doctortran @ doctortran @lemm.ee

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1 yr. ago

Find me any charitable, non-profit, or community organization that wouldn't call the cops if someone was breaking into their networking closet to install data harvesting hardware.

Because he literally broke into a server room and installed hardware to harvest this data.

There's no world where any organization, for profit or otherwise, would tolerate that. Even your local library would call the damn cops if you tried that.

Can we be honest about this, please?

Aaron Swartz went into a secure networking closet and left a computer there to covertly pull data from the server over many days without permission from anyone, which is absolutely not the same thing as scraping public data from the internet.

He was a hero that didn't deserve what happened, but it's patently dishonest to ignore that he was effectively breaking and entering, plus installing a data harvesting device in the server room, which any organization in the world would rightfully identity as hostile behavior. Even your local library would call the cops if you tried to do that.

What they've done in the past has earned them trust, but it is irrelevant to what they intend to do in the future. Bitwarden is growing company, not the scrappy little open source app they once were.

In 2022, a private equity firm injected 100m into Bitwarden. From that point forward, users are rightfully going to scrutinize any action they take because it's 2024 and the tech space is a hellscape of enshitification and acquisitions, thanks in part to VC money. We've seen this story play out too many times to assume there's nothing to worry about.

So yes, people are going to be suspicious. That's not irrational.

It's the difference between a theme park and a casino. Both are legitimate forms of entertainment for many people, and both do need income to maintain their operations.

One of them charges for entry and then you enjoy the park, only paying for additional but ultimately optional things like merchandise or food. The fun ends when you decide to leave or the park closes.

The other is designed so you have to spend small amounts consistently, and it is designed in incredibly manipulative fashion, literally employing tactics that trigger addictive responses. The fun ends when you run out of money to spend, therefore compelling you to keep spending.

The people designing the theme park are designing something entertaining, the people designing the casino are perfecting a skinner box.

One is more deserving of income than the other.

Also because the install base for mobile devices is just about everyone everywhere, and yes, a fair amount of people, particularly young people, would much rather play something on their phone than a PC or even console.

The difference in potential customer base is orders of magnitude larger.

Click reader view and refresh, without leaving reader view.

Right but you could at least be reasonably sure it wouldn't be outright spied on from the person you're sending it to. Now it's almost a guarantee.

Like if I sent something to a friend of mine, I could be fairly certain it wouldn't end up in the wrong hands unless they got compromised or did something stupid. I could trust their competence.

Now everyone that isn't actively managing their own windows installation is absolutely compromised, as a rule. Like I can't just send an email to my mom anymore, from now on its always my Mom and Copilot.

Yes, and that's a valid concern, but there's no good answer here. That's why it's such a problem. From now on, one of the most widely used operating systems in the world is going to be harvesting data from any and everything that appears on it. Meaning any software you use to send any form of electronic communication, if a Windows computer opens it, and the user either hasn't bothered or doesn't know how to disable recall, your information has been harvested by Microsoft.

There's just no way to limit or avoid this. We need regulation.

That's shitty but I fail to see how the course of action there would be to start using the voice commands instead of just, you know, silently pulling out the phone and checking the notifications with your eyes.

Being massive assholes to people you feel are being assholes. No contradictions there.

I know this is a completely separate thing, but something about the current redesign they're pushing is making me very uneasy, as well. It feels very much like corporate focus-grouped, iOS chasing crap, i.e not at all interested in the type of power user and FOSS types that initially embraced it.

Moreover, when someone asked for compact mode (again, as people have been asking for it from the beta for at least a year now), the response was some of the most PR shit I've seen from a FOSS developer.

They legitimately defined something as basic as compact mode as a "power user" thing that they're "considering". And routinely reinforced how much they "value" power users, whole also suggesting their robust search function.

A bunch of people had to demand the Android Beta app restore Quick Tile functionality because the dev team got in their heads it wasn't necessary to have a manual trigger for auto-fill.

Just feels like a lot of disconnect coming from the development side and its not inspiring confidence.

