jmp242 @ jmp242 @sopuli.xyz

Posts

20

Comments

537

Joined

2 yr. ago

You're going to need to specify what Windows and what distro at least. But I would argue that most people's idea of computer security would include privacy. Not that they get it, but if you asked someone if they feel Facebook posts are secure because others can't edit them, I think you would get some head scratches and people saying they are available to the world.

I am interested in some of the features of BiglyBT, but don't love the .sh installer for Linux - they should have rpms and debs IMO. I'm a little concerned they don't end up in EPEL or whatever like qbittorrent is.

Yea, we spent time from at least 6th grade in the library using card catalogs, index cards, and learning not to use an encyclopedia or the Internet for any sources. This was in the 90s. Research papers were a big thing in highschool. I don't think media literacy was taught, because I'm not really sure what that means.

I have to say, my computing life changed A LOT for the better when I stopped playing games on the PC back when the PS3 was out. I got so tired of Windows getting screwed up by various games and their anti-cheat crap. I think in 2023, it might make sense to separate out functions a little - used computers run Linux just fine and are cheeeap. So if you want a yar har, web browsing, e-mail processing, programming etc computer, do that on the more private / (to be better) OS and then have your game only computer for gaming.

Have you considered learning how to type? (I know, kind of snarky) I don't need to look at my keyboard or see my hands, there's little bumps on the home keys and then you just type based on location.

Me too. I noped out of Win10 after fighting with Win7 too much. Most people tell me I'm just unusual however I think more people than will admit just browse the web and can't handle Win95 levels of customization and lack of making decisions for you. People are generally overwhelmed with the mere idea that they could customize their computer to work in different ways... Heck, on Windows it's varied if you can even reasonably change to a different default browser without being "techie" (stupid low bar considered techie by many)...

I use Fastmail - not too expensive, really good webmail client, has working shared calendar that isn't OWA, and isn't advertising scraping my e-mail. I would have liked a more private service, but back when I moved from self hosted to a service, that was about the best I could get that also had calendaring.

I use Signal, it's about as private as I can get other normal people to use.

To be honest, you can also pay with crypto which I imagine makes you less tied to the purchase.

I also don't love being logged in, and I separate work and innocuous searches into kagi. And like I said work searches are noticeably better in kagi for me. But I'm more interested in the 40 plus dollars a month of AI access thrown in with search for the 25 a month. That makes it a steal. (for people using AI stuff)

This I don't understand. Why should search be free? Who do you think would do that amount of work and donate it to the internet? Search has always cost money, we just paid with ads and that model has kind of reached its enshittification maximum to be useful to me,and apparently others.

It depends on what you're buying - I don't buy (commodity) books much anymore so can't comment on those. What I can say is for "random tat" that I don't need quickly, Temu is an unabashedly "cheap chinese stuff" that is often the same as the Amazon version, but usually a lot cheaper. I'm assuming they charge less fees to the sellers. They deliver in under 2 weeks. AliExpress has now started offering the same service. Downside is there's not really returns - or at least I've never wanted to deal with the hassle. However, for most stuff under $10, I wasn't going to return to Amazon either.

For "Brand Name Stuff" I kind of go to ebay and/or the specific retailer like Best Buy or B&H or the manufacturers site. They seem far less likely now to have counterfits because with e-bay the actual seller is tied to the specific product where Amazon isn't, and the other stores don't want counterfeits and have a more controlled supply chain.

For stuff like spices or the like, ebay or Walmart.com seems reasonably good. Walmart also has a lot of random sellers, but as far as I can tell, they don't do the binning Amazon does, if you buy from Walmart it's from them, if you buy from a third party, it ships from that third party.

Honestly, I don't use gmail much, but I really just want a normal inbox, folders, and rules I can define to filter stuff. Netscape E-Mail circa 1998 was all I ever wanted, and I still miss the PITA trying to get even close to that interface today.

I don't mean to be dismissive, though I can't help being reductive given my "only as a customer" experience this decade. To me, and my interaction group, fast food jobs appear to be a bunch of stuff that seems like it should be a minimum baseline for logical people to accept.

• no professional org limiting membership
• no special credentials needed to be hired
• no minimum educational requirement
• extremely available geographically
• lots of competitors / options for getting hired
• lots of labor needed / advertised for anyway

Most of the negatives I'm aware of would apply to what I know of the jobs paying less than fast food. And going back to my college days, for someone in poverty / worried about paying for basics - working in food service often has a less advertised benefit - cheaper / free food while you're on shift during your food break. I'm not claiming any job is for everyone, but I am suggesting if you could do elder care or work at Wal-Mart, you likely could work at a local fast food place and (now) make more money, so I do wonder why people don't. At least as long as seemingly every fast food place is advertising for workers.

I fully understand not wanting to go after maximum earnings as the only consideration in a job - I could very likely make more money in a different job (I guess theoretically most people could), but would take major hits to work/life balance, flexibility, etc etc. But I'm also not in the market at minimum wage - and when I was working minimum wage jobs, I switched in a heartbeat when I could get a dollar more an hour across town. The one thing that would differ is if I could go full time vs part time at a slightly higher rate. And I don't actually know if that's what's hurting the fast food companies filling their staffing needs. If they're not offering full time to all the employees they already have when they have to close sometimes due to lack of staff - well, that's another one of those illogical things to me. "Saving money" on benefits while not being open to make any money always felt like knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Yea, except doesn't Facebook etc often make it pretty easy - no demand, just pay us some fee and we'll give you data? I mean, Google and Facebook are just selling the data. From what I recall hearing, the phone companies give away location data pretty similarly too. It's not a constitutional issue if you "voluntarily" give data to a third party and they're just willingly selling that - whether it's to another company, individual or the government.

