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Mahonia

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Apple (slrpnk.net)

I don’t care if anyone has a Xiaomi, Oneplus, Samsung, etc. Each brand is using a modified version of Android, and they chose to be compatible with each other. But for example the “blue vs green bubble” drama is a thing specifically because of Apple locking their unsuspecting users into a closed ecosystem. And it sure...

Mahonia ,

Much of your data can just be subpoenaed and then provided to law enforcement without physical access however. Apple complies 90% of the time.

theguardian.com/…/apple-user-data-law-enforcement…

Also, there are ways that LE can bypass your iphone’s encryption. Just doesn’t work all the time.

vice.com/…/unlock-apple-iphone-database-for-polic…

GrapheneOS, based on AOSP, is really the only truly private and secure option. Android offering interoperability is not a downside and Apple having a walled garden does not mean it provides increased security. Apple is decidedly not transparent and this is ultimately not a good thing.

Mahonia ,

I’ve been using GrapheneOS for about 5 years.

Google pay won’t work, but everything else should. I’ve never experienced any of the issues the other commenter had, and I’ve installed Graphene on 4 devices (not dismissing you BTW, just saying I think your experience is quite uncommon).

I don’t think third-party launchers are a good idea (you’re giving full device permission to an unneeded app) but it should work.

Almost every app I wanted to use worked with Graphene before they introduced their sandboxed google services, and now everything I’ve tested works with Google push notifications. The only exception is Google pay, and there are upstream reasons for that. Keep in mind, on a very rare occasion the hardened memory allocator breaks compatibility (again this is very rare), but there is an app-specific setting toggle to turn this off so it’s kind of a non-issue.

Mahonia ,

Nevermind the infringement on human rights and the conservatives’ historical tendency to cater to corporate interests. Affordable housing wasn’t a priority under Harper either.

Mahonia ,

This is insanely moralistic and just a bad idea, but also… of all the things going on, how can this possibly be a priority?

Mahonia ,

I don’t understand the format of this. Why put a dictator/murderer/war criminal and shitty capitalist/conservative talking head having this detailed and interesting conversation. These two in no way deserve any of the positive association this meme implies.

Mahonia ,

If you’re using a stock android device, the OS on your phone still has permissions to read and write to storage, by necessity. If what you’re concerned about is privacy, you have very limited ability to set storage scopes if you don’t trust the OS, and this doesn’t really change if you install an app.

If you’re using fossify file manager or any other file manager, you’ve given that app+the default Files app access to your storage. This is not more private. Most of those similar apps are essentially just skins on top of the default manager (which I suppose could be useful). This only really adds attack surface and doesn’t have any meaningful privacy benefits, and potentially some detractors depending on the app you use.

If you don’t trust the operating system and its utilities, the best option is to find an operating system you trust, and not to just install new skins on top of existing apps.

Mahonia ,

Well that’s actually exactly what I’d expect

Mahonia ,

Samsung skipped 11-19

Mahonia ,

I once tried to do a relatively basic repair on a phone, and ended up really breaking it. Like the touch screen won’t work because I broke some shit on the motherboard that now requires micro soldering broke it.

So I send it to a repair company that allegedly does some micro soldering, and they call me to tell me they can’t repair it because their diagnostic utility doesn’t work unless it’s the stock OS (I’ve been a GrapheneOS user for many years). What they do is… wipe my data and then tell me it’s not the screen so they can’t repair it.

Then I sent it to an actually good repair shop and they fixed it very quickly, easily understanding the problem. Good repair companies aren’t easy to find but damn are they worth it. They’re almost always smaller shops and they do not GAF what you do with your phone’s software.

Mahonia ,

It seems like maybe the problem is that automakers were able to widely market vehicles that use wireless protocols that are relatively easy targets for attack. This was never properly secure.

Automakers should absolutely be held to higher standards (in general) than they are, and it’s not likely that banning specific devices is going to have any measurable outcome here. It’s pretty well known that people buy and sell malware, and people can just… make devices similar to a Flipper with cheaply and readily available hardware.

This is just dumb posturing to avoid holding automakers and tech companies accountable for yet another dumb, poorly thought out, design feature.

