call of Duty is a game that after its sell-by date passes, gets left to rot by Activision. The servers stay up, but playing the game becomes a gambling session. Playing the game online now might get you into a good match, or you’ll get into a match with some kid trying to render a 15-year-old game unplayable because he’s having a bad day or wants to cause chaos. I mean, the entire TF2 cathook fiasco that took forever for Valve to finally stomp out after dragging on for literal years with numerous “save this game” campaigns was a good example of this. Activision could care less, which has led to community members taking matters into their own hands.
Black Ops 3, probably the most popular title in the franchise on Steam for now, has a third-party fix for it. With t7patch, RCE bugs are patched and you can even put a password on your game or make it friends only to reduce the attack surface, and 2.04 even reduces it further by disabling Steam Workshop support (meaning that you have to subscribe to mods first, avoiding possibly malicious mods from being downloaded).
The situation is much more mixed for older titles. There are two major modding groups for older Call of Duty titles, AlterWare and Plutonium. Plutonium is the most successful of these, covering Black Ops 1, 2, MW3, and World at War (for when the servers go down for that like they did a while back). AlterWare (covering AW, MW2, and Ghosts) is much less popular due to some players moving back to the hacked dumpster fire of vanilla MW2 (thanks to the Xlabs shutdown) and the relative unpopularity of Ghosts and AW (it’s a shame because AW is really fun…and I’d love to not play on a P2P connection from Venezuela (and I’m not joking) on the PS3). Both of these are probably the best way to play older Call of Duty titles on the PC not only due to the RCE exploits, but also due to the fact that they run with a server list model. In fact, Plutonium has more people than the Steam versions do right now, and it’s the only way to play BO1 online once the server payments end for the few remaining servers on GameServers!
There are two major problems with this. The first is that due to how these mods work, the playerbase is rather split between people playing the Steam versions, and the mods with server lists. The second problem is that these mods have had a shaky legal history.
A few years back, Activision shutdown one of the modding groups, Xlabs, with legal action. There are different people who had different theories for why this happened but the big theories at the time were:
XLabs was literally linking to pirated game torrents.
The devs were Patreon-walling a BO3 PC client, which to add insult to injury wasn’t even GPL licensed but worse: a “proprietary” license.
Modding BO3 on the PC is also a touchy topic given that BO3 on the PC is the only CoD title made after CoD WaW to allow for full player control of the game, and the servers are still up. The motivation for modding the other PC titles had to do mostly with wanting dedicated servers and mods.
XLabs was not verifying that anyone using their patch and servers legally owned the game.
This led to several major events. AlterWare would pick up the mantle from XLabs, but due to the panic over XLabs and its shutdown the player count for IW4x decreased even with the fallbacks that allowed it to survive the shutdown. Meanwhile AW and Ghosts were unpopular on the PC as it was so this acted as a killing blow to those two games on the PC. Unlike XLabs, AlterWare does not link to pirated games and instead instructs you how to install the mod side by side with your Steam install. The bigger thing is that Plutonium would force you to link a Steam account to play online that showed you owned those games. This seems to have worked because neither project has been shutdown yet (and to be fair nobody cares about AW or Ghosts on PC, unfortunately).
The fear seems to have subsided for now about Activision shutting down these modders as they seem to be focused more on suing cheat developers and trying to get people to play Black Ops 6. Furthermore, what led up to the bnetd lawsuit and controversy over that was the inability to verify that anyone using their software owned the games as the CD Key was the copy protection measure of the time. By making sure that anyone on Plutonium owns Black Ops 2, this solves this problem and this has likely led Plutonium to stay active. If these servers would go down, it would be a massive loss for anyone trying to play this game online today.
It’s also why it’s unlikely you will see similar mods for SBMM-era Call of Duty titles for a good period of time, because most of the legal action against private servers took place when these games were still at their peak. Trying to make a mod to play any SBMM-era Call of Duty title online with servers instead of SBMM is just as legally risky as making AlterIWNet was when MW2 was still popular. Maybe in a few long years you might see these, but by then will anyone care? I don’t think people will be as nostalgic for MWII as they were for MW2.It’s why user control of online games is important
The patches for these titles are not because of Activision, but rather despite them. Activision has left these titles out on a vine to die and they could care less. In fact, the saddest long-running joke about how Activision simply couldn’t care less is that the digital prices for old Call of Duty titles are still $60. Black Ops 2 in particular is still $60, along with later titles like Ghosts, AW, Infinite Warfare, and more. They could care less about lowering the price on a 2012 game that is so old that we’re living in the year it takes place in (2025!)
