What kind of abuse are you talking about? I doubt you’re talking about a 51% attack, which is incredibly hard. I’m guessing you are talking about social engineering, like where some scammer gets a poor soul to leak their bitcoin wallet or something like that.

In these cases, yes a centralized payment system can be useful, because the authority in charge can just reverse transactions that are deemed fraudulent or the result of a scam. But that same authority can do things like ban all payments to Steam for porn games (like the recent Visa Mastercard drama). That same authority can say “GrapheneOS and Pinephone users aren’t allowed to make NFC payments”.

In cases like these it would be nice for there to be an alternative to centralized systems, at least for those technologically literate enough to use these alternative systems.

they’re not controlling her, they’re trying to provide an alternative that she’ll stick with

And authoritarianism can be more efficient than democracy. Doesn’t mean I want authoritarism though

It sounds like you assume that if offline access was a fundamental right, the government would not only respect it, but the offline access would also be private by default. I think that is a bold assumption, but I think we’ll just have to disagree because it’s impossible to know what the government would actually do. I just know that society tends towards efficiency, and offline methods are simply inefficient, so I expect it to go away in the future, unless there was some fundamental reason why offline access was necessary (and not indirect reasons, like the right to privacy).

I think at this point it’s also good to revisit your original comment at the root of this thread so we can clarify what exactly you are asking for. It sounds like you are asking for two things: for offline methods to interact with government services and utilities (in other words, things necessary for survival), and for offline methods to use commercial services, like games.

What is the reason you want offline access to government services? Surely it’s not privacy, since you usually have to provide your government ID to interact with the service. My guess is that you want to avoid giving data to commercial entities, and also avoid interaction with commercial entities, like Microsoft. Your primary concerns are third-party data collection and boycott rights. So it sounds like you don’t necessarily want offline access, you want to be able to interact with government services without any other dependencies.

But the postal service is just one example I brought up. There are tons of other dependencies in the background. I’m positive most governments use Microsoft Word. They’ll be using it to draft the paperwork that they send to you. They probably scan and OCR your letters for archival, and their scanning software is probably commercial and collects data. If your goal is elimination of external dependencies, then offline access is just the tip of the iceberg. And just because these dependencies are hidden, doesn’t mean one can ignore them. If that was the case you could just send your documents to a friend and ask them to send it to the government for you, and ask them not to tell you how they did it. That way you wouldn’t know if a commercial service was involved!

OK and as for offline methods to use commercial services, like games, I think in this case your goal is privacy. However I think this demand is fairly unreasonable as well. Obviously there are certain services that require online access, like real-time chat applications. The problem is that any company can construct artificial reasons for why they need online access, or even data collection. Youtube can say that they require personal data to curate your feed. You already mentioned that data minimization laws were ineffective. I don’t see how you can reasonable expect companies bend over backwards to provide offline access, when it’s far simpler for them to just make up a reason for why they need online access, or why they need your personal data.

I should clarify since I realize I got a bit mixed up in earlier comments: when I argue that privacy should be a fundamental right, I don’t expect to force all companies to follow some vague definition of “data minimization”. I just want to make sure the government can’t ban encryption and anonymizing services like Tor. In other words I’m not forcing companies to perform certain actions, I’m preventing certain consumer actions from being criminalized. I think this is much more realistic of a goal. And I believe that as long as encryption and anonymization is possible, then certain individuals will want it, and certain companies and groups will provide it. Anti-trust is important here too.

Of course the market for privacy is tiny, but that’s simply the reality. Not many people care unfortunately, and it’s unrealistic to force companies to care about something few people care about. However, the good news is that some people do still care. There are FOSS re-writes of some of the games you mentioned. For Age of Empires theres 0.A.D and OpenAge. I think this is the best one can hope for.

I believe they are talking about this: https://dev.to/cypheroxide/why-i-left-hyprland-52fd

Nobody expects things to never break, but stability is a spectrum and clearly hyprland is less stable than the average. That’s the main conclusion I got from the post at least. And less stability means more time needed to fix. Nothing you can do about that aside from switching to a different DE

That is an incredibly detailed reply. Thanks.

Not in the case at hand. But yes, I do believe offline ppl are entitled to the same benefits w.r.t. public services. E.g. our human right to healthcare and education is not preconditioned on being online. It’s inalienable.

The problem with offline is that it’s more expensive, and often less convenient. I don’t see a fundamental reason why offline communication must be available. Let’s assume that your country added a fundamental rule (for example for the USA this would be a constitutional amendment) saying that all goverment services should collect the minimum amount of data necessary to function. So they would have to support things like Tor, to avoid collecting IP addresses, etc. Would this be enough for you to waive the offline requirement? Because the world is always marching towards more efficient communication, and an offline requirement could hold society back for little benefit.

Another factor, for example, would be that if I boycott Microsoft and the gov uses MS for email, I effectively lose my boycott privileges if email is the only means of communicating that the gov accepts.

I fear this is unavoidable. If you depend on certain services (like interacting with the government), then you simply can’t fully boycott that service or any dependency of that service. For example, if the government only accepted post mail, you would not be able to fully boycott the postal service. But I feel like your idea of boycotts is also too extreme. If you want to boycott Microsoft, and all local grocery stores used Azure somewhere in their infrastructure, would you stop buying groceries? I see boycotting as simply doing your best to avoid a company’s products.

An analog mechanism is always needed as an escape from the tyranny of poor design. Without an analog mechanism there is little incentive to implement a good design.

Analog systems need to be designed too. And they can be just as tyrannical, inconvenient, and invasive.

The problem is not lack of possibilities. It’s lack of competency.

Lack of competency is often simply lack of incentive. What incentive does the government have, for providing privacy-friendly services? Of course, they have incentive for the opposite. Tracking users gives them power, and makes their job easier.

Likewise, if they have incentive to track people, why would they provide an offline option, which is both more expensive and bypasses their tracking measures.

Based on your entire reply, it sounds like what you mainly want is privacy. It’s an important distinction, because I reckon that it will be easier to ask the government to enshrine privacy as a fundamental right, rather than offline access as a right, since offline access is much more expensive to provide.

yes but the problem is having to spend time to fix it in the first place. On a more stable de/compositor like Plasma or Sway, you won’t have these problems

how is this related to NixOS? Once you upgrade your hyprland version on NixOS (which you’ll have to do eventually, at least for security fixes), you have to worry about the config breaking just the same

Rollback means you still have to fix it later, and often it’s longer than a 5 min fix. The post is about the cost/effort of tinkering vs just using a stable system and accepting the lack of certain features

Even with docker, things can get complicated. Like if you use *arr stack for your plex library, but you manually copied in some extra subtitle files, or tweaked the descriptions of some media. Now you have to find those customizations so you can migrate them to the jellyfin library

The steam deck might make KDE the most popular

Sorry for necro but your ideology is fascinating. It sounds like you believe offline people deserve the same benefits as online people. Why do you believe this? Why shouldn’t the world move towards an expectation of online existence?

If I were to guess, your goal is not offline existence, but privacy, and doing things offline guarantees privacy, the same way that high-security environments use airgapped machines. But that’s just a means to an end. There are other ways of achieving privacy, like using vetted open source software that take privacy seriously, for example a fediverse client running in Tor browser. Privacy does not necessitate being offline. Going to a cafe to download articles to read offline, is not really offline either. It’s just an intermittent internet connection