If you want to disable Intel Management Engine, the always-on backdoor built into every Intel CPU and/or want as much software as possible on your machine to be FOSS
Not that I know of, AMD is also soon going to make their own FOSS bios with OpenSIL so they're generally the better option if you're a privacy/libre software junkie.
As far as I know, OpenSIL stands for Open Silicon Initialization Library, and handles only the hardware initialisation part of the boot process. It may still require loading binary blobs like the Platform Security Processor (PSP), which is AMD's version of Intel Management Engine
Bestie Brave is literally just Chromium again. Not to mention the fact that their CEO is someone who got ousted from Firefox for being a tremendous bigot. It's not a better alternative to Chrome, it's just the same thing again. It you must use a chromium browser, use ungoogled.
I tried it but didn't care to find out if there was a way to stop it from deleting all my tabs and logins, and I'm not relogging into everything just because I needed to close my browser.
You can set exceptions to the cookie deletion in the security settings. I personally have everything I use frequently (invidious and stuff) to keep the login cookies.
Or you can just completely disable that feature.
An important note to your last one is for some of us we don't get an option. Work does everything with Office 365? Welp, guess you gotta use Microsoft products now 🤷
Grats on Arch Linux install, S-tier distro for what it attempts to accomplish.
It feels like there needs to be a category in between conservative and paranoid. I'm probably 90% of the way over to tech paranoid but using Tor Browser and Tails is a little much.
Grats on Arch Linux install, S-tier distro for what it attempts to accomplish.
For some reason, the best word to describe it in my mind is "fun". Just fun to learn and play with, fun to install, fun to configure and customize, and fun to daily drive. Definitely not fun when a random package update breaks your system (looking at you grub), but that hardly ever happens anymore provided you don't enable the testing repo.
Also pacman is the fastest package manager I've ever used.
Apt is very quick as well (with the nala frontend), no complaints there. I've been running Arch for the past 5 years and recently switched to Debian Stable. The "grub event" was certainly notable, but otherwise I don't think Arch is really that unstable or gimmicky. Arch itself is a very solid and dependable platform - the reason I decided to move is because I really don't need the bleeding edge packages from other projects anymore. With Flatpaks and all the rest of the /home-based package managers that are around now, I can keep a stable base system and install a couple bleeding edge packages that I want, instead of being forced to run my entire system as bleeding edge (do my printer drivers really need to make me bleed?).
Overall, I'd say the Arch experience is as high quality as the Debian experience, they just target different usecases. Neither of them is better, it's just up to the user how bloody they want their system to be.
I just lost a raid 0 array for what seems like no reason, all I even had to do was reformat and both drives are working again. It's fortunate I only use them for my steam library.
That being said I have an Ubuntu machine that's been running 4 drives in RAID 5 for like 5 years so.... Your mileage may vary?
Somehow mkinitcpio broke my initramfs the other day when I installed the latest microcode updates. Took me like an hour to debug the issue and boot from the fallback 😑. That’s the first time I’ve had an issue like that though. I’ve been using arch for a few years now.
Also the middle should be called Tech Centrist or Tech Social Democrat, daring to use the projects from philosophical minorities is not conservative at all.
Not extreme is rather moderate. Conservative estimate means there's a tendency to not change what was estimated in the past. Moderate would mean that a small change would be accepted.
Conservatives are always trying to make themselves seem "cool and different" like the middle guy in the meme. Being anticonsumerist, pro-privacy and pro individual liberty is far from actual conservative policy goals but they obviously have to pretend otherwise.
Mullvad browser is a fairly new Firefox fork which aims to reduce fingerprinting potential while also having sane (paranoid) defaults. Developed with the Tor project. Basically the Tor browser but without connecting to the Tor network. Passes coveryourtracks.eff.org.
SimpleX Chat is a fairly new privacy oriented IM platform which seems to address many issues current ones have. Development is very active. E2E, video and voice calls, decentralized, doesn’t have user ID of any kind.
Tor/Mullvad are better for anonymity use cases, but when you go tweaking it (settings, add-ons) you are no longer blending in with the pack. LibreWolf suits a more privacy-oriented use case I think since it’s not aiming to mimic Tor, but just have privacy settings mostly maxed out & you opt into everything you are comfortable with, such as cookies—whereas base Fx you have to opt into more privacy.
Honestly, I can’t remember specifics but I read some bad stuff about Librewolf a few months ago (nothing nefarious, just seems the developers didn’t necessarily really know what they were doing and made some weird design choices).
I trust the Tor project somewhat, so I tend to trust Mullvad browser more.
Honestly, I can’t remember specifics but I read some bad stuff about Librewolf a few months ago (nothing nefarious, just seems the developers didn’t necessarily really know what they were doing and made some weird design choices).
I trust the Tor project somewhat, so I tend to trust Mullvad browser more.
He's the kind of guy that looks at a Fairphone and says "if you compare this to a Pixel, the Pixel is faster", talks about how important repairability and sustainability is, vows to mention it in future phone reviews and then proceeds to never mention it ever again but instead keeps on saying how great the new iPhone is.
Hey I watched this video when it came out a year ago, and honestly don't remember a single thing about it, other than I had already "liked" the video. Damn my brain needs an oil change...
And he mostly talks about phones anyway... hardly relevant to the avg pc enthusiast as he only covers macbooks and not their competition, which is silly.
Not really. People who use the apps are trying to preserve (conserve) the time when privacy wasn't an afterthought. It's not working, but they're sure trying.
What I mean is that privacy is no longer mainstream. The software shown does work but the majority of people don't use it or don't even know what it is.
It's using the word conservative in its literal definition, rather than the definition it's been given by some that incorrectly use it to describe their beliefs.
Tech paranoid all the way, although not the same type of tech paranoid as Luke Smith. The only good computer is one you have the hardware schematics to (i.e. virtually none of them). Thinkpads are just another brand of overpriced laptop. Besides the occasional steam game, I heavily prefer FOSS only and will flat out refuse almost anything that has drm. My unlocked bootloader android phone is so heavily locked down with privacy stuff that I cause Google to lose money merely by existing.
This is only for laptops by the way. System76 desktop BIOSes are still closed source. It's such a shame that there's no FOSS BIOS for desktop PCs, hopefully AMD OpenSIL changes that.
Assuming the schematic is for repairability, not security.
Seems unlikely that enthusiasts would have the equipment to non-destructivly identify malicious deviations from spec, introduced by competent actors.
From memory you can, but that may have changed, there is a useful page ok their wiki that keeps track of all services that work and refuse to work with them since they use VoIP numbers and some companies refused to accept them
I fit somewhere between normie and conservative. Philosophically, I agree with the tech conservative, but I also have shit to do and when FOSS gets in my way, it's hard to justify it.
I use Firefox because it was an easy switch.
I used Signal until they killed sms support. Sorry, most of the people I know use a default messages app. And the day I force everyone I know to use Signal is the day they stop talking to me.
I dabble in Linux, but I main Windows because I'm not a programmer or IT admin. I know how to use it, for better or worse, and I don't have to memorize terminal commands to perform even basic tasks. Sure, gaming is getting better on linux, but it's still a compromised experience and I still, to this day, have to look up tutorials and terminal command every time I try to do anything on my Linux box.
But...wherever possible, I use FOSS software.
I like to call it the tech pragmatist. I agree with the conservative, but I'm not that smart and I got shit to do.
A lot of us are in this boat. I do daily drive Linux but I am very fortunate in that I'm my own boss so I can use whichever computer I want.
And yeah, there is no way to force people to use Signal. It is what it is. Fortunately here in Europe WhatsApp is the default messaging app. It is at least better than SMS for UA non-iPhone people.
The nervous system of humans has been corrupted by being fed data from the internet, alcohol, toxic people, society in general etc. A lot of people, understandably so, want to escape this and take control of their own brains, and by extension their nervous systems.
It is illegal to slice up humans and analyze the source code of our brains unless you have a licence. And we as consumers are not provided with all the data the professionals gather. Think about it. We aren't even allowed to know what is in our own brains. This goes completely against the philosophy of Free and Open Source.
