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Your Computer Isn't Yours

sneak.berlin

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Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#601

Post by megous »

andy_threos_io wrote: post #171
ThePhysicist wrote: post #143

What we poor souls didn't understand all these years is that we're effectively helping other companies to steal from Apple by running software that isn't distributed via their app store [1]. I think now that Apple has learned from iOS how profitable a walled garden business model is they are trying to bring that model to the PC world as well. Shipping hardware with their own processors is an important step in that di…

Real Hacker who has concern about her/his privacy wouldn't touch this kind of product with a 10 foot pole!

Real hackers don't need secure boot and code signing either. :) Real hackers have backups, plan for failure, and are not afraid of consequences.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#602

Post by panzagl »

emptysongglass wrote: post #219
zanny wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing said hacker culture spent 15 years buying inflated laptops and desktops from them ultimately for convenience to give them the market presence to do this in the first place. Its the same thing with Windows. People will preach all day that they won't make any personal sacrifices to try to avoid feeding literal cancers that are eating the software industry and are shocked when said all consuming voids take aw…

What's worse is the number of other posts with the top comments being vociferous defenses of these companies as if they needed these people to defend them or cared one iota for their welfare. It feels like it's Stockholm Syndrome on a mass scale. I worry for Gen Z because they're tiny-mobile-device native. And the only usable tiny mobile devices are walled gardens. They scream outrage when they're not allowed their t…

I understand the sentiment, but how many people were ever going to understand their systems at that level? I'm sure Gen Z will have their own tech equivalent of Roy Underhill telling them to put down the Ikea bookshelf and grab an axe and a log, and that the number of people who respond then will be about the same as now.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#603

Post by maddening »

christophilus wrote: post #479
jtbayly wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just pop in the live installation media So... way harder than Mac OS. In fact, that’s literally impossible on my computer.

You don't have a USB port of some kind?

Macbooks from 2019 have 4 thunderbolts 3 ports and 1 mini jack. And that's all.

If you want to power the device, you do it through a thunderbold. If you want to connect a USB that is not USB C, you have to use adapter and/or USB HUB. So you would have to connect to your USB through adapter/hub, and if for some reason whatever installer wouldn't support this you would be screwed (but I guess most of the time it would be doable, just inconvenient).

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#604

Post by stkdump »

danuker wrote: post #316
stkdump wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We all encouraged our friends and family to ditch IE for chrome, and look where that got us. I didn't. I encouraged friends and family to ditch IE for Firefox and nowadays I encourage them to ditch Chrome for Firefox. I never cared that Chrome was a little faster for some time. One person that only uses the (very old and underpowered computer) for mail and printing documents I helped install Linux (not Ubuntu ;)) a…

> encourage them to ditch Chrome for Firefox You should probably start advising that they ditch Firefox for IceCat. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/browsers.html

The last IceCat update is over a year ago. Might as well leave my front door open.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#605

Post by jolux »

jolux wrote: post #22
sneak wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And everyone you iMessage with? Both parties to the conversation have the plaintext and a key that will decrypt the whole conversation. Unless you are 100% certain that everyone you iMessage with has also done this, your conversations are still not reliably private. Even then, Apple can silently inject additional escrowed wiretap keys into the keylist for one or both participants, although this is an active attack an…

iMessage is not a security or privacy-first messaging app. It is a fun and usable messaging app with decent efforts towards privacy and no user tracking. The only messaging app that goes all the way with privacy is Signal, which I use for most of my communication. But Apple is focused on the user experience, and there are some fundamental trade offs with user experience that are not necessary for most users. Most use…

Look, iCloud Backup is the weak link here. I don't actually know if your messages will still be in other peoples' backups even if you turn off iCloud Backup, but I also don't know enough about the security model one way or another to be able to say, and I haven't seen evidence provided. I'm willing to believe that they are, just for the sake of argument.

What I was trying to say is that Apple is trying to make it as easy as possible for people to recover their messages, because this covers most peoples' threat models, which do not include protecting data from subpoena. Signal is great technology but the fact is it doesn't sync messages between devices because they haven't figured out how to do that in a way that's fully secure. This is a feature that tons of iPhone users want and are not willing to sacrifice for higher security. What am I missing?

