cecilkorik

@cecilkorik@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨History is rewritten by victors. How can I find books about actual history?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  There is always going to be some level of interpretation. You are looking for an absolute truth that, while it may theoretically exist, cannot be reliably perceived through a human lens, which you are guaranteed to have at least 1 of (yourself), and almost certainly 2 (the source), and maybe many, many, many more in between.

  Imagine you had a time machine that could bring you back into whatever time you’re interested so you can watch it unfold first-hand. Ok, great. But do you trust your eyes? Did you see everything that happened? Even if you can invisibly go and explore the aftermath. Even if you can go back to the same point 100 times, 1000 times, and meticulously detail everything you find. Do you now have the perfect and unambiguous truth? Of course not. You can make mistakes, you can misunderstand. Even our eyes lie to us. Even our brain misremembers things. Different people using the same time machine to travel to the exact same point in time may see what happens in an entirely different way, may see things that you did not see. Who’s right?

  I know you think you’re looking for the absolute unvarnished truth, but you are chasing a phantom. Your goal is not realistic. At some point you have to arbitrarily accept and define what errors and limitations the sources you’re drawing your understanding from might have, and attempt to make your own interpretation of what the facts actually are. You will never know what really happened with absolute certainty. Absolute certainty is its own kind of myth and there’s some very fundamental metaphysical reasons for that. You’re not going to find a magic textbook of trustworthy history that solves that problem.

  Understanding history is a process that requires connecting many different pieces of variously flawed contexts and information to paint your own, interpreted but hopefully relatively accurate picture. No matter what book you read, you cannot guarantee its accuracy and it is a fool’s errand to try, but you can continue to try to collect more evidence, more pieces of context, more clues to add more details to your picture. Perhaps you will never be satisfied with the detail of the picture you’ve created, sometimes you will have to throw your whole picture away and start to create a new and different picture on the basis of some details you find that don’t fit. You’re never going to have a perfect picture, but I think a lot of people have managed to create really pretty good ones based on a whole lot of research of many different sources and pieces of detail, not just written records alone but cultural references, archaeological artifacts, scientific analysis, and sometimes just assumptions about basic human behavior. You just have to learn who and what you can trust and how far you can trust them. Both as sources, and as interpreters. And you are always welcome to argue you own interpretation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Were these accounts hacked? How does one prevent it from happening?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Basic rules: Have a strong password. Don’t reuse that password on other sites because it’s more likely one of those sites will get hacked than your account will get hacked. For sites that support it, enable 2FA/MFA codes or email verification. Keep your email accounts locked down like Fort Knox, since Email can be used to password reset just about anything you have, usually with little difficulty.

  That said, if the accounts had no activity for 2 years, they were probably created intentionally for the purpose of spamming/selling. They may have been saving them to see if the value goes up. They might have just recently been sold to a spammer and activated in their spambots.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are some old games that are hard to revisit, because a more modern and superior version exists?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  OpenXcom is a fantastic reimplementation of the original, and has some even more fantastic mods. I agree if you’ve never played it before and aren’t too familiar with old school “Nintendo-hard” games, it can be extremely challenging even on the lowest difficulty. Fun fact, the original had a broken difficulty selection and reset to the “easiest” difficulty after reloading any save game, so most people never truly experienced a full run at any difficulty above “easiest”, so that’s just naturally perceived as the way the game was meant to be balanced. Don’t be ashamed of playing on the easiest difficulty or using “cheat” mods if that’s what makes it playable for you. There’s nobody to judge you but yourself and what matters is that you’re having fun. And it is a ridiculously fun and replayable game, to me at least.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is this true? Software companies had diversity quotas to meet, and realized it was easier to turn autistic men into women than it was to turn women into software engineers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Given the current state of the world, it’s easiest to just assume that literally anything anyone is saying about anything DEI related is probably just pure fucking falsehoods, like everything else spewing out of MAGA.

  Even in the unlikely event you do accidentally dismiss one slight half-truth in the mountain of lies, you can rest assured that it probably wasn’t as meaningful or widespread as they are trying to make it seem.

  You are being lied to. The lies are repeated and relentless to batter you until you accept them. They’re still lies though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the term "Apotheon" an ancient term?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Not sure if it’s a real word or not, or some conjugation of a real word, but it’s probably connected to or inspired by the Ancient Greek apotheos (literally apo=from, theos=god) found in its most common derivation today into apotheosis. Hope that helps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wait, why is the White House using Starlink to ‘improve Wi-Fi’?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Merchandising, merchandising! Where the real money from the coup is made!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would "banning encryption" even work in practise?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not only obvious, it’s already done worldwide. [Deep packet inspection] evolved into HTTPS inspection and corporate/enterprise firewalls can detect and hijack attempts to establish encrypted connections already, as a “feature”. So do government firewalls in totalitarian countries. Of course they (probably) can’t do this secretly and transparently, because of the man-in-the-middle protections built into SSL, so they simply make the actual encrypted connection themselves on the client’s behalf, and give the client a different encrypted connection signed by their own certificate authority, which they force you to accept.

