irotsoma

Yes, that too. I should have said want to code stuff…and continue to maintain it…

KDE if you want to just configure stuff. Gnome if you want to code or manually style stuff.

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“There’s nothing to suggest that these people will be approached with any claims directly.”

No, but they’ll be pressured to testify with the threat of such a lawsuit. And if the RIAA wins, then ISPs will likely start giving the names to them openly so they can start those lawsuits back up again, at least in the US where it’s again no longer considered an essential utility service by the government thanks to Republicans. There’s a reason they’re not targeting the bigger ISPs that have enough money to fight back anymore. This way they can get a judgment to use against them later.

Yeah I think hashes in the same folder are only valuable as a check to make sure you downloaded the file successfully. Which isn’t a big issue for at least the around 80% of internet users who have access to broadband. They are only useful for security if the hash is on the website that you click on and then you download and verify it manually.

Yeah, IMHO Signal is the right balance of usability and privacy. Problem with not having a user ID is that you can’t easily use the application on multiple devices at the same time and if you lose the device, or don’t properly migrate to a new device, you will have to start over building your connections to others.

But the real issue with no user ID or centralized platform is discoverability. Same reason things like gpg for email never caught on. You can’t just type in a person’s phone number, username, or whatever and start talking to them. It only works if you have another line of communication with each person to set up the connection. This is usually the deal-beaker.

But the problem with user IDs is that anyone can create as many as they want and use them to avoid spam and abuse filtering. So that’s why phone number is used by Signal as a unique identifier. It’s not 100% unique, but it’s good enough to deal with all but the most determined abusers.

Can’t speak to this incident, but i do agree that in general, free VPNs are not safe because usually they are funded by selling your personal information and web traffic data or performing MITM attacks to inject ads and thus compromising security, even if that’s not the intention.

That being said, Rise Up is a donation funded organization and is specifically run by a nonprofit promoting activism, so really it all comes down to your trust that org. The cost of bandwidth required to run a VPN is high, their site mentions it costs them about $60/person/year. So that money has to come from somewhere. If you’re paying, and it’s a reasonably trustworthy company, then it’s unlikely they will be willing to risk selling your data. But if you’re not paying, then the incentive to not sell your data just isn’t there, thus it requires more trust, IMHO.

Also, if they are a legit org and I take their product without paying, I’m taking that money from activists in places that truly need VPNs to stay safe from arrest or murder, so I generally don’t feel it’s moral to use it just to save money, but that’s me.

Not OP, but for me the issue is if you want to override the default and make it opt-out, especially sine the opt-out process isn’t that well documented, then you should realize that support is a necessary part of that process and fix problems as they arise rather than resorting to name calling and hostile behavior when something you published is broken. It’s a responsibility of taking on that kind of project. Either that or make it explicitly opt-in and give users a warning like with beta version opt-in notifications that the packages are not official and issues may not be fixed as quickly as the official releases.

I got an ASUS Zenbook about a year ago for about $1,500: model UX3404VC-BB99T. But it looks like it’s no longer available:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-zenbook-14-120hz-oled-touch-laptop-evo-intel-13-gen-core-i9-with-32gb-memory-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3050-1tb-ssd-gray/6548463.p?skuId=6548463

It has pretty decent specs. Intel gen 13 Core i9, nice looking touchscreen, 32GB of RAM, etc., and it all works out of the box with Ubuntu and now Fedora. It did have some issues with plain Debian, but that’s fairly common with Debian and newer hardware.

Although that particular laptop is not around anymore, there might be some other Zenbooks as I have found they tend to be Linux-friendly in general. And ASUS gets a lot of hate for whatever reason, but I’ve always found them to be good for the price.

Anytime there is an update, files are often deleted during that process so they can be replaced with new files or because those files are no longer part of the new version being installed. If an error occurs during this process, it is possible that an application will appear not to be installed because it’s broken.

Anyway, most software does at least partially “uninstall” when it is updating, so if the install fails, then it’s always possible that an update will have uninstalled something. That’s just updates regardless of operating systems, package managers, etc.

