I expected something more shocking when I read “working with Russia”.
Kagi uses multiple search backends, and of course it needs to forward search terms to these backends. These backends probably can’t trace the searches back to the individual Kagi user though, but Yandex could still analyze search trends for example.
What’s worse is that - unless they use Yandex’ API for free - customers indirectly (and likely unknowingly) support a Russian company with their paid Kagi subscription.
Kagi should at the very least release a statement about this claim.
This being displayed as “Unknown” is likely just a bug or an app you (very) recently uninstalled. And you probably opened the camera app by accidentally swiping right to left on the lock screen. Even just a slight swipe will launch the app so it’s ready when you’re done swiping.
And I’m not even sure what you’re talking about regarding your QR code.
Android is not de facto superior to iOS, nor is the opposite the case.
If you’re really that paranoid, even GrapheneOS on a Pixel shouldn’t calm you down because it also requires proprietary firmware by Google (and possibly other vendors) to run on these proprietary devices. In this case my advice would be to stop using smartphones altogether and rely on open source computers (couple of RISC-V options out there I think) for your computing needs.
If there’s no setting in the iOS Settings app to take away the camera permission (which isn’t even given by default and the app has to ask for it), it can’t access the camera (unless it exploits a potential vulnerability in iOS, which I highly doubt).
It probably used data from motion sensors and the reason you saw your room was because of the glossy display. Or you have allowed the YouTube app to access your camera.
I didn’t see any mention of the Microsoft Store on their website?
Nintendo Switch - on the Nintendo eShop Epic Games Store - for Win / Mac WorldOfGoo2.com - right here, for Win / Mac / Linux, DRM-free
Or are you saying it should also be available on the Microsoft Store? That wouldn’t help my mentioned use case (easy install on Steam Deck and cloud sync between Deck and desktop PC).
EDIT: Also, none of my computers run Windows anymore, so yeah, I couldn’t care less about the Microsoft Store.
Not a fan of that Epic Games Store (semi) exclusivity deal.
Offering a DRM-free version in addition to the Epic Store one is nice and all, but having it on Steam (on which games don’t have to use any DRM either should the studio choose not to) would be much easier especially because of cloud saves and the Steam Deck.
It’s a skip for me (for now). Still an enjoyable game I’d guess if you don’t care about Steam.
I have an Intel Arc A750 lying around that I used at the end of last year to test whether a specific problem I was having under Linux was related to NVIDIA or something else. The answer was NVIDIA basically all of the time, but keep in mind this was around the 535 driver version.
I didn’t really test the Intel GPU long enough to tell you whether I’d recommend it. It worked well out of the box, but I’m not sure whether some of the game compatibility problems under Windows mirror over to Linux.
What was very cool when I was A-B testing some of the issues I had with the AMD card though, is that you can simply shut down the computer, swap the cards and it’ll boot up just fine right away. No driver installs needed as the kernel just includes it - no driver conflicts either. With NVIDIA, the driver can have conflicts when using a card by a different vendor.
Also, so far the flicker/crash issue I had under KDE didn’t happen under GNOME (with experimental VRR enabled). It’s too early to tell (only about a week into using GNOME), but this issue might not occur under GNOME. It’s kind of hard to pinpoint what the issue is related to anyway (kernel, firmware, Wayland, KDE/desktop environment, etc.).
I reported the issue here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/3268 and pinpointed it to weird fluctuations with the memory frequency. Just workaround so far though, no fix.
I’m not regretting the switch, no worries :). Overall the Radeon 7800 XT is still a great card, it’s a decent step up in terms of efficiency compared to the RTX 3080 as well and the PowerColor Hellhound model I got is the first card I ever had (well, with active cooling at least) where I actually agree with the reviews that the card stays pretty quiet even under load.
