unix_joe
SDF user since 2001. BSD user since 1998.
Just here for the tech discussion.
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There is an entire industry of shady companies who make tens of millions per by selling dogshit “secure comms” products to barely literate and computer illiterate LtCols and procurement officers in the US Government.
Those officers are close to retirement and by regurgitating big words they do not understand while still in their procurement positions, they can land a job at said company and receive some of those funds once they hit minimum retirement age and wait a year.
Signal is free and disruptive to those business models.
Ergo the misinformation campaign, the FUD, is well funded, by people who have a lot to lose.
I am going to say the unspoken part out loud: it’s rooted in Hitler’s “Creators, Maintainers, Destroyers” view of race.
The fact that this article exists at all shows how deeply rooted the sentiment is, even if 95% of the people regurgitating it don’t see themselves as racist or know that this is what their society has conditioned them to believe.
Asians only get tech by copying and stealing from the West. So when the “free market” West gets bothered by a little bit of competition and enforces protectionist measures, Asians who aren’t willing to whore out their women to Westerners are supposed to come crawling back and accept sanctions as punishment for trying to be uppity. It’s a shock to the system that China was able to keep innovating independently in a different direction, that can’t easily be attributed to IP theft. It’s not about the 7nm process; it’s about the entire SoC.
There are a lot of dogwhistles and things left unspoken in these articles and TikTok videos (where I saw it first) and I’m sure the “well ackshually nobody ever said that” jackasses are ready to pounce on this comment so it’s probably best to just leave it at this:
Unilateral protectionism has been a fucking disaster for consumers. All we got out of it was increased prices. A maxed out iPhone in 2016 cost $949. A maxed out iPhone in 2023 costs seventeen hundred fucking dollars and Samsung has done the same increase over that period. Less choice meant less competition and the duopoly was able to further entrench in their positions. This phone would be competitive with flagships at half the price. Why is that a bad thing?
Laptops: ThinkPad P-series. The repairability that the T-series used to have with slightly beefier specs and better heatsinks. Great for Linux.
Phones: FairPhone 4 (FP5 will likely be announced end of the month so wait for that) - user repairable, supports alternate operating systems, 7 years official OS support from FairPhone.
They also only fight for privacy as a marketing differentiator from Google in the US. Their privacy stance varies from country to country.
If Apple had the same capability to harvest and mine user data as Google, there’s no doubt in my mind they would already be doing so. Their inability to produce a viable cloud service and major security and update issues with iCloud imply it’s a lack of ability and not any pro-user/privacy-oriented sentiment in the company.
The Protonmail client is okay.
Sometimes, it hangs and never shows the Inbox or takes a very long time to show your Inbox (several minutes). You have to clear your app cache when this happens and sign in again. You also don’t get full access to settings. You cannot go in and add a new alias from the mobile app, or change payment options.
Fastmail is okay. My gripe is you can’t use biometric security on Android and when you set custom color schemes on the web client, the app disregards them.
I use both. I used Fastmail since college when they were the big thing and they support and develop FOSS software. I migrated to ProtonMail out of curiosity after more than a decade, but when they turned over the IP address of a fucking CLIMATE ACTIVIST to police, I decided to halt that process and later on I renewed my domain with Fastmail out of convenience (other things that irked me were were the Proton Mail bridge didn’t work on OpenBSD and I couldn’t use it with alpine or K9 mail at the time). I keep ProtonMail for occasional registration/verification email that doesn’t make it to Fastmail but I’m not under any illusion about protection under Swiss law.
I was so entrenched in Fastmail that I stayed with them because the annoyances with ProtonMail service didn’t outweigh the benefits or price increase. If you are starting from scratch, I would probably go ProtonMail.
This came out when I was still in elementary school. I remember at the time the computer guru people were like, “It’s not a real computer, it doesn’t even have a 3 1/2” floppy drive. How can it be a computer without a floppy disk?" And people bought into that sentiment because Apple of the 90s was a company with no new ideas that was almost dead.
