Hoping for another Moonlight/Sunshine moment! Already running Vaultwarden, rbw, and Keyguard. Just need a simple FOSS browser extension for autofill and editing entries.

For context, Moonlight was created first as a FOSS Nvidea gamestream client. Then Sunshine was created as a FOSS server implementation. Later, Nvidia dropped “official” support, now the two projects are a FOSS stack built atop a formerly proprietary protocol.

… Are there others?

What about KDE connect for using phone as remote input instead of some proprietary app?

Writing this from my Fairphone 5 running postmarketOS (Linux).

Biggest downside right now is no phone calls, but that’s being worked on.

The point is how expensive it is. For your 1 request, you wait 2 seconds, and the power draw is a minor inconvenience. For the massive botfarm, it adds up to days of CPU time and a significant portion of the electricity bill.

Lets ignore the “is it possible” and imagine what would happen if it was. Whatever entity forks AOSP would start off with (next to) no userbase. The platform “Android” will remain Google’s AOSP, including some proprietary components. Whenever Google decides, they can enforce apps on the Google Play Store to use a new version of the Android system API. This is often a breaking change; apps that update won’t work on older Android. There is nothing stopping Google from creating complex breaking changes that tie into their proprietary components, killing off any attempt at running Google Play Store apps on older or “fully FOSS” Android. Even if a hard fork of AOSP existed, it would not remain compatible with the vast majority of applications.

So even if this could happen, it won’t. Nobody is going to invest in hard forking a project that is going to be killed off by Google’s monopoly.

The much better (long term) option is to stay completely outside AOSP, like with mobile Linux distros such as postmarketOS. Right now, it is underdeveloped and not an option as a daily driver for most. But over time, this is the only feasible option that can give control back to the user.

Assuming this is malware, depending on the complexity it might be really hard to remove. The best course of action is much like on Windows; Backup your personal files, figure out how the malware got on your PC (so you can avoid it next time), then reinstall the operating system.

For backing up personal files, stick to documents, media, etc. Do not include executables (like installed games), and be very careful with config files (and system files), basically only back these up if you know what’s in them is legitimate.

You can find more about the process in the /proc/4212/ directory (this is the number on the left in top). By running ls -l, you should be able to see where the exe symlink points to, which tells you where the program is installed. This might give you a clue as to where it came from (or it might not, depending on how the malware is made). If you suspect it is not malware, due to information on your system, look it up online before trusting it. I have personally never seen a root-owned ““windows”” process, which is why I’m heavily leaning towards this being malware.

If you feel like you know where the malware came from, or you’re stuck and are struggling to find out more, you should reinstall your operating system to get rid of the malware. Malware can have different levels of complexity, what you’re seeing on the surface might be the whole thing, or it could have more complex systems to reinstall itself after removal. Which is why reinstalling your operating system is the safer option.

It’s still made by the slop machine, the same one that could only be created by stealing every human made artwork that’s ever been published. (And this is not “just one company”, every LLM has this issue.)

Not only that, the companies building massive datacenters are taking valuable resources from people just trying to live.

If the developer isn’t able to keep up, they should look for (co-)maintainers. Not turn to the greedy megacorps.