morganvachon

As mentioned above that's apparently a parody account that fooled me. His real Twitter shows he's still the raging bigot he always was.

I've seen that and I believe he felt he had to do so to maintain his readership after being called out for his bigotry so often of late. I for one don't believe he's changed at all, but I don't personally know the guy so I can't say for sure he hasn't. Anyway, I'll still refuse to read his articles just to be sure I'm not supporting a bigot with page views.

It's not, but people should be aware of where they get their news sources.

I'm honestly surprised that someone on Ladyada's staff would link to an article by the highly transphobic and racist Bryan Lunduke. As recently as March of this year he was deliberately deadnaming and misgendering a prominent ElementaryOS developer.

https://www.osnews.com/story/134655/elementary-os-is-implodi...

This is disingenuous at best. The browser itself is open source but show me the source for your data collection servers and crypto scheme servers. What's that? It's not open source? Imagine that!

I appreciate the attempt to explain your company's bad behavior, but I'm not convinced. And to be fair, you're not alone in making mistakes in the arena of privacy and security; all the major browsers have privacy-averse settings and "anti-features". The difference with your company is that you falsely advertise yourself as the one true private browser, while simultaneously profiting from your users' personal data. It's a lie, it's a scam, and it's morally reprehensible. You only fixed the issues I brought up after being caught and publicly shamed over them; if you hadn't been caught out you'd likely still be doing those things today. Shame on you.

> or a privacy-focused company is snooping on your devices to steal your personal info (so they can send you mailers?)

I never said that. I don't want Brave on my devices due to their past bad behavior: lying, stealing money from creators in their affiliate program, redirecting legitimate links to shady crypto sites, running a crypto pyramid scheme, and so on. This is just the latest in a long list of reasons not to use their software.

Here's the fun thing: I have opted out of blind mailers from the USPS, yet I got one of these Brave mailers last week with my name on it (I'm in the Atlanta area). Just one more reason of many for me to never, ever let Brave near any of my devices.

I guess I'm really old school but I just have a spreadsheet for my budgeting, with formulas and charts I've written and maintained over the last 25 years. It's gone from old Microsoft formats (xls/xlsx) to ODS, to Gnumeric, back to ODS, and now I use Apple's Numbers since I have a Mac and an iPhone, and iCloud web works on pretty much any device with a browser I might have in front of me. If I do ever feel like ditching my Mac and going back to an open source OS, I can just export it to ODS again and all my formulas and tools transfer over (I don't use anything proprietary from Numbers, though color fills don't always match right up).

I am salaried with weekly payout, and so I have a weekly chart for where my money goes on payday (bills/loans/cards/savings), an amortization schedule for each account that allows me to see how extra payments will affect the payoff and interest, and a brainstorming sheet for planning future large purchases (cars, maybe a bigger house one day). I can do pretty much anything with this that I could with Firefly III or a paid solution, but (for me at least) this is less hassle and my data stays between me and Apple's iCloud server; I trust them enough with that basic data to not bother with maintaining and securing a VPS just to balance my budget.

The difference is that this unit does the AC-DC conversion inside itself, whereas your DC-DC power supply relies on an external AC-DC brick that is likely the same size as this entire self contained unit, if not larger.

Except the M1 Air and 13 inch M1 Pro reverted to left side only (the new models with M1 Pro/Max chips have an extra USB-C on the opposite side). It's my only real gripe with the M1 laptops compared to older Intel Macs.

Of course, the Framework is the polar opposite of the M1 Macs' locked down "appliance" feel. I'm enjoying the progress being made with OpenBSD and Asahi Linux on the M1 platform, but the hardware itself remains impossible to upgrade or repair for mere mortals. The Framework is the pinnacle of truly owning your laptop while not sacrificing speed and a crowd pleasing design.

I'm not saying you shouldn't give up Google services; I did. I'm just saying the unfortunate reality is that you'll never fully escape them.

I agree wholeheartedly in principle, but the reality is that it's nearly impossible to escape Google getting their hands on yours and your correspondents' messages at some point. So many businesses (and third party email providers!) use Google's services on the back end, and many relays out there are owned by Google/Alphabet even if it's not readily apparent, that the only way to even attempt to avoid them is using encrypted email. Unless everyone you communicate with (including companies, governments, and other organizations) is willing to only communicate via encrypted email as well, it's a lost cause.

Thanks for the info. I wonder if, now or at some point in the past, Klarna had mandatory customer DOB as opt-out rather than opt-in for a default card processing setup on the merchant facing side, and many small businesses in my experience either don't have IT staff or it's their cousin's wife's uncle doing IT for them on the cheap, and they just don't see it or understand its significance.

I know there were dozens of switches to flip when we switched to a new storefront and shopping cart vendor a few years ago, and I missed a few initially despite my experience with setting those up in the past. That's what sandboxing is designed to catch, but I can picture PHBs in every industry saying "damn the testing, full speed ahead!" with no thought for consequences.

Or, as with anything else privacy related, outside of intellectual bubbles like HN the vast majority of people don't think twice about giving up unnecessary PII to a payment processor because they naively think the entity won't sell or leak their information. Even those who see conspiracies around every corner somehow constantly fall victim to identity theft due to negligence, and divulge way too much information for their own privacy and safety every day.

A movie quote springs to mind: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."

This is fine for you and your use case, but some of us (as pointed out in the article) are forced to stay with BIOS either due to owning legacy hardware that is still fully functional and even necessary, or because we use VMs and/or hosted services that require BIOS and don't support UEFI, or both. I'm one of those; I use a few legacy machines locally and I have VPS instances hosted with Vultr.