And obviously it doesn’t stop at cars. It seems pretty clear that snooping on any feature using RFID or NFC tech is only going to become more widespread. Novel idea: what about using… actual keys as the primary method of granting physical access? Lock picking is obviously possible but a properly laid out disc-detainer lock is pretty goddamn hard to bypass even with the proper tools, and that skill can’t just be acquired in the same way as with electronic methods of bypass.

Mahonia , (edited )

I don’t get these arguments. These tools aren’t weapons, and limiting legal access to pentesting tools will decrease corp’s and individuals’ ability to be proactive about security.

These devices can be manufactured relatively easily and making them illegal will essentially mean the only people doing security tests are criminals. Large tech companies, correctly, run bug bounties where independent security researchers can make income by reporting reproducible and exploitable bugs. The concept here is called offensive security and it’s extremely important for building better and more secure platforms. This situation will never be improved by limiting legal access to useful testing tools.

The responsibility should be on automakers and other companies that have massively insecure products, not on open source developers who are making products for security researchers.

Mahonia ,

I don’t totally disagree with the sentiment of what you’re saying, but it’s worth giving a cursory glance at psychedelic research before you totally write it off. One of the things that’s been documented is an increased ability to access compassion for yourself and others. Another suggests that psilocybin could help reform maladaptive neural pathways.

It’s not like “ingest a substance and your problems will go away,” it’s more like “this is one tool that could be helpful in some specific ways.” Psychedelics are legitimately different from other substances and I think it’s worth reading about with a hair less cynicism. It’s potentially very useful medicine.

www.hopkinsmedicine.org/…/psychedelics-research

Mahonia ,

You love to see it

Mahonia ,

So this was the exact thing that pushed me over to the FOSS side the last time they did it. Nice to see the tradition of annoying users to the point of them abandoning Microsoft is alive and well.

Mahonia ,

This is one of the things about assisted driving tech that’s always confused me. It seems unlikely that we will have fully self-driving cars soon, but the illusion of being able to be absent while driving seems really dangerous. It doesn’t seem like an improvement to me to remove the human element from most of the driving tasks while also requiring that human to spring into action seemingly at random.

Like don’t get me wrong, people do dumb shit on the road with or without assistance, but having a system that requires human involvement at a zero-to-hero level seems like a bad system.

Then again, based on this actual content, maybe people just shouldn’t be allowed to own vehicles full stop.

Mahonia ,

Well, the actual causes of pedestrian deaths (big dumb vehicles, infrastructure that more or less necessitates personal vehicle ownership) are the same things that the auto industry lobbies hard for.

Mahonia ,

Kind of an aside, but there are a lot people who think they don’t like tomatoes because of what is generally commercially available and sold as “fresh” tomato.

It’s actually wild how different vine-ripened tomatoes are in taste and texture, compared to their commercially produced counterparts.

The flavour and texture of fresh tomatoes tends to develop more fully than if picked half-ripe and ripened during transport or storage. Also, the soil tomatoes are or aren’t grown in has a pretty significant influence on its flavour. Refrigeration also has a pretty significant effect on taste as well. It’s suggested that you don’t chill them, as this reportedly changes the flavour considerably.

There are actually a few recent studies that assess the flavour qualities of different tomatoes by region, variety and method of growing. Commercially produced tomatoes have largely been selected for shelf life and yield, without much consideration given to taste or texture (and it shows).

Mahonia ,

But there’s actually an outrageous amount of wealth in the west. It just needs to be redistributed.

It’s not an easy problem to fix, but it’s relatively simple.

Mahonia ,

I can’t imagine why you’d get downvoted for that. Yes that’s absolutely true and I’m all for a globally equitable wealth redistribution.

Mahonia ,

Just so we’re clear, this is the endgame of all of the propaganda against trans people. Many are culpable in this.

Mahonia ,

Well, Republicans are pathologically fucking stupid.

Gen Z boys and men more likely than baby boomers to believe feminism harmful, says poll (www.theguardian.com)

Boys and men from generation Z are more likely than older baby boomers to believe that feminism has done more harm than good, according to research that shows a “real risk of fractious division among this coming generation”....

Mahonia ,

I think these things are very related.

