Both sides win in this arrangement.
What about the third party (you the user), and fourth party (everyone whose creativity was fed into the machines, and everyone who has to accept your LLM generated slop like it’s useful and/or contributing to the conversation)
Of course some people go too far. I think a lot of folks on here grossly overestimate / overstate their threat model, but I think the discussions are good for the limited few who really do need to cover their asses.
Me personally, I hate the idea of companies bidding for my attention without my consent, so I try and make it as hard as possible for them to get it. This just so happens to overlap nicely with the goals of the privacy community much of the time.
I think SD card failure rates are way overblown if you’re buying from reputable manufacturers (Sandisk, Samsung). I’m sure they do occasionally fail, but I’ve never experienced one.
You’re right, for really intensive tasks the costs can climb, but I see people asking for ideas for what to do with a junk laptop and the top suggestion is always something like pi-hole or a bookmark manager that could run on a potato.
Like with most things in life, it depends.
Laptop performance when closed is quite variable, but depending on where you live, each 10W of idle consumption 24/7/365 could cost you somewhere around $20/yr (assumes @$0.20/kWh, YMMV). This isn’t overwhelming on it’s own, but it is “cost difference between a junked laptop and a Raspberry Pi” kinda money.
Should be FMAGA
Instead of Firefox we need hundreds of stripped down browsers some first year CS students cobbled together in their basement for browsing the web.
Or something like that, I didn’t quite follow either.
Just built a new PC literally this weekend. WiFi mouse and Bluetooth drivers did not work out of the box. I had to spend hours searching through what little info exists out there tangentially related to my problem to find:
WiFi drivers were fixed in kernel 6.10, which fortunately Mint let’s you upgrade to 6.11 at this time with relative ease.
Bluetooth drivers do not appear to have been fixed, but I might have a shot if I switch over to a rolling release distro and relearn everything I’m used to from using Debian-based distros for years. Dongle is on order, but I don’t love having to have 2 bluetooth devices.
It’s unclear if mouse drivers have been fixed in the kernel, but I was able to find a nice set of drivers/controller on github which fixed some mouse problems but only if i used their experimental branch and it did not work with my wireless adapter. Very fortunately I had an old wireless adapter from a mouse from the same brand that was able to close the loop, but that was just dumb luck.
By EOD today I should have everything I want working, but it wasn’t “30s” of searching - to your point, 60-70% of problems may be solvable that way, but having 1/3 of your problems require technical expertise is not going to bring Linux out of the hobbyist domain.
Note: this is not a complaint against Linux, just a statement of fact. These things have gotten a lot better over the years, and things get easier to find as the community grows and these struggles get discussed more openly, but there’s still lots of challenges out there that take more than a 30s search.
The VPN speeds will be throttled pretty substantially, and low ram will result in some instability seeding, but it should run. Good thing about torrents is they’re built for unreliable.
I’ve run a torrent box like described on pretty much every pi generation, and the pi4 was the first one where VPN speed was no longer the bottleneck.
Sounds like the app worked as intended and she found the mushrooms she was after.
The advantage of Tile and AirTags is that they’re relatively dumb devices that leverage passing cell phones to snitch on their location. This means they can last months on a single charge while the phones do the heavy lifting.
There may be more and less private ways to do what they do, but they’ll all have similar tradeoffs.
A device that tracks its own location and reports it out over a cell network would basically require all the complexity and size of a smart phone minus the screen and cost similarly
There are Bluetooth trackers that can be run privately and with enough creativity can be used to identify the location of something within the confines of your home (or know if something is not home), but won’t be much help if you’re trying to track down lost luggage or want to know if you left your wallet at work or the coffee shop. (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fmBwINdsxQ)
Mindustry.
The browser version at least does not have the ability to take screenshots, but you will always be tracked on the websites you use, especially if their business model is advertising-based
save you a click: it’s in-app tracking and device screenshots. Don’t install apps that have a working website. Also don’t use Facebook.
“There were no audio leaks at all – not a single app activated the microphone,” said Christo Wilson, a computer scientist working on the project. “Then we started seeing things we didn’t expect. Apps were automatically taking screenshots of themselves and sending them to third parties. In one case, the app took video of the screen activity and sent that information to a third party.”
Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third-party sources.
Use it? The US invented it. The US has historically funded it as part of their human rights initiatives. Like I said:
Also many of the sponsored projects help people circumvent authoritarian government overreach, which is something that until recently has been considered “good” for the US. The more freely information can flow the harder it is for authoritarian regimes to exert control.
Given the nature of the Tor network, it’s likely any “official” use within the US government would probably involve things like communicating with people working undercover / informants, etc., and not be something broadly discussed.
If US uses FOSS software in its operations (it does, everyone does) it has a vested interest in keeping these projects alive.
Also many of the sponsored projects help people circumvent authoritarian government overreach, which is something that until recently has been considered “good” for the US. The more freely information can flow the harder it is for authoritarian regimes to exert control.
For those who maybe breeze past it in the article linked, here’s an unofficial tool for searching all of the zillions of Kagi bangs: https://kbe.smaertness.net/
They have all the usual, !g for Google, !gi Google Images, !b Bing, !ddg, !brave, etc, plus like a billion niche ones.
Unlike free search where there’s definitely no incentive to sell your data to keep the lights on, right?
You can set uBlock to run in incognito tabs, so it’ll hold if you let it.