Originally this was a reply to this article about a Windows feature called Recall, but there’s a good argument the author’s concerns resonate far beyond Windows and Meta to proprietary generally.
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It’s funny how they’re saying “You need to use Linux” and not “You need to get off Facebook”. How’s Linux going to save you from Facebook spying on you?
They mentioned Microsoft updating privacy agreements at the same time as other companies, and OP mentioned that the context was a discussion of a Windows ultra-keylogger type of feature, the implication is they’re in on this shit too, and Linux is a way to not use Windows.
I think the be careful what you do on Facebook is implied. He’s highlighting something that’s less expected, where you may need to be careful what you do on Windows systems.
They literally work for the Fediverse branch of meta, sure its an evil corp and zucks intentions aren’t exactly pure (more than likely an effort to lower server costs) but it is something likely to put more eyes onto the fediverse which I definitely think will benefit the fediverse in the long run.
I read the post like you at first, but I don’t think he works on the fediverse. I think it was just a poor/unclear sequence of clauses in his post.
My uncle works at the fediverse and gets all the games before they come out
Threads has fediverse integration, the fediverse like the internet is decentralised its not an entity.
“im a henchman for a bad guy…and lemme tell you…I think we might be starting to do bad stuff…not sure yet…”
Thanks bud
“Are we the baddies?!”
At some point we need to start welcoming people to the Light, instead of demonizing them for having been in the Dark. It’s pretty difficult for me not to dunk on people as they wake up to the nightmare that they voted for, but a lot them ARE actually otherwise decent folks. Making America Great is going to involve deprogramming a lot of people.
That’s all good and well and I agree with you, but I also believe if you have and are continuing to feed the machine, then you don’t get to be put on a pedestal or respected for recognizing how bad the machine is. This person is repeating something that is already very well known and accepted and is simultaneously adding to the alarm while causing it. I have extremely low patience for that particular brand of person. They are continuing to cause the problem they are rallying against.
If I were face to face with this person, I’d genuinely say “either quit working there or shut the fuck up.”
What about when it’s your family? I am estranged from a lot of people that I care deeply for because they refuse to engage with reason. I’m not trying to put anyone on a pedestal, good or bad.
I just want people to know that they are welcome to change their minds, nobody is going to mock them for doing so, or say I told you so. That’s what they expect, and pride is part of what holds many of them back from admitting that they were wrong. Because it’s what they would do. Unfortunately, we’re going to need to take the high road.
I just want people to know that they are welcome to change their minds, nobody is going to mock them for doing so, or say I told you so.
JSYK: I and many others are putting great effort into letting them know that they’re not welcome, because Nazis who voted for this wanted this, no excuses at campaign #3. They can either die or live in obscurity until they do, period. The time they were allowed back was pre-24 election, simple as
People gotta earn money to survive, I don’t blame the employees for this. And this is not just a case of Meta’s privacy being bad. This is close government involvement with potentially serious impacts and implications across all US based platforms.
“I’m only following orders!”
if they didnt know what they were signing up for, and they cant quit, you cant blame them
if they didnt know what they were signing up for,
People knew meta (then FB) was evil in 2010, dude, cmon
Yeah, just like the attorney’s who resigned when asked to drop the charges against Eric Adams.
imagine how great it feels to say this for like 20 years while getting dismissed as a conspiracy nut.
and then having it happen exactly as you said it would.
If you think this is new, you’re very naive. They just have better tools to spy on you now.
if ive been saying it for so long, maybe its not exactly new.
its just that we can’t stop it anymore.
nah you can totally stop the surveillance. Just use tailsOS, live in the basement of a building under an aluminum ceiling (to hide from synthetic-aperture radar spy sats), near a busy highway (so the LIGO gravity-wave observatory cant record the sound of your footsteps), get food deliveries so you don’t have to leave, and connect to the internet using a neighbors wifi.
It’s called the Cassandra Complex, named after Cassandra/Kassandra of Troy.
