If the cable coming through the wall is coaxial like the pictire OP posted, that’s exactly what’s happening. New installs will be FTTP and a lot of networks have been upgraded, but there’s still plenty of areas using DOCSIS over coax.

…du

You mean my best friend Plank?

They’d get bored after a time and Charles Foster Offdensen would have to step in.

In fairness, he’d vote for me.

Not that I’ve seen and I’d take what Purism say with a grain of salt: they’ve acted like pretty shitty gatekeepers themselves. Nothing they mentioned in the article seems too egregious in truth and they’re exaggerating the scale of it: Play Store app DRM exists already, and the restrictions on browser-downloaded apps they mention can be bypassed (albeit by having to go into settings) and don’t apply to apps installed through other apps stores (F-Droid, etc).

No. Unfortunately, ActivityPub just isn’t geared up for that kind of thing. It’s why BlueSky uses a different federation protocol called AtProtocol which is a lot more demanding than ActivityPub but is specifically intended for Twitter/TikTok style services.

While I’m generally of the opinion that there’s no such thing as a ‘good billionaire’, Gates has, at least, used the bulk of his fortune for some laudable enough endeavours. He’s one of the better ones, but if that’s not damning with faint praise I don’t know what is.

Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum”, or, “I think therefore I am” is a favourite of mine. It’s proof that I exist. Nothing more.

Nollendorfplatz is the main gay village. Easily reached on the U-Bahn. Just saying.

A severe simplification of the history, but: In the 1960s, say, if you lived in a town with shit TV reception the local authorities might set up a really good TV antenna on a nearby hilltop and run a wire through town that everyone could connect their TVs to. This was called Community Antenna TV, or CATV, which later became known as Cable TV. The coaxial cable used for this doesn’t carry signalling like, say, twisted pair; instead, the purpose of coaxial is to provide an enclosed, shielded tunnel for radio signals to propagate along. The signal would fade over time, so repeaters would be added every so often to boost the signal and filter noise.

So, yes, all your neighbours can ‘see’ your data, because you’re all sharing the same coaxial cable, though it’s encrypted between your modem and the cable company’s local headend. Those boosters I mentioned would historically break the Cable network into neighbourhood-sized chunks preventing the modem signal propagating too far, so there would be a local headend within the same segment for your modem to connect to. The bandwidth available is split between all the users in the segment, so having a second coaxial cable coming through the wall would be of limited utility; it’d be easier for your ISP to just allocate more bandwidth to your existing modem.

You mentioned Ethernet, but in most Ethernet networks we use switches that ensure that only the recipient gets to see the packets. In the old days we used hubs, which are more analogous to neighbourhood cable networks in that regard.

How dare you bring nuance, experience and moderation into the conversation.

Seriously, though, I am a firm believer that no tech is inherently bad, though the people who wield it might well be. It’s rare to see a good, responsible use of LLMs but I think this is one of them.

When it stops being American and stops bribing American politicians, obvs.

Well he’s right. Cars don’t create congestion, in the same way that raindrops don’t create floods. Cars ARE congestion.

Yeah, that was the “oh, shit” moment for me too. I bought into the bullshit until that point.

Relevant xkcd: