

What’s the encryption and signing on a hardware level for? I mean dependent on what’s that good for and who controls it, it’s trusted computing, or treacherous computing as Stallman calls it…
(I mean it’s not working out great for GrapheneOS either. Back in the day I had a phone I owned, with privacy features added and alternative background services so I had a pretty much Google-free experience. These days it’s all locked down, I hand out my private metadata to Google, can barely ride a train without, or get a discount in the supermarket. I can’t do backups and I’m f***ed if I want to cross a border to a more restrictive country because these guys are in on it as well. They’re probably going to use it to limit what I can install. And more and more manufacturers lock down bootloaders etc and I thought we were past this. Graphene itself advised me to switch to proprietary code in the name of security and they’ll have a look at the code later, once Google eventually releases it. All of this is due to (or related to) these security measures working way too well and that’s also why they’re being used. I wish my phone didn’t have a TPM but a simple disk encryption like LUKS on Linux instead. And I don’t see many reasons why we should copy these very bad dynamics.)
I think the overall idea is nice, though. We had these project ideas to just plug in a box and be self sufficient in the self-hosting community since the SheevaPlug. Or the FreedomBox. There are some hardware projects as well like the Home Assistant Green or back in 2019 they tried to sell a Pioneer-FreedomBox. None of those match exactly with your proposal, but I think they’re pretty close. Maybe get in touch with them and see if you can participate in a new iteration, or read about their past experience with the proposed target audience. Especially FreedomBox seems like a good fit to me. They’re not very loud, but afaik still around. And they’re Free Software nerds, which seems to align with your idea, minus the locking it down and transferring control to other parties via the TPM.



Always a breeze once I go to a music festival or bigger event and there’s all the diversity with the German language. I think there are many places like that. And even in the larger metropolitan areas you can tell the difference between Cologne, Düsseldorf and the Ruhrgebiet and the people slightly to the east or north of it. At least where they grew up because all of it mixes in the cities and people will also commute 1h to work. So I think it happens in villages, cities and everywhere. It’s not entirely the same, though. Seems to be more nuance here than proper dialect, but people from 3 cities away will occasionally tell me on how my grammar has some funny peculiarities.