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#606

Post by lovelyviking »

szc wrote: post #127

I'm not going to comment on the linked article, other than say I think it contains serious mistakes in describing what OCSP is for and errors in other statements. In the background there is a war going on, but it isn't what you think. It is a war between malware creators and OS creators. From my perspective it goes like this: To "identify" malware you need signatures. Signatures need valid certificates. Signing keys…

>In the background there is a war going on, but it isn't what you think. It is a war between malware creators and OS creators.

No, this is _exactly_ the war we think. It is a war between Apple and malware over control of _my_ personal(!) computer.

At this point both malware and Apple leak personal data from _my_ personal computer. So from the perspective of controlling MY personal computer they are both malware and differences are neglectable if I do not even have a choice to install my own OS.

Secure boot is secure if I(!) can secure it, not Apple or any other external authority.

>For me, Apple products really are designed to protect my personal information.

Apple products designed to get _control_ of your personal information from you and thus to control you and your behavior.

Computer is no longer a "Personal Computer" with all of these developments. It's simply a termianal of some big machine where your 'personal' space isn't even really your personal.

Probably it is a good idea to recall what "Personal Computer" meant and what it should mean.

For me it is My control over My computer and My data if I wish to, and this a minimum for My privacy.

And privacy is a minimum for society respecting freedom and rights of a person.

All of this is really like R. Stallman predicted.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#607

Post by siraben »

Fellow Gen Z-er here. I recall reading Stallman's writings some time during high school (a few years ago), at first taking them seriously, using free software as a much as possible (even installed and used Trisquel at one point) but then gradually due to peer/environment, even school-related pressure I became more complicit in using non-free software. I began to dismiss Stallman's predictions as unrealistic or overreactive, but as the years passed, as many have noted, these predictions have been realized on a massive scale.

Opting out of this stuff is hard, and in many causes would involve changes at educational institutions and companies. IMO it's the normalization and following-by-example of adults that lead children to sacrifice their freedom and privacy. Things such as

- creating G-Suite accounts for users joining an institution

- school-provided MacBook Pros/Chromebooks

- making use of a proprietary program (when free alternative exist) mandatory in a course

- strong one here, peer pressure from the network effect of services such as iMessage, social networks, or even AirDrop

If anyone is in a position of influence for the next generation of society, please think about these points and at the very least make it possible to use FOSS alternatives and make users aware of the issues surrounding digital privacy and freedom.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#608

Post by megous »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #484
megous wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can buy a PC with GNU/Linux preinstalled then. If I bought a mac and tried to install windows there it would be a shitshow too.

It would actually work rather well, that’s the whole point of bootcamp.

Interesting. :)

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#609

Post by ben_w »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #488
ben_w wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a kid with a phone but no money wants to know if programming is something they might like to study, and somehow the school also can’t afford a Pi, I’d point the kid at something like https://js.do/

The problem is that's not really how people get started. Hello world is how you get started in a university intro course, not in your parents' basement. What happens there is that you have a pile of photos that are all in one folder and you want to organize them into separate folders by date. A problem you're actually having, not a homework assignment. Which is possible to do automatically, because they all have meta…

Not everyone learns the same way or for the same reasons.

For example, I learned to read at the same time I learn to code, and from the same source — I had the unusual combination of not just the right birth year, but well-off parents and two elder siblings that had gotten bored of their Commodore 64 just as I was reaching reading age.

Back then my coding was, naturally, 95% transcribing from the manual, but it was fun. One of the few ones I can remember reasonably well this far removed from the experience was a sentence generator that had a list of nouns, verbs, etc and picked from them to build grammatically correct gibberish.

Re: Your Computer Isn't Yours

#610

Post by raxxorrax »

eternalban wrote: post #414
ThePhysicist wrote: post #143

What we poor souls didn't understand all these years is that we're effectively helping other companies to steal from Apple by running software that isn't distributed via their app store [1]. I think now that Apple has learned from iOS how profitable a walled garden business model is they are trying to bring that model to the PC world as well. Shipping hardware with their own processors is an important step in that di…

"What we poor souls didn't understand all these years is that" computing and information processing started out as tactical and then strategic components of military, intelligence, and industry. The central computing infrastructure ("the Cloud") and attendant closed/dumb psuedo-terminals (closed systems, walled gardens) is precisely the vision outlined in the 60s if not the 50s. Two unexpected events in information p…

True, but I think people who gifted these tools are the first who got them taken away again.
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