A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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Is this true? I.e. Apple can ship notification contents after an app has made the actual notifications with contents? Can’t read the linked article behind the paywall
Dude had a problem with Framework supporting a politically dubtious FOSS project so he went with HP as the morally superior choice 😆
Dude as soon as I read that I stopped reading the article and rushed straight to the comment to the comment and I wasn’t disappointed to find I wasn’t the only one that noticed that.
i’m deeply skeptical of someone having done that much “research” and concluding that HP has to be the best option for any kind of hardware
Can I get a quick rundown on hp controversy?
https://bdsmovement.net/boycott-hp
you can pretty much just read the headlines:
https://www.npr.org/2006/10/12/6252448/hp-spying-scandal-offers-window-into-board-battles
https://www.pcmag.com/news/hp-accused-of-quietly-installing-spyware-on-windows-pcs
https://www.cio.com/article/260587/hp-spying-scandal-a-timeline.html
https://www.gsaig.gov/news/hewlett-packard-agrees-pay-united-states-55-million-settle-allegations-fraud
this is all ignoring their bricking of their own printers when you try to use 3rd party ink, though widespread enshittification is making that particular bullshit more common among different brands
Commissioned article
It ain’t much, but it’s dis-honest work.
Or HPE software
If you want the “morally superior choice” just head over to your nearest electronics recycling center and pick up some old laptops.
Heh… like him, I have an M1 Pro and an iPhone 13.
Unlike him, I maxed both out at the time so they’d last me 7 years. Also, unlike him, I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem for 41 years, been in the Linux ecosystem for 29 years, been in the BSD ecosystem for 32 years, and been in the Windows ecosystem for 27 years.
So far, so good… they still do everything I want them to.
For anything else, I have my Linux server I can remote into. Both devices are still beefy enough to run VMs as needed for most tasks that won’t run on bare metal.
My takeaways? Apple still has the most reliable out of the box experience for hardware. I’ve run macOS, Windows, Linux and BSD as my base OS, and get along fine with all of them these days. But I always have containers and VMs running other OSes so I can use the best tool for the job (or at least the best tool for me).
I generally want a computer I can pick up and use to get a task done these days, without having to spend a few hours on the update and configure cycle first. My hardware on hand can’t handle it? That’s what networked compute is for — I can even set up a container locally and deploy it to beefier inline infrastructure if I need to.
Maybe if I were a PC gamer who always wanted to play the latest games, this setup wouldn’t work — but for my actual needs, it works.
My friend recently sold his Mac as he’s very accustomed to tinkering and MacOS either didn’t listen or broke. The ouf of the box experience is real but once you are ouf of this box (aka you need more customisation and configuration) it’s not enough. But of course very Linux approach to MacOS.
Same experience here… Luckily we have brew ^^ Gives some freedom to customize !
But things like .plst… What a hellish dumb experience ! Nowadays I use my Mac as testing ground before they go into my main server…
But what a surprise when I found out that bash on Mac doesn’t work the same as on Linux…
Yeaaah Macs are good for a set/forget/pay workflow… But tinkering?? Naaaah.
Brew is the only thing that saves it somehow however that’s only package manager with formulas.
MacOS is perfect for people that just want to install the software and use it (still out of the box).
But for even system configuration MacOS falls behind in many ways - I mean even in the settings. I use Ubuntu at my work and more people with Mac have DNS / Wireguard (VPN) problems than me.
pkgsrc also works well with MacOS
Out of curiosity, did you try an equivalent, e.g. Framework or Tuxedo or a SteamDeck, or only generic hardware, like a PC, then slapped on it a random distribution?
I don’t want to presume of your experiences and only to highlight that Apple out of the box experience better be flawless precisely because they have very limited hardware to support. In fact I would argue any distribution, even an obscure one, could fare very very well if it only had well known hardware (even if hundreds of them) supported, as opposed to an open and thus endless ecosystem.
While I always love a good privacy tantrum and throwing your toys out of the pram, I don’t really get why there has to be a public announcement of ”switching”.
But I guess it’s his blog, so whatever. Wish him the best of luck with the new HP 2-in-1. Hope he remembered to turn off all the tracking features in his Ubuntu.
Fair enough but I think every single “I managed to leave the wall garden!” is a rally cry for others who are still on the verge of trying. It’s encouraging to see the success of others.
You are correct about the awareness part. Sometimes I forget that people make tech choices a big part of their identities (like being an “Apple user”) and fixing problems becomes a social cost, more than a technical or privacy choice.
it took me forever to work up the gumption to ditch the thing i’d been using for decades too-- as someone who knew zero about linux (and still don’t know much more than zero), seeing other people in similar situations make that switch definitely helped me to take the leap of faith. now windows is gone and i’m never looking back
Social proof is a hell of a drug. Getting off Instagram was always a “yeah they suck, I barely use the app, but I do not really want to spend the energy” for me; then I saw a real life friend do a post about how they were getting off Instagram. I promptly did the same.
That’s always the problem when deciding whether to post something you did you think is good and that you want others to do more. How much would I possibly influence others to do the same (because my nobody ass followed my nobody friend in getting off Insta, we clearly do not have to be mega celebrities to put our small drop of influence in the proverbial bucket), vs how much backlash will I get in the vein of “why do you have to announce it and have a public privacy tantrum, you’re not that special boo” and “humblebrag much? nobody cares”. (I’m special to the group of people that cares about me, as I am sure everyone is to the group of people that care about them! And social media makes it easier to announce it to them instead of texting everyone individually, and if you don’t have a giant group chat… I do wonder what standards you have to meet before you can post without being told “nobody cares”.)