You can find monkeys in the wild. They are not an endangered species by any means, which means that people will only report you to the police because of disgust, not because you are breaking laws. [Note: I am not a lawyer and haven't read the laws relating to animals deeply, I do not take responsibility for legal troubles you get in if any]. Rip apart the monkeys and you can see the brain and nerves in their full glory.
Now you may ask, why monkeys of all animals? That is because they are one of the animals closest to humans that an individual can realistically capture. You do not want to fight a Chimpanzee unless you don't care a lot about your life.
You may realize that you don't understand the brain even though you have it. No worries there. You can't understand the code of any FOSS application you use either. The important thing is that the source is available to you without restrictions.
Another question you may ask is that "This is too primitive". This is a misunderstanding. People(non-developers only) think the command line is primitive and outdated now that graphical interfaces exist. This is simply not true. We are simply going back to our roots.
To self host it, you can simply install its docker image. Now this is the tricky part, since we don't have a traditional OS. Basically, primitive brains, all they do it eat, sleep, reproduce, and do dopamine releasing activities. All you need to achieve this is follow the following two steps. They are very simple and everyone can achieve it without any technical knowledge or difficulty.
Reject modern humanity
Return to monkey
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People don't realize that part of diverging from our monkey ancestry traded a lot of brute strength for dexterity. Chimpanzee's can weigh as much as an average adult male, but their hand and arm strength is enough to literally tear your face off.
Not joking, there was a lady who made the news because a chimp removed her hands and then all of her facial features. The way muscles insert in their arms and the upper arm/forearm proportions maximize force but reduce the range of motion and fine motor control, but it's still like fighting a middle schooler with the strength of a couple of adult men. And also that kid's a an angry cannibal.
Apparently chimps have been seen killing and eating gorillas. Basically, monkeys can be rough, but chimps are scary as fuck. This website almost reads like it's joking, but all the numbers actually line up and it seems like a legitimate zoology website.
Ion potentials are electricity... That's the same thing as a voltage measurement: a difference in ion charge between two areas. Open the gate and the charge diffuses. That's a wire.
And in nerves it's ion pumps first shoving ions outside and if a trigger occurs, the gate opening, ions flooding in, opening the next gate and so fort. It's not the same.
Wish I could just ditch Windows and Whatsapp for something else....... I've tried Linux but every time I quickly wanted to do something it first took me 30/40 minutes to get it working :'( was driving me insane after the cool factor of daily driving Linux went away
Probably 1,5 months ago. I used Fedora 38 - to be fair I was really impressed with how far gaming has gotten. Basically anything I trew at it just worked (big F for Rust). However my audio kept breaking when switching application's which I could only fix by restarting. Besides that I was really annoyed by Fedora somehow not picking up my second display from time to time. No idea what happened but every like 20 restarts my second display wouldn't work, or games suddenly started to display on my second display instead of my main. These where probably the biggest things for me, besides some applications I use for debugging not being supported on Linux. Anyhow I'll probably try Linux again in a couple of months, maybe another distro, since I do really enjoy programming on Linux.
My now-husband thought a good first date was to compile gentoo on my computer with KDE 4.0 (so raw that folders/desktop/drag and drop didn't work). 13 years later, I finally decided to use Arch on one of my computers... the other two are still Ubuntu, though that's likely to change.
I still can't quite figure out why I kept dating him and eventually married him. Maybe it's the free tech support?
What do you think about Zorin? It's Ubuntu in a Windows Skin if I remember correctly, so target audience are Windows and Mac OS users who want to switch.
Been daily driving Zorin a few months now. Once I got past three very large hardware-related hurdles (that unfortunlatey would be impossible for normal users), it has been much better than Windows. I do recommend it if you're like the middle guy in the meme (but not conservative lol)
Well my mother , who is in her 50s was studying for a course two years back , so i booted my old PC with linux mint and gave it to her , for libre office , some browser stuff and pdf etc, the thing it is just worked , and as a programmer I love how i get things done easily via terminal !
A lot of linux platforms are pretty plug and play now unless you're trying to get a programming running that wasn't built for Linux. That's why I think both Linux and proprietary operating systems have their place. Its just too bad not everyone makes their stuff for linux. It's definitely getting better though.
Unfortunately i think steam removed support for team fortress 2 on Linux a long time ago. I didn't stay long on Linux. I mean i use headless ubuntu and debian for a bunch of projects but not on my desktop.
The fact that the favorite OS of the tech conservative is an Arch based distro and and a Debian based distro instead of pure Arch or Debian makes this meme inaccurate.
Tails is also total ass as a daily driver. I know, I did it for a long time before the lack of persistence was such a pain I had to give in. Like, you can save in your data partition, but having to install/configure everything on each boot sucks, and if you made the system partition writable it would defeat the point of Tails.
I don’t think Tails, backtrack, kali, and similar distros were ever intended to be daily drivers. I’ve only used them as live ISOs to leverage their very specific toolkits.
I watched one HTML video 5 years ago, and now I'm using a De-Googled phone, Linux, and get a more paranoid than I should when I see and Echo Dot. This is not what I signed up for...
tbf vscode is a decent, open-source editor with great support for Rust (it's rust-analyzer's primary platform with nvim and Clion on the second place)
(but the official ms packages ship with a custom config with ms telemetry, branding and marketplace)
basically just use code(oss) or vscodium instead of binary vscode releases
Most of the language servers can run with Vim, Neovim, Helix, Kakoune, or Emacs as you noted. You could run VS Codium if you’re the “Tech Conservative”, but ultimately if you’re going all the way to “Tech Paranoid”, you won’t touch VS Code or Codium knowing Microsoft is steering the ship with another EEE plot in mind. It’s all a part of that package with Microsoft™ GitHub® + Codespaces® + Copilot® trying to vendor lock-in the developer experience into the platform.
It's "open source" as a technical matter, but the fact is that plenty of common extensions are still strictly controlled by Microsoft (like say, Live Share) and can't be used with vscodium due to licensing. It's a pretty useless editor without extensions, and the marketplace isn't exactly "open", either.
Matrix has de-facto centralization around Matrix.org where all metadata floats back through them in one way or another. Due to the expense of all the mirroring required (every message + attachment from every DM & chatroom of every user) as well as the Python back-end being slow, it’s in practice not good to self-host despite in theory Matrix being good. XMPP runs on a potato relatively & has so much feature overlap (with the ability to extend being inherent to the protocol)—the only issue is fragmentation of servers & clients (though Conversations Compliance is close-ish to a minimal standard).
I'm not very knowledgeable, but Matrix is only centralized, if you don't include non-matrix.org instances. You can safely chat locally without matrix.org, AFAIK.
If you chat with one user from Matrix.org or one user in your room is Matrix.org (or any org they host for) then all of that chat data will be synced with them. A room with any general traction will inevitably have someone from Matrix.org & there’s not a lot of options to choose from (I’ve seen a lot of instances shutdown because of the cost to sync all that data was too much).
Yeah, multiplayer games with kernel-level anti-cheat are gonna be real hard to support on Linux. I don't know that we'll ever have a good solution to that.
Yeah that really made it hard to convince normies to use it. Have you found a similar replacement that does e2e privacy if both using the software and sms/rcs as a backup if not?
Signal used to be an SMS (text message) client in addition to its secure IM protocol. If both people were using Signal, it would use the secure protocol, otherwise it would fallback to a text message. They removed the text messaging feature from Signal and now it's a lot harder to convince normies to use it.
Previously: Hey replace your texting app with Signal, if two people use Signal you'll be upgraded automatically.
Now: Hey use Signal, no one you know is on it and you'll need to remember who uses SMS and who uses Signal.
Oh god, this meme. It's not something I've ever seen before, but it's so true.
