What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space? • Hacker News Board

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#221

Post by sneak » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:24 PM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #196

sneak wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you trust that? Apple has specifically admitted to having a nefarious plan to scan your local files without consent and further use your computer (also without consent) to report on you to law enforcement. This may well be that implementation. The latest desktop and mobile OSes are quietly shipping code to enable this, despite the uproar that happened when Apple announced it. They let people believe they were…

> Why do you trust that? Not OP, but I'll throw my two cents in. While some people on HN were hyperventilating about the CSAM thing, I was digging into the docs to see what was actually happening. In every instance, I found myself a bit more impressed with how much engineering the folks at Apple clearly put into making it work without compromising privacy. Contrary to what people kept saying here on HN. It made me a…

People are rightfully upset about it because there is precisely zero amount of clever engineering that makes using my own hardware to spy on me and potentially report me to the police okay, morally or socially or technically. Literally no one would willingly opt in to such a thing on their computer if prompted. This appears to be the US government exercising an extrajudicial, extralegislative mandate (aka functioning as a dictatorship) with regards to a software publisher, and Apple unilaterally forcing this on users via updates.

This is an authoritarian, tyrannical end run around basic human rights to due process, and if indeed it is an essential prerequisite (per the government) to Apple deploying e2e crypto, then we don't actually have freedom of expression (as Apple would presumably be punished by the federal government for publishing software that supports e2e encryption WITHOUT such literal spyware).

The fact that this is even being discussed is a giant blinking red warning light about the lack of freedom in our society. Both for millions like us, who want the availability of quality tools that don't work against our personal interests and human rights, as well as Apple, who appears to not be allowed to publish software unless it contains backdoors for the cops.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

That should worry you a lot.

PS: Any clientside scanning whatsoever that the user did not consent to, that reports its results to a remote party (even if only positives) is a privacy violation. You cannot scan local files in any way whatsoever (for a purpose that is explicitly against the user, that is, reporting on suspected illegal activity) without compromising privacy, even if Apple's system works perfectly as described. Clientside nonconsensual scanning is inherently a privacy violation.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#222

Post by Isthatablackgsd » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #201

rootusrootus wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had spotlight hog things for more than a few hours, and only after a fresh install. It's generally well behaved. And it's very useful and fast for searching.

A few hours is a pretty long time for a CPU to be running at near-T-Junction temps. On top of that, every time I pull from a larger repo or unzip a large folder, MacOS will decide it's time for me to take a quick 2 hour break while it depletes 60% of it's battery. Instead of setting up a complicated ignorelist, I just disabled Spotlight indexing altogether.

If the content of the folder or repo have thousand of files and folders, then it would made sense for Spotlight to index them all.

It the same for transferring the folder/files to other location. a single 1GB file will take 5 second to transfer to external hard drive. A 1GB non-zipped folder (consists of thousands of thousand file from 1KB to 1MB each) will take half hour or more to transfer to external drive. I have a 150GB folder that contains over 500k of files, averaging 120KB to 4 MB, will take 3 hours to transfer to the external drive. I have another 120GB folder that are consist of videos, averaging 300MB to 10GB, took 20 minutes to completely transfer to external drive. This transfer through NVMe ---> spinning rust external drive through USB 3.1.

If you are pulling a large repo that have thousands of files in it will take a while for Spotlight to index each file. That is not the fault of Spotlight, that is just the way it is because it have to scan individually each file to index.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#223

Post by Animats » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:30 PM UTC

That should be reported to US Homeland Security. It needs to be examined for backdoor vulnerability. Now that the Western world is semi at war with Russia, you can't ignore this sort of thing any more.

Right now, anything that can affect running systems from the outside has to be viewed as an attack vector. It would be a good idea for anyone running anything critical or semi-critical to turn off all remote updates for a few months.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#224

Post by mlyle » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #205

mlyle wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You would not be contributing to an ecosystem controlled by a single entity who is increasingly abusing their dominance to extract more rent from consumers and other developers. c.f. > > If you're going to argue about some kind of collective loss by many people making the same choice as me-- that we all lose freedom, etc-- spare me. Tragedy of the commons, etc: not enough people are going to make the choice you're…

> not enough people are going to make the choice you're posing to have any significant effect. A billion flies can not be wrong... I am not personally affected by what you choose to use. I could give two shits about it and go on with my day. It's you who stands to gain or lose - along with all those that make a similar choice. > That doesn't seem like "freedom". You are also free to stuff yourself with sugar, drugs,…

> A billion flies can not be wrong...

This willfully pretends not to understand the argument (I hope). My use of MacOS is not likely to make a big difference in the adoption of MacOS, and therefore ascribing all of the massive network effect of usage to me is a tad unfair.

> I am not personally affected by what you choose to use. I could give two shits about it and go on with my day.

OK. Personally, I'm doing quite fine with MacOS for my laptop. Thanks for your concern, but you don't need to call names and judge me over it. If you really don't care so much, you can spare us all the invective.

