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Time to start de-Appling

heatherburns.tech

141–150 of 471 posts

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#141

From the article: > Otherwise, please make sure you de-Apple, de-Google, and de-American Stack yourself when you have time, clarity, and focus to do it. Start today. I don't understand the core of this advice. So if you're in the UK and do all the above, can you suddenly get similar E2EE cloud storage from a different provider without a UK government-mandated backdoor?

I'm sort of out of the loop as a US citizen....Does the UK really have the ability to enforce every E2EE storage solution on GitHub to comply? Even if you monitor downloads, every VPN, every ISP..... can't I copy paste the source code? Isn't SFTP already E2EE? They're not going to come down on SFTP....right? I really hope not...

The simple answer is: Money.

If you're making money in the UK, they have a lot of legal authority over you.

If you're based in the UK, they have a lot of legal authority over you.

If you're neither of those things, they might complain, but the actual consequences are close to nil.

And they're not banning the tools (this is arguable, but they "can't" logically, as you point out). They're banning businesses from providing the tools.

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#142
post #36
post #28

Sounds more like people need to de-UK. It's going to be a problem with any company or technology.

It's more likely to be a problem with Apple (and Google) because they have put themselves in a position where they are a gateway to everybody . There are multitudes of online storage providers outside of the UK's reach and jurisdiction but 0% of iPhone users back up to them because of technical limitations that inhibit iCloud competitors or any compatible storage solution.

> There are multitudes of online storage providers outside of the UK's reach and jurisdiction

Not according to the UK, lately. The problem is still domestic. UK wants to exert this control over any service a UK citizens happens to use, whether they have a UK presence or not. Same with the ID/Age verification stuff.

Moving away from Apple and Google probably is something they should do, but it's not going to be a solution to the problem of the UK government's overreach.

UK citizens need to turn their attention inward against their government.

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#143

From the article: > Otherwise, please make sure you de-Apple, de-Google, and de-American Stack yourself when you have time, clarity, and focus to do it. Start today. I don't understand the core of this advice. So if you're in the UK and do all the above, can you suddenly get similar E2EE cloud storage from a different provider without a UK government-mandated backdoor?

# Encrypt a file openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -salt -in secret.txt -out secret.enc # Decrypt openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -in secret.enc -out secret.txt Wow that was hard.

You may think you're being sarcastic, but you are just stating a true fact here. For about 99.9% of this planet's population, it's not just hard, it's something they'd never ever know how to do and have no intention to ever learn. Like it or hate it, but that's what it is.

And, for 99.9% of people who know how to do that, they'd still be too lazy to do it properly (hint: where do you keep secret.txt exactly? What happens if your dog eats it?) and will use some third-party solution instead.

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#144

From the article: > Otherwise, please make sure you de-Apple, de-Google, and de-American Stack yourself when you have time, clarity, and focus to do it. Start today. I don't understand the core of this advice. So if you're in the UK and do all the above, can you suddenly get similar E2EE cloud storage from a different provider without a UK government-mandated backdoor?

[deleted]

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#145

From the article: > Otherwise, please make sure you de-Apple, de-Google, and de-American Stack yourself when you have time, clarity, and focus to do it. Start today. I don't understand the core of this advice. So if you're in the UK and do all the above, can you suddenly get similar E2EE cloud storage from a different provider without a UK government-mandated backdoor?

My new high-privacy, high-control data management solution revolves around pen & paper. As far as I am aware, these implements have not yet been banned in the UK. I don't know why everything must be digital. If you don't put it on a computer, it's almost as if it doesn't exist. If you do this often enough, it is almost as if you don't exist.

Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops ('dealing on the free market', it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#146
post #118
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit like the famous HN post where somebody said that Dropbox is not needed if you have rsync and friends. Technically this can even be correct. You can build and operate a good, secure solution for yourself if you have time and skill to build . Could make sense for a company handling sensitive data. Would hardly make sense for most individuals who are not professional SREs / SWEs. (To check how it feels, an en…

Sure but in this case most of the difficulties are artificially imposed by Apple, depending on how the tribunal responds to their alleged iCloud monopoly it could become as simple as choosing a compatible provider and putting your username/password in.

And as soon as you have "a provider" as a business entity, UK government can ban them from providing E2EE solutions to Apple users the same way they did ban Apple. Or the provider would just silently bend over hand hand all the keys to the UK govt.

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#148
Maybe it is better to de-tech a bit. Go back to some older decentralised stuff.

Like buy cd's and blu-rays instead of digital/drm locked/streaming service shit. Be an owner again instead of a renter.

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#149
post #41

[flagged]

If you google it with the words next to it, 'Home Office TCN' (no quotes necessary), the proper definition comes right up. It's written for a UK technical audience, who is likely familiar with these terms. An American article doesn't bother to define "FBI" or "USDA," and an article about breaking Python news doesn't expand "PEP" or "RFC."

Try any of those example acronyms (which are far more common in search indices IMO "in my opinion" :) and they will be immediately disambiguated by Google's top results. Type "TCN" and "Technical Capability Notice" doesn't show up after 4 pages. I needed to use an LLM and provide a paragraph of context for it to learn about it.
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