Yes, this is true (although the name change happened years before the major version was no longer 10) and doesn’t contradict anything I wrote. But the first version of Mac OS X was an entirely new OS technologically unrelated to Mac OS 9; not the case for later version jumps.

True, that usually costs money though, while Tor is free.

In general no, at least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS#macOS the name change happened several years before the architecture change. But I don’t know what the distinction is on that graph; it’s possible it just depends on how the OS is called in the user agent string?

The OS was renamed at some point; the first versions of the Unix/NEXTstep-based OS made by Apple were named Mac OS X, then at some point they switched to “OS X” (which hardly anyone ever actually said), then at some point to “macOS”. So it’s somewhat silly that they are separate lines and I don’t know what the difference is on that graph.

except that laws about social media usually target any online service regardless of technology

I don’t see Tor solving the problem of I.D. verification on social media, for example.

It does by disguising the location you’re accessing the website from, which may or may not have such laws.

I was wondering how much closer it can get than it is now… then I noticed the date.

Followup question: Is there an overview of which VPNs can be used with third party (FOSS) clients and which not? I don’t currently use a VPN except a corporate VPN, but may change that in the future.

Finding restaurants can be done with the same OpenStreetMap-based apps as navigation. I use OsmAnd all the time to find out where restaurants are.

But OpenStreetMap doesn’t have a review functionality, nor is it trivial to add one from an external site to one. Apparently there have been efforts in this direction, but I don’t know a lot about them: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Reviews

So I don’t have an answer for reviews. But the review databases that currently exist are a manipulation battleground which people should take with a grain of salt anyway.

Of course those would be good things. It still doesn’t sound like priority #1 when it comes to software freedom alone especially in a world where smartphones are mostly not open systems designed for installation of any new operating systems.

Are they planning to license it as free software?

Linux is already the most common kernel in phones in 2026. In this case we really have to distinguish between Linux (incl. Android) and GNU/Linux.

And given that AOSP is already FOSS, it doesn’t exactly sound like a priority to reinvent the wheel of a FOSS smartphone OS.

That is not new. They’ve been doing that since the 2000s.

The way I understand it is that there are at least two reasons, maybe more:

• Google (like all tech companies) uses a lot of open source software internally, so benefits from it being improved
• Google wants to train possible future employees

Not everything Google or other big tech companies do is necessarily bad; we should be taking advantage of the good parts of what they do.

exposing small children to AI-generated things? I seriously wonder about the effects of that on their brains…

You could spend an entire lifetime reading existing bedtime stories from your local library.

or even from the Internet, fwiw, there are plenty of public domain fairy tales available there…

Depends on what kind of editing, really. Brightening, cropping, rotating, etc. an image is part of the art creation process; adding or removing objects is falsifying reality. Doesn’t matter if AI is involved or not.

No, that’s not, or at least shouldn’t be and used to not be, “how you do things”. Blocking websites because they aren’t complying with national laws used to be the domain of authoritarian countries like the PRC or Thailand or Russia. Now it’s “how you do things” in so called liberal democracies? Has that really become so normalized?

We had a solution to this problem in the 2000s and early 2010s when we were on topic-specific forums where each (broad) topic was a separate website where you needed a separate account.

But that had its disadvantages too…

So people will be able to fork it and add ActivityPub integration? :D

They do pretty much the same thing. If there are nuances, I do not know about them.