God, Tor, freaking Tor. Bless it's heart, really, but it's practically unusable. At least for me. I was really getting into it, trying to use it as a daily browser, ran with so much less ram than all the others. But it's practically unusable! All the shitty websites I had to go on daily for School practically didn't work, and half the websites would always take at least 10-15 minutes to get working because they keep thinking I'm a hacker. Or it's just region blocked, and I have to spend SO MUCH TIME making new connections in the hopes it doesn't go to a single blacklisted country. Sometimes even with a phone there to authenticate, it just doesn't work. So I had Firefox anyway, it was literally what Tor was built off of. And because of how unbelievably inconvenient and annoying Tor (Or more accurately, how shitty the Internet in general has got, I really wouldn't mind logging in to every website every time, with a phone authentication every so often) was, I ended up just using Firefox and using Tor for dark web stuff. Essentially, what it's supposed to be used for.
Linux...man, Linux was always one of those things I wanted to get into, but thinking critically, it would be very dumb for me to do. Almost every single thing I do is required by a Windows app. Critical and niche shit, mind you. So essentially, it'd be the Tor situation all over again. I'd be doing effectively everything worthless on Linux while molesting my computer for a VM for windows, which I would be doing on a daily basis for practically as long as I use the computer. So I'm practically stuck being a normie. I try to do everything I can to stop all these companies and shit tracking me and have my machine running faster, like running scripts to debloat windows, but in the end, it doesn't amount to too much. I'm stuck a normie, no matter how much of a poser I act.
Wine and crossover can probably meet the needs of most of your windows app needs at this point, which realistically aren't a lot if you look into it, and keep a windows vm / cloud instance handy. Why not try a vm of Linux on your windows machine (or use WSL) to get your toes in the water to see if your assumptions are still correct today?
I tried. I have very peculiar needs, I'm not joking when I say I use shitty old programs from before the millennium AT LEAST EVERY WEEK. Very specific niches that I have found no solutions for on Linux.
Essentially, I need Windows for it's main selling point. Insane compatibility on software from every field. And until Linux can actually RIVAL windows instead of presenting Fisher price alternatives, I'm forced to stay with the shackles of blasphemy.
I've tried it in the past. The actual UI and the general process of doing things was the least of my issues. I'm not loyal to Windows or anything at all, I can easily get used to that.
Props for even actively thinking about it, that's always the first step! If you want to switch to Linux I recommend first switching to apps that run on both Linux and Windows. They exist for almost every use case, and you can migrate gradually app by app.
That's unfortunately simply untrue. You can't, with a straight face, claim that there is any actual competition to Photoshop, Revit or a myriad of other, non-programming use-cases. It's easy to use Linux when you're a developer, it's almost impossible if you're an architect. Sure, you can use wine. Good luck, half of photoshop builds are borked. All Revit has garbage rating on wine. You just can't professionally escape windows if you're in a wrong profession.
This is sadly just true. At least I as an artist could decide to bite the bullet with Clip Studio and learn Krita instead which is not THAT inferior. But to tell a Photoshop professional to switch to GIMP is simply stupid. If only Affinity ported their crap to Linux...
Hopefully with China moving to openKylin, there may be more adoption for the Linux desktop, and it hopefully maybe will incentivize corporations to port their stuff. But for now, yeah.
I mean, I'm talking about switching IF there are apps for your workflow on Linux. If not then of course this is not (yet?) an option for you. But that's exactly why I say switch app by app, so you can figure out if your workflow would actually work. Afaik many people don't switch because the apps they are used to don't exist on Linux, not because there are no replacements. And as a side effect, most Linux apps are open source, so even switching to just some of those is still a good thing.
First of all, if you want to get into Linux, DO IT! It's truly awesome, I love it. Just get Mint, throw a Windows skin over it and nobody will notice, trust me. Honestly, it's incredibly rewarding.
When it comes to browsers, I now have the best setup I could think of: LibreWolf. It's a hardened version of Firefox. It doesn't use TOR and all websites are accesible. I use Startpage as a search engine. Granted, it can be a bit slow but it gets great results and there is a button that lets you open websites via a Startpage proxy. LibreWolf by default erases all browser data on exit so for logins I use KeePassXC password manager. It has an awesome addon which automatically fills in login fields, it can do TOTP and autofill that, too. It's pretty great.
Weird to put the Self Hosted podcast on the FOSS-only Gentoo user seeing that Jupiter Broadcasting has been on the contrarian "Red Hat is actually good" train.
I used to watch him a lot as well, especially for the specific Linux content. I got a bit put off by some weirder ideas but mostly forgot about it. Which idea's does he have now and which you particularly don't see yourself in?
Firmly in camp conservative (yikes)
Fav OS: Fedora
Fav browser: Firefox
Fav apps: Thunder and Element and technically feeder but only because I haven't had the energy to write my own rss feed consumer nervously in dart/flutter
I'm in the process of putting together my own next cloud and moving to proton mail. After that I'll be able to install bridges from a self hosted matrix to discord for people and teams for work. I use edge, outlook, and teams on my work computer but it occasionally connects to my home network so at some point I'll probably put it on an isolated vlan.
Telegram has open source clients and protocol specifications. Whatsapp is a piece of proprietary bullshit that you can't even use without a phone and zuck will sue you for even trying to decomple it
I am not a big WhatsApp fan, Signal and Matrix are clearly better from a privacy perspective, e.g. because of the meta data.
And while it's true what you wrote, it still doesn't explain my question / counter my argument. WhatsApp is, no matter how much I disliked Facebook / Meta, having better privacy. All messages are end-to-end encrypted and can't be returned to anyone, while most chats in Telegram aren't end-to-end encrypted. Telegram often doesn't give out any chats, but they are capable of doing so and could change their policies at any time.
Telegram's secret chats are e2e encrypted as well. They're not the default option because it's their way of balancing between being a messenger for privacy nuts and a social network with huge channels full of media at the same time.
Comparing the end-to-end chats, I straight up don't trust WhatsApp, it could send my messages straight to Zuck as far as I'm concerned. Given how many reverse engineering projects got closed after a cease and desist letter from them, I suspect a great deal of security by obscurity. While Telegram isn't much better with it's ridiculously convoluted code, it's inviting people to check and they have verifiable builds, that means that they are at least confident in what they are doing.
As for Signal and Matrix, I don't know a single person who uses either, so for me Telegram is the best middle ground for my normie purposes
Which you manually need to enable, which almost no-one does, which only work on one device and not on multiple devices like WhatsApp and Signal (which essentially renders the feature useless), and which is not possible for group chats.
USA, Germany, Russia, Iran, China, Brazil, and other have tried to or have banned Telegram at various points of time in the past decade because of their concern they can't access Telegram data. You can't say the same for WhatsApp. That suggests WhatsApp isn't as secure as they say.
That logic is bogus. I can't say the same about WhatsApp because WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted. They can't give you any message data because they literally don't own it.
Telegram, on the other hand, does have all the messages. They just refuse to give it to authorities. But they could change that at any point and just start giving the data, while in WhatsApp, that's not possible by design.
Tech conservative, apparently. Although fuck big tech, you can achieve the sake thing with decentralised federated services or blockchain (in some cases).
I guess I am a cross between “Normie” and “Conservative”. I use macOS and Fedora daily, I watch MKBHD but also watch FOSS YouTubers. I use WhatsApp, but only because, in Netherlands, it’s impossible to live without it. I don’t use any Chromium, and I use Firefox, but I also use Safari.
I feel like WhatsApp should be in the middle. The app is terrible, but the messaging is actually encrypted. We paranoids also appreciate Signal, and Element disappointingly gets no play here.
Also:
*believes not every company is inherently evil*
It's kind of weird, then, how they all end up doing evil stuff, including the guys that explicitly set out with the philosophy "don't be evil".
We can all tell conservative is supposed to be the enlightened one, but unless the creator is using a very malice-driven definition of evil (as opposed to including accidental evil) this line is an own-goal.
Do you think Whatsapp is actually encrypted and isn't a tool to get more information from its users because Meta pinky promised?
Closed source piece of garbage.
Open Whisper did the actual message algorithm, and I understand it's open source. It could be copying your messages at the endpoint, I guess, but nobody has caught it doing that on wireshark to date.
