It’s meant to protect the software, not the hardware. Of course you can still put a hardware keylogger on it.

You’re also only considering the use case of the owner and user being the same person. In a business context, the user and the owner are two different persons. It can be used to ensure the company’s MDM and security software aren’t tampered with, for example if you try to exfiltrate company data. In that situation, even if you have a keylogger, it doesn’t help you much, it still won’t allow you root access on the machine, because the user of the machine doesn’t have root access either.

Same with servers: you don’t even care if the hardware is keylogged, nobody’s ever using the local console anyway. But it’ll tell you if a tech at the datacentre opened the case, and they can’t backdoor the OS during a planned hardware maintenance.

Same with kiosk machines: you can deface the hardware all you want, the machine’s still not gonna let you order a free sandwich. If you buy one off eBay you can bypass secure boot and wipe it and use it, but it won’t let you sneak a USB on it while nobody’s watching and attack the network or anything like that.

But yes, for most consumers it’s a bit less useful and often exploited in anti-consumer ways.

It’s mostly for use cases where you can lose physical access to the computer like overnight at the office, at a hotel while travelling, in a shared server room, etc. It’s extra assurance that the computer runs the software you expect it to run and nothing else without at least being somewhat noisy about it.

This can in turn be used to use the TPM to get a disk encryption key, so you can do full disk encryption but still boot to a normal login screen without entering a password. It will only hand out the key with the correct signed boot chain.

If you have a desktop PC at home that nobody untrusted touches, then yeah there isn’t that much value to it for you.

If we deleted everything written by insufficiently pure developers, we wouldn’t have a Linux desktop. Especially if we count the ones that were smart enough to not bring up anything political in public.

Not a fan of DHH, but then you delete Rails then there’s no GitHub, GitLab, Mastodon, and many many other things given how popular Rails is, and that’s just that one guy.

If you include all the sketchy stuff that happens in the supply chain mining the minerals, processing, assembly all the way up to the final computer product, you just can’t morally justify supporting any manufacturer either.

This really doesn’t do anything useful other than feeling good to not support one of those guys. If anything it just adds extra political drama that feeds into a much bigger worldwide division problem.

How much easier can it even get to deploy? You start it, point your domain at it and you’re good to go.

They said it would require network access and that they would have a handful of popular apps preloaded to avoid too much disruption so those can be installed offline. In practice that probably means Google apps, Meta apps and other big corp apps.

They also have you register package names with them, not just a certificate.

I was hoping it would be a certificate situation but we’re kind of past Google using the least intrusive and privacy preserving options.

Apps from outside the Play Store? No, because previously your phone had no reason to ask Google anything. You could always not sign in to Google and disable Play Protect and use F-Droid and Obtainium.

But now, it needs to check developer signatures to know if it’s a verified developer, and it obviously can’t cache all of them as the size would be insane.

And that in turn implies that your phone needs to reach out to Google and be like yo, is this app banned?

That query gives them at minimum the IP of the user, the package name, and the time at which it happened.

And thus they can effectively track anyone using say, privacy apps, making it that much riskier to use them in places where they’re not allowed.

For your “safety”.

That also means they now will know about every app installs, worldwide. So when the government comes in and ask who have installed this app they decided is bad, they can come get you.

Signal, VPNs, they’ll have a list of everyone opting out of government-mandated backdoors.

LineageOS so worth losing Play Integrity.

At this point China doesn’t need propaganda, they just let the chinese users look at the US user’s misery by themselves and sit back.

When Rednote was first flooded by the first wave of TikTok refugees, the chinese users were baffled just how much worse it was than their propaganda said. Which is probably why they just let it go and didn’t immediately shut it down.

Rednote is pretty different vibes, I’m on it but not nearly as much as TikTok. It’s pretty interesting for what it is but it’s not a replacement and it’s not competing to be a replacement either.