That first comma is a bit out of place - ‘why won’t you just try, Linux?’
‘seriously Linux, just try your vegetables’.It can’t. Its just a kernel. Maybe with the right gnu core utils…
Its a bit odd to see an employee of a company that has always had a terrible privacy policy now be suddenly alarmed.
Things have changed. Before, the worst Facebook could do to its critics was ban them and those that they knew. Now Facebook can have ICE turnover your house without a warrant for a troll post. A private company is now working to suppress a specific kind of conversation that questions the judgement and actions of those in power. It’s a subtle but very dangerous difference in why a bad EULA may not have previously caused concern but the new one is.
I’d be leery about posting anything on any platform, especially one that has even your email or other personal info attached to it. Even on a random day that I go browse ahem the other place, I don’t really comment anymore. I don’t even have my email tied to that account, but I don’t trust spez’s greedy little pig boy ass, and I’m doing my damn best to fly under the radar while they build their databases. Nor would I trust MS, Google, or even Apple to not be tracking every thought and action online for resistance monitoring.
Well, if they want to intimidate everybody who says anything anti-Trump…they’re going to be very busy. What I’m worried about are leaders of movements.
What are you scared of? There’s more of us than there are of them. Hiding in the shadows, too afraid to act is how they win. Be loud and deliberate in voicing your opposition. If they’re coming for you anyway you may as well face it head on.
Until those willing to stand up and fight build up into a critical mass, every individual is at risk of being disappeared by the thought police. So until then, there is a good reason to be scared.
He is kinda whistle-blowing about the next level of evil. Up and coming.
it wasn them under the crosshairs before
This is a big oof.
Switching from Windows to Linux isn’t going to block them from monitoring your use of online services. Facebook doesn’t even do anything in the OS space.
I think what they are getting at is that Meta does this and they find it likely Microsoft might be doing something similar.
Yeah, this was a weird way for them to phrase this. You can use Meta stuff on Linux and Fediverse stuff on Windows.
They have an agreement with MS, so they are definitely doing something there.
I’ve done OSINT research and that alone converted me into a privacy advocate. Seeing how Alphabet, Meta, and MS have allowed creep to get training data… Whew. It’s breathtaking and complicated beyond the ability to explain in 114 characters.
Y’all, we are cooked. Currently. Present tense. If you aren’t freaked out already, you’re missing about 85% of reality.
Yeah OSINT existing is proof that no backdoor is secure, not even mentioning what you can buy from data brokers, something authorities wouldn’t need warrants for.
US corporate “leadership” has a rapists mentality. Consent is not needed. They will do the crime either way. and daddy sam let’s them get away with it.
What exactly in the privacy agreements is this person worried about? All I’m seeing is PANIC but without a reason given…
I work for Meta (Facebook).
For example, the word “protest” will now get your account and activity monitored.
I’ve wanted to switch to OpenSUSE for quite some time now from Fedora for the same reason. Should really do it now
Its so beautifully stable, without giving you ancient software like Debian. Never had an issue using it n its got a grandma level installation.
Shit I was just about to install PopOs! Which is developed by a US company. It’s maddening trying to find the right distro that fits all the requirements.
Edit: Opting for Mint.
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out
It really isn’t, though
as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
Good thing Mint uses Cinnamon, which with the flip of one toggle on install changes between the Mac and Windows style environment. To the point my wife literally didn’t notice at first she was on Mint and not Win 10
Not gonna bother with the rest of your comment if the start is that weak, tbh
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”?
Gee, it’s common even for ‘experienced’ folks. I just went to update to the 6.14 kernel this morning (everything that I use [and monitor for conflicts] was supposedly finally working with it), and apparently that didn’t play well with my desktop manager. Cue the tty at boot and trying different DMs until I finally said screw it and went back to the previous kernel.
According to Distrowatch mint and Zorin are from Ireland, opensuse and manjaro are from Germany and more was lazy for more searching
Canonical/Ubuntu is uk
Suddenly Ubuntu doesn’t seem so terrible now, does it??