I do trust Open Whisper and their open source project as well. I also trust Meta to do everything possible to collect even the slightest bit of data possible. Plus as Whatsapp is completely proprietary we don't know how the solution from Open Whisper was integrated. Why not open source it like Signal does?
You'd have to ask Meta, I guess, although you wouldn't get a straight answer. It's possible they could switch just your phone to send them cleartexts. Anyone who's read this far should probably use an actual secure app.
Fuck anything created by Facebook. It wouldn't surprise me if the EFF released an announcement today saying that Facebook always had a master encryption key and have hard records of every conversation ever had on WhatsApp. Actually, I'd be willing to bet real money that is the case, if there was any way to actually resolve that bet.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the EFF released an announcement today saying that Facebook always had a master encryption key and have hard records of every conversation ever had on WhatsApp.
Literally not possible, from what I've read of the scheme involved. I haven't looked over it myself but I trust Open Whisper.
I self-host my stuff because it's cheaper, I run Gentoo since the last 15 years and use Chrome because it's just better and friendly. I also have a Xperia android phone and really, really don't like MKBHD.
I honestly have no idea what's going to happen. Most probable outcome is I'll run two different browsers based on what works for me. I stopped acting "ethical" about computing a long time ago, with some small exceptions. I'm not here on Lemmy because ethics, but because I'm fucking pissed at Reddit.
Where does Element/Matrix fit in here? It doesn't really seem like Paranoid like XMPP since people have been using it pretty regularly now, not just paranoid people.
Internet Relay Chat. Super old school, everyone connects to a server with their own clients. I think with modern encryption though it's one of the more secure ways to chat as long as the server owner is trusted.
Isn't tor like compromised? And most privacy based solutions are usually run by shell organizations that have ties with Five Eyes. Stuff like VPN services, proxies or some of those password managers.
Most people who got caught on Tor were caught by undercover operatives or one of their friends on there got busted. Just general recklessness on there. I have heard that CIA tries to run a bunch of tor nodes to deanonymize tor but I've also heard that tor checks if those nodes are legit before allowing them on. I don't see strong evidence for tor being compromised.
And most privacy based solutions are usually run by shell organizations that have ties with Five Eyes. Stuff like VPN services, proxies or some of those password managers.
Privacy based solutions is kind of vague, the main privacy and security services I use are Signal, Protonmail, Protonvpn, and Bitwarden. All of these are open source, you can view the source code yourself and see if there's spyware, strangers look at the code all the time so online strangers can see if there's spyware in there, they also are all checked and audited by third parties. So the code you see is what you get and there are no backdoors or spyware running in there. You can build it all from source if you're extra cautious but it's probably done right.
So I have no idea what this guy is saying but it is not true at all.
You forgot "Only uses 10+ year old librebooted Thinkpad" on tech paranoid
uses a modern Notebook which is QubesOS certified and runs coreboot
I forget there are linux-friendly laptops nowadays.
I find most laptops are well supported about a year after their release.
whats librebooted mean
Replacing the bootloader with a FOSS bootloader called LibreBoot
It's an open source bios. There are only builds for a certain few laptops and it involves opening it up and flashing the bios chip
why would you even do that, forgive my ignorance
Attempting to closing NSA backdoors
If you want to disable Intel Management Engine, the always-on backdoor built into every Intel CPU and/or want as much software as possible on your machine to be FOSS
Also it boots much faster than most stock bios.
Is there a similar issue with AMD?
Yes, it is called AMD PSP
What's the deal with Play Station Portable?
Not that I know of, AMD is also soon going to make their own FOSS bios with OpenSIL so they're generally the better option if you're a privacy/libre software junkie.
As far as I know, OpenSIL stands for Open Silicon Initialization Library, and handles only the hardware initialisation part of the boot process. It may still require loading binary blobs like the Platform Security Processor (PSP), which is AMD's version of Intel Management Engine
Bestie Brave is literally just Chromium again. Not to mention the fact that their CEO is someone who got ousted from Firefox for being a tremendous bigot. It's not a better alternative to Chrome, it's just the same thing again. It you must use a chromium browser, use ungoogled.
Brave also does sneaky shit with your data
I personally use Librewolf. Its just a hardened version of Firefox so you don't have to do it yourself.
I tried it but didn't care to find out if there was a way to stop it from deleting all my tabs and logins, and I'm not relogging into everything just because I needed to close my browser.
You can set exceptions to the cookie deletion in the security settings. I personally have everything I use frequently (invidious and stuff) to keep the login cookies. Or you can just completely disable that feature.
Me too lol, why cant I see other replies tho?
Telegram being next to Signal is also questionable.
Unfortunately he's also the inventor of JavaScript. Which makes the entire concept of Web 2.0 problematic by association.
I fall under Tech Conservative mostly, but I would like to edit the last 2 points to this for myself:
"Believe every publicly traded company is inherently evil"
"Doesn't morally support big tech, but uses some anyway"
An important note to your last one is for some of us we don't get an option. Work does everything with Office 365? Welp, guess you gotta use Microsoft products now 🤷
I mean, work is work, you don't get a choice in what product your company uses. My point was meant for personal use.
Grats on Arch Linux install, S-tier distro for what it attempts to accomplish.
It feels like there needs to be a category in between conservative and paranoid. I'm probably 90% of the way over to tech paranoid but using Tor Browser and Tails is a little much.
For some reason, the best word to describe it in my mind is "fun". Just fun to learn and play with, fun to install, fun to configure and customize, and fun to daily drive. Definitely not fun when a random package update breaks your system (looking at you grub), but that hardly ever happens anymore provided you don't enable the testing repo.
Also pacman is the fastest package manager I've ever used.
I hope you enabled parallel downloads, that makes it fast as fuck.
Updates go brrrrrr
Apt is very quick as well (with the
nalafrontend), no complaints there. I've been running Arch for the past 5 years and recently switched to Debian Stable. The "grub event" was certainly notable, but otherwise I don't think Arch is really that unstable or gimmicky. Arch itself is a very solid and dependable platform - the reason I decided to move is because I really don't need the bleeding edge packages from other projects anymore. With Flatpaks and all the rest of the/home-based package managers that are around now, I can keep a stable base system and install a couple bleeding edge packages that I want, instead of being forced to run my entire system as bleeding edge (do my printer drivers really need to make me bleed?).Overall, I'd say the Arch experience is as high quality as the Debian experience, they just target different usecases. Neither of them is better, it's just up to the user how bloody they want their system to be.
Btrfs would beg to differ.
Is it really not that stable? I'm trying to switch from ext4 because of the built-in compression
I've been using it with Ubuntu and Arch with no issues for a couple of years, so ...?
I just lost a raid 0 array for what seems like no reason, all I even had to do was reformat and both drives are working again. It's fortunate I only use them for my steam library.
That being said I have an Ubuntu machine that's been running 4 drives in RAID 5 for like 5 years so.... Your mileage may vary?
I will stick to static partitions, I am aware btrfs and RAID don't mix well
Have you heard of our lord and saviour nixOS?
Somehow mkinitcpio broke my initramfs the other day when I installed the latest microcode updates. Took me like an hour to debug the issue and boot from the fallback 😑. That’s the first time I’ve had an issue like that though. I’ve been using arch for a few years now.
There is another version with two more tiers
Please tell me there aren’t two more tiers to the right of paranoid. The last tier would just be “homemade pencils only.”
There's one either side!
Edit: also, I'm at "Newborn Paranoid" and definitely feeling the pull towards tech paranoid. Writing this on Librewolf in Arch (btw) lol.
The only things I even recognize from those two are fdroid and lynx.
Most of the others were Emacs related. I'm sure someone on here is even using the new emacs client lem to read this comment.
I definitely fall in newborn paranoid too
Its Emacs all the way down
Also the middle should be called Tech Centrist or Tech Social Democrat, daring to use the projects from philosophical minorities is not conservative at all.
Conservative means "not extreme"
E.g. conservative estimates
Words can have multiple meanings - it might be best to find one that doesn't have the same baggage that conservative has, such as "risk-averse"
Not extreme is rather moderate. Conservative estimate means there's a tendency to not change what was estimated in the past. Moderate would mean that a small change would be accepted.
