deweydecibel

Do I trust them? Sure, I guess, when it comes to privacy from other entities.

Do I trust that I will have privacy from Apple? Hell no. What does “local” even mean on an iCloud connected iOS device anymore? Because there’s nothing on that phone Apple can’t access remotely if they want to, and if any of the AI cache is backed up on iCloud, that’s not local anymore.

Do I trust them with the data they’re absolutely gathering? No, but I don’t trust anyone with it. But I also think that data would be relatively safer with Apple than their competitors.

If Apple announced Recall? Apple wouldn’t announce Recall, that’s the whole point. Apple wouldn’t be so brazen and stupid to push a tool that is so obviously invasive and so poorly implemented. Apple earned its trust by not making those mistakes.

But if they did decide to say fuck it and implement something like Recall, of course people would trust them. That’s what trust means: consumers take them at their word. But if it’s as bad as Microsoft’s Recall, Apple would burn all that trust when people found out.

People don’t believe Microsoft because they have long since burned any trust and good will for most of their consumers. They have proven time and time again they don’t give a shit about users’ wants or needs, and users have felt that. So when they announce Recall, they have no earned trust. No one believes their assurances. There’s no good faith to cushion this. And it turns out everyone was right not to grant them that trust.

Does that mean I’d ever use an Apple device? Hell no. I value my privacy, but I value it on my terms, not Apple’s, and I will never use a device that creates privacy through taking power from the user.

Maybe the central problem is racing to put other people out of work period, regardless of who they are. Maybe putting people out of work is not a net benefit for society, it’s actually negative in the long run, and only truly a benefit for shareholders. They don’t need any more of those at the expense of the working class.

And the fact they provide those configurations is important in and of itself. Configurable software is falling more and more out of fashion.

The value is likely that they’re selling it. Because they’re a non-profit, and they have to make money somehow. Or they’re using it to develop some kind of ai search function.

But the important, critical fact here is that Mozilla has routinely demonstrated that they can be trusted when they tell you “You can turn this off, and if you turn this off, it is actually off, and it will stay off.”

You will never see that from Google or Microsoft or any of the others.

Look at the part where they mentioned that if you already disabled telemetry, this new telemetry is also disabled. Think about how rare that is nowadays with any consumer software from most big for-profit tech companies. New bullshit is always on by default, even if you disabled it previously. The fact Mozilla respected that puts them miles ahead of any of their competitors.

As for the “path they’re going on”, I don’t know what to tell you, man. Every company is on this same path right now. The economics of the internet and the tech industry have gone to absolute shit, where privacy, user choice, competitive markets, and non-profits are all dying a slow painful death to enrich wall street. Mozilla will probably get caught in it too, but the best we can hope for is they hold out the longest.

Are we ignoring the part where you can disable it the same way you always could?

They even when out of their way to assure you if you already had telemetry disabled, absolutely nothing is changing for you and no data is being collected now.

I bought Remake on launch day. Haven’t bought Rebirth yet. Not because I’m not interested, I’m very excited for it. It was mostly just because I don’t have a PlayStation 5 yet. And money’s been pretty tight for the last year or so.

At any point in the process, does it warn you about setting up recovery with personal email addresses?

Feels like with as much as Proton advertises nowadays as a privacy protecting service, they need to be taking into consideration that a lot of their customers now are going to be average users who don’t know anything about proper OpSec. They should be much clearer about what things they can’t protect you from.

It shouldn’t be in a press release like this, they should be explaining the difference between privacy and anonymity to the customer. It’s not like their marketing team isn’t aware of the fact most people don’t know any better.

It’s in their best interests, too, because it doesn’t matter how many times you say “we provide privacy not anonymity”, the headlines are a bad look.

My Jellyfin is also running media from recycled HDDs from work. No where near this impressive haul, but it was nice to be able to get a solid 10 TBs for free to get my server going.

Other problems include newpipe having an old material interface

That’s a selling point for me.

Be thankful it didn’t take an explosive shit.

Recently discovered it myself. Absolutely excellent.

Which is a problem given it’s a media player, and AndroidTVs still on Android 11 or earlier would be denied updates.

Or winget if they provide it.

Who do you think makes the decisions for a bank?

The person writing the Android app?

Or the person who just wants customers to be able to access the app and use the services?

Banks aren’t run by the people that develop the apps. They have no idea what a signing key is, they just want the app available and updated.

From their Twitter:

If you wonder why we can’t update the VLC on Android version, it’s because Google refuses to let us update:

• either we give them our private signing keys,
• or we drop support for Android TV before API-30, and all our users on TV API<30 can’t get fixes.

It’s not much, just dozens of millions of people use Android TV before Android-11…

Maybe we should tell users to buy new TVs? #electronicWaste

I can’t speak to why they’re not updating on FDroid but seeing as how it’s much more difficult to get people to use FDroid on Android TV, I don’t think it will help them with that issue anyway.

In addition to the private key thing, the Play Store is requiring them to drop support for APIs older than API 30 unless they provide the key.

Which in effect means VLC can no longer be updated on AndroidTVs running Android 11 or earlier.

Which is millions of customers, according to VLC

I believe I read somewhere they’re focusing heavily on the mobile app at the moment (or rather turning K-9 into their mobile app). Once they get that out, we’ll see where the desktop goes.

Proton forces you to pay for a bridge to use Thunderbird.

Tutanota doesn’t even provide that.

These “privacy respecting” email services don’t respect the user enough to let them use third party email clients easily if the user chooses to.

Proton’s whole thing is it’s meant to be secure, private, encrypted, etc. To achieve that, it requires the Proton app or website as an endpoint, so your email never leaves Proton’s environment. As long as your reading your email in the Proton app/site, they can guarantee its privacy and security.

Once it sends your emails to Thunderbird or another client, it’s leaving the Proton environment, and they can no longer control it. You’re sacrificing the inherent privacy/security of Proton when you use Thunderbird (they claim).

All of that being said, it’s an absolutely bullshit excuse. Tutanota does this same shit, only they don’t even provide the bridge like Proton does.

It’s true it’s technically more secure for those emails to stay in the Proton environment, but they’re still your god damn emails, and they should operate like every other email service by giving the user the option to export those emails in whatever way they damn well please, for free.

It’s just more platform lock-in garbage. Your emails are trapped on their server, so they’ll be no moving away to a different provider easily.