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Time to start de-Appling

heatherburns.tech

431–440 of 471 posts

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#431
post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a free and open technology that is sufficiently user-friendly that grandma isn't going to lose all her photos, I'm all ears

Plug in a phone, run adb pull /storage/emulated/self/DCIM or wherever that Android garbage OS stores photos these days. Local, doesn't need encryption since there's no middle in E2E that you need protection against, and simple. Grandma can setup ~/.zshrc `alias bak=cd ~/phonephotos && adb pull ...` to make it even simpler.

When I'm done teaching grandma shell scripting, I'll let you know

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#432
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tell me, did they install and set this up themselves or you?

Did you have to state that as a question? (I obviously install even FB and Watsapp in there) It's unthinkable to setup a phone with whatsapp and fb here. When meta had a BGP problem, they (the older ones) asked me why there was "no internet"

The fact you're answering rather than ignoring shows the problem I'm very sorry to say

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E2EE cloud storage is not some kind of magic that only tech bigcorps can provide. I de-Dropboxed a few years ago, replacing it with Syncthing running on a local NAS with e2ee backups in Backblaze and Wireguard VPN out to my mobile devices. Sure, this is not the sort of thing most people can set up for themselves, but I don't think that's particularly relevant in context.

Unfortunately for the vast majority of people, it absolutely is some kind of magic.

I explicitly addressed this in my comment.

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#434
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking for a monkey's paw. The current ruling party in the US has given its voters exactly what they think they wanted, and it's a fucking disaster.

My day-to-day life has never been impacted by who is in the White House. Where is the disaster?

You have no opinion on single-payer versus obamacare funded-mandate versus unfunded-mandate versus free-for-all deny-pre-existing conditions health insurance?

You have no opinion on the removal of the legislature as a branch of government, and concentration of all that power into an office held by one man?

You have no opinion on the country turning into a 'papers please, comrade' state for anyone who looks brown?

Your life isn't impacted when flights are cancelled because ATC stops getting paid?

You don't, or don't know anyone working for the federal government? You don't know anyone on EBT? Anyone who has ever done schedule 1 drugs? Your life isn't impacted when billion-dollar frauds escape prison and restitution, setting an example and roadmap for others to follow? Or when tax rates and benefits get adjusted up or down? Or when a complete quack gets put in charge of the country's healthcare and infectious disease control?

You aren't at all affected by any decade-long wars that the country's entangled in? You don't use any foreign imports? Or domestic products that rely on foreign imports?

You don't derive any value from living in a country that mostly follows the rule of law?

You must be incredibly privileged to not be affected by any of this.

---

Society is a series of jenga towers. No particular brick is load-bearing.

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#435
post #157

Taking inspiration from the East India Company, Apple should colonize the UK and take over the government - the iGovernment, if you will. Citizens will regain their right to e2ee privacy, they will not have to deal with voting for mediocre politicians to lead them. Instead, Tim Cook will be their new leader, and every morning over the mandatory installation of HomePods in each home, citizens will be greeted with an e…

> Voting will be done via iPhones, where FaceID will verify the eligibility of the voter before the vote has been submitted.

Only Apple shareholders will be eligible for voting. Citizen services like Medical Insurance, etc will be subject to performance review. A poor score will have you relinquished and deported.

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/restic/restic not exactly for a "layperson", to be honest, but easy enough for someone familiar with a command line

So entirely unusable by any layperson, or the majori of the population.

Obviously the majority of the population needs to elect better leaders, or failing that, be out in the streets over this. But they aren't. They don't care and there lies the real problem.

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#438
post #86
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

England has been speedrunning the dystopian surveillance police state for a while now, through numerous governments. Voting is pointless. Same (but different) in Denmark where politicians vote to give themselves more money[1], snoop on everything[2], violate our constitution unpunished[3], delete evidence of corruption[4], open the borders[5], etc. etc. etc. I used to care - a lot - I really did. But I'm done. [1] ht…

Might come across as pedantic, but its important, "the UK" not "England". Confusing the two can upset people, especially those from the rest of the UK. Personally I do not think its just the UK and Denmark, its pretty much everywhere.

Might come across as pedantic, but it's important, "Kingdom of Denmark" not "Denmark". Confusing the two can upset people, especially those from the rest of the the Kingdom of Denmark.

Also, picking on non-native English speakers for using a name that is identical to the very old, commonly accepted name for the entire UK in their own language is beyond pedantic.

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the passphrase is: at 5,21 which is the 5th line on page 21 of your favorite book Yeah, it's one of those things that you'll forget in N years. That's exactly what prompted "where do you keep secret.txt" question.

Some people are lucky with memory that works extremely well with numbers. My memory is average but when it comes to numbers, I remember serial numbers of certain products, enrollment numbers etc from more than a decade ago. HP-L170 (A monitor I bought) QW4HD-DQCRG-HM64M-6GJRK-8K83T (Windows XP key) 10396-9 (My enrollment number for board exam) I remember a bunch of long-ago-abandoned phone numbers as well.

I could probably remember one or two things like that key, but retaining it over the years would be questionable... I used some of my favorite quotes as the passphrases for some of my crypto wallets, and once spent an annoying week when it turned out I misremembered one of them and lost access to some bitcoin. Not a huge value - it's about $1k worth now - but still unpleasant, and I had to spend quite some time figuring out how to recover it (fortunately, it worked). So since then I'm more careful about "I'll surely remember it" thing.

Re: Time to start de-Appling

#440
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a backdoor per se. UK just banned using E2EE (at least for Apple users' data). I don't think though they can ban E2EE in general - like, if I upload a binary blob to a data store, how would they know whether it's encrypted or not? Short of banning all strong encryption completely (which even UK yet is not stupid enough to do) it's not possible to prevent. But they did not build a "backdoor" into encryption -…

> banning all strong encryption completely (which even UK yet is not stupid enough to do) What we have in effect today (ban of E2EE, chat control) was laughably impossible to conceive just five years ago. ttyl

That's why I used "yet". It looks like things that were the domain of wild tinfoil hat theories a decade ago now are routine policies.
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