Can we be honest about this, please?

Aaron Swartz went into a secure networking closet and left a computer there to covertly pull data from the server over many days without permission from anyone, which is absolutely not the same thing as scraping public data from the internet.

He was a hero that didn’t deserve what happened, but it’s patently dishonest to ignore that he was effectively breaking and entering, plus installing a data harvesting device in the server room, which any organization in the world would rightfully identity as hostile behavior. Even your local library would call the cops if you tried to do that.

Yeah, I was gonna say, holding Chrome OS above Windows because its Linux based is bizarre. That’s getting more true about Android, too. For all its faults, I can still say I’m the admin of my Windows OS (for now), and not Google.

That’s generally what you hear from people who have basic use cases and simply can’t fathom other people may want or need different things from their devices.

Which is fine, they don’t have to understand. If stock is good enough for them nowadays, more power to them.

What I’m sick of is the condescension. This bizarre thing where they somehow think a person wanting control over a device they paid for is worthy of derision or shame.

It’s like if someone who only checks their email on their laptop laughing at someone using a desktop for heavier work, for no real reason other than thinking using technology differently than themselves is silly.

That other comment is a perfect example, and indictive of this weird subculture in Android spaces that hates Google but seems to be drinking from the same user-hostile Kool aid.

Personally, I’m an odd case, in that I didn’t used to root or use custom ROMs at all until recent years. Basically since Android 10, simply to get around the needless roadblocks and restore the functions I want. I was fine with stock for a long time, until Google started becoming Apple.