Ubuntu gang represent.
Well, their “customisation” of Gnome with that ugly bar on the left side is still ugly as hell.
And GCHQ isn’t also really trustworthy, with them being part of 5 Eyes
That’s part of why I use Xubuntu/Kubuntu mainly and Lubuntu for real low end stuff. Straight vanilla Ubuntu is… not super appealing. Ubuntu server that’s just CLI/headless though, that’s pretty tits, imho.
Ubuntu server is okay, but I’ve come to really appreciate a minimal, stable Debian install instead.
I think I will go for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. But Kubuntu is also nice to keep in mind
That is just a customized version of Dash to Dock. You can move the dock on the bottom if you want or make it auto hide. The same functionality you can expect from Dash to dock but with the Ubuntu theme applied
I don’t want it at all.
But thanks for the Head Up that you can make this ugly thing go away
Snaps still suck
I agree that the backend for snaps being proprietary sucks, but I actually think snaps themselves are pretty useful in server configurations because of the sandboxing and limiting access to system resources. I get the whole argument that it’s doing what flatpak already did yadda yadda, but like… competing standards happens. It’s part of life and always will be.
Mandrake/Mandriva is from France
SUSE is now garbage. Not sure about open suse
What’s garbage about it?
When SLES 12 came out they made everything harder and forced everyone to migrate to 64 bit, even if you were doing legacy development
Stop worrying about the country of origin. It’s a FOSS project. The vast majority of Pop’s components are developed independently of the company, and by citizens of various nations. Applying the “USA bad, so product bad” rhetoric is a seriously shortsighted approach. Consider instead the amount of influence exerted by the company. Does Ubuntu still seem like the better choice just because the company is headquartered in the UK?
Besides, if you really want to cut American software out of your life, start with Linux and GNU. Torvalds was born in Finland, but he is a naturalized US citizen, and Linux is developed on American infrastructure and includes significant amount of work from American developers.
It’s not “USA bad, so product bad”, it’s the concern that the US government can do a lot more to US based projects and you probably wont know untill it’s too late.
The code is open though, I don’t check it since I am an idiot but I assume pros would spot irregularities.
Do you have a specific vector of attack here in mind?
I guess most methods of attack on a FOSS projects are independent of the country of origin. But, I could still see them being forced to do things they don’t want in the US, without being able to tell anyone. Hopefully if that ever happened it wouldn’t be too hard to detect, but you never know.
FOSS has no country lines.
Try out CachyOS
Does that mean that fedora is not recommended?
Fedora is an international collaborative effort but Red Hat is the main sponsor and it is US based. We will have to be careful and observe
And the new leader (whatever the fuck it’s called) is going to be a Red Hat employee. It’s why I left Fedora despite liking it quite a lot. That’s way too close to IBM for my liking
Look, Software shouldn’t be free and open Source. I really like that we probably have a decade left of it before it gets bundled with ad services which it should have been from the start. The more people that adopt it means that it’s only a matter of time as long as we all just passively watch it get usurped
The fediverse isn’t ready for this level of sarcasm. Look at those downvotes, lmao.
It’s hard to tell sometimes. Especially when it’s such a sensitive issue where normies will parrot the same ignorant crap over and over again. I one went off on someone, not even considering it was in-jest, because is was so convincingly written.
The /s is important people. I know it slightly reduces the impact of the joke but some people believe that shit 110%.
you should add a /s
Ok fed
It’s feRd
Are you a not, a troll, or an idiot.
Why not Haiku 🙃?
Point out in the image file where this is relevant to the topic in the OP, please.
“Nunclear Brickmanship” interesting way to describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine
You don’t know what either of those words mean, do you.
There is only country that regularly gets on teevee with nuclear threats and it ain’t the US
!agedlikemilk
jfc they think they’re living inside the conspiracy theories.
Yeah, the government and corporations would never spy on us. What a ridiculous idea!
Said a person in denial lol
