@ngraham, @lydia, with mandatory backdoors on the horizon, freedom-respecting software will soon lose its purpose, so perhaps it would be for the best for you to just disband the KDE community on its 25th birthday, as a gesture of hopelessness if nothing else…

The EARN IT anti-encryption bill is still on track, and the recent on-device content scanning announcement from Apple made it pretty clear that it will most likely pass, and the “savior of democracy” Biden is, of course, doing absolutely nothing about it…

Every one of our glimmers of hope has turned out to be a mirage, it seems. The vast majority of Free Software has failed to find a sustainable funding model, decentralization looks more and more like a pipe dream, Snowden’s leaks have changed nothing, Mozilla has become an anti-user Google subsidiary, cryptocurrency has been co-opted by the 1%, Hong Kong has fallen, and now the West is openly abandoning freedom and privacy…

And then there’s the deafening silence… I mean, this bill is so bad that I would expect everyone who cares about privacy (and especially developers of software that advertises itself as privacy-respecting such as KDE, Matrix, Elementary OS, etc.) to put up conspicuous banners explaining the bill, its implications, and how to take action (remember SOPA?) on their blogs and websites, and yet there’s nothing… Even privacyguides.org doesn’t mention it anywhere…

I think it’s about time to just accept that there is no hope. We’re done. These are the last days of human freedom.

@ngraham, don't worry, I will soon no longer feel safe to pester you with my concerns… Once the West normalizes mandatory backdoors, surveillance self-defense will become a thing of the past for us poor souls living in not-so-democratic countries, especially if AMD and Intel cave in and let governments to openly use Intel ME and AMD PSP to break into people’s computers…