You shouldn’t opine
To “opine” is to have an opinion. Are you suggesting I should refrain from having an opinion? Does this apply to your own opinions too? Odd place to make such an argument.
Otherwise: interesting point. To me, a state that can obtain personal data by leaning on its owns corporations is, by definition, more threatening than one that has to negotiate for it with a hostile power. But perhaps I underestimate the scale of that practice.
Your points are of course valid but this is getting slightly offtopic.
If your bank really spies on you through its app, I would change bank
What would be nice would be not to have to use a proprietary app on a closed-source software stack in the first place, given that it clearly represents a privacy compromise. And that is possible: almost no bank makes it obligatory. But they would obviously love to. If only to fire their web team and save some money.
And this is not just about banks. Every online service is trying to force us onto the closed platforms of Google and Apple, when an open-standards software platform exists and is perfectly workable. Seems there might be a battle worth fighting here. Nobody much seems to agree. Fair enough.
Just let your password manager fill up the login everytime, it’s not hard.
IME that hardly works any more, as mentioned.
Exactly, the 2FA recourse usually affects browsers and not apps. And comes on top of the password or PIN, rather than replacing it. Which seems like discrimination. And it’s not even secure, as you say.
This all feels very convenient. Like a subtle form of abuse, in the name of security, to push people away from the only platform where they have any serious chance of privacy.
The arguments about the insecurity of the browser context have some merit in the aggregate, but in the end all these considerations are relative to the individual user. Which makes the discrimination a form of collective punishment that might have a legal redress.
Fair enough, but “regulatory requirements” can be a symptom as well as a cause. Bad rules are there for the changing.
So if you add up all that, then they’re more likely to allow long term login sessions on an application that they control than on a desktop/web browser that they don’t.
Again, all true. But this is all just probabilistic, as someone else said. A properly secured browser on a locked down machine can be much more secure than an outdated Android stack in the hands of the kind of person who falls victim to scams.
Here, the effect of “assumptions” is to undermine software freedom and privacy. That feels like a problem that needs a better fix.
So I will offer constructive pushback instead of inane downvotes like everyone else.
clowns
This word does literally nothing except trivialize your argument and so make it less convincing.
don’t give a shit
Ditto. Makes you sound angry and irrational. Not much of an incentive to go on reading.
psychotic
psychopathy
These are medical terms. Presumably you will claim to mean them literally and not figuratively. But really, nobody is going to assume in good faith that you’re a doctor or a psychologist. So, again, the result is to undermine your whole point and make it seem like empty bloviating.
Hope that helps.
Good analysis, thanks.
regulation like that is only proposed to hide up other clauses and proposals that are equally bad or even worse - get the public distracted and thinking they made a difference
But IMO this bit was superfluous POV. An alternative theory is that nobody is secretly scheming to do anything, least of all the chaotic EU apparatus, and that most politicians are not experts and they are simply responding to various competing stimuli, as humans do. Notably elections and media hype and lobbyists. Personally I don’t get why so many people attribute to malice what can easily be explained by incompetence, but whatever, I’m in the minority and that’s fine.
Interesting detail about the eID certificates. You’re right that Americans will find this crazy in the way that we Europeans might not. Perhaps Americans are right.
Quick politics primer. The EU Parliament is not all-powerful. It cannot even propose legislation (yet). The EU is still mostly a confederation so it’s the governments that hold the reins. But the EP has to say yes for anything to pass. And since it is essentially a consultative body, the EP also tends to contain at least a handful of earnest idealists and specialists (usually Germans) who know when to say no, and how to amend legislation. They are often from the Greens-EFA parliamentary group and sometimes from the liberal Renew group. That is likely what happened here, yet again. It is very important for EU citizens to vote for these parties and candidates in EU elections. The next election is coming up in 6 months.
Would love to, but there’s no way I’m using the account that has root access to my mobile computer in order to write random comments on the internet. To me that just seems absolutely screwed up. And I’m not renting a separate phone number, which is the only way to create a properly sandboxed Google account.
So, sorry Google, I’ll let you manage my mobile OS because there’s no easy alternative, but I will not use any of your services or voluntarily give you any information about me on any of your platforms. And of course I will mercilessly block any and all ads I see anywhere. In my case at least, you will be providing your service for literally zero $ with zero prospect of monetization. That’s the price to pay for trying to privatize our digital lives.
App-accessible contact lists is the original sin of smartphones. As a result, a few powerful corporations know the social graph of entire countries. The handful of people who make efforts to stay anonymous be damned - they’re in the database too thanks to their friends. This one infuriating feature makes decent privacy all but impossible.
Agreed that the best one-stop answer is to tell people to buy their next computer from a Linux specialist (and be able to name 3 of them).
And yes, there’s a limit to how easy the DIY solution is going to be. But I think that the bar is now pretty low if we make it as easy as possible. As you suggest, installer software is now pretty much “just hit Enter” until it works. The weak link is now the boot medium. I’m pretty experienced and yet whenever I have installed Ubuntu from Windows I’ve had to struggle with Powershell (or whatever it’s called) and go googling for dd command parameters. The alternative is third-party software, as you say, which has its own security risks and learning curve.
This s a crazy situation. The OS should bundle all software you need to get it running and it should hand-hold the user every step of the way. Big button “Get started”, step 1, step 2, step 3, done. It doesn’t have to be walls of text full of jargon and useless technical asides (as Debian does it, and even Ubuntu to some extent). And the user doesn’t need to understand what exactly is happening, they just need to get up and running. When I was beginning with Linux I had no idea what I was doing but I persisted. So many others are not going to persist in the face of this unnecessary complexity. It really irritates me that FOSS shoots itself in the foot like this.
Rant over. Last time I checked, the specific answer to your question was: Fedora. Big buttons, 1, 2, 3, and the boot-creation binary is right there as part of the process. Probably some further refinements are possible, but Fedora seems not bad.
Yes that’s all great, but really you’re just proving my point here. How do you get a non-techie past this whole obstacle? Tell them to ask instructions on an obscure forum, whereupon they’ll get a wall of text like this, full of obscure geeky jargon? (That is roughly how Debian does it, by the way.) Obviously you know exactly what you’re talking about but I’m a bit concerned that you - and most other Linux users - are slightly out of touch about just how obscure and forbidding all this is to a non-technical person. The problem is that we need at least some of those people to succeed if Linux is to thrive.
Yeah, with the small caveat that you first have to somehow make that USB stick. For non-techies that is still anything but easy-peasy, and most distros seem to weirdly assume that you already have the thing in your hand, as you just seemed to do. The reality is that it’s now easily the biggest single hurdle to installing Linux, the rest is easy as you say.
This is the solution I’m considering. Does it make sense if you have no actual contacts on Matrix? Do you think it would work on localhost instead of remote server? My use case is to get a single conversation view that includes Signal and Telegram contacts, but I don’t need it on multiples devices, one desktop box is fine.
To do that literally is actually quite hard if not impossible for most people. A deGoogled mobile device that is functional - that is a quite a technical challenge.
However, ditching Chrome is obviously low-hanging fruit. Drives me crazy that so many people can’t see the obvious problem of having a web where the client and the server belong to the same company.
IMO the “ownership” thing is a red herring. It has its roots in a specifically American obsession with private property.
If everybody “demands ownership of goods”, that means we share nothing. Hardly a model of “sustainable consumption”. There are loads of examples of redundant private ownership of goods. My favorite stat: the average electric drill is used for 7 minutes in its entire life. All because every household in every building on every street must have its own one, instead of us finding a way to share them.
In the context of digital “goods”, “ownership” really just means control. I wish we would use that word instead.