61–70 of 764 posts
Yet despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth - both in the article and in the comments here in the various threads - people are still making excuses for continuing to use Apple/Google/Microsoft/et al products because the alternatives are a bit rough round the edges. These companies have repeatedly shown that they don't respect people's privacy and people have resoundingly responded that neither do they. I would…
I have found it curious how this has gotten zero traction in the press. Earlier today, I was naïvely sure this would cast a pall over the product launches.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hopefully Apple can find their way back. It's not going to happen. Apple talks up privacy and security but the truth is they don't care about those things. What they care about is having a locked-down platform because locked-down platforms make Apple $hitloads more money than open general-purpose computers. Let's take another example: Remember back before 9/11 and you didn't have to show an ID when you boarded a pl…
> It's not going to happen. I'm allowed to hope, I've been using macs continuously since I was 4 years old, over 30 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with that, user experience in Linux is and in foreseeable future will be the most flexible of all and hence allows users to make it look exactly the way they like. For comparison I would say Linux is like bootstrap that you can customize to make it look the way you want. iOS is like a paid theme you have bought over Themeforest with near to zero flexibility. If you want a predefined good looking desktop, y…
I switched back (after a Mac stint for 12 years) to Linux a couple of years ago, and although hardware support is much better there are still some very sharp edges you could easily bleed out on if you briefly touch. I have a ThinkPad T470s running Arch Linux (I also tried Fedora and Ubuntu and saw these there too): - Desktop performance is too poor to run at 4K, even though it works fine in Windows. I'm not talking p…
They do bunch of optimization and come with tested and stable drivers pre-installed.
Yet despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth - both in the article and in the comments here in the various threads - people are still making excuses for continuing to use Apple/Google/Microsoft/et al products because the alternatives are a bit rough round the edges. These companies have repeatedly shown that they don't respect people's privacy and people have resoundingly responded that neither do they. I would…
To be fair, if this was truly a big deal, it would be a political issue with bipartisan support and taken care of short order. In times of strife, at least there's one thing you can always count on: Democracy . It never fails. If you can just remember that one thing, you should be able to sleep soundly at night. (It works for me at least, I used to be a constant worrywart until I learned this trick from my therapist,…
Are you serious? Since you're using the term bipartisan, I'm going to assume you're also from the US. Have you been following the news/current events recently (and by recently, really I mean any time at all over the course of the past forty or fifty years)? Almost nothing actually gets "bipartisan" support these days. Our government is in a constant state of gridlock and it is next to impossible to get anything done.
> In times of strife, at least there's one thing you can always count on: Democracy. It never fails. If you can just remember that one thing, you should be able to sleep soundly at night. (It works for me at least, I used to be a constant worrywart until I learned this trick from my therapist, and I've been golden ever since.)
I'm really having a hard time telling if this comment is sarcastic. I'm not trying to cause you to lose sleep or anything, and honestly, I commend your optimism if you're serious, but the fact is that democracy is an abstract concept that is almost never put into practice perfectly. Even if democracy's promise of "most people being happy" meaning 51 people are happy while 49 people are not is actually sufficient, even that idealized version is very far from our actually political system in the United States.
I think one thing most Americans actually would agree with is that the way we do things here, right now, in terms of government, doesn't work so well. I think there is a lot of disagreement about what should change, and how, but it seems like very few people are satisfied with the current state of affairs. The more I think about it, the more I think this comment just has to be sarcastic, so this reply is probably a waste of everyone's time, but in any case, wow. I wish what you were saying here were actually true. That would be a nicer world to live in than this one (although, frustrating as it might be at times, this one is also not so bad).
In every case, the greatest return on investment for any surveillance system comes from extortion. Extortion takes many, many forms. Some forms are favored by the FBI and prosecutors. Others are favored by spooks. Criminals have many of their own. In every case, they involve coercion. A key fact about extortion is that the person being coerced is often not the person surveilled. It may be, instead, a judge, or a pros…
1. Disconnect Internet (if possible) 2. Open Terminal 3. Run `sudo vi /etc/hosts` 4. Type `G$` (go to end of file) 5. Type `i`, left arrow, enter 6. Type `127.0.0.1 oscp.apple.com` 7. Press esc then type `:x` then press enter 8. Restart https://gist.github.com/nathanhleung/2ceeda4c743f2a1cf3d670c... Some updated procedure.
Doesn’t the success of the latter kind of undercut the former?
For most people, if there computer was ‘theirs’, it would be that way for about 10 minutes until it was pwned by a bad actor. The general issue of other people (I.e. Apple et al) having a lot of control over your computer, is entirely valid even if some of the points in the piece are exaggerations. The problem is that people want it that way. They are in fact correct that computers are scary and too complex for them…
As Apple has demonstrated, neither has the presence of closed software. Between Apple and Microsoft, they're nearly 100% likely to get software that is not trustworthy, and cannot be made so.
This would be less worrisome if the state did not compel these organizations to provide their data to the military on demand without a warrant, but due to the vertical integration of big tech companies and US military spying, this becomes a major threat to our society and the basic exercise of civic participation.
It's hard to do things like, for example, investigative reporting against corrupt government officials if the government officials know every time you open Premiere, and where you do it, because they forced your chip/OS manufacturer to tell them.
> These machines are the first general purpose computers ever where you have to make an exclusive choice: you can have a fast and efficient machine, or you can have a private one. Most of the components inside my PC are over 10 years old. I do video editing. I do music production with many VSTs open and running. And of course web browsing with a million tabs opened at once. For any of those tasks I can't see what wou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's not going to happen. I'm allowed to hope, I've been using macs continuously since I was 4 years old, over 30 years.
The time to choose to stop being exploited is, ever and always, now.
I'll miss it.
EDIT: It's possible that via bputil(1) run from the Recovery partition that the signed system volume checks might be disabled in M1 macOS 11. This means I could remove the plists for certain intrusive/telemetry system services and still boot. I've updated the post, and will write more about it once I have the equipment in hand.