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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • It is a LOT of work indeed! In fact I even commented on that hours ago in https://lemmy.ml/post/36231170/21124115

    … but as you mention the alternative is ALSO a lot of work PLUS frustrations.

    So between learned helplessness and tiring empowerment the choice remains obvious.

    FWIW whenever it feels like it’s “too much” I reminder myself how I browse through obscure man pages decades ago… to still find them useful today! It’s crazy that so long after learning about tools like more or grep is useful on :

    • a desktop
    • a console (SteamDeck)
    • a mobile phone (which basically didn’t exist back then)
    • a VR headset (yes, via termux)
    • the “cloud” (as in fine it’s just a server)


  • I understand the concern. I also imagine (I want to be optimistic here, maybe naively so) that most websites wants some form of analytics, probably does not code it themselves and instead of relying on aggregate data like a traffic counter of hits (maybe due to crawlers and other bad agents not respecting robots.txt) then went with somethings fancier. Maybe that fancier tool is trying to mitigate automated traffic with fingerprint detectors.

    Well, one can understand and still disagree with it. I suggest contacting the administrator of such website with their concern BUT in the meantime, until they actually do act (which might be never) I suggest to start with self-defense and use dedicated tools e.g. Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection (you can use a non-Mozilla flavor of Firefox if you prefer) or even more specifically JShelter with its Fingerprint Detector.


  • and the IT pro with 10 NAS setup are the perfect linux users.

    Well I’m closer to that. I’m an “IT pro” (I pay my bills by writing software) and I did learn CS at uni… and yet it’s STILL damn hard!

    I think that might be the part that “grandma” (bit sexist and ageist there but going with the example) finds it hard is a given but that professionals are struggling daily is somehow hidden away.

    I can give you examples from just yesterday :

    • my deGoogled Android phone rejected my SIM card yesterday “SIM 1 not allowed”
    • my home IoT server stopped working

    and few others smaller problems. So… I had to find ways to fix that which lead me to learn that :

    • some bug into HomeAssistant (my IoT server gateway) led me to restart its container, without having to restart the device itself
    • my Android ROM has a “Reset Network Settings” within the “Reset Options” menu

    The irony is that some people who are not professional might even know about the later one but I didn’t. So… my whole point :

    TL;DR: IT is hard for everyone because it’s complex (lots of moving parts) and always changing (“updates” are not just “better” but different) so we ALL must keep on learning.





  • I’ll preface my answer to clarify that I’m against surveillance capitalism and privacy Zuckering. I say that in the open, do not use Google services, Amazon, have my own PeerTube instance, IoT at home is HomeAssistant with ZigBee, etc. So my goal here is NOT to cut some slack to anyone.

    I started with this because I’m not actually sure what you are referring to. Since my initial comment is about Murena STT I’ll assume it’s that but if not please correct me. This specific service… is not a compromise I would accept. So I’m in NO way advocating for me. The only thing I’m clarifying is that this service is not something one can “stumble upon” and enable without paying attention. That’s why I put such recurring emphasis on it. It’s not coherent with “sharing all data” or imagining a scenario where somebody buys an /e/OS phone Murena and somehow ending up getting their data leaked (due to the potentially imperfect anonymization) to OpenAI. One has to activate it and to do so one must be a Murena services paying customer. This is not the case when “just” installing /e/OS. So once again I’m not saying Murena is perfect, not even that it did the right choice (according to my own privacy preferences) my relying on OpenAI, and yet that problem is not relevant to most people who use /e/OS.

    To make a quick a analogy it’s like installing WhatsApp on a privacy OS phone. Sure you technically can do that but if you do and complain about how Meta is collecting your data then you did it on yourself, you can’t blame the OS developers.


  • While I appreciate your desire to improve privacy for yourself and others, you are again inventing things (optional service as if everybody using /e/OS had it, relying on Murena services where not everybody does it) from your very narrow perspective as if it was the truth. Again I imagine your ultimate goal is to help people to find a better alternative (which is something I hope too) but I can’t spend more energy arguing with made up problems. I hope others who do read your words and are exhilarated by your passion and the strength of your words do still go check the source of the claims you make but I don’t want to have this kind of conversations again so safer to block. Take care of yourself.

    Edit: to clarify, Google is the enemy. Meta is the enemy. Amazon is the enemy. etc, not you, not me, not Murena, not LineageOS, not whatever tiny project of the Internet is trying to do slightly less worst than BigTech and surveillance capitalism.







  • auto delete all the telemetry /e/ collects by default, including the Voice data Sent to OpenAI?

    You are back with your FUD. I don’t know what you have against /e/OS specifically or if you are genuinely paranoid but in this specific instance you are making stuff up! I clarified in https://lemmy.ml/post/35472063 so maybe a language barrier because the post you linked to was in French but the STT service is

    • NOT on by default
    • for paying customers only (0 chance that a random person would activate it and thus be shocked)
    • tries to anonymize the data

    So… that’s not even telemetry, that’s like activating a service which the company explicitly said relied on OpenAI in the first place, people STILL paid for it AND activated it. They can’t be surprised that it’s sending anything to OpenAI then.

    Come on, help us make this community better. We have enough problems with BigTech, small tech and more that we do NOT need to invent problems!

    PS: also the reasoning about the presence on kill switch is … just plain silly. The PinePhones are running Linux, no Android, no /e/OS/ or whoever actor you might dislikes, OSes built by others, e.g. PmOS, Ubuntu, etc and yet still have hardware kill switches.



  • So… a lot more people now have :

    • 4G/5G on the go and proper broadband at home and office and even in unique location (sadly via MuskSat for now…) other ways to get data
    • very capable devices in mobile phones, (mostly Android) clients e.g. video projector or dongles, of course computers
    • human eyes… that can’t really appreciate 4K on average

    … so obviously we should NOT stop looking for more efficient ways and new usages but I’m also betting that we are basically reaching diminishing return already. I don’t think a lot of people care anymore about much high screen resolution or frequency for typical video streaming. Because that’s the most popular usage I imagine everything else, e.g XR, becomes relative to it niche and thus has a hard time benefiting as much from the growth in performances we had until now.

    TL;DR: OK cool but aren’t we already flattening the curve on the most popular need anyway?




  • You might want to check sshfs but overall yes rsync works well. I just uploaded 200Go yesterday, no failure.

    On my LAN if I want to share without downloading them then I rely on MiniDLNA/ReadyMedia for DLNA/UPnP meaning it works with VLC on desktop, obviously, Android video projectors, mobiles, etc.

    Guess it depends on your usage but I stopped using Samba when I didn’t have Windows machines on my network. Never looked back.