Conservatives are always trying to make themselves seem "cool and different" like the middle guy in the meme. Being anticonsumerist, pro-privacy and pro individual liberty is far from actual conservative policy goals but they obviously have to pretend otherwise.
I use arch as my main disto with Firefox but use tails and tor for "purchases"
For fellow paranoids:
Mullvad browser is a fairly new Firefox fork which aims to reduce fingerprinting potential while also having sane (paranoid) defaults. Developed with the Tor project. Basically the Tor browser but without connecting to the Tor network. Passes coveryourtracks.eff.org.
SimpleX Chat is a fairly new privacy oriented IM platform which seems to address many issues current ones have. Development is very active. E2E, video and voice calls, decentralized, doesn’t have user ID of any kind.
Do you know how Mullvad browser compares to Librewolf?
It's librewolf if they had a VPN to shill to you
Tor/Mullvad are better for anonymity use cases, but when you go tweaking it (settings, add-ons) you are no longer blending in with the pack. LibreWolf suits a more privacy-oriented use case I think since it’s not aiming to mimic Tor, but just have privacy settings mostly maxed out & you opt into everything you are comfortable with, such as cookies—whereas base Fx you have to opt into more privacy.
I mostly use librewolf as a substitute for private browsing. Firefox is my go to for places where I log in
Honestly, I can’t remember specifics but I read some bad stuff about Librewolf a few months ago (nothing nefarious, just seems the developers didn’t necessarily really know what they were doing and made some weird design choices).
I trust the Tor project somewhat, so I tend to trust Mullvad browser more.
Honestly, I can’t remember specifics but I read some bad stuff about Librewolf a few months ago (nothing nefarious, just seems the developers didn’t necessarily really know what they were doing and made some weird design choices).
I trust the Tor project somewhat, so I tend to trust Mullvad browser more.
Edit: here’s some good information: https://github.com/mullvad/mullvad-browser/issues/1
What does MKBHD have to do with this? He's just a tech reviewer who kinda fits between tech normie and tech conservative
He's the kind of guy that looks at a Fairphone and says "if you compare this to a Pixel, the Pixel is faster", talks about how important repairability and sustainability is, vows to mention it in future phone reviews and then proceeds to never mention it ever again but instead keeps on saying how great the new iPhone is.
I'm not kidding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkmzDwgvqQM
Hey I watched this video when it came out a year ago, and honestly don't remember a single thing about it, other than I had already "liked" the video. Damn my brain needs an oil change...
And he mostly talks about phones anyway... hardly relevant to the avg pc enthusiast as he only covers macbooks and not their competition, which is silly.
What if my favorite OS is Mac, my favorite browser is Firefox, and my favorite app is self hosted?
It means you're Tim Cook's mistress
Ain't Tim Cook gay?
win-win
I'm a tech conservative?
Yes. The meme said so and it is now universally and unrefutably true.
Same, a I’m a tech conservative too, mostly though
I don’t trust big tech
I am but I've used windows for about 25 years so 🤷♂️
Doesn't sound right does it?
It's the only time in my life that I'll wear a conservative title with pride.
Conservative is the wrong word there
Not really. People who use the apps are trying to preserve (conserve) the time when privacy wasn't an afterthought. It's not working, but they're sure trying.
Tech savvy
You have no clue.
What I mean is that privacy is no longer mainstream. The software shown does work but the majority of people don't use it or don't even know what it is.
Ah, sorry, my bad.
Conservationists are not the same as conservatives.
The only thing that conservatives are trying to conserve is their own privilege and impunity.
It's using the word conservative in its literal definition, rather than the definition it's been given by some that incorrectly use it to describe their beliefs.
The word they're looking for is "Facist"
🏳️⚧️ Congratulations on coming out and I wish you a successful transition. 🏳️⚧️
worst username award 🏆
Ty I couldn’t have done it without real life inspiration to guide me.
bruh
Tech paranoid all the way, although not the same type of tech paranoid as Luke Smith. The only good computer is one you have the hardware schematics to (i.e. virtually none of them). Thinkpads are just another brand of overpriced laptop. Besides the occasional steam game, I heavily prefer FOSS only and will flat out refuse almost anything that has drm. My unlocked bootloader android phone is so heavily locked down with privacy stuff that I cause Google to lose money merely by existing.
Purism, System76 and, more recently, Framework
edit: Purism apparently is not trustworthy as a company
What's the point if they still have AMD, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, etc. chips on them?
You mean things like the Intel Management Engine? I think they are partially disabled, like in librebooted ThinkPads.
PinePhone Pro for the mobile side. The schematics are available. I quite like mine, especially with the keyboard case. It's basically a pocket laptop.
This is only for laptops by the way. System76 desktop BIOSes are still closed source. It's such a shame that there's no FOSS BIOS for desktop PCs, hopefully AMD OpenSIL changes that.
Assuming the schematic is for repairability, not security. Seems unlikely that enthusiasts would have the equipment to non-destructivly identify malicious deviations from spec, introduced by competent actors.
i am litterally a 100% match with conservative wtf did you hack me (except I use XMPP for phone service, JMP.Chat is an amazing thing!)
Could I reach people using WhatsApp with this?
From memory you can, but that may have changed, there is a useful page ok their wiki that keeps track of all services that work and refuse to work with them since they use VoIP numbers and some companies refused to accept them
I fit somewhere between normie and conservative. Philosophically, I agree with the tech conservative, but I also have shit to do and when FOSS gets in my way, it's hard to justify it.
I use Firefox because it was an easy switch.
I used Signal until they killed sms support. Sorry, most of the people I know use a default messages app. And the day I force everyone I know to use Signal is the day they stop talking to me.
I dabble in Linux, but I main Windows because I'm not a programmer or IT admin. I know how to use it, for better or worse, and I don't have to memorize terminal commands to perform even basic tasks. Sure, gaming is getting better on linux, but it's still a compromised experience and I still, to this day, have to look up tutorials and terminal command every time I try to do anything on my Linux box.
But...wherever possible, I use FOSS software.
I like to call it the tech pragmatist. I agree with the conservative, but I'm not that smart and I got shit to do.
A lot of us are in this boat. I do daily drive Linux but I am very fortunate in that I'm my own boss so I can use whichever computer I want.
And yeah, there is no way to force people to use Signal. It is what it is. Fortunately here in Europe WhatsApp is the default messaging app. It is at least better than SMS for UA non-iPhone people.
A truly paranoid individual unplugs every piece of technology and uses nothing with screens, buttons or electricity going through it.
Your body uses electricity to send nerve signals...
"self-hosted alternative to nervous system 2023 foss reddit"
Monkey brain
The nervous system of humans has been corrupted by being fed data from the internet, alcohol, toxic people, society in general etc. A lot of people, understandably so, want to escape this and take control of their own brains, and by extension their nervous systems.
It is illegal to slice up humans and analyze the source code of our brains unless you have a licence. And we as consumers are not provided with all the data the professionals gather. Think about it. We aren't even allowed to know what is in our own brains. This goes completely against the philosophy of Free and Open Source.
You can find monkeys in the wild. They are not an endangered species by any means, which means that people will only report you to the police because of disgust, not because you are breaking laws. [Note: I am not a lawyer and haven't read the laws relating to animals deeply, I do not take responsibility for legal troubles you get in if any]. Rip apart the monkeys and you can see the brain and nerves in their full glory.
Now you may ask, why monkeys of all animals? That is because they are one of the animals closest to humans that an individual can realistically capture. You do not want to fight a Chimpanzee unless you don't care a lot about your life.
You may realize that you don't understand the brain even though you have it. No worries there. You can't understand the code of any FOSS application you use either. The important thing is that the source is available to you without restrictions.
Another question you may ask is that "This is too primitive". This is a misunderstanding. People(non-developers only) think the command line is primitive and outdated now that graphical interfaces exist. This is simply not true. We are simply going back to our roots.