  In this situation, you have two choices: You accept the certificate, and you accept that the owner of the intermediate certificate will be inspecting your “encrypted” connection. If you don’t accept the certificate, then your connection is blocked and you have to find some other way to encrypt and hide your traffic without it being intercepted, because it won’t let you go direct end-to-end. Usually, at the moment, this is not that hard for the tech-savvy to avoid, it doesn’t even require something as secretive as steganography, it’s usually simply a matter of tunneling through a different protocol or port. Although those approaches are still obvious, and can easily be detected and either blocked in real-time or flagged for investigation after-the-fact if they have any interest in doing something about it. Corporations or countries that want to lock down their networks further can simply block any ports or protocols that would allow such tunneling or inspection-evasion in the first place.

  Deep packet inspection already allows any non-encrypted traffic to be clearly identified. If you don’t want any encrypted traffic to sneak through, you can safely assume anything that can’t be clearly identified is encrypted and block it. Depending on how strict you want to be about it, you start essentially whitelisting the internet to known, plaintext protocols. If it’s not known and plaintext, just block it. Problem solved. Encryption gone, until people start building (possibly hidden) encryption on top of those plaintext protocols, which is inevitable, and then you update your deep packet inspection to detect the encrypted fields inside the plaintext protocol and block them, and the back-and-forth battle continues.

  Encryption is probably a false panacea against a major state-level adversary anyway, especially if they have plausible access to network infrastructure, but that’s a whole different can of worms and unless you’re a serious revolutionary/terrorist probably beyond the useful scope of most people’s realistic concerns.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would "banning encryption" even work in practise?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You can download a torrent client and start pirating because it’s encrypted. If they wanted to crack down on it, the first thing they need to do is crack down on encryption. If they can see exactly what you’re doing, it’s now possible to easily catch you, with encryption it isn’t.

  Note that this also applies to encryption itself. Once it’s banned, it gets much more difficult to hide the fact that you’re encrypting something. Encrypted data itself has to go into hiding. You have to resort to something like some pretty hardcore steganography which means you need to hide secret encrypted messages in normal-seeming non-encrypted traffic. The problem is that to do this you need to have a sufficient quantity of non-encrypted traffic to hide your secret encryption in without it starting to look suspicious, either due to the unusually massive volume of meaningless “normal” traffic needed to subtly encode the hidden data, or the fact that large amounts of hidden data in small amounts of “normal” data become increasingly obvious as the large number of supposedly “normal” mistakes and errors and artifacts that form the encoded data will suggest some of those variations are not in fact “normal” at all and will indicate that encrypted data is being concealed.

  Governments banning encryption will of course never stop everybody. But it makes it much harder for the people still using encryption anyway and much easier for the people who want to see what they’re doing or at least see who they are. It’s classic “black or white” thinking to assume that because it hasn’t simply stopped encryption it hasn’t worked. This would be a big step that makes things much harder, and even taking small steps to make things slightly harder is an extremely effective tool and it’s become extremely common to try to convince people that these small regressions and erosions are inconsequential and normal even when they are in fact targeted, repeated, relentless and consistently add up to dramatic change over time. The only saving grace we have is that at least some people are simultaneously making the same kind of targeted, repeated, relentless changes for the common good and those can have just as drastic an effect.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Steam is a ticking time bomb.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What a weaksauce article, spends most of the time arguing against itself, and the problem is most of the strawman arguments it sets up to argue against actually win in my opinion. Most of its arguments follow this kind of format:

  I think that 2 + 2 = 5, now I know you might hear that 2 + 2 = 4, but the only thing that says that is thousands of years of math, and we can’t assume that’s going to continue into the future because Valve made a mistake doing math once.

  Finally ends with some vague hypothetical about how even though they admit Valve is pretty good today, but still it will become evil someday because grr capitalism bad.