I mean, bugs are a part of all software. Stability is about reliability. That if you boot up your computer you are less likely to spend the first hour or two troubleshooting unless you just did a major upgrade. I’m not saying Arch is unstable, just less stable.

Apple hardware is good, but not priced at the same quality to price ratio because there’s no competition. You can get other brands with higher quality at the same price point that better supported by Linux.

I think that was the point there. Not that Apple has bad hardware, but lack of competition and the premium for the product family mean you can get higher specs per dollar with many other manufacturers and you can find hardware that won’t require “jailbreaking” or other workarounds or missing drivers to get it working with Linux.

There’s too much of a fine line in what is considered hate and what is considered “alternative facts”. The current state in the US shows how language can be twisted to mean the opposite and how easy it has always been to dehumanize some group in order to make laws not apply to them.

Arch is more cutting edge and thus less stable in very general terms. And is would be a learning curve for someone used to Debian based distros.

Sounds like this might be specific to your brand of TV. I have a Sony and there’s a bunch of Sony junk on there that I disabled a long time ago. But my TV app doesn’t have any ads in it yet. I’m guessing your manufacturer added ads to their TV app and made a deal with Google to use them as the ad provider. Unfortunately, those apps are relatively proprietary since they are supposed to be primarily just a simple UI for the tuners and so mostly hardware specific. Not saying there aren’t replacements, but likely that would require someone to reverse engineer some of of the hardware firmware’s APIs rather than web APIs that most apps interface with and aren’t guaranteed to be the same across models. Those are only available if you own an actual TV, so it’s less likely to exist.

Anyway, my point is that your searching probably needs to focus on the TV rather than the Android/Google TV platform as a whole. Look on forums devoted to the TV brand. You may have more luck.

The other alternative might be to block the ads on your router, but that may or may not work or cause some unintended inconveniences. For example I have Google’s DNS blocked and my wifi constantly drops and reconnects even when I only want to watch locally hosted content because the TV thinks it’s offline and needs to fix the connection.

I distance myself from companies run by people who say or explicitly support people who say that I don’t or shouldn’t exist. There are a few other things that make me distance myself from companies, but that one is a pretty hard line. (I’m gender “non-compliant” and on the Autism spectrum among other things that have been explicitly said don’t exist, shouldn’t exist, or need to be “cured”). Otherwise, I try to distance myself from any companies who explicitly collect and sell my information and other things that I find problematic, but that’s not always possible.

But the shithead exec is supportive of fascists which means privacy is secondary to the desires of the current regime. That’s just a standard part of fascism. And if the current regime is allowing untested backdoor code to be inserted in the Treasury department and NASA and the CDC and most major social media to strip out protections for people they don’t like, climate change, etc. Just imagine what someone who actually supports them ideologically would be willing to do.

That’s for use of the website. Not the device.

I said from the beginning it’s a deal breaker for me. You’re the one trying to convince me it’s not the issue I think it is.

And I’m not talking about the license to modify the firmware software itself. I’m talking about the EULA of the device itself. Pretty much any device you own that has any kind of software on it is not owned by you outright to modify as you wish. This website doesn’t show the agreement, but if it has a paid feature to unlock, it has to have one somewhere.

But were talking about firmware here. My computer also has firmware and an OS. I never have to touch that. Home Assistant is an application that I run on a computer. And I don’t have to modify the code in Home Assistant to get it to connect to another device. I just configure it.

I also install Linux on my laptop. Is that self hosting, too? We’re not talking about a server or a “host” other than the hardware device itself that lives in the house. If I want the server functionality, sure that’s self hosting the server software. Firmware and operating systems are generally not referred to as self-hosting since all devices need those things. Self-hosting refers generally to cloud-based applications, not standalone hardware firmware/OS.

This is a hardware device that is hard coded to connect only to a specific server that you have to pay to access if you want any API functionality. If I want to use my own I have to learn the programming language, figure out how to modify the Firmware, and then maintain a fork of that firmware indefinitely including making sure that there are no automatic updates since that would overwrite the modifications.