I guess I was just comparing things like an elder care aid which also tends to require hard work / labor (possibly worse than fast food, lifting and turning 200lbs+ patients), dealing with literal shit every day (changing adult diapers etc), and similar being treated like crap. But doing that for $4 less an hour seems surprising to me.

That said, the closest I ever came to fast food work was a dining hall in college, and it wasn't busy all day or particularly hard work. Nor was instant memorization needed, we had slips people filled out with their order. Which is basically what the fast food places do now with the kiosk / app / or counter ordering. Maybe it's also location dependent, but around me fast food is just slow now, so I do wonder if the "unable to hire" is more "I don't actually want to pay for 5 people on shift anymore". McDonalds seems to be moving that direction by just eliminating order takers in favor of kiosks and using their app.

The problem in the US is that the mail is kind of special, I just wish it wasn't. If our government paid a company, it'd just be the same as us paying a company, and we'd still get ads, just Facebook or whoever would also get a huge government check. Not what I'd say a success or improvement.

Of course, that just says more about how bad the government is really. I just think charity (donations) is a horrible and unreliable way to run any sort of "needed service" (for a given definition of needed).

You would think so - wouldn't you? But all the fast food places are paying $15 an hour here, and minimum wage is less than that, yet some places still have minimum wage jobs. What's even stranger is these are often both important and shitty jobs - like medical aids or the like. I honestly don't know why anyone would want to work somewhere that pays less than fast food places, but it seems common. Not only that - fast food places (claim anyway) to not being able to get sufficient workers to be fully staffed still.

I wouldn’t want a government agency running social media for obvious reasons but a government giving out grants or the equivalent of a crown corp.

It just seems kind of weird to me the instinctive distrust of government for social media but complete acceptance of them for roads, physical mail, and other public services. Or maybe I'm just missing something. I mean, it's not like the companies are showing amazing efficiency and results here.

This happened with our ambulance service - the volunteers dried up, and so we had to put it in our taxes. There was a donation push to get us to the next tax year, but then it's something we all pay for to have an ambulance available.

with the power to identify and criminally sanction users.

I think in so far as people are in the jurisdiction of a given government, they generally can identify social media users already, and if they choose criminally sanction these people. In the US I'd argue the government would be far more bound by First Ammendment issues than any corporation. And you have far more redress against the government when they screw up than the current "you agree to binding arbitration" from companies. Which... honestly... says something crappy about our tort law and T&Cs allowed. My main point is that I don't actually think social media or discussion boards are a public good. I think it should be federated like e-mail (and the fediverse) but otherwise you can choose the provider you like. This seems like the best option IMO.

Shift some of the burden of responsibility to a third party. Organizations love this shit This is the only valid suggestion I've seen. And I get it - I just think there's probably better third parties. Microsoft has some of the best paid security analysts and engineers in the industry. Chances are they’d be able to detect and mitigate attacks attacks better than a small local team of not highly paid sysadmins.

I hear this a lot about cloud companies, but see little evidence of it. People post frequently about leaving big cloud companies because of all sorts of reasons, one of which might well be pay. But even if they did have some of the best paid people - they're not all highly paid people, and I doubt operations support are those people. (Have you ever tried to talk to Microsoft support?)

As I remember and understood it (I'm not doing a deep dive to refresh my memory for a lemmy post, but the overall point I think stands) the recent hack of Microsoft was because of accepting a home end user certificate to authenticate to a business / corporate (and apparently government) accounts. From what has been released, this happened due to a mix of (IMO) questionable design and lack of documentation or knowledge of how the authentication flows worked. These security engineers should have caught this before it landed in operations - because you have to catch these things in design, not rely on everyone using an authentication framework to sort of "cover for accepting multiple trust centers" that should not overlap. The reason this is a design issue is actually because it seems like it came about because of a new feature or function that wanted to allow lower confidence credentials to migrate to higher confidence or something like that.

If the security engineers missed that - they're not that great. If they were overruled by management, well, that's actually likely, but doesn't change the facts that you as a subscriber didn't OK that (frankly crazy) design change - you weren't even informed. This is always an issue with the Cloud services, and I don't see a way around it. Even people with contractual agreements got screwed here.

Microsoft is large enough to get some assistance from 3 letter agencies. That’s almost never going to happen with smaller companies.

I don't see how that actually helps though. Most of our 3 letter agencies provide public guidance about defensive security recommendations and have for over a decade. There's plenty of consultants if you can't hire internally that can guide you through that stuff. The TLAs are not magical - I guess they might tell you you've been hacked or may tell you they know you've been targetted - but honestly - OF COURSE Microsoft Azure is a target, and we know it's been hacked. This hack wasn't revealed by a TLA, or by the "super duper security analysts" - it was a customer going over logs (that are so in the weeds most people didn't pay for access to these logs at all) who informed Microsoft.

And this is my main counterpoint - when you have a "Fort Knox" you need really really good guards and can never make a mistake. I'm not sure it's possible to have sufficient defenses when you're running the e-mail for most businesses and the US government. We need to stop just assuming the Cloud providers have better {insert thing here} because of scale or money. I'd argue it's pretty obvious they don't - because they make more money if they don't have the top end employees and can sell more features if they don't lock stuff down and actually test before release. I'm going to argue that there's every reason to believe that most Microsoft employees or contractors doing all functions are more like their support people than some better than you can hire super IT person.