  Steam is fantastic, they’ve made mistakes yes (Australia’s gaming laws are well known to be crazy for example so that’s not completely Valve’s responsibility) but on the whole they are doing great things and making money while doing it, which is great because a successful and profitable Steam is able to continue to do great things. Making money is not a sin if they do it fairly and ethically, and they do. 30% is a bargain for what they’re providing, especially the devoted audience which they have attracted (completely legitimately), and if you don’t agree it’s worth that 30% you’re welcome to distribute your game literally anywhere else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The mature thing to do would be to tell them something like “I can see that you’re trying and I appreciate that, but I don’t know if I can like or respect you after what you did to my mom and my family. I’ll let you know if that changes but I’m not ready to have you mother me, I can and will cook my own dinner for the foreseeable future.” however be advised this could cause more hurt and lead to escalation because some people can’t handle rejection even when it’s honest and will either desperately seek approval anyway or reject you back. Given what you said about her age she may not even be emotionally mature herself.

  Also you’re under no obligation to be mature about it. You’re allowed to be an asshole if you want. Cheaters and homewreckers and broken family creators are some of the worst things in the world to me. As someone who was raised in a broken home I really have little sympathy for the people who don’t understand that having children is a commitment, not just personally but to their whole relationship. They’re not just possessions you get custody of and get to drag around on your own personal life journey.

  I’m not religious but I think this is one of the things that religion was trying to accomplish by making marriage such a sacred thing and divorce so restricted and children out of wedlock so disapproved of. The “nuclear” family was a secular version of the same principle. Yes, all that had unintended consequences too but if you are not prepared to raise children with a person you should not be having children with them. Yeah, “people change” but your commitments do not. That’s why they’re called commitments. If you’re not going to follow through on your commitments you’d better have some really damn good reason to be causing such lasting damage to your child. It can be justified in some cases, but I think it’s pretty rare that it actually is justified. Children deserve a stable and lasting family environment. I think that’s a big part of why foster care is generally such a disastrous failure too. How do we fix this? I don’t know, but I know it starts with the parents being responsible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  State-sponsored violence, typically.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Authoritarianism is a threat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there anything the internet can't do?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The internet cannot download more RAM into your PC. (Sssh! Don’t tell them!)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What’s an acceptable gender neutral replacement for “techbro”?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah it’s like the guy in Wyoming who passed an anti-trans law saying that it’s not required to use preferred pronouns to refer to somebody and then getting all upset when he was called “madam”.

  Even if there were some woman as hellbent on destroying civilization as these guys, then she’s a techbro. And if she gets mad about being called techbro because she’s a woman? Well, how sad for her. “My heart goes out to you”

  We’re not trying to make them happy. Fuck them, fuck them all. If it makes them mad to be called a “bro” good, that’s a bonus.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nextcloud is self-hostable or paid/managed services and either will work with an Android app that works just fine for me. It will sync whatever you ask it to, if you tell it to sync a whole folder it will sync the whole folder.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who gets all the tariff money about to be collected from US citizens buying products from Canada?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Of course. They will pump and dump that too, over and over again, with your tax dollars in the “reserve” taking the hit each time while they embezzle what will probably eventually be trillions, just wait, they will not stop looting America until there is nothing left to loot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is using MicroSD cards a good way to store data that you can destroy quickly incase an adversary is about to seize control of it?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I absolutely would not count on a snapped in half MicroSD to protect the data that’s on it from someone determined to find out what it was. You don’t even know if you actually managed to break the memory chips themselves or just the connections between them, which with time and patience and the right equipment could be reconnected, and even if the chips are broken a great deal of the data on them will still remain intact, etched in silicon for eternity and vulnerable not only to current technology but also future technology.

  Your goal is turning the data stored on your MicroSD card into a puzzle. A 2 piece puzzle is likely quite solvable even today. To properly vaporize the card and make it actually unreadable you’d likely need to do some experimentation and try things you would potentially have access to in war like fire, gunfire, explosives or corrosive chemicals, some combinations of which may serve to well and truly annihilate any hint of structure. The question is how many tiny pieces can you break that MicroSD card into, if that number is a human-countable or even human-comprehensible number like the number of pieces a document typically gets shredded into, then it’s probably not safe enough to consider it reliably destroyed.

  If people can tape back together shredded documents to get the basic idea of what was written on them, someone can likewise theoretically repair your MicroSD to get a large proportion of the stored data from it if they are absolutely intent on doing so. It’s probably a lot of work, and maybe not even a not-worth-it amount of work depending on how important your data might be, and there might be a substantial amount of data unrecoverable and missing, but it can be done. Unless you make it a puzzle with so many pieces that doing so is mathematically implausible and just as likely to be an incorrect reconstruction of data that might say anything the reconstructor imagines it does, without actually giving them any confidence that it is real and correct. The only thing that’s certain is that 2 is probably not a good enough number of pieces to rely on for that to be the case.

