Because they love and believe their corporate daddies they so worship, especially in the US.
Because they love and believe their corporate daddies they so worship, especially in the US.
The session keys for WhatsApp are stored on Meta servers, so the encryption is meaningless. Meta can read everything everyone types. Yet all of the eastern hemisphere seem to worship it like it’s pure platinum.
IIRC, Threema’s crypto algo is a patchwork cluster of copypasta and prayers.
I think you give the idiots in charge of the corps that can’t see beyond a 3 month window of time too much credit. It is just the natural progression of unchecked and unregulated Capitalism that will always lead to this place, regardless of the industry or technology.
Don’t get me wrong, I want to blame them too for their evil plot, but they’re too dumb to have contrived the whole narrative.
Example with the cloud:
The reality is, a lot of these cloud techs have been held up by:
Once these problems ended up being solved, it wasn’t some visionary with a big plan executing. It was just another Business Weenie being paid 9 figures having the same idea 300 other people had, and it just sticking this time because the technological environment is different.
(Replace Apple examples with Google, Microsoft, Cisco whoever as necessary.)
Their modems are crap. The primary function of a phone is to access cellular signal. No thanks.
GPT is selectively useful. It’s also, as of the last few weeks dumb as a bag of bricks. Dumber than usual. 4 and 4o are messed up. 4 mini is an idiot. Not sure how they broke them, but it started roughly around the time of the assassination attempt. Not sure if it was a national security request or a mere coincidence, but just the same.
I’m even seeing 4o make comically dumb and stubborn programming mistakes lately, like:
GPT: “I totally escaped that character”
Me: “no, it’s the same as your previous response.”
GPT: “Oh, sorry, here is the corrected code.” replies with same code again.
I canceled my sub.
Thank you for the clarification. WHQL is such a pain to set up, I’m sure the AV vendors whined, “but, security! Do we have to test everything every time? That would slow an urgent 0day release!”
Not even that. Kernel drivers are supposed to be Microsoft WHQL certified through a thorough testing process (that would have caught it in 3 minutes) before Microsoft will cryptographically sign them.
…but apparently Microsoft allows AV vendors to skip WHQL certification testing.
The walled garden needs to be destroyed. Compute devices should not be bound to the whims and fancies of their manufacturer. I’m honestly surprised it has gone on so long.
Honestly, it wouldn’t have been a bad place to be if they hadn’t destroyed it from the inside. Windows on ARM is super stable. You can still build your own computer, or at least buy one with user-swappable parts. Linux has become much easier and wasn’t too bad to use even a decade ago, but it was nice being able to have a non-Apple computer running programs and getting work done that was just there to do the business. I’m speaking as one that attempted to use the kool-aid for a few years after Apple stopped using user-swappable batteries, memory, disk, their hardware upcharges are pure asshole insanity. I’m fully capable of using Linux, compiling my kernel, modifying driver source to work around problems, but, I don’t want to when I’m just trying to pay my bills. Streaming media services come and go with Linux support, hardware support is often lacking until the work is done to make the hardware work correctly. Windows, for all it’s … windowsness … worked. Until the last 8 months when they decided to put a molotov cocktail under the hood and see what happens.
Apple is headed this way too, now that they don’t have SJ to errantly blow up the current tech to try something new and random (although, had he survived his cancer, he’d have just gone Musky with age like a lot of that generation has, mmmm leaded gas!) Apple will hold on just a bit longer because iOS gave them one new platform reboot (ish) to live off of, while Microsoft is still kicking around technical debt until the end of time.
Oh, edit though, I’ve been migrating my machines to Linux one by one now. Not going to bother sticking around to see that Windows train wreck continue.
To point out that: even on the operating system/platform where the YouTube app comes from, it is pointless. Works fine in a browser.
There’s no reason to even use the YouTube app. One of the first things I uninstall on Android.
“My new email address is persen@icloud.com”
Done.
No explanation necessary. Just give people the new address.
(Just used icloud as a bad joke there.)
Having to do the meta-workaround of running another computer to make your computer usable is just…don’t get me wrong, I love running infrastructure, but that seems like it should be unnecessary just to use a computer.