Granted, I don't use Fedora so this doesn't directly affect me yet, but the Linux community has a history of too-early adoption of ideas started at Fedora (systemd, pulseaudio) that take years to reach production-ready status, if ever. At some point those of us who still use legacy hardware at home/work will be forced to either throw out perfectly good machines, or switch to a holdout distro like Slackware or Void (not that there's anything wrong with either of those) and lose valuable time moving our workflow. We'll also be at the mercy of our hosting providers as they decide whether to overhaul their entire hosting backend, or else drop Fedora and any other distro that follows their lead.

I get that UEFI is the future of bootstrapping, but it's too early to pull the plug on BIOS.

It seems that way. I did a very simple one: "A car ran a stop sign in front of me and I flipped them the bird."

I got one NTA: "They shouldn't have run the stop sign!", and one YTA: "You shouldn't flip someone the bird just because they flipped you off, you should pull alongside them, assess the situation, and apologize if necessary."

Slightly off-topic (sorry!) but have you considered testing/porting to the BSDs, especially since you have a macOS port? I'm particularly interested in an OpenBSD port. I may try cloning the repo and building it myself; SDL2 and CMake are available on that platform.

SecureBoot was as much an attempt by Microsoft to put in place a method to lock out other OSes as it was for local physical security. Most consumer desktop and laptop computer users don't password protect their BIOS/EFI, so an attacker with physical access can simply turn off SecureBoot themselves and then boot whatever toolkit they want to take over the system.

And for those of us who aren't wealthy enough to have two different attorneys on retainer, giving your spouse the encrypted password store along with the key to a safety deposit box containing the decryption key would have to do.

Personally, my wife would wonder why I'm going to so much trouble to keep my passwords secret from her until I die; but then my personal password store is for services we share like banking, and any passwords she doesn't know are benign things like my email addresses and various website logins that wouldn't matter anyway when I die. Of course I also have my work passwords (I'm the IT manager), but my supervisor and the company owner each have a secured store of all of my work passwords as well, plus the master password to access them, in the event something happens to me (or I'm just on vacation for a week and temporarily unreachable when access is needed).

Acorn is probably the closest we'll get to a native macOS app that is analogous to Paint.NET from the Windows world, and it's worth the money if one is a Paint.NET cult member. Pinta (open source Paint.NET clone) is available for Macs but it's just as buggy as it is on Linux.

Agreed, it even runs on OpenBSD! It's as close as we'll ever get to a spiritual successor to the original two games. Deadly Shadows (the third game) was terrible compared to the first two, and we don't speak of the 2014 reboot.

This was exactly me and my girlfriend at the time (still good friends today). We were obsessed with the game, we both beat it several times then explored the world of custom missions. I think our mutual favorite was "Hush Hush, Sweet Harlot".

Years after we broke up we remained friends, and one day she called me asking for help getting it to run on her then-new Windows Vista PC. I never could get it to work correctly so I cobbled together a working PIII era machine for her with Windows 2000 installed, and period correct GPU, and she was in sneaking heaven!

These days the GOG version plays perfectly well on modern hardware and OSes, no need for hacks or period hardware anymore.

I'm pretty sure OP meant the original (first) release for IBM PC, which happened in 1981. I'm not sure if you're being naively pedantic or intentionally obtuse here.

Same. Several years ago I was a happy Plex user, but our Internet got knocked offline and we wanted to watch some local content, no dice. I canceled my Plex Pass sub as soon as I had Internet again. I use Emby now which offers pretty much the same experience without the need for a permanent Internet connection. Their subscription offers a few bonus features but it's not required for LAN streaming.

Unless you rely on systemd, try Void Linux. It has a sane package manager and a very active, friendly community. It requires a little legwork to get to the same polish as Ubuntu and other consumer-oriented distros, but it is rock solid and reliable.

Otherwise be careful with Manjaro; it is a noble project with great goals and some great implementations (and a stellar community!), but they tend to go a bit overboard on customization for customization's sake which has introduced breakage in the past. Nothing that isn't fixed within a day in my experience, but stable it most certainly is not.

There's also Mint for a more traditional and conservative take on Ubuntu's method, as well as MX Linux which shows off how good Debian can be in the right hands.

Or go crazy like me and start using OpenBSD as your main workstation provided your workflow can adapt to it; I'm on 7.0 on this machine with Firefox 95 and literally everything I need is here.

I agree with your position but that's a bad analogy (as most analogies are). With your computer you can choose to uninstall and no longer use VSCode. You can't choose your neighbor and you can't force him to move away to prevent his bad actions. Also, it would be more like your neighbor is peeping in your windows or planting a monitoring bug to record your activities, rather than breaking in.

Taking that further, you can ditch your Mac and switch to Linux or BSD if you're concerned about the article subject. In other words, you can sell your house and move if you don't like the direction the neighborhood is going with all the peeping toms about, but there's extra work involved in that solution so you have to decide if you can afford such a change for more privacy. So, you can sell your Mac and move your workflow to a less invasive OS on hardware you choose, but depending on how deep your workflow is intertwined with and relies upon the macOS ecosystem, that can be a ton of work as well.

Russian citizens != Russian government. The Telegram development team is not on good terms with the Russian government last I read. With that said, it still operates within the borders so it's subject to government control (just as any US-based messaging service is subject to US government control). It's always a cat-and-mouse game between those who want free, unfettered, unmonitored communications and the governments that feel threatened by that kind of freedom.

Too late to edit now unfortunately. I had tried to word it so it wasn't spoilery, I guess I failed on that.

This is one of the few movies of the last two decades that brought me to tears at the reveal towards the end. Once it hits you, you'll look back at the entire movie in a different mindset and it's emotionally jarring. It also helps not having read the source story.