  As an alternative to the fire/gunfire/explosives/acid style methods, you might also use sandpaper (would take awhile), or better yet a grinder tool of some sort (dremel, angle grinder, bench grinder) to give yourself some confidence that the card has truly been turned to a pile of arbitrary dust. Even then, I’d still concerns as the data density increases, a single speck of MicroSD dust from a 1TB card shredded into millions of pieces might still contain 1 MB of data – that’s an awful lot of text and even potentially some images if it can be decoded. They really prove surprisingly hard to destroy. Electrical attacks, even Microwave ovens, reportedly have mixed results and don’t sound like reliable approaches either.

  If you can get it to a molten state, that’s your highest confidence method. Silicon has a melting point of 1,414 °C, good luck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should all AI generated images be age restricted?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Let’s just restrict them from everyone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Algorithms are breaking how we think - Technology Connections⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That push and pull is exactly why they’ve been intentionally using them to rot people’s brains. The dumber and more apathetic you can make your users, the more you can monetize them, you first minimize the push so you can maximize the pull. This is not an accidental “quirk” of modern algorithms, it’s part of the design. Money must be maximized at all costs, including the mental health of the users and the stability of society. Money uber alles. The techbros will drive our society into the ground without a second thought if it makes them a few bucks richer. They’re not planning to stay here anyway. We are just a resource to them, and they will exploit us to the fullest to pursue their unachievable techno-utopia fantasies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why are they called “popular girls” if they’re typically not friends with anyone outside their small friend group?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The implication is typically that they’re popular with guys. ie, they’re physically attractive to the opposite sex, they are sex symbols. That’s really what it’s all about. It’s not a two-way label, it doesn’t mean the attraction is necessarily returned. Although it is often assumed and commonly leads to people accusing them of being “sluts” despite not being justified. But on its own it just means that they are the object of desire of many boys: they probably have many suitors, lots of people want to ask them to the dance, etc. That is the way they are considered “popular”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨German thermostat company Tado locks previously free app behind fake paywall, claiming it's "marketing tests"⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  We can helpfully answer that for them by making sure they get sued.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a device to help turn stoppers with an o-ring?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  You could probably 3d print a square or hex shaped thing that has a slot on one end to fit onto the stopper, which will give you a better angle to grip it, work it from side to side or twist it. Wood would be another easy material option to try to make a little tool out of.

  That said if it’s really stuck enough to break the handle, then you’re going to need a new one anyway, and at that point destructive measures and eventual replacement may be your only option. As any mechanic with a blowtorch will tell you about a seized fastener, “it can’t be stuck if it’s liquid”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many UK electrical sockets have an on/off switch next to them?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Many, many big power-smoothing capacitors inside those jumping from 0 to 120V in a microsecond, that’s why. The better-smoothed the power supply, the more capacitors and the bigger the sparks tend to be, although some really high quality ones put most of them behind inrush-current limiters to reduce the sparking, but that can also marginally reduce efficiency. High power electronics are always a bit of a tradeoff. The problem is that capacitors charge and discharge almost instantly in most cases, and when empty they act like a short circuit until they’re filled, so they can create some pretty big sparks, even though the actual energy going in is minuscule by any reasonable measurement. It’s almost like a static shock, huge spark, tiny energy.

  Some motors will also spark badly when disconnected, but the reason is slightly different. They have a huge electromagnetic field which suddenly fills or collapses and that inductance in the coils can draw a lot of amps on startup and generate some pretty high voltages, more than enough to spark across the gap. Like the capacitors, they are very nearly a short circuit until they start moving.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many UK electrical sockets have an on/off switch next to them?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The fuse is actually in the UK plug (the big brick-like thing with the wire on it), not the socket. But yes, it’s a thing, and most of the rest of the world considers it overkill. Also a lot of cheap junky equipment (ironically the stuff where you’d most want the plug) omits the fuse in the plug, go figure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many UK electrical sockets have an on/off switch next to them?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No you can’t. You can lock yourself out, but a typical residential house built to code in North America has a latch handle that always turns from the inside, even when locked, and usually unlocks by doing so to prevent accidental lock-outs. And likewise if the door has a deadbolt, it must have a deadbolt with a handle on the inside. Most other kinds of locks are also easily accessible and removed by hand from the inside. The point is that they can’t require a key from the inside, because if you can’t find the key then you are locked inside and in thick smoke and fire that the key may be impossible to reach. If any egress door requires a key to unlock from the inside it is considered a serious fire hazard and will never pass a code inspection. (Of course, foolish people can still add them later but you can’t prevent stupid and it’s still a fire hazard not to mention impractical)

  These types of building code and fire code rules are typically written in blood. People have died because of this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there the ultimate battery maintainance device?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Chargers for RC model vehicles (car, airplane, helicopter) can do most if not all of that stuff, but you will have to be comfortable with soldering connectors as there is no universal standard connector system for any of the battery types you mentioned, and even standard size 18650/21700 cells are rarely used for RC purposes. The RC hobby has mainly settled on XT60 and its smaller cousin XT30 as the closest you’ll find to a standard, but even within the hobby many batteries use other connectors. Snipping leads and soldering connectors is not an optional skill, the currents involved can be very large and will easily melt a poor connection made with poor skills or some hacky clip-on connector.