Hahaha! I’ve been dabbling in live USB thumbdrive copies of various flavors of Linux to see which one I want to go to for a while. Did a few years back and thought, “you know, my time is worth something to me, maybe I’ll give Windows a go, 10 seems pretty stable.”
Booted up Debian Cinnamon, couldn’t get two-finger right click to work on the Synaptics config out of box, it had a few arbitrary prefs for whatever the devs decided people would probably use. Tried Debian Gnome. It had trackpad settings that were more in line with what I expected… Not giving up, but it did make me pause, because I know one can reconfigure the trackpad driver under the hood, but did I really want to jump down the rabbit hole of bespoke shellscripts again just so my audio driver correctly wakes from sleep (if it can even successfully sleep)?
Other funny to figure out, the computer has iGPU and dGPU, both were active and the battery life was maybe 2 hours. Another thing to figure out with bespoke configurations.
So it’s like, Windows and Linux (and lesser, MacOS) pain is definitely there, it is just kinda what kind of pain do you want to subscribe to? Linux pain will probably only occur during initial setup and maybe every few years when a major OS release comes out. MacOS pain is even more rare, unless a major OS release comes out with something you don’t like and you have to find where in the OS frameworks the feature is to disable it, if they have hooks in which to do. Windows pain is…every Tuesday.
“Oh here’s a new lock screen weather widget”
“Oh cool, I can get on board with that!”
Next week:
“Oh, here’s a new stocks and news widget to go along with the weather.”
“Hold on there buddy, I didn’t sign up for the first and you’ve pushed two more? Time to shut those two off. Oh, it’s all or nothing, thanks! Nothing it is.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll reinstall Dev Home next week and flag it a system app so you can’t uninstall it, and then we’ll force Copilot to be present, and then we’re going to screw with the start menu, and then we’re going to delete WordPad, and reinstall all those Office/cloud 365 shim apps and and and.” That was like, last month.
Granted it was a few months ago, but I seem to recall a command prompt keystroke and a command line command that allowed skipping online install during setup.
So you’ve obviously never had to use defaults write com.apple.stupidpreference.fix bool true
Apple has a lot less nonsense than Microsoft, but the amount of nonsense is greater than zero. What’s really annoying (on their mobile platform specifically) is when certain problems occur on iOS that would have been completely solvable on MacOS with a command line tool, but you have to erase the phone because Apple doesn’t give you access to the OS.
MacOS is already deprecating the Keychain access tool, which will obfuscate more of the OS security from the user and make it more iOS-like in trying to fix failures.
Apple is enshittifying in absence of Jobs, they’re just behind Microsoft by one or two decades.
Removed by mod
No, they don’t care about privacy. It is just marketing buzz. They give Google and Facebook access to internal data for money. They give governments access to iCloud data for market share.
They then design the OS full of dark patterns to trick you into enabling iCloud. They have telemetry on every aspect of the operating system from a timeline down to the millisecond as to when and where you opened and closed browser tabs, to what application was consuming power at a given time, to where you go and what bluetooth and wifi devices you saw along the way. Metadata scrapers index the contents of your devices under the guise of making it “smart and helpful.” The health monitor is ostensibly capable of dead reckoning location tracking, and you have to jump through hoops to even shut off BTLE when the phone is off.
Their communications platforms log all sorts of metadata, (this can easily be seen by requesting a GDPR data dump) and if one believes they don’t tee every iMessage conversation off to three letter agencies and who knows where else, one would be sorely mistaken. (This, I don’t know of direct evidence of, so it is more inferred based on how the messaging technologies work and how the government(s) wouldn’t truly allow privacy to exist.)
One can’t even stop their Apple product from talking to Apple servers, as they run access to their own systems on a layer of abstraction above the user’s userspace network layer. If they so choose, they can brick your phone at a moment’s notice using their “activation” infrastructure.
Nothing they do is privacy-oriented, beyond making it slightly difficult for Johnny the bicycle thief to gain access.
All without any of the code being available for inspection.
LLMs have improved my education, work life, and general knowledge search. I get more time to spend living my life and less trying to find one dude’s stacked change post from 2009 that fixed my problem.
They allow me to access information the way I learn and operate in a way that textbooks, college education, video courses, or online classes have never allowed me to do in my entire life.
That being said, the general AI buzz and buzzwords need to die, the real positives need to be celebrated.