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Your Computer Isn't Yours

sneak.berlin

81–90 of 764 posts

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#81
post #15
post #7

Thanks for summarizing a bunch of changes that make me depressed about modern computing. Now Android, 'privacy apple' macOS, iOS & Windows all act in similar way. The only thing left is bad user experience linux.

Somehow I prefer the user experience in Linux. If something breaks, it's most likely due to my own doing.

Or an update removing your graphics driver

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#82
Quote: "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."

I call BS on Apple having the fastest machine, even at current moment, not to mention in the future. I can make a gaming rig with latest Ryzen CPU that will run whatever I want and be both faster and cheaper than Apple's expensive crap.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#83
post #61

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…

The alternatives are still completely unusable by most people.

Android handles this reasonably well. I can use F-Droid reproducible builds where possible and fall back to Play Store (or Amazon App Store) apps for apps I don't care that Google (or Amazon) knows I'm running. I get to choose where I want to make the trade-off between privacy and convenience. If I want convenience, it lets me go further than any Apple product, and if I want privacy, it also lets me go further than any Apple product in that direction also.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#84
post #58

This doesn't apply to Ubuntu,right? As in Canonical isn't doing something like this, right??

Ubuntu doesn't run on the fastest/most efficient laptops that were announced this week.

There is an Ubuntu ARMv8-A release (Commonly called AArch64) and there are many Linux-based distros running on AArch64 hardware. Probably wont use any extras on the Apple M1 SoC but it would run nonetheless.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#85
post #61

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…

The alternatives are still completely unusable by most people.

Well the alternative can't rely on unpaid workforce while Apple/Microsoft and co spend billions on their software, GUI and user experience. It is simple economics. Open source needs financing, not just free Github repositories that MS/Apple and co can then exploit for free because the code is licensed as MIT.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#86
post #59

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…

> They are in fact correct that [insert anything] are scary and too complex for them to manage, and they want someone they can trust to do it for them Is this an argument for forced autonomous cars or stopping selling of knives because they are scary and you can cut yourself while cooking?

Forced autonomous cars: Yes, once they are good enough. We make people wear seat-belts. Same thing.

Stopping selling of knives: Yes, once we have a safer way of cutting things. Though the real problem is probably people cutting each other on purpose, rather than themselves by accident.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#87
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu doesn't run on the fastest/most efficient laptops that were announced this week.

There is an Ubuntu ARMv8-A release (Commonly called AArch64) and there are many Linux-based distros running on AArch64 hardware. Probably wont use any extras on the Apple M1 SoC but it would run nonetheless.

I guess we'll see when my M1 air arrives this month. It's my understanding that by default they won't boot anything not signed by Apple, but I'm hearing scattered reports that there may be some command line configuration tool options that can cause it to disable boot security and boot unsigned stuff. It's certainly the default configuration, and on all of their other arm64 platforms they've shipped so far (iPhone/iPad/ATV/Watch), disabling the boot security is not a configurable option.

My fingers are crossed. We'll know soon.

EDIT: https://keith.github.io/xcode-man-pages/bputil.1.html

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#88

Quote: "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." I call BS on Apple having the fastest machine, even at current moment, not to mention in the future. I can make a gaming rig with latest Ryzen CPU that will run whatever I want and be both faster and cheaper than Apple's expensive cr…

How about efficient? A Mac Mini is extremely efficient.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#89
post #61

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…

The alternatives are still completely unusable by most people.

Every time you open the shell a windows user talked into switching to Linux, quits forever and talks about the experience to all his friends. For a osos to suck seed the power users would have to give up- their privacy and share their work flows and set up as macros.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#90
post #59

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…

This is the same sort of logic that some people have that people shouldn't be allowed to make choices in life because they "might get it wrong". People should be allowed to make their own choices in what they believe to be their best interests and they should be allowed to get things wrong.

> 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.

This may have been true back in the early 2000s when people first had good broadband. However all the major operating systems have pretty decent security out of the box mainly due to the embarassment of events like MS Blaster Worm.

> 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 if you buy a general purpose computing device. You should be able to run whatever you like on it.

They should just have a button somewhere in whatever the equivalent of the BIOS on these machines is that says "I am an adult and I accept the risks of turning off these protections" and then let you install Temple OS if you so choose to.

This is something that needs to be enforced by legal means IMO, something similar to right to repair.

> The problem is that people want it that way.

I don't know about that. They frequently get irritated by it and are just resigned to it IME.

However the popularity of single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi, People building their own gaming rigs and people tinkering with gadgets goes someway in refuting this notion. There will be of course many people that just won't care and will use "iDevice" and that is fine, however there is a large spectrum between "I only run stuff from the app store" to "I run custom Arch Install with optimised kernel with tk kernel patches".

> The presence of open software isn’t enough without a way for people to know what is trustworthy without being experts.

I agree. This is a failing of the open source community. I've actually written a draft manifesto called "better than freedom". This may actually push me to at least have it critiqued by my friends.

> Until we provide that, this situation cannot change.

Something has to change. We are sliding back into the 1980s where all the computer hardware was incomptable with one another.

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