Spyke

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privacy

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Do you think using GrapheneOS is useless if you plan on installing proprietary apps anyway?

Graphene user here ! The privacy and security gains are quite huge. Play services are more or less regular apps, with the sandbox offering limited access. Some of the "advanced" security offered by graphene triggered a few times for me, sometime highlighting something sketchy in some apps.

Also, you can disable the internet permission for apps, which can effectively block a lot of stuff (ex : you install a supposedly offline game, but it stills asks for the permission: denied).

If your main concern is not depending too much on Google, your options are limited, and very, very flawed depending on how far you whish to go (went far down this rabbit hole, came back). One less "extreme" way, using graphene, is to install play services and everything dependent on a separate user account, and clone app from this account to the one you will use. Since alternate accounts are sandboxed and not running when not logged in, when you use your phone from the main account, you will effectively be almost goggle free.

Almost, because the main remaining privacy hole is notifications. A lot of things goes through GMS in order to reach your phone without melting your battery

privacy

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Does Gboard spell checker phone home on Android?

It does, don't remember the details but at one point I let a packet capture tool on my phone run for a few days and checked which apps phoned home. Gboard was one of them. You'd besurprisesd at the amount of network traffic for most apps between 2-4 am.

Just remove its network permissions, and it works fine (without the phoning home part) AFAIK other spell checkers / autocomplete aren't quite there yet

linux

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I legitimately want to run Linux as my desktop OS, please tell me how to meet my requirements.

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I've not used it for quite a bit, but look at Thunderbird (a mozilla project iirc), it might do what you want as far as email is concerned. However do note that Microsoft is really closing things down in outlook/office these days, they really don't like people using a "real" Linux (they want people to use windows with all their crap and start menu ads, and just have a small Linux VM they call the wsl )

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How do I poison pdfs against LLM ?

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Most actual poisoning techniques don't actually work that well. When I end up with a PDF, I usually strip out the existing text layer, apply a denoiser and a few other preprocessing steps to correct common errors, then a layout / reading order detector, and finally OCR the different blocs. This is against the most common poisoning techniques, and one of the most efficient, called : someone printed a document, forgot about it for 3 years, then scanned it slightly tilted (and dirty, crumpled, ...), and the scanner decided to apply its crappy OCR.

Using screenshots of the PDF also avoid any kind of font face poisoning, and anti copy protection.

If you really, really need to protect your PDF, please consider accessibility first, then what would work imho is to use the scripting features of pdf to actually render your content on the fly. That would probably mess up most of the "automatic" processes.

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I've had ios apple phones all my post-2010 life and am thinking about buying my first android phone, what are some things to know before switching?

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I went the /e/os way and quickly turned back. Not to dismiss the effort of the maintainers, but it really felt like a frontend on lineage os meant to sell alternative cloud services. I did not find convincing arguments over a bare lineage os and the pretty much forced /e/ cloud was a total turn off.

I went the "real" security / privacy way and switched to grapheneos. Very happy overall, already went thought with 2 major os updates, no issues whatsoever. Only issue would be if you want Google pay (won't work on graphene). You'd need a pixel phone if that's in your budget. The pixel phones are great at photos, but pretty "meh" otherwise

linux

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Update: I did it! Old: Help! Installing Linux with no external media.

Random idea that might work: Try to install ReFind from windows, it should work and allow you to boot from random thing more easily. Then try using it to boot from the SD card. Don't forget to turn off secure boot. If that doesn't work, the right idea is indeed to "burn" the media on a partition, however you will also encounter some amount of headache with this option: an installer is not a single partition, but multiple ones. You could try only having the "main" partition on disk, and use refind to boot it too.

TL;DR: ReFind could help you. Turn off secure boot.

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I bought an Ender 3 V3 (corexz) recently, and have been having bed adhesion issues. Please help me interpret this bed adhesion test result

Clean the printing surface with dish soap and tepid water, and adjust your z offset. It appears to be too low from what I can see, but it's hard to tell from a few pictures. It's not supposed to be 0, and will depend on your specific printer, extruder, ... You should aim to have fully filled squares, with no apparent "scars" on the surface left by the hotend moves. A nice rule of thumb is to be able to barely move a sheet of paper between your plate and the hotend freely without feeling friction (make sure to clean the tip of the hotend before). If after these steps it still produces these results, maybe there is an issue with you bed planarity, but most likely your pla has gone bad (I've even seen sealed bags go bad over a few years), try with a freshly dried filament, or a new roll from a reputable source

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Using a Raspberry Pi as a Router

Didn't read this particular article, but using a pi as a router works rather well. I've been using one as my main router for years now, with openwrt. You get a CPU fast enough to handle QoS without issues, more than enough power to run a few additional things if you want to (wireguard, AdBlock, ...). Only thing is : the wifi is trash. Doesn't matter for me (I just use the integrated wifi for a guest network, main network have dedicated APs)

france

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Météo-France à bout pendant une panne

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Il y a aussi meteociel, qui expose directement les résultats des différents modèles, y compris maille géographique et temporelle assez fine (par forcément à 10 minutes, mais au moins à l'heure ). Point bonus, on peut choisir le modèle qui marche le mieux (vers ici, météo France est toujours à la ramasse, mais Arome s'en sort plutôt bien sur 24h)

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France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone, spy on people

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I've seen this news published at a few different places, and IIRC they plan to use already existing exploits. You can read a bunch about what could potentially be used on the grapheneos website, specifically on how the modem and cellular network stack is very highly privileged on android at least, and it is very likely that most cellphones are vulnerable to some kind of code injection via a stingray, for example.