  For charging, this is the sort of thing I use, no promises. RC chargers also include a balancing system to allow it to balance different cells across an entire battery pack but you will have to have individual wires junctioned in between each of those cells so it can sense their voltage and top them up as needed.

  Also most RC chargers don’t bother having anything to do with lead acid (automotive style 12V or otherwise), as they are much too high amperage and heavy for any sort of RC use and they use a wildly different charging design and have much more complex health monitoring and maintenance needs. Not recommended for that, use an automotive, marine or off-grid style battery maintainer and repairer for those.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does sunlight through UV-blocking windows warm you less than unfiltered sunlight?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s false. You can literally not only feel heat from, but you can in fact set things on fire with, a completely monochromatic green laser with a wavelength exactly in the middle of the visible spectrum. No infrared, no ultraviolet. Lots of heat transfer. You could do it with an ultraviolet laser too if you were careful enough and could get around ultraviolet’s tendency to destroy molecular bonds completely before they even have a chance to burn chemically. Any light contains a large amount of energy and that’s still true whether it’s infrared, ultraviolet, or somewhere in between.

  Infrared has a special relationship with heat, yes, because of the distribution of blackbody radiation, but “No” is absolutely the wrong answer here. The right answer is “Yes, but… it’s complicated”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would there be any merit in the idea of NATO waging a "benevolent war" (for lack of a better term) against Ukraine?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tell that to Bosnia. NATO can do whatever it sees fit. It’s an organization that operates entirely by consensus. If they have consensus, they can do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to install my own OS on a "smart" TV? Is that a thing?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh absolutely. Smart TVs are completely under the control of the technology and media companies with very little hope for freeing them, except that you can still plug a computer into them to bypass all the “smart” features and just use it as a dumb screen with a smart computer instead. But they always seem to put a few new stumbling blocks in the way of both those options every year. That loophole will eventually get closed, it won’t happen overnight, but they will keep eroding the functionalities and convenience of doing so until few if anyone wants to do that anymore.

  Cars are nearly a lost cause too, except where regulations say they must use some standard like OBD2 for “emissions reasons”, although that is obviously a limited scope and manufacturers try to find any ways they can to sabotage it or otherwise avoid it. Appliances and “smart homes”, all the way down to the light bulbs and LEDs, have plenty of proprietary, locked down, unrepairable technology in them too despite reliable open standards being available. The war for total control over our digital devices is in full swing and there’s no area of our lives from large to small that isn’t a battleground. People need to keep prioritizing the freedom of their devices because once they get these technologies and features entrenched it’s going to be very hard to work around them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it possible to install my own OS on a "smart" TV? Is that a thing?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, they did it with phones too. Android is just Linux. That was one of the main attractions, for me at least.

  At first, many people and groups supplied their own phone OSes. There was a whole thriving community ecosystem. Then they started to make it really hard, locking bootloaders and including critical pieces of hardware that didn’t or couldn’t have open source drivers (look up WinModems for a very early example of this technique, it remains really effective) or otherwise required extremely convoluted methods to access and the phone might function marginally without some of these fully functional, but at least you could still install a custom ROM on it if you were stubborn enough.

  But even that wouldn’t last. Nowadays they’ve made it literally impossible to defeat the security on most phones, in the name of keeping hackers and criminals out, but really a big part of their motivation is blocking these pirate OSes that let you actually control the hardware and software in your phone, doing criminally nefarious things like stopping them from downloading ads (the horror!) and preventing them from funneling all your data and activities back to Big Brother (how rude!) and worst of all updating it with modern functionality after they’ve declared it “obsolete”. The goal going forward is to sell you things that you don’t and can’t control, so they can shut them down or make them gradually more and more useless and make you buy new ones forever. They want you to have a subscription for everything including physical objects without realizing that you’ve been forced to subscribe to their regularly-scheduled-disposable-device-replacement-plan for no actual reason.

  They’re coming for computers too, or at least they’ll try. They want control of everything we interact with. For profit, mostly, but I wouldn’t rule out other motives. It’s a powerful thing when you have control of everything people see and do.