To self host it, you can simply install its docker image. Now this is the tricky part, since we don't have a traditional OS. Basically, primitive brains, all they do it eat, sleep, reproduce, and do dopamine releasing activities. All you need to achieve this is follow the following two steps. They are very simple and everyone can achieve it without any technical knowledge or difficulty.
That is it for the article. If you enjoyed reading it, please do consider sharing it on Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Peertube(if you have a channel to talk about this) and Pixelfed. Thank you for your time.
This article was sponsored by monkeyresurgence.com. They are a group that wants humanity to reject modernity and return to monke. Please visit the website and click on as many ads as possible so that they can get a decent earning. We are also completely dependent on their funding so if they earn more, we can provide you with more articles.
As someone who lives in a country with monkeys, you do not want to fight them either.
People don't realize that part of diverging from our monkey ancestry traded a lot of brute strength for dexterity. Chimpanzee's can weigh as much as an average adult male, but their hand and arm strength is enough to literally tear your face off.
Not joking, there was a lady who made the news because a chimp removed her hands and then all of her facial features. The way muscles insert in their arms and the upper arm/forearm proportions maximize force but reduce the range of motion and fine motor control, but it's still like fighting a middle schooler with the strength of a couple of adult men. And also that kid's a an angry cannibal.
Apparently chimps have been seen killing and eating gorillas. Basically, monkeys can be rough, but chimps are scary as fuck. This website almost reads like it's joking, but all the numbers actually line up and it seems like a legitimate zoology website.
"Jamie, pull up that video"
No, nerves use cascades of ion potentials. Those are just triggered by touch or electricity.
Ion potentials are electricity... That's the same thing as a voltage measurement: a difference in ion charge between two areas. Open the gate and the charge diffuses. That's a wire.
And in nerves it's ion pumps first shoving ions outside and if a trigger occurs, the gate opening, ions flooding in, opening the next gate and so fort. It's not the same.
We call them The Amish
Wish I could just ditch Windows and Whatsapp for something else....... I've tried Linux but every time I quickly wanted to do something it first took me 30/40 minutes to get it working :'( was driving me insane after the cool factor of daily driving Linux went away
How long ago was that and what did you want to get working? In my experience anything I do has been smoother on modern Linux than on Windows.
Probably 1,5 months ago. I used Fedora 38 - to be fair I was really impressed with how far gaming has gotten. Basically anything I trew at it just worked (big F for Rust). However my audio kept breaking when switching application's which I could only fix by restarting. Besides that I was really annoyed by Fedora somehow not picking up my second display from time to time. No idea what happened but every like 20 restarts my second display wouldn't work, or games suddenly started to display on my second display instead of my main. These where probably the biggest things for me, besides some applications I use for debugging not being supported on Linux. Anyhow I'll probably try Linux again in a couple of months, maybe another distro, since I do really enjoy programming on Linux.
I would suggest using something easier like Linux Mint next time you give Linux a try.
nope. if your not installing arch for your first distro then linux is too good for you
/s ←←
My now-husband thought a good first date was to compile gentoo on my computer with KDE 4.0 (so raw that folders/desktop/drag and drop didn't work). 13 years later, I finally decided to use Arch on one of my computers... the other two are still Ubuntu, though that's likely to change.
I still can't quite figure out why I kept dating him and eventually married him. Maybe it's the free tech support?
sounds like a keeper
I recommend Linux Mint, it's very user friendly. And it's based on Ubuntu, meaning almost every Ubuntu guide works for it as well.
I'll look into it!! Haven't got much todo anyway right now since my summer break just started.
What do you think about Zorin? It's Ubuntu in a Windows Skin if I remember correctly, so target audience are Windows and Mac OS users who want to switch.
Been daily driving Zorin a few months now. Once I got past three very large hardware-related hurdles (that unfortunlatey would be impossible for normal users), it has been much better than Windows. I do recommend it if you're like the middle guy in the meme (but not conservative lol)
Well my mother , who is in her 50s was studying for a course two years back , so i booted my old PC with linux mint and gave it to her , for libre office , some browser stuff and pdf etc, the thing it is just worked , and as a programmer I love how i get things done easily via terminal !
75% of users use only the browser, and maybe the downloads folder of their file explorer. OS basically doesn't matter as long as they have that.
Yeah both Linux (IMO, I use Mint BTW) is getting better but also windows getting crappier.
A lot of linux platforms are pretty plug and play now unless you're trying to get a programming running that wasn't built for Linux. That's why I think both Linux and proprietary operating systems have their place. Its just too bad not everyone makes their stuff for linux. It's definitely getting better though.
That's exactly what people do. Everything we use was made for windows. Games. Editing software.
Unfortunately i think steam removed support for team fortress 2 on Linux a long time ago. I didn't stay long on Linux. I mean i use headless ubuntu and debian for a bunch of projects but not on my desktop.
Ah really? I just be mixing up with Rust. If tf2 is playable on Linux i might give it another try then
The fact that the favorite OS of the tech conservative is an Arch based distro and and a Debian based distro instead of pure Arch or Debian makes this meme inaccurate.
Tails is also total ass as a daily driver. I know, I did it for a long time before the lack of persistence was such a pain I had to give in. Like, you can save in your data partition, but having to install/configure everything on each boot sucks, and if you made the system partition writable it would defeat the point of Tails.
I don’t think Tails, backtrack, kali, and similar distros were ever intended to be daily drivers. I’ve only used them as live ISOs to leverage their very specific toolkits.
They weren't. Or at least Tails wasn't. I did it anyway.
I watched one HTML video 5 years ago, and now I'm using a De-Googled phone, Linux, and get a more paranoid than I should when I see and Echo Dot. This is not what I signed up for...
I dislike this meme, it's inaccurate
Tech normie also uses VS Code as a text editor sending data to Microsoft & using proprietary plugins.
tbf vscode is a decent, open-source editor with great support for Rust (it's rust-analyzer's primary platform with nvim and Clion on the second place)
(but the official ms packages ship with a custom config with ms telemetry, branding and marketplace)
basically just use code(oss) or vscodium instead of binary vscode releases
Most of the language servers can run with Vim, Neovim, Helix, Kakoune, or Emacs as you noted. You could run VS Codium if you’re the “Tech Conservative”, but ultimately if you’re going all the way to “Tech Paranoid”, you won’t touch VS Code or Codium knowing Microsoft is steering the ship with another EEE plot in mind. It’s all a part of that package with Microsoft™ GitHub® + Codespaces® + Copilot® trying to vendor lock-in the developer experience into the platform.
It's "open source" as a technical matter, but the fact is that plenty of common extensions are still strictly controlled by Microsoft (like say, Live Share) and can't be used with vscodium due to licensing. It's a pretty useless editor without extensions, and the marketplace isn't exactly "open", either.
most extensions I use are available on openvsix
don't care about proprietary C++/C# debuggers because I use CodeLLDB (with Rust-analyzer).
🥺
Yep, you best pull your Chad chaps, & decide what’s better: Church of Emacs or the Cult of vi.
Join us in the cult of vi! Just remember to learn the secret password when you need to leave.
I run arch, have the latest iphone, watch MKBHD, amd use tor… so…. yeah i dunno
the fuck is My Kebab Beats His Dad?!?
I just tried to decode that acronym for a bit too: "mystery kanban bunny haired boss"? He's a tech YouTuber.
I'm between conservative and paranoid and watch mental outlaw.
based.win
is IRC still a thing? was huge 20 years ago, what happened to it
It’s still around, just in a much smaller capacity. IRC clients are still being actively developed today too.
Twitch chat uses IRC weirdly enough.
Probably more popular than ever technically.
I use it for book piracy, myself
Honestly best way ive found
with how contentious Red Hat and Canonical decisions have been lately, the mid panel should have Arch and Debian replacing Ubuntu and Fedora.
This is very true. As soon as I get a new PC I'll switch to Debian.
Finally someone who doesn't call me either a corporate simp or paranoid
In our hearts.
Sweet
It's still relatively new so it's gonna take time for it to reach mainstream meme status like Arch or Gentoo.
There's should be a Matrix app in the middle or at the right.
