This is why the “nothing to hide nothing to fear” line is bullshit. You can be a model citizen and there will still be people actively trying to use your data to harm you.

Would you leave your door unlocked just because you’re not hiding illegal activity in your house?

Shouldn’t it be MANGA now that Facebook renamed itself to Meta?

Thanks for the corrections! I edited my post to reflect them.

TBH all the claims you commonly hear about Macs are either outright false or outdated:

• Macs don’t get malware? Yes they do.

• Macs are more private? More than Windows maybe, but that’s like saying you should go to the restaurant that gives you explosive diarrhea instead of the one that gives you botulism. The one that serves normal non-infected food is not an option I guess. Apple being “not as bad” as the worst offender is not praiseworthy and still means they’re in no way private.

• Macs “just work?” Unless Apple decides it shouldn’t. They can prevent you from installing paid apps you already own because the latest version arbitrarily doesn’t support your older device anymore. Want to install an older version? Fuck you, stop being poor and buy a new Mac. Oh you installed a genuine Apple replacement part with the wrong serial number? Fuck you, your device is banned.

• Macs have better support than Windows computers? Yeah maybe when the Apple logo was still rainbow coloured and they had CRTs built in. Now a battery replacement costs nearly as much as a new device and they go out of their way to make sure you can’t do it yourself.

• Macs don’t come with bloatware? Then what do you call that bullshit AI they’re pushing to compete with Copilot? What do you call Safari? What do you call Photo Booth? Has anyone ever opened Photo Booth once the novelty of their first time using a Mac wears off?

• Macs are intuitive? Look, maybe I’m just a tech illiterate idiot, but I had more problems figuring out how to drag and drop on my friend’s Macbook than I had tinkering with the Linux kernel and systemd.

• Macs are good for developers? Yeah they’re so good they’ve recently had to cave and introduce a WSL-like system so you can run Linux containers.

• Macs are innovative? Yeah they’re so innovative they don’t even support snapping windows to half or a quarter of the screen when Linux desktop environments and even Windows have had it for ages. Gotta either leave all the windows floating, or full screen them all and swipe between them, or manually resize the windows to the layout you want. (They have this now.)

• Macs are convenient? Yeah I just love carrying HDMI (some newer Macbooks have HDMI again) and USB A to C adapters forever because they couldn’t be bothered to install those ports on a laptop sized device that can clearly fit them. Also fuck Apple for giving other laptop companies the idea that everyone wants only USB-C on their devices. No, we want ports we can use today, not in 10 years when all the peripherals switch to USB-C and all the computers bought today will already be obsolete regardless of what ports they have. I’ll buy a computer with only USB-C when everything else I own actually uses USB-C.

• Macs are more secure? How do you know? Do you control the disk encryption keys? No, Apple does. Can you encrypt the drive yourself with a key you control like you can on Linux? No, fuck you for even thinking about that.

• Macs are elegant and their design is well thought out? Because gluing the battery to the chassis with double sided tape is the elegant way to do it and not redneck engineering. And with glue so strong that you risk puncturing the battery and burning your house down if you try to remove it yourself. Another great attention to detail is soldering the SSD to the motherboard, thoughtfully ensuring you lose data when the motherboard fails. But hey, I’m sure the Genius bar will be happy to recover your data for you since they made sure you can’t do it yourself, and for only $999.99! Your wedding photos and your PHD thesis are each worth more than that right? So it’s a bargain!

Linux beats Mac in every one of those categories (other than the hardware ones) and you can install Linux on every device. Even ancient ones, and you get to decide if it’s too old to be usable or not, not the company who’s incentivized to obsolete devices as fast as possible so you’re forced to buy a new one. How many years before a brand new Mac stops getting OS updates?

Reject modern operating systems, return to punch tape

In what way is a suggestion for improving Lemmy anti Lemmy propaganda?

My new baseless theory: We know that AI is trained on tons of novels and fictional stories. Is it possible that because all novels have significant conflicts and drama, and stories where some person just boringly does his boring job forever aren’t exactly bestsellers, the AI is maybe trying to inject drama even when it makes no sense, since it’s been conditioned that way through the training data? So it’s seeing these inconsequential issues and since every novel it’s ever “read” turns them into massive conflicts, it’s trying to follow suit?

In the same way your fridge needs a web browser.

Though the point of this is probably not that it will be a viable product, but managing a vending machine is one of those seemingly easy and straightforward tasks that make good starting applications to test the AI with. Basically, if it can’t even handle something as simple as a vending machine, it definitely can’t be trusted with anything more complex.

“You call yourself a beverage machine?!”

“I call myself Bev.”

Just tried it. Am I Unique says yes.

Tor still reports your operating system and processor architecture which is dumb as hell. If you’re on Linux for example, that’s probably one of the biggest things making you unique. Why not just make everyone “Windows x64” since that’s the most common?

It also still reports extensions. Apparently it’s definitely possible to tell vanilla Tor and Tails users apart because Tails has uBlock Origin installed by default, and the generally accepted advice is to never install extensions on Tor, one reason being it could make you unique.

Also, apparently the default window size Tor chooses in an attempt to prevent the window size from being used in fingerprinting isn’t all that common, I got 1% and 5% on screen width and height respectively.

Tor doesn’t seem to have WebGL enabled by default so it can’t be used to fingerprint (though having it disabled is unique in itself).

Tor’s canvas data is unique but I’ve heard that it generates a new canvas fingerprint each time you restart it. I don’t know if that’s true or how well it works though.

Tor, like every other browser, also has something called “audio data” that’s a weird graph of numbers without units. No browser I’ve seen has ever not been unique for that category and Tor is no different. I didn’t mention it in the post because I don’t know what it is or if it has a genuine purpose or not.

I didn’t try Tor on my phone but I would hope it would block sensor access?

One of the biggest reasons websites need to run JS is submitting form data to a server. Like this website.

But old forums did all this without JS by just using the HTML form’s submit functionality itself. The issue is it causes the page to refresh meaning you can’t keep any other unsubmitted forms, and you can get those annoying “submit form data again?” popups. So every website writes code to submit everything asynchronously.

Another major reason for using JS is dropdown menus and panels. You need to either write code to listen for the click and reveal/hide it as needed, or you have to do weird CSS tricks that are usually inferior in UX to a JavaScript implementation, or you have to bastardize the form dropdown selector into your general purpose dropdown.

These shouldn’t be things you need to implement yourself using a Turing complete programming language. These should be natively implemented in the browser and accessible through HTML.

Remember when the only way to play videos on websites was with Flash or Java applets? But then video playback got natively implemented into HTML and now it’s way easier and doesn’t even require JS.

If browsers did the same for asynchronous form submission and dropdown menus, it would get rid of 80% of websites’ need to run JS. Including this one.

But obviously they want you to run JS so they won’t do that.

I mean, I’ve always just assumed that the government has unlimited access to any and all data regarding anything related to air travel given the amount of security there is.

If it’s a work computer, tell your IT department it’s getting in the way of your job.

Embrace <-- You are here

Extend

Extinguish

Fuck Apple

Just say “pfft, you believe in the government?”

Or ACK

That’s the keepalive message for when there’s a delay in the data query to prevent the passengers from closing their connections.

Ah, so “out” is like an EOF!

Didn’t they already try with Conrail?