The future for general-purpose computing | Hacker News Reader

The future for general-purpose computing

lwn.net

22 pointssigna114 comments

> gives Apple a bunch of data that folks may not really want to provide to the company, but the OCSP queries are made over unencrypted HTTP. So anyone able to see the traffic (e.g. ISPs, government spy agencies, WiFi hotspot providers) also gets a look at which applications the user is running, when they are running them, and where.

Somehow I feel that in this case it is the intended purpose.

“.. makes sense for those who are technically savvy, but sadly may leave our less knowledgeable friends, neighbors, and family behind. Protecting those folks, without forcing them to buy into a walled garden of one sort or another, is a difficult nut to crack.”

Anyone have experience of doing work to bail family and friends out in a meaningful way? What did you do?

Here are things I found that worked well for supporting family/friends that are not OS specific (of course, if feasible, I advocate for installing GNU/Linux):

- make sure that auto-update is on. Recent OSs are pretty good about this. GNU/Linux / MacOS are also pretty good about updating 3rd party apps (since they come through the package manage / app store), Windows needs a little help (there was Secunia PSI which is now deprecated)

- run the user as a "restricted user" (ie. not superuser / admin). Again, this is mostly given with recent OSs. This also mostly blocks them from accidentally installing software (I generally set up machines with all needed software - like browsers, office suites, media codecs, etc and tell them that they don't need anything else and if something/somebody tells them they need to install something else, they should treat it with extreme suspicion and call me first)

- the big one: ad blocking. I usually combine hosts file based, DNS based and browser plugin based blocking (like uBlock Origin). Seems like lots of scams / malware are going through advertisement and since starting to blocking advertisement over a decade ago, the problems my family / friends are seeing with their devices went down dramatically.

You can install LineageOS on phones and Linux/GNU on computers for your family members, unfortunately that may lead to inconveniences that they won't be happy about.

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