Middle is Matrix and ActivityPub, right is Session, SimpleX, and Nostr
Matrix has de-facto centralization around Matrix.org where all metadata floats back through them in one way or another. Due to the expense of all the mirroring required (every message + attachment from every DM & chatroom of every user) as well as the Python back-end being slow, it’s in practice not good to self-host despite in theory Matrix being good. XMPP runs on a potato relatively & has so much feature overlap (with the ability to extend being inherent to the protocol)—the only issue is fragmentation of servers & clients (though Conversations Compliance is close-ish to a minimal standard).
I'm not very knowledgeable, but Matrix is only centralized, if you don't include non-matrix.org instances. You can safely chat locally without matrix.org, AFAIK.
If you chat with one user from Matrix.org or one user in your room is Matrix.org (or any org they host for) then all of that chat data will be synced with them. A room with any general traction will inevitably have someone from Matrix.org & there’s not a lot of options to choose from (I’ve seen a lot of instances shutdown because of the cost to sync all that data was too much).
But that’s why I said “in practice”.
Look at me, I AM big tech now Self hosted, or it doesn't exist
As the enshitification of the internet continues, this is going to start becoming more and more the case for me
Somehow I fall within all these categories
I use ms edge on linux. Evil laugh
Laughs in .net core
I just learned a few weeks ago about people who use Edge on iPads. Like, what?
Tech conservative. What does it mean if I use librewolf?
Your canine is free but not on fire
Oh thank god.
Awooooo!
I use Edge, my favourite (or more accurately, most comfortable) OS is probably Ubuntu, and I self host a bunch of stuff.
The hell does that make me?
An independent and unique individual. Who cares what others think? You do what you do.
Between normie and conservative, I'm waiting for SteamOS to become publicly available to even attempt switching to Linux.
I'm curious: what feature(s) of SteamOS are keeping you from trying/switching to Linux?
If it's Proton, you get that for free with any Steam install on Linux. I've been using it for the last couple years. (And it's awesome)
As for me - can't play Fortnite on Proton/SteamOS
Yeah, multiplayer games with kernel-level anti-cheat are gonna be real hard to support on Linux. I don't know that we'll ever have a good solution to that.
If true, that would be awesome if a new SteamOS became a Linux on-ramp (Debian base didn’t quite pan out).
Try out EndeavourOS. It's based on Arch (Like SteamOS) and I have had no trouble with gaming so far.
Somewhere between Normie and Tech conservative?
Real bummer that Signal decided to shit the bed.
Wait what happened to Signal?
They stopped the dual support of both SMS and private messages (for "UX" reasons).
I've used it like 3 times since then, but to be fair, I have used it.
Yeah that really made it hard to convince normies to use it. Have you found a similar replacement that does e2e privacy if both using the software and sms/rcs as a backup if not?
Nope. I got nothing.
what does that mean im confused
Signal used to be an SMS (text message) client in addition to its secure IM protocol. If both people were using Signal, it would use the secure protocol, otherwise it would fallback to a text message. They removed the text messaging feature from Signal and now it's a lot harder to convince normies to use it.
Previously: Hey replace your texting app with Signal, if two people use Signal you'll be upgraded automatically.
Now: Hey use Signal, no one you know is on it and you'll need to remember who uses SMS and who uses Signal.
whyd they do that
Likely one or more of the following:
Oh god, this meme. It's not something I've ever seen before, but it's so true.
God, Tor, freaking Tor. Bless it's heart, really, but it's practically unusable. At least for me. I was really getting into it, trying to use it as a daily browser, ran with so much less ram than all the others. But it's practically unusable! All the shitty websites I had to go on daily for School practically didn't work, and half the websites would always take at least 10-15 minutes to get working because they keep thinking I'm a hacker. Or it's just region blocked, and I have to spend SO MUCH TIME making new connections in the hopes it doesn't go to a single blacklisted country. Sometimes even with a phone there to authenticate, it just doesn't work. So I had Firefox anyway, it was literally what Tor was built off of. And because of how unbelievably inconvenient and annoying Tor (Or more accurately, how shitty the Internet in general has got, I really wouldn't mind logging in to every website every time, with a phone authentication every so often) was, I ended up just using Firefox and using Tor for dark web stuff. Essentially, what it's supposed to be used for.
Linux...man, Linux was always one of those things I wanted to get into, but thinking critically, it would be very dumb for me to do. Almost every single thing I do is required by a Windows app. Critical and niche shit, mind you. So essentially, it'd be the Tor situation all over again. I'd be doing effectively everything worthless on Linux while molesting my computer for a VM for windows, which I would be doing on a daily basis for practically as long as I use the computer. So I'm practically stuck being a normie. I try to do everything I can to stop all these companies and shit tracking me and have my machine running faster, like running scripts to debloat windows, but in the end, it doesn't amount to too much. I'm stuck a normie, no matter how much of a poser I act.
Wine and crossover can probably meet the needs of most of your windows app needs at this point, which realistically aren't a lot if you look into it, and keep a windows vm / cloud instance handy. Why not try a vm of Linux on your windows machine (or use WSL) to get your toes in the water to see if your assumptions are still correct today?
I tried. I have very peculiar needs, I'm not joking when I say I use shitty old programs from before the millennium AT LEAST EVERY WEEK. Very specific niches that I have found no solutions for on Linux.
Essentially, I need Windows for it's main selling point. Insane compatibility on software from every field. And until Linux can actually RIVAL windows instead of presenting Fisher price alternatives, I'm forced to stay with the shackles of blasphemy.
I've tried it in the past. The actual UI and the general process of doing things was the least of my issues. I'm not loyal to Windows or anything at all, I can easily get used to that.
Props for even actively thinking about it, that's always the first step! If you want to switch to Linux I recommend first switching to apps that run on both Linux and Windows. They exist for almost every use case, and you can migrate gradually app by app.
That's unfortunately simply untrue. You can't, with a straight face, claim that there is any actual competition to Photoshop, Revit or a myriad of other, non-programming use-cases. It's easy to use Linux when you're a developer, it's almost impossible if you're an architect. Sure, you can use wine. Good luck, half of photoshop builds are borked. All Revit has garbage rating on wine. You just can't professionally escape windows if you're in a wrong profession.
This is sadly just true. At least I as an artist could decide to bite the bullet with Clip Studio and learn Krita instead which is not THAT inferior. But to tell a Photoshop professional to switch to GIMP is simply stupid. If only Affinity ported their crap to Linux...
Hopefully with China moving to openKylin, there may be more adoption for the Linux desktop, and it hopefully maybe will incentivize corporations to port their stuff. But for now, yeah.
I mean, I'm talking about switching IF there are apps for your workflow on Linux. If not then of course this is not (yet?) an option for you. But that's exactly why I say switch app by app, so you can figure out if your workflow would actually work. Afaik many people don't switch because the apps they are used to don't exist on Linux, not because there are no replacements. And as a side effect, most Linux apps are open source, so even switching to just some of those is still a good thing.
First of all, if you want to get into Linux, DO IT! It's truly awesome, I love it. Just get Mint, throw a Windows skin over it and nobody will notice, trust me. Honestly, it's incredibly rewarding.
When it comes to browsers, I now have the best setup I could think of: LibreWolf. It's a hardened version of Firefox. It doesn't use TOR and all websites are accesible. I use Startpage as a search engine. Granted, it can be a bit slow but it gets great results and there is a button that lets you open websites via a Startpage proxy. LibreWolf by default erases all browser data on exit so for logins I use KeePassXC password manager. It has an awesome addon which automatically fills in login fields, it can do TOTP and autofill that, too. It's pretty great.
For mobile KeePassDX is great
Guess I'm between normie and conservative since I use Windows and Firefox.
Weird to put the Self Hosted podcast on the FOSS-only Gentoo user seeing that Jupiter Broadcasting has been on the contrarian "Red Hat is actually good" train.
It's not Russian, it's made by some Russians
Tech conservative. Still use Windows unfortunately.
With every passing year, little by little I go deeper to the privacy paranoid side.
But my focus is way more anti big corporation than pro privacy, that fact those are almost one and the same is mostly a side effect for me.