I feel like I've been saying it from the beginning, but for all of the problems Reddit has that Lemmy ostensibly solves, it opens the door for far worse moderation problems than Reddit had.

We can shit talk Reddit admins all night and day, but their long-standing and often problematic insistence on neutrality was nevertheless beneficial for the site's growth.

And I think one of the fundamental problems with Lemmy is that too many of the people in charge of various instances don't have a similar philosophy. They want to choke the place, and curate it to their exact specifications, for their own individual reasons.

Which would be fine in a vacuum. But in a federated space, what is done on one instance can have a wide ranging effect on the visibility of content outside of that instance. And as op rightfully points out, because communities are locked to an individual instance, the nature of federation doesn't help users escape overbearing moderation when the only true sizable communities for a thing happen to be on a specific instance.

It does warn you, but when it does, there's a box that you can check to never warn you about that again. Most people just check it and close it so it'll stop popping up, and then forget.

Which I can't blame them for, because using Windows and 365 nowadays is a never ending barrage of bullshit, meaningless pop ups and notifications that you have to close. The average user just starts tuning them out so when an important, relevant one pops up, they don't pay attention.

Frankly, if you have the disk space, OneDrive should not be the exclusive home of your data. No cloud should. Your data should live on your physical computer hard drives, the cloud is just where it's backed up and shared to other computers.

Granted, this isn't how Microsoft wants you to think. They want you to think of OneDrive as your main hard drive, that your computer is just borrowing from. There aren't two files, there is one file in the Cloud, the computer is just mirroring it. Don't let them sucker you into thinking of file management like this, it is a trap to make you more dependent on them and their services.

In fact, you shouldn't even be thinking of OneDrive as a backup, because that's not what it's for. Microsoft even tells you this you really read there documentation on it. The only real backups are physical backups in your possession that don't require you to first phone home to a Microsoft server before you can access it. If a corporation is standing between you and accessing that data, it's not your backup, it's your data that you are letting them hold for you.

What you would do in this scenario is leave OneDrive doing it syncing, but COPY the files from the OneDrive folder to a non-OneDrive folder or to a second hard drive.

The problem is there are many things you can't disable, remove, or alter, and that will continue to get worse over time.

Just because some bullshit is listed in Winaero Tweaker or whatever as an option to disable doesn't mean all the bullshit in the system is listed there.

But will those methods even survive future updates?

The greater point is, the pattern is very clear with Microsoft and windows, and it will continue to get worse, and your options will continue to shrink. It would be better to just put any effort towards learning to use Linux and escaping the ecosystem rather than continually trying to find the ever-decreasing bits of freedom you can extract from Windows.

Photoshop/Illustrator will only ever get ported if enough people have already made the move that Adobe can't afford to ignore Linux any longer.

I disagree. They have a strong enough hold on the industry they can resist moving to Linux and it will have the affect of choking Linux's growth.

Moreover, there's no way in hell Adobe ever allows their subscription bullshit on a platform that gives the user as much control as Linux. They won't touch Linux until they can be guaranteed no one will be able to alter or interfere with how their software operates (oppressively).

The issue with Linux going forward is software in general is all moving towards a more locked down, gatekeeping model. The iOS philosophy is infecting every space, from Android to Windows. Linux stands in opposition to that type of control over the user's system, and therefore tech companies won't develop for it if the trend continues.

I don’t expect but also won’t be surprised if it ends up being a Windows XP situation where they extend support for Windows 10 several times.

They absolutely will, and they're planning on this, they're just not going to announce the true EOL date. The deadline will scare people into upgrading, then they'll start extending it.

Security.

They want everything to be managed by Windows because they're managing Windows themselves from Azure or Intune or whatever.

Corporate IT around the country is basically being instructed that the best and only viable security policies are the ones Microsoft writes, which also just so happen to involve all of their products exclusively. Insurance companies are starting to demand compliance with Microsoft's security recommendations. It's going to keep getting worse, and even though there should be heavy regulation on this monopoly, there won't be.