This game has serious exploits that remain unpatched unless something so blatant and drastic like “malware that self-spreads” is written for it. Even the theater mode exploit remained unpatched for a while. Activision just doesn’t care, but if this were an older game you could imagine how there’d be a community patch already and a serverside patch too by now. Yet because the control of the player was removed, these exploits are only fixed with a third-party patcher or an entire infrastructure designed for the sole purpose of escaping the closed system.
The point is; user control of online games isn’t just important because of shutdowns or matchmaking chugging because of a low player count. It’s because there are things a lot worse than shutdowns, like having your computer exploited by malware.

2024-12-20 02:57:40 UTC

The NiCD and NiMH batteries killing 90s laptops (just one way they rot from the inside)
Recently, my NEC PC-9821Nr15 laptop had a component burn out, either due to a loose screw in the chassis somewhere or age. Essentially, I have to hold the power switch for seconds to make the laptop power on now and stay on. Unfortunately, after tearing down the laptop, I was unable to see a “burnt” component. I have no schematics of this laptop, and I don’t think many 90s laptops have leaked boardview schematics or something like even some low-end Lenovo will these days. Nor do they have test carts, in depth documentation, and even hidden diagnostic modes like many 80s computers did. If it breaks, your best bet is to buy another. So I bought a sight unseen for the most part, PC-9821Nr166. Unfortunately, this one had hidden damage, and the damage was barely hidden in the low-quality, low-resolution YAJ images. It was sold as a junk as-is item that might or might not have leaks, and quite frankly I should have paid closer attention.
Essentially, I wasted $100 on a parts donor laptop with a trashed motherboard, good LCD screen, and a dead battery that is probably leaking inside of its case. But let’s take a look at what is inside a random 90s laptop, because I want this to be a PSA. The laptop was sold as powering on to a PASSWORD DESTROYED screen. For those of you who don’t know PC-98s, that is one of the first screens you get when turning on a later PC-9821 along with SET SOFTWARE DIP SWITCH, this is to indicate that the password has been reset on models with passworded BIOSes. However, after a few attempts at powering on the laptop would power on to a solid BEEP with no video out, and then nothing.
I tore the laptop apart to see what was wrong with it, and what I found was horrific. So, let’s take a look inside. The first sign of trouble was seeing corrosion in the HDD bay, and on one of the screws. This was hidden damage, buried below the modem board on this model.
The keyboard had rust below it, common on Japanese PCs…mixed with corrosion.
Inside, the NiMH standby battery had not only leaked, but it crawled through the multi-layer traces to the RAM slot and other parts of the board. The Lithium VL2330 battery had not leaked, as these never leak. In fact, the NiCD leakage was so bad that the connector had fused itself to the socket!
Essentially what I was left with, was a nice PC-98 shaped object: a dead laptop that was only good for parts. Maybe some of the chips would be good for decapping and I’m sure the YMF288 would be a nice chip to salvage for a project, but for now it’s a useless brick that only exists as parts for another PC-98 laptop.
The problem is, this is not exclusive to PC-98 laptops or NEC laptops. This is a common issue that affected numerous 90s laptops. See, 90s laptops loved to use NiCD or NiMH batteries as either the main system battery, a CMOS battery, or as a backup battery. The end result is a barely functional or nonfunctional laptop with serious issues caused by leakage. On Thinkpad 755 laptops, the battery leaks onto the keyboard membrane. On others, it corrodes the entire board. There are multiple
vogons
threads about this very issue affecting their laptops too. Due to multi-layer PCBs, a lack of schematics, and niche interest, there isn’t much that can be done to save these laptops other than to remove the NiCD batteries if they have not leaked too badly, and consider yourself lucky. If a NiCD battery is needed, you can always do what the pinball guys did and wire in a blocking diode with a lithium battery or something. No really, you can find tons of videos of pinball guys doing this to the simpler PCBs used there:
With that being said, that’s not talking about the capacitor issues on old laptops too that kill them and leak as well, or rotting plastics, or vinegar syndrome. In other words, 90s laptops are rotting themselves from the inside in multiple ways!
With a PC-98 desktop, or PC desktop of the era, this is not a problem. A Socket 5/7 system from the same era will probably keep working for a long period of time. They don’t have rotting plastics, rotting LCDs, or leaky caps. They just werk. If the PSU is normal/standard, you can even grab a generic PSU or adapter if it blows out, and some later PC-98 desktops like the ValueStar and Ra series do this. A PC-9821Ra20 or V200 can be upgraded with an ATX PSU from Micro Center, and the same goes with many PCs using AT or ATX PSUs.
Essentially if you don’t hate yourself and don’t want parts machines, buy a desktop and save yourself the hassle.