Who is MKBHD ? I was addicted to luke smith once , but now i feel his views are bit too radical !!
Marques Brownlee on YT
Fortnite and Markass Brownlee
I used to watch him a lot as well, especially for the specific Linux content. I got a bit put off by some weirder ideas but mostly forgot about it. Which idea's does he have now and which you particularly don't see yourself in?
I don't remember any specific ideas but I got turned off by his political rants eventually.
This may be a hot take, but in my experience most FOSS believers are either very right or left politically.
Many ideas that would lead to me becoming someone they call an incel to begin with !
Firmly in camp conservative (yikes) Fav OS: Fedora Fav browser: Firefox Fav apps: Thunder and Element and technically feeder but only because I haven't had the energy to write my own rss feed consumer nervously in dart/flutter
I'm in the process of putting together my own next cloud and moving to proton mail. After that I'll be able to install bridges from a self hosted matrix to discord for people and teams for work. I use edge, outlook, and teams on my work computer but it occasionally connects to my home network so at some point I'll probably put it on an isolated vlan.
How the fuck is Telegram after WhatsApp?? Telegram has some of the worst privacy while WhatsApp is at least end to end encrypted.
Telegram has open source clients and protocol specifications. Whatsapp is a piece of proprietary bullshit that you can't even use without a phone and zuck will sue you for even trying to decomple it
I am not a big WhatsApp fan, Signal and Matrix are clearly better from a privacy perspective, e.g. because of the meta data.
And while it's true what you wrote, it still doesn't explain my question / counter my argument. WhatsApp is, no matter how much I disliked Facebook / Meta, having better privacy. All messages are end-to-end encrypted and can't be returned to anyone, while most chats in Telegram aren't end-to-end encrypted. Telegram often doesn't give out any chats, but they are capable of doing so and could change their policies at any time.
Telegram's secret chats are e2e encrypted as well. They're not the default option because it's their way of balancing between being a messenger for privacy nuts and a social network with huge channels full of media at the same time.
Comparing the end-to-end chats, I straight up don't trust WhatsApp, it could send my messages straight to Zuck as far as I'm concerned. Given how many reverse engineering projects got closed after a cease and desist letter from them, I suspect a great deal of security by obscurity. While Telegram isn't much better with it's ridiculously convoluted code, it's inviting people to check and they have verifiable builds, that means that they are at least confident in what they are doing.
As for Signal and Matrix, I don't know a single person who uses either, so for me Telegram is the best middle ground for my normie purposes
Just because it tells you it is doesn't mean it is
But when it doesn't tell you it definitely isn't
Telegram is end to end encrypted for secret chats
Which you manually need to enable, which almost no-one does, which only work on one device and not on multiple devices like WhatsApp and Signal (which essentially renders the feature useless), and which is not possible for group chats.
USA, Germany, Russia, Iran, China, Brazil, and other have tried to or have banned Telegram at various points of time in the past decade because of their concern they can't access Telegram data. You can't say the same for WhatsApp. That suggests WhatsApp isn't as secure as they say.
That logic is bogus. I can't say the same about WhatsApp because WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted. They can't give you any message data because they literally don't own it.
Telegram, on the other hand, does have all the messages. They just refuse to give it to authorities. But they could change that at any point and just start giving the data, while in WhatsApp, that's not possible by design.
Fair points. Though how could you say for sure that WhatsApp doesn't have a backdoor in place?
Hardcore (tech)conservative here. I will survive the AI doppelganger crisis.
Tech conservative, apparently. Although fuck big tech, you can achieve the sake thing with decentralised federated services or blockchain (in some cases).
I guess I am a cross between “Normie” and “Conservative”. I use macOS and Fedora daily, I watch MKBHD but also watch FOSS YouTubers. I use WhatsApp, but only because, in Netherlands, it’s impossible to live without it. I don’t use any Chromium, and I use Firefox, but I also use Safari.
Fuck getting labeled.
I feel like WhatsApp should be in the middle. The app is terrible, but the messaging is actually encrypted. We paranoids also appreciate Signal, and Element disappointingly gets no play here.
Also:
It's kind of weird, then, how they all end up doing evil stuff, including the guys that explicitly set out with the philosophy "don't be evil".
We can all tell conservative is supposed to be the enlightened one, but unless the creator is using a very malice-driven definition of evil (as opposed to including accidental evil) this line is an own-goal.
Do you think Whatsapp is actually encrypted and isn't a tool to get more information from its users because Meta pinky promised? Closed source piece of garbage.
Open Whisper did the actual message algorithm, and I understand it's open source. It could be copying your messages at the endpoint, I guess, but nobody has caught it doing that on wireshark to date.
I do trust Open Whisper and their open source project as well. I also trust Meta to do everything possible to collect even the slightest bit of data possible. Plus as Whatsapp is completely proprietary we don't know how the solution from Open Whisper was integrated. Why not open source it like Signal does?
You'd have to ask Meta, I guess, although you wouldn't get a straight answer. It's possible they could switch just your phone to send them cleartexts. Anyone who's read this far should probably use an actual secure app.
Yeah, Matrix should be in the middle. Telegram is tech normie but in the east.
Fuck anything created by Facebook. It wouldn't surprise me if the EFF released an announcement today saying that Facebook always had a master encryption key and have hard records of every conversation ever had on WhatsApp. Actually, I'd be willing to bet real money that is the case, if there was any way to actually resolve that bet.
Literally not possible, from what I've read of the scheme involved. I haven't looked over it myself but I trust Open Whisper.
Last time I checked (which has been a while admittedly) they used their central server for key exchange, meaning the whole encryption is compromised.
You'll learn pretty soon that the really cool kids are running zOS
I think I'm somewhere in between two and three.
How do you tell if someone is an Arch user? You don't, they will tell you.
Self-hosting podcast is paranoia??
I’m mix of second and last one
What a bunch of bullshit.
I self-host my stuff because it's cheaper, I run Gentoo since the last 15 years and use Chrome because it's just better and friendly. I also have a Xperia android phone and really, really don't like MKBHD.
I'm somewhat curious as to whether you plan to switch to another browser when Google finally pushes Manifest v3 and/or Web Integrity API
I honestly have no idea what's going to happen. Most probable outcome is I'll run two different browsers based on what works for me. I stopped acting "ethical" about computing a long time ago, with some small exceptions. I'm not here on Lemmy because ethics, but because I'm fucking pissed at Reddit.
Tech conservative, because I use FreeBSD, Surf browser, IRC...
whats irc
Old school group chat.
Surprised Zorin OS is there.
I like it - even paid for the Pro. But I'm more partial to Pop OS as my favorite Debian based distro.
I can't be a Tech Paranoid.
Where does Element/Matrix fit in here? It doesn't really seem like Paranoid like XMPP since people have been using it pretty regularly now, not just paranoid people.
People care so much about the weirdest stuff.
Watches Luke smith. Based.
I watched a few of his videos and I don't get it
whats irc chat?
Discord for chads
Internet Relay Chat. Super old school, everyone connects to a server with their own clients. I think with modern encryption though it's one of the more secure ways to chat as long as the server owner is trusted.
Isn't tor like compromised? And most privacy based solutions are usually run by shell organizations that have ties with Five Eyes. Stuff like VPN services, proxies or some of those password managers.
Can anyone confirm this for me?
Most people who got caught on Tor were caught by undercover operatives or one of their friends on there got busted. Just general recklessness on there. I have heard that CIA tries to run a bunch of tor nodes to deanonymize tor but I've also heard that tor checks if those nodes are legit before allowing them on. I don't see strong evidence for tor being compromised.
Privacy based solutions is kind of vague, the main privacy and security services I use are Signal, Protonmail, Protonvpn, and Bitwarden. All of these are open source, you can view the source code yourself and see if there's spyware, strangers look at the code all the time so online strangers can see if there's spyware in there, they also are all checked and audited by third parties. So the code you see is what you get and there are no backdoors or spyware running in there. You can build it all from source if you're extra cautious but it's probably done right.
So I have no idea what this guy is saying but it is not true at all.