I’m queer and trans, and I’m not so picky about the demographic that I hang out with. I’ve met a lot of dudes who wanted to act their best in good faith, but received such vitriol for even showing up in conversations that they stopped bothering. Even as a transgender person, I don’t tend to engage much with community because there’s so little room for meaningful dialogue that isn’t totally prescribed. There seem to be a lot of rules on how you should and shouldn’t be. I understand that propping up the voices of those who have historically been ignored is an important thing, but there is something to be said about the fact that men and boys are often actively shunned from specific groups. If you’re frequently told that you have no place in community, you’re probably going to model a different community around that rejection.

Now what I actually think is happening is that tools of mass manipulation like the more centralized social media platforms are weaponizing the language of social justice to create division and escalation. All media platforms are quite effective at serving the ruling class, but social media is particularly insidious in that it pretends to be real life and the exposure is virtually constant.

Mahonia ,

This is kind of an aside but it’s always weird looking at caricatures of poverty from the 90s and earlier, where people live in modest homes they seem to own. Or people living alone in plain apartments in places like New York.

A six-figure salary in so many cities means that you can probably rent a decent apartment and never own anything. It’s just so obvious that this system isn’t working.

Mahonia ,

When I saw them prop it up I thought “Oh good they figured it out” and then they started rolling it… the hard way. What a ride.

Mahonia ,

Pain science is real weird.

This is a bit reductive, but one of the theories of pain is that it’s entirely neurological, essentially meaning that pain doesn’t actually correlate to physical harm to the body meaningfully. The other thing this means is that we tend to build these neural pathways the more we pay attention and hyper focus on any given body part. Compounding on this: the less outside stimulus, the more likely it is that we will have the ability to focus on the minutia of our internal processes in the first place.

Again, this is somewhat reductive as a measure of explaining pain, but it is probably partially correct.

Mahonia ,

Can I ask why?

LineageOS supports a custom avb (android verified boot) key and a locked boot loader on a very limited number of devices, and surely not a galaxy s4. Which is to say if malware was installed on your device it could be persistent through boot/reboot cycles. There will be no verifying OS integrity. Also on a device that’s been unsupported for that many years, the firmware and software that you’ll have access to is dramatically less secure. And this just can’t improved by also not having a locked bootloader.

Lineage can only do so much to support devices after they’ve reached EOL, which while I agree sucks, it’s a problem that’s at the hardware level (Qualcomm and Samsung make it impossible to continue meaningful support).

I understand if you’re trying to keep a device alive that you already have, but buying a phone for this purpose is probably not a good call. Or do you live in an area with limited access to newer tech?

If you can at all, the cheapest and best move would be to buy something like a Pixel 6a or 7a (or even a 5a) and run GrapheneOS.

Mahonia ,

Not tiktok music?

What's (are) the funniest/stupidest way(s) you've broken your linux setup?

Tinkering is all fun and games, until it’s 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you’re about to execute… And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought...

Mahonia ,

I set up 2FA via a hardware security key (a yubikey) for login, sudo etc. I then tried to switch security keys, removing the old pam files and adding a new one. But I didn’t tidy the pam files up before logging in, and there was effectively no way to log in, since editing the pam files required sudo access to edit in the first place. So basically the whole system required access to a pluggable authentication module that it no longer had any ability to recognize. It was honestly pretty funny. I did manage to recover my data by booting from a live system and decrypting my drive from there.

I’ve also accidentally removed my desktop environment twice while trying to update Python versions and then cleaning up old packages, but that’s kinda not that big deal and is just a facepalm moment.

Mahonia ,

I don’t understand the endgame of price gouging. It eventually will just completely destroy the economy.

I hate consumerism and capitalism, but like in functional capitalism the goal is to get people circulating cash as much as possible. The endgame of a massive pool of money on the part of the ruling class effectively will mean that currency is worthless over time.

Even under a shitty economic system that rewards greed, this doesn’t work for long. Only prioritizing the aims of literal psychopaths is a really fucking bad idea.

Mahonia ,

Not specifically. History has repeated a few times here, but “inflation”, either in a normal pace or artificially created, literally means money is worth less over time. 1920s Germany is a specific and extreme example of this that out in a disastrous way, and also coincides with a similar climate of political extremism. An overview of that period of time in Germany

Mahonia ,

All I’m really saying is: “artificially driving inflation is a bad idea and here’s a historical precedent that supports this.” I’m not saying it’s an identical situation. I know that it’s not.

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