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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • I’m not interested in anything based off Chromium, and I don’t really like the idea of going with a Firefox fork much either. You’re not only trusting them to actually care about your privacy and security, and you’re not even just trusting them to actually catch and fix all of Mozilla’s shenanigans as well. You are also trusting them to constantly stay on top of all the latest security patches. There aren’t really any Firefox forks I trust with all 3 of those things at once. Even if there was, there are certainly no forks of Firefox that have anything even remotely close to the capacity necessary to maintain a web engine on their own, so you’re still trusting Mozilla to keep Firefox updated and secure for your fork of choice to even have a chance.

    Until a new browser with a new engine comes along that actually lets me use the full uBlock Origin there’s not really any other option besides Firefox that makes sense. At least to me.


  • Yes to the first part, no to the second. For some reason people like to pretend that surveillance is a binary on or off thing, but that’s gross oversimplification to the point of being more damaging than an actual lie. All the various government agencies collect whatever easy to find information about you there is to get, but that information is possible for you to have some control over, and it’s too expensive for them to really properly process all of it. It’s just some random bits of trivia about you sitting in a bunch of disconnected databases until somebody takes an interest in you. If they start to take an interest in you, they start coordinating their information and actually targeting you for more individualized information gathering. This is adding gay and trans people to that next level up of surveillance, and that absolutely does change things. Pretending nothing the government does matters and there’s no point in even trying is maybe the most harmful lie you can spread. Please don’t.





  • BSD was the main open source option for a little while, but got into a big legal battle that dragged out for years, and Linux came out during that time and took over. BSD never made a major comeback because no one really needed it anymore after Linux came along. It’s still around because it was already done, so people have just had to maintain and update it since then. Hurd is non-existent for reasons that are contentious, but everyone agrees that at least one of them is that a lot of people got excited about the Linux kernel and lost interest in Hurd and switched to Linux development instead. It is possible that if more people had stuck with it there would have been a real, useful Hurd instead. These aren’t even the only alternatives that were being worked on at the time.

    The idea that any one person could will an entire operating system into existence by making a hobby kernel that fit a useful niche at the right time is just patently absurd. Linux is great, and Linus Torvalds is a good steward of it, but no, he is not the only reason why open source operating systems are popular.


  • They were trying to merge rust code into the dma subsystem, because what they were working on needed to talk to it, and it would be easier to do that with rust code in the dma subsystem. He said no specifically to that part. Just the stuff in the dma subsystem. That’s all. It can be worked around.

    It wasn’t actually a big deal until Martin stuck his nose into a discussion that was none of his business and then cried about it on social media. I get being frustrated. The old guys are weirdly hostile sometimes, but creating drama is not the solution.




  • Well, I certainly don’t want to minimize what Linus Torvalds has done. No one has done more for open source software than him, but if he hadn’t come along with his kernel when he did there were other options. BSD did eventually get out of the legal purgatory that Linux gave an alternative to, or heck, maybe if Linux hadn’t come along Gnu Hurd could have even been a real thing.

    I’m happy with Linus being in charge of the biggest open source project in the world. I agree with him more often than not. He’s not the only reason open source operating systems exist though.



  • I’ve been using mailbox.org, and it’s pretty great. It’s cheap, it’s private, and it works well.

    I like the idea of e2ee email, but the way they all work it’s pretty much a completely useless feature for most people, myself included, and I also like using Thunderbird. It’s just not worth the trade off for something I’d basically never get any use out of anyway.



  • No, a single dumb tweet doesn’t make you a fascist. Running a company that people are supposed to trust with their privacy and security and doubling down on praise for a political party that has been using state surveillance to hunt down people for choices they make with their own bodies as the party of the “little guy” does mean I’m never going to trust you again, though.



  • They’re actually pretty good at protecting you from casual mass surveillance as long as you don’t do anything stupid with them, that was the whole point of my post. It’s just not profitable to spy on you if they have to bother to put any effort into it.

    I also think you’re overestimating the capabilities of most local police. When I said state level actors I wasn’t just talking about the NSA. Smaller countries, actual US states, or even some big cities would be included there, but your local small town police department wouldn’t even know where to start. If you plan on personally pissing off any of those bigger police agencies then you should really just be assuming no phone is safe. Otherwise you’re not likely to run into anyone that even knows what de-googled android is, let alone how to get into it.


  • It’s dangerous to get too obsessed with trying to secure everything against state actor level threats. It’s not that hard to dramatically increase your privacy if you’re currently using a regular android phone. Sure, yes, more security is better, but a single individual’s private information isn’t actually that valuable. It only becomes valuable to exploit people at a massive scale. Even just putting up minor speedbumps to data collection can massively increase your privacy as long as you aren’t being individually targeted, and more people getting into caring about their privacy is a good thing. Any de-googled android rom is already a big step in that direction. Lets not let perfect be the enemy of good.