> You are also free to stuff yourself with sugar, drugs, play russian roulette

All of these things have likely and measurable short term harms to the individual doing them. Using Apple carries some risk of individual and systemic negative effects, but also some benefits (both individually and communally).

Note, this is true of all things. I just drove to school to teach some classes to kids. I could have died on the way. There are possibly even better moral choices of where I could spend my time that are given up (opportunity costs). But, I judged this is what I wanted to do and the benefits outweighed the risks.

> But no, being free to do X does not mean that X is morally virtuous.

I'm pretty sure that I've done way more to make open systems possible on the desktop than you. The fact that one thing I'm doing isn't moving the needle that direction (but isn't hurting it, either) should be OK. Otherwise, you should immediately stop all activity which isn't helping the cause of open-systems-on-desktop to avoid accusations of hypocrisy.

> you shouldn't be expecting any sympathy if you have to face any consequences when things blow up on your face.

Anyone deserves sympathy when things blow up in their face.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#225

Post by blaser-waffle » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:35 PM UTC

colonwqbang wrote: post #182

gotaquestion wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not with 3rd party drivers. I think people fetishize the desire to have complete control, and it is a myth. I've been using Linux since 1997, and all the fighting for transparency has been a tempest in a teapot with no progress made at ALL. If people wanted to fight for it, stop using NVIDIA products, but do you see that happening? Not bloody likely. This isn't so much whataboutism as it is about trying to coerce an…

Nobody forces you to buy NVIDIA hardware. I don't.

Aye, the open AMD graphics drivers are pretty good.

Nouveau will get there, one hopes...

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#226

Post by blaser-waffle » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:42 PM UTC

cmeacham98 wrote: post #163

sjcoles wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try out Fedora! There's Fedora Rawhide if you want rolling release. I have been using Rawhide (+ mainline, non rc or git, kernel) on my work machine for the past 6 months without issue. If you have to compile a lot of kmods it can be a pain as everything is transitioning to GCC12 but the kernels are still built with GCC11. A container can take care of that though.

I really want to like Fedora - it gets so much right. But: `yum` is the worst package manager I have ever used on linux by far, and that sours the whole experience. I wish I could get "Fedora with pacman/apt instead".

dnf is what replaced yum, and it's alright.

yum is still aliased on most fedora / rhel systems so you can put Fedora 35 on a drive and run yum update -y and it'll kick off the associated dnf process.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#227

Post by RedShift1 » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

cmeacham98 wrote: post #163

sjcoles wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try out Fedora! There's Fedora Rawhide if you want rolling release. I have been using Rawhide (+ mainline, non rc or git, kernel) on my work machine for the past 6 months without issue. If you have to compile a lot of kmods it can be a pain as everything is transitioning to GCC12 but the kernels are still built with GCC11. A container can take care of that though.

I really want to like Fedora - it gets so much right. But: `yum` is the worst package manager I have ever used on linux by far, and that sours the whole experience. I wish I could get "Fedora with pacman/apt instead".

Why is it the worst package manager?

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#228

Post by rglullis » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:50 PM UTC

duckmysick wrote: post #219

rglullis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution for that is easy: don't buy the absolute-latest-generation of any hardware. I've owned Samsung laptops, HP laptops, Thinkpads. I've built my own work desktops. I've never had any issues, as long as the hardware is ~6 months out on the market. That's about the time it takes for linux devs to catch up with companies that focus on windows drivers.

How do you deal with laptops that have both an integrated and an Nvidia graphic card? I can't find a reliable way of having the dedicated card on for just some applications on Linux. It's either always on or always off, which is not as convenient or useful as the on-demand mode available on Windows.

> How do you deal with laptops that have both an integrated and an Nvidia graphic card?

Honestly, I don't.

I think all my laptops had only iGPUs. I always treated my laptops as secondary workstations for the times I was away from my main desktop.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#229

Post by trelane » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

josephcsible wrote: post #217

gotaquestion wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s your machine, but the inner workings are this ineffable mystery. At some point, every machine's software becomes an ineffable mystery. Do you know what is going on in all your 3rd-party Linux drivers, say, from NVIDIA?

I only buy AMD GPUs, specifically because AMD provides open-source drivers and NVIDIA doesn't.

Same. I bought Intel for a long time because they Just Worked. It looks like AMD will Just Work _and_ have great performance.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#230

Post by trelane » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:53 PM UTC

cafed00d wrote: post #190

koprulusector wrote: post #93

>Over the last year or so Mac users have run into problems that appear related to a background service named triald. Some report it stealing huge amounts of CPU, others associate it with various glitches, and a few have noticed gigabytes of disk space apparently being taken up by its folder at ~/Library/Trial, and in their Time Machine backups. This article explains as much as I know about this mysterious new service…

> - Apple can double speak all they want about digital privacy, but their actions tell the truth. As a paying Apple customer, you’re not deemed worthy enough to even understand how your own machines work, less even to “tamper” with their working, and who knows what data is actually being shared? > - Personally, I say no thank you. I’ve been on Debian or a variant for almost 10 years now, and haven’t looked back. It’s…

Put Mac in the same laptop and compare.