Wait, you thought I was arguing against the idea of OS updates in general? Read better.
I was arguing against the idea that the user has to be forced out of the system while they run updates. This is because I use an OS where the updates run in a window and I can keep working.
(To everyone else: check out this guy’s comment history. He basically came here to do PR for Windows.)
Windows has so much pushy behavior - trying to trick you into using Edge, turning on OneDrive and syncing files in the background (eating bandwidth in the process), locking you out of the machine while OS updates run.
When I switched to Linux Mint in 2015, the most surprising result was how much smoother and frictionless everything became.
I genuinely believe that the “average” user outlined above would be served well by Mint. Why would I not tell people to use it?
I love Signal, and I have persuaded people to use it a lot. That said, it is definitely not the gold standard for privacy. It’s a good-enough compromise between actual unbreakable encryption and trivial for anyone to use. It’s always been valuable for that reason, and still is.
Don’t worry about Molly - it uses a variation of the same code that Signal does, so they don’t need “help” to get critical fixes that Signal receives. Use it if you like it!
The actual gold standard for privacy would be logging in through TOR and sending GPG-encrypted messages that way. And there’s an app which does this, too - it’s called Briar. (No phone number needed, either!) It’s not as seamless to set up as Signal is, though.
Asking the right questions is fine.
If you posted, “I was tremendously affected by the events of 9/11” and someone replied “By which event on 9/11? Lots of things happened that day!” or “9/11, which year?” They are not advancing the discussion, they’re just wasting your time. Asking someone in the early 2020s to specify which pandemic they mean is just as pedantic.
Socrates would have loved to interrogate the possible relationship between internet culture and the pandemic. He would have asked questions to draw out the thread OP’s beliefs and assumptions. Asking “which pandemic” doesn’t accomplish that goal.
I feel that bad faith arguments need to be called out on sight.
The purpose of a bad-faith argument, for the person making it, is to derail a discussion - with the end-goal of protecting something that the discussion would otherwise cause damage to.
A good-faith discussion would reveal a lot of correlation between social media corporations, misinformation, and vaccine denial - with a good bit of political and religious context as well - but if the posters in the discussion have to waste their time being badgered about “which” pandemic, or whatever else can be nitpicked, then the discussion becomes tiresome and people stop having it. That’s the goal, for some.
You have made an interesting example of a bad faith argument. There is exactly one possible pandemic he is referring to, yet you are acting like he is not specific enough about which pandemic. He is not referring to the black plague, the Spanish flu, or smallpox, as those are not correlated with internet privacy.
If you were genuinely curious about a link between internet privacy and the pandemic, you would not ask the poster to waste everyone’s time specifying “which pandemic” we all know he was referring to.
Personally, I would like to see @mariubrlu@mastodonapp.uk talk more about the link between internet privacy and the pandemic. I have my own theories about it as well, but hearing more from others may help to clarify my own position or even change my mind on some points.
Edit from the future: I was wrong to say “There is exactly one possible pandemic he is referring to”. See https://lemmy.ml/post/713841/comment/372567
The TLDR is that I realized the big internet companies are trying to make our lives worse to their benefit.
It started with the Kindle - I was comparing e-readers, saw that most of them use the ePub format, and learned that Kindle was not supporting that format. They had a custom format instead. Anyone with a computer can make an ePub, but you need special software to make Amazon’s format.
The effect would be that everyone who bought or received a Kindle was tacitly agreeing to make all of their ebook purchases from a single store. If B&N has a sale, or Kobo offers better image quality, the Kindle user will still only purchase their ebooks through Amazon. It’s a per-user monopoly.
(I know that technically savvy users, with a cavalier attitude towards Terms of Service agreements, can work around this. I do not believe this describes a majority of book customers.)
Anyway, when I saw what Amazon was doing, I cut ties with them entirely. I then started examining the other tech giants critically, and saw their bad behaviors as well. How FaceBook manipulates its users’ mental health, and how Google and Amazon slurp up your data and sell it. How Microsoft badgers its users and tricks them into installing anti-features. (I used to be so pro-Windows before this, it’s embarrassing.)
My goal with internet privacy is to ensure that these corporations do not profit from my data or attention. And I try to bring my friends and family with me, when it’s possible.
I’ve been using Linux since 2015, and I run OS updates ASAP. Usually about once every 1 or 2 weeks, if we are only counting system updates. So that’s about 298 updates total, right?
Given your math (298 × 0.3) , you predict that I would have encountered driver issues after an update 89 times.
I have encountered driver issues 0 times.
(This is across 4 computers and 5 distros.)