Oh boy, the jingoism.
You can’t legally work in the US without a Tax ID (generally your social).
Hospitals used to track you by name and address, with no problem. They did for me for decades. Using a government ID number isn’t necessary, organizations just like exerting control.
And no, in the US you don’t need to have ID to go anywhere. You can drive from California to Maine never having to show an ID - why should you?
I just did a 7 hour road trip, never once even opened my wallet.
Also, your social security number is not to be used as an ID - states so right on the card. Let’s think about the implications of that statement, vs what is occurring today.
Warranties are practically useless, or I should say I find better value buying a 2 year old phone for a fraction of new. I can own three or four Pixel 5/6 for the cost of a new Pixel.
I prefer having a spare around. One dies, just swap Sim and move on.
Custom roms are significantly easier today, and you can buy phones with them pre-installed, e.g. Graphene, /e/, and Lineage. I’d look at those 3, noting that /e/ also provides some google-like convenience.
Nope.
I don’t remember the last time I was in a group taking photos. Family, years ago, but the older person taking the photo was using a digital camera, not a phone, and would maybe share via text.
No one in my family really uses Facebook, and wouldn’t waste their time tagging anyone. Anyone looking at those photos would know who is who - no need to tag.
The photo would have to be tagged by someone I don’t even know, like a sibling’s friend’s kid or something, and there’s no reason for them to be viewing these photos, let alone tagging them - they likely wouldn’t even be interested in the first place.
Yep, Ghost Profiles.
Though I’d love to see what they think they have on me.
I’m old enough to well pre-date digital cameras, and of the photos I know I’m in, those people are unlikely to have uploaded pics (very few of those photos are with phones, and those people don’t share online with others much anyway).
Genuinely very curious, since I’m such an outlier - it would be really insightful as to how effective FB is at piecing together disparate and tiny elements, including the tracking pixels, etc.
I’ve never intentionally even been to the FB website - the first time a college kid in the family talked about it, I knew it was bad news, but couldn’t convince them.
Maybe I’ll spin up a Linux machine off of usb, fire up a VPN, hit FB and see what I can find. I’m kind of curious now.
Yawn.
I keep having to say this, as much as I like Linux for certain things, as a desktop it’s still no competition to Windows.
As some background - I had my first UNIX class in about 1990. I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I’d stuck with Cobol).
I run a Mint laptop. Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won’t even boot. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery (even then, to really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero).
There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions on Linux.
There are many reasons why Linux doesn’t compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.
Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. No, I’m not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That’s just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn’t realistically shareable with other people.
Now there’s that print monitor that’s on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?
Networking… Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn’t say “save creds”? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. Smh.
Someone else said it better than me:
Every time I’ve installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it’s gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn’t look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works… only it doesn’t save my preferences.
So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically… but that doesn’t work, so now I can’t boot… so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that… then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution… wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it’s been four hours, it’s 3:00am and I’m like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.
And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren’t supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can’t wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?
I just can’t do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I’ve loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.
I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.
Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM’s on Linux (Proxmox) because that’s better than running Linux VM’s on a Windows server.
Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment.
Linux doesn’t even use a common shell (which is a good thing in it’s own way), and that’s a massive barrier for users.
If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would’ve had a chance to beat MS, even then it would’ve required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.
These are what MS did in the 1980’s to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.
All this without considering the systems management requirements of even an SMB with perhaps a dozen users (let alone an enterprise with tens of thousands).
The battery life difference pretty much went away several Android versions ago (also when hardware improved).
But, yea, that’s partly why my work phone is an iPhone. I can’t use it for anything but work stuff, and it’s managed by them anyway, so no benefit to using Android for work.
It “just works” for the fundamentals…and that’s what many people want.
You can copy addresses in GMaps.
Touch and hold the address in a place “card” or whatever the fuck Google calls it now.
Yes, I despise what they’ve done to it. Used to be able to simply add a location to your contacts directly from maps (it would actually copy everying - business name, address, phone number, etc).
Guess that wasn’t collecting enough info from us.
Read the post by signal. Note the use of the word “plaintext”.
we don’t have a plaintext record of your contacts, social graph, profile name, location, group memberships, groups titles, group avatars, group attributes, or who is messaging whom.
Whenever someone qualifies a statement like this, without clarifying, it’s clear they’re trying to obfuscate something.
I don’t need to dig into the technical details to know it’s not as secure as they like to present themselves.
Thanks. I didn’t realize they were so disingenuous. This also explains why they stopped supporting SMS - it didn’t transit their servers (they’d have to add code to capture SMS, which people would notice).
They now seem like a honeypot.
Yea, I really try to avoid those logins. A Windows machine really has no need of it, and if your Corp IT allowed it to work that way, they’re really dropping the ball. Regardless of the size of the company, you buy windows pro licenses, and don’t even allow the creation of, or connection to, MS accounts with business devices.
My work phone is an iPhone, because work manages it, so Android holds no value there.
I run only local software on my PC. I refuse to use web apps - they suck in every way.
It does mean I use older versions some times, but that’s never been a hindrance (currently using Office 2016, Visio 2007, Publisher 2006,etc).
Tech illiteracy is so frustrating. It’s one thing when my older siblings/family “can’t be bothered” to learn - at least for them computers were science fiction (or at least took up a room), but seeing it among people younger than me is incredibly frustrating, since they grew up with it.
Where did rdyoung say any of this?
What you just did was put words in his mouth;make a straw man.
And factually, browsers explain what their respective private/incognito modes do. People assumed they did something else.
Did these corporations take advantage of that? Yes.
In the end, these users are as much to blame for using a tool and assuming how it functioned.
Sadly we know you are very much the exception in Apple Land.
Generally, folks who buy Apple do so because they don’t have to think about this stuff.
Most people just login/create accounts as prompted (on Android too, with companies like Samsung - there was a post yesterday confused about such logins).
It’s a hill I’ll die on.
Ive refused to use anything FB since it first launched and I wasn’t permitted to use it anyway (not that I cared).
I’ve never once been to FB intentionally. I’ve accidentally clicked a link, then closed the tab as soon as I realized.
I was sent an FB link the other day. Replied that all FB domains are blocked on my networks and devices.
Sometimes doing what you believe in comes with costs. Oh well. My life is for me, and if someone can’t be bothered to look outside their bubble, put in a tiny bit of effort, then I guess I’m not worth it in their eyes. Message received.
I even have friends who’ve complained how shitty SMS is for 20 years. I’ve offered multiple solutions, and they simply refuse to change. OK, not my problem when you message me and I don’t get it because SMS sucks and you refuse to solve the problem.