From an LA Times article, “Wait, did I really say “no floppy”? I did. This is probably the biggest gamble. Third-party vendors will no doubt develop a floppy that will attach via one of the iMac’s universal serial bus ports for connecting peripheral devices. (USB is a successor to a range of ports used previously on PCs and Macs.) My guess is that Apple is wrong about home users–most will still want a floppy (or zip drive) and will have to buy an add-on.”
I thought it was kind of neat to not have a floppy because even in those days 1.44MB was pathetically small and there were competing standards for a floppy replacement around 100-120MB range.
I think the biggest influence, besides killing off floppy drive was that this also killed beige PCs. Everybody shit on Apple for their new design but then in a few years they were all putting different colors on their cases and nobody had beige computers anymore.
I never got to use one until almost a decade later, in undergrad, where they were still in use at the kiosks for free internet in the student center. That’s where I finally learned to despise the puck mouse.
Yeah, that and another model. It’s frequent enough that there are videos on YouTube on how to replace it. That part would wear down around 30k pages, or once a month for our fleet of printers; there were several hundred of those printers on the network. Minimum 2 hours of work for that part. We went with Ricoh and Xerox for the next contract and the reliability was better.
Even the Brother printer I got in undergrad needed electrical tape on the toner sensor so that it wasn’t lying to you and telling you that you needed to buy a new cartridge at 33%. That was from 2008, 2009 tops.
I can decide for myself when I need new toner. I don’t need some service in the Amazon cloud to do it for me, I literally see what the fuck the page looks like when it’s finished.
Fuck printers.
I have a Brother laser printer that works fine since undergrad. $100, almost 15 years ago. Good colors still, but it came with this thing where you have to block it at the firewall from the Internet so it doesn’t spy on you (something about reporting to Amazon servers?) and it will pretend that your toner is low on purpose, but you can cover up the sensor with electrical tape and it works fine. Prints with Linux, BSD.
I also have a Canon inkjet. I was on a trip and needed a printer and … $25 dollars out of pocket, I ended up with a device that has scanning and color printing and works with Linux. Five years later and it still works, although the aftermarket cartridges I use are $33, more than the printer itself cost. There’s no DRM making me buy just Canon ink. Works with Linux.
After reading that Epson was getting out of the laser printer business altogether for environmental reasons, I called BS on it. Likely a reason for them to sell nothing but DRM’d junk inkjets that are even more wasteful because they break every other year.
But the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Laser printers are also horrible for the environment. The fusers and toner cartridges cannot be recycled and the toner itself is nothing but microplastic that never breaks down.
I hope to never buy a printer again. Fuck that anymore, It’s the 21st century, I have a PDF editor and a tablet.
The great #twittermigration worked out for me because I always thought twitter sucked, with its obviously made up trending hashtags and suggested accounts.
In the Fediverse, I find myself following interesting people and wanting to see what they post out of curiosity, and interacting with them in a genuine way. Kind of like old phpBB forums or the early days of meeting people on campus through Facebook. Maybe that’s not what most people are looking for, or maybe that’s not the narrative that marketing teams who pay for these articles are trying to push (caveat: I’m an Ars Pro subscriber). It’s really difficult to monetize the fediverse, after all.
The Fediverse has me interested in people I’ve never met. Traditional social media has me wanting to ignore people that I already know.
The barrier to entry is lovely.
Android 12 still, and that just came a few months ago.
It’s a minimal stock Android without any protection against pocket dialing or ghost touches. And updates are slow to come, although I think we are finally on the third month of consistent monthly updates. aptX is a shitshow at the best, broken at the worst, so bluetooth music listening isn’t great, which is not a good thing for a device that got rid of the 3.5mm jack.
You are better off using CalyxOS on the Fairphone, which fixes all of those problems, except it doesn’t have true Google Play services.
I got the popup all the time for a few weeks with Firefox and uBlock Origin. As a YouTube Premium subscriber. The paid service. The whole reason they were pushing back on ad blockers to begin with.
Fuck these guys, I let the subscription lapse.