>It's only by convention that OSs choose to obey things like HOSTS files; there's nothing stopping them from filtering it and always allowing their own traffic.

Exactly among top ten reasons why I have a Nokia E5 (and bought a C7 recently but bricked it while trying to teach it how to piše & čita - i.e. read and write with full alphabet) - because they run on Symbian, and nobody bothers to write a snitch layer for it. The same goes for my PCs - the two that I use every day run Linux Mint. There's an old laptop with W7 on it, which works generally two days a year (as a jukebox for the garden parties).

>HP Instant Ink recent changes - part of an entertaining Cory Doctorow read at the EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer . He does go a little over the top, claiming "The printer industry leads the world when it comes to using technology to confiscate value from the public, and HP leads the printer industry." Sorry, Cory, the banking/finance/market trading sector is multiple orders of magnitude better than that.

HP is proven to be the worst of the trade, and Cory may well be right if we don't look further. Just over the last 13 years my family had four cases (on two printers, two laptops) where they not just screwed up, but actively cheated.

At the same time, we had the same amount of cheating from the banxters.

When they asked Stalin which were worse, the left or the right, he answered "they are both worse!".