I also know how to work around each problem: KDE has a built-in workaround for the cursor stutters (as of version 6.something) and in GNOME you can disable hardware cursor which can decrease performance, but so far I haven’t really noticed anything. The artifacting and eventual crashing after standby with enabled VRR can be worked around by reconfiguring any display: I usually change the refresh rate of my second display between 144 and 165 hertz. The frequency of random crashes decreased a lot with newer kernel versions, and I’m not even sure if the crashes I had in KDE 6/6.1 were caused by the AMD driver or by KDE - which seems quite a bit more moody to me than the more mature KDE 5. That’s also why I’m trying GNOME now (which I actually enjoy using way more than I thought). A few days ago AV1 decoding on AMD was borked in Mesa 24.1.something, but was hotfixed a few days later. My self-compiled kernel 6.10 refused to boot with errors related to a network card, but I’ll check it out again as soon as Fedora releases their official test build (potentially this weekend) and will report the bug should it still occur. As soon as 6.10 is working, that’s one less workaround for me to worry about (unless that fix somehow doesn’t work for me).
My comment was more about the fact that I’m happy NVIDIA starts taking Linux serious (again). It’s probably not quite there yet, but NVIDIA seems to be committed to delivering a good Linux driver now and their latest releases each brought big improvements. There still seem to be some bigger issues (like the one you described), but now I’d assume we’ll get there sooner rather than later.
I tried Linux on my desktop end of last year (like I always did on about a yearly basis) and decided that if I was gonna make the switch, I needed an AMD card. NVIDIA + Wayland had a lot of flickering issues and whatnot, but I didn’t want to use X11 because Wayland has way better support for multi-monitor with different refresh rates and also VRR.
So, I sold my RTX 3080 and got a Radeon 7800 XT and switched to Linux on my main desktop full-time January 1st. A few months later and NVIDIA finally decides to stop fucking around and properly improve their Linux driver. Could’ve saved a few bucks there (sold the 3080 for like 350,-€ to a friend and got the 7800 XT for like 550,-€, and the 7800 XT is pretty much in the same performance ballpark, so I spent 200,-€ on better compatibility/less pain).
Good to know that NVIDIA will be an option for me for a GPU upgrade in the future. It’s always good to have more choice. While my experience with AMD Radeon under Linux was okay, it wasn’t really perfect either. I had the odd crash here and there with kernel versions from earlier in the year (6.6), 6.7 had black screen issues with RDNA3 (maybe RDNA2 as well) after standby and hot restarts (fixed in 6.7.4 or 6.7.5 iirc), and ever since 6.7 I have stability issues with enabled VRR and multi-monitor as well, unless I force the memory clock to stay at a higher frequency. Then there’s also this issue that just got fixed with 6.10 it seems.
So if NVIDIA really ups their game now and consistently improves their Linux driver, I could see myself going NVIDIA again. I’m also excited to see what Intel has in store though.
Not really. A 6-digit PIN gives you ~20 bits of entropy so it’ll be cracked in no time. The only protection you’re relying on is the hardware and the OS, and according to the Cellebrite compatibility table it’s mostly a question of when a vulnerability is found, not if.
So it’s a trade-off between security and usability.
So in short newer Pixel and iPhone models seem to be the most resilient to these attacks, with every iPhone able to run iOS 17.4 (XS/XR or newer) currently not attackable.
But obviously an attacker in possession of the device can wait for an exploit to be found on whatever OS version the device is running.
The by far best protection then is to set a strong passphrase so even if/when your device/OS have known vulnerabilities to allow brute force attacks, the passphrase is too complex to be brute forced in a realistic amount of time.
I’m gonna say Valheim, even though the native version doesn’t respect your default audio device so it can end up outputting sound to the wrong device at startup, which you can then correct using a volume mixer.
That’s the reason why I still play the Windows version via Proton though.
But you were asking for my favorite game with a native Linux port, not for the game with the best Linux port :D
I think their services are generally pretty good, yes.
But their frontends really aren’t. Their web apps are serviceable for desktop use. The Proton Mail desktop app is essentially the web app in an Electron or CEF wrapper. But on the desktop you can at least use Proton Bridge to then use whatever IMAP mail client you want.
On mobile, you can’t. You have to use their services with the corresponding app they provide on Android and iOS. I moved from iCloud Mail to Proton just a few weeks ago (and I also had Proton a few years ago), which meant I had to switch from the default iOS “Mail” app to the Proton Mail app, as Proton doesn’t support IMAP without a bridge (naturally, as IMAP doesn’t support end-to-end encryption).