I would guess they’ll probably move to Bytedance’s other app, Lemon8, or probably Skylight Social as Bluesky is generally pretty popular with the particular part of TikTok I’m on, so everyone already have ATproto accounts and follows.

You can mostly backup everything but it’s impossible to make a perfect backup like the old days anymore because of the TEE. Flashing a new ROM will change the keys and permanently make the old data worthless. Stuff like Google Authenticator for example simply won’t backup even with a perfect bit copy.

Apps will restore okay but many will be logged out and have lost their permissions and push notification registration with Google.

Maybe Torvalds will make Sebastian understand that Linux is not a product, it’s an ecosystem, and maybe finally make him review Linux properly without the “as an average tech consumer” approach he’s been doing. It’ll never be “ready” through that lens if always approached with a FOMO attitude.

One can’t be free when sucking it up to big tech all the time because “you need the latest fancy half baked proprietary features”.

You need to set up your PC to be on that IP address first, TFTP doesn’t magically listen to a particular IP, you need to configure the PC with that IP.

ip link set eth0 up
ip addr add 10.10.10.3/24 dev eth0
ip addr add 10.10.10.1/24 dev eth0

Then you can start the TFTP server on the interface:

dnsmasq -d --port=0 --enable-tftp --tftp-root=/path/to/tftp/root -i eth0

This is why when an app pops up that permission dialog, you always say no. The number of permissions Meta apps ask immediately upon startup is a red flag on its own.

Can’t collect and upload what it doesn’t have.

For all its flaws and mess, NFS is still pretty good and used in production.

I still use NFS to file share to my VMs because it still significantly outperforms virtiofs, and obviously network is a local bridge so latency is non-existent.

The thing with rsync is that it’s designed to quickly compute the least amount of data transfer to sync over a remote (possibly high latency) link. So when it comes to backups, it’s literally designed to do that easily.

The only cool new alternative I can think of is, use btrfs or ZFS and btrfs/zfs send | ssh backup btrfs/zfs recv which is the most efficient and reliable way to backup, because the filesystem is aware of exactly what changed and can send exactly that set of changes. And obviously all special attributes are carried over, hardlinks, ACLs, SELinux contexts, etc.

The problem with backups over any kind of network share is that if you’re gonna use rsync anyway, the latency will be horrible and take forever.

Of course you can also mix multiple things: rsync laptop to server periodically, then mount the server’s backup directory locally so you can easily browse and access older stuff.

It won’t do much in english, but makes a lot of sense for french, spanish and other languages using heavily gendered nouns.

In english, “the user” is neutral. In french, you have “l’utilisateur” and “l’utilisatrice”, because everything including nouns are gendered. So you’re stuck misgendering half the population by default. This lets you address women as women and men as men.

The writing’s been on the wall since they swapped to ColorOS with Android 12 and the bootloader update that came with it that no longer supports relocking, along with the delayed/nonexistent source code releases for the kernel.

It’s very sad that basically the only real option is Google’s Pixels, and even there the tides are turning.

Technically it wasn’t really designed with megainstances in mind that swallows the entire fediverse.

My instance has no problem whatsoever keeping up and storage is well under control. But we’re few here subscribed to a subset of available communities so my instance isn’t 90% filled with content I don’t care about and will never look at. Also reduces the moderation burden because it’s slow enough I can actually mostly see everything that comes through.

Lemmy itself is also pretty inefficient in that regard, you can very much make software that pulls instead and backfill local cache as needed.

Even my Reddit subscriptions would be pretty easy on my instance.

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One thing to keep in mind is ActivityPub isn’t exactly made for social media in the sense most people use it nowadays. It’s intended to be more like RSS feeds: you’re support to subscribe to stuff like news sites and be able to bring it all into a content aggregator. Seen that way, its design makes a lot of sense.

It kinda works well for public microblogging as well. It’s when you start involving moderation, voting, sharing, boosting that things get kinda weird.

I’ll add some of my comments to that discussion.

You guys have basically been describing Aether and Nostr