Unfortunately the Proton Mail app is not a fully native app but instead it must be using React Native or something similar. It’s a low effort port of the web app, meaning very few integrations with iOS were actually done. For example, Apple Mail can show the email content in the notification, Proton Mail doesn’t. At least you can mark mails as read in the notification, but you can only see the subject line without opening the app. Offline functionality is very limited as mail contents aren’t cached on device, which can also make opening specific mails very slow (comparatively at least), and overall the app just feels less responsive compared to a native Swift UI app. UI animations aren’t “attached to your finger”, instead they just fully play once triggered no matter what. Calendar attachments just show up as an .ics file that you then have to download and open to add them to your calendar instead of just having a simple “Add to calendar” button.
But the worst part is that the iPad version is basically just the iPhone version blown up to fill the screen. It doesn’t have a multi-column layout with your inbox on the left and the selected mail on the right. Nope, just like on the phone app, you open a single mail, it takes over the whole screen and you have to go back to your inbox again.
For that reason I didn’t even bother with their calendar service.
The VPN app is fine. The iPad app is the same blown up iPhone app as well, but you don’t actively use the app for more than a few seconds to pick and connect to a server, so I don’t care.
Proton Pass is a little bit better (it’s also newer I think), it does have a separate iPad layout. It also integrates well with their email alias service (SimpleLogin, although the SimpleLogin service standalone is a bit different still). I still use 1Password though because of the SSH Agent integration on desktop and it also comes with a Safari iOS browser extension for additional convenience features over just the native OS integration for password managers.
I actually use SimpleLogin and while it’s technically not an OG Proton service, you do get their Premium service included with your Proton subscription (Proton owns SimpleLogin now). Very good service and hey, it has a pretty solid iOS app.
I didn’t really use Proton Drive yet, but I’ll probably use it for archiving some stuff by just uploading it through the web interface. Last time I checked they didn’t have a native Linux client yet (for Dropbox-like folder sync), but somebody hacked support into rclone I think, although the API isn’t documented on Proton’s part, so it’s probably not super-reliable.
That’s it, right? Apparently Proton might acquire Simple Notes, and I’d sure take that included in my subscription, although I feel like Proton should focus on vastly improving their existing services first before they broaden their portfolio.
Android users would use RCS for communicating with each other via the default messaging app on Android.
MMS has a hard size limit depending on the carrier the sender uses, that’s independent of the sender using an Android phone or an iPhone. This limit can be as high as “more than 1 MB”, but also as low as 300 KB or even less. Compressing an image down to 300 KB will naturally incur a quality penalty.
About “Security theater”: you can enable what’s called “Advanced Data Protection” so the encryption keys are only stored on-device for most types of data including photos, backups and also notes for example. Mail and calendar is one exception that comes to mind, but you could also always use a different mail and calendar service. This is a fairly recent feature, so you may have missed it. Sure, it’s not your fully self-hosted “cloud” on which you can audit every single line of code and whatnot, but it might actually be the best “compromise” of ease-of-use vs. privacy for many people outside the tech bubble we’re in in this community.
About “Proprietary App Store”: the store itself and many apps on there are proprietary, but there are a lot of open source apps on the App Store as well. The bigger problem is the fact that the App Store is the only (hassle-free) way to install apps to the iPhone and only recently the EU seems to change that with alternative storefronts now emerging, but Apple is limiting the use of them to the EU, so they’re essentially doing the bare minimum to comply with EU law.
About “Gaslighting their customers”: I’d like to see hard proof on that. I think what you’re talking about is the fact that messages sent to Android users using the default “Messages” app are sent as MMS, which is an ancient technology and as such only support tiny, low-quality images. Android doesn’t support iMessage and Apple seems to like to keep it that way as it’s apparently selling a lot of iPhones this way in the US (and sure, I agree that’s a bad thing). It does get better with the just-announced RCS support (a supposedly open protocol which Google added so many proprietary extensions to you can’t really call it open anymore) so pictures can be send in full quality to Android users using the Messages app. Also, you could always use a third-party messenger like Signal or WhatsApp and send full-quality pictures just fine.
I’m not saying there aren’t any concerns, but some of the information you provided is at least out of date.
I had an ASRock X570 Taichi once. It had a great feature set, but unfortunately every few cold boots the BIOS would completely forget all settings and reset everything to default. This may have been related to my memory’s XMP profile, but the same memory ran just fine with XMP and the exact same CPU on a much older ASUS X370 Crosshair VI Hero. So I eventually switched to the ASUS ROG Strix B550-E, which was/is a very good board I would say. So naturally, I went with the ASUS ROG Strix B650E-E when I switched to AM5, and while the board is generally stable, the Intel NIC has issues the way ASUS configured it (see my reply to the other commenter).
The GIGABYTE B650E AORUS Master looks quite interesting with its 4 PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe slots. I eventually settled for the ASUS ROG Strix B650E-E though when I got my Ryzen 7000 CPU at the beginning of last year, but if I got to choose again it wouldn’t be an ASUS board.
The mainboard I have is mostly fine (great even, in terms of general stability), but ASUS fucked up their version of the firmware or power management of the Intel 2.5 GbE adapter so it can just completely die after a few hours under Linux, and sometimes get the connection speed wrong under Windows. A workaround under Linux is to disable PCIe power management entirely in the Linux kernel parameters (pcie_aspm.policy=performance pcie_port_pm=off), but that’s hardly ideal. I don’t see myself spending hundreds of dollars on a new mainboard just because of this issue though. ASUS fails to even acknowledge the issue.
NVIDIA is getting better but AMD (and Intel Arc for that matter) is still more straightforward. No proprietary driver required as hardware support is right in the kernel, no need for any kernel modules and it’s pretty much plug-and-play. You can swap your AMD card for an Intel Arc card, do absolutely zero package/driver installs and it will boot right back to your desktop. It’s easier compared to Windows, while dealing with NVIDIA is harder.
I use the 8BitDo Ultimate, the one with the Xbox button layout (A bottom, B right) as opposed to the Switch layout one.
It works out of the box under openSUSE Tumbleweed for example. Steam recognizes it (make sure you have steam-devices installed) just fine.
Keep in mind that 8BitDo’s firmware update tool isn’t available for Linux though. It might work via Wine but I didn’t try it. There’s a button remapping software also available for Windows. Didn’t try it under Linux either, but the profiles are saved to the controller so once set up, you don’t need the software.
The title is misleading in that the attack isn’t against the VPN apps or even the VPN protocols, but against the networking stack of the operating system.
I also don’t get much value out of the statement that “every” OS except Android is vulnerable. Do they really mean all other OSes, or just what would come to mind for most people, i.e. Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS? What about the various BSDs for example?
You are likely using X11. X11 treats all enabled displays as one “screen” and therefore different refresh rates will have issues (as will VRR for example).
Wayland is the way to go, but the NVIDIA drivers are still buggy with Wayland. Pop!_OS currently uses a desktop environment based on an outdated version of GNOME, so it probably won’t be amazing under Wayland.
I’d recommend using a distro with a recent version of KDE Plasma as it has non-experimental support for VRR and great support for Wayland. You’ll also want an up-to-date kernel and the latest NVIDIA drivers. I recommend Fedora KDE Spin or openSUSE Tumbleweed. Installing NVIDIA drivers is a little bit more involved (search for “RPM Fusion NVIDIA” for Fedora), but very doable.
I personally switched to an AMD GPU because of the issues with NVIDIA, but NVIDIA support is improving so you’ll probably be fine.
Wait, so you’re telling me there’s a MOBA without kernel-level, permanently running anti-cheat? Sign me up!
(Yes, I know, every MOBA except LoL doesn’t require kernel level anti-cheat soon)
System requirements are identical to Windows, except they replaced “GTX 1050” with “GTX 1060”, but oddly enough the Radeon card is the same model. In my experience Proton runs games at pretty much native performance, so I’d be surprised if it was different here.
If they’d make this the default a lot of leas tech-savvy people would regularly lose their data because regular account recovery mechanisms don’t work with E2EE enabled. The vast majority of people don’t even use password managers and yes, people forget their passwords and yes, the same thing happens with a 28-digit recovery phrase. No, many won’t remember where they put it when they wrote it down. Many won’t even understand what this phrase means, even when the setup process directly explains it to them.
But we can obviously also be all negative about why this isn’t enabled by default and make assumptions.
At 8 months old it should be well within warranty. Just get it fixed.