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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2025

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  • I’m not sure how “suspicious behavior” could be relevant to a seller issuing you a refund. Nor do I understand why a government ID would help with that kind of situation. If they are saying it’s because the credit card might be stolen, that doesn’t really make sense for a refund. If they’re saying the account might be hacked, then again, I can see limiting purchases, but not refunds. Are you sure this was a real email from Amazon and not a phishing email? I’d contact them again to verify, first. Then if you can’t resolve it, go to your bank and ask for a reversal of the charge.




  • I’m going with how police work currently in the US as a baseline. In the US, many jurisdictions require that you surrender your phone as a blanket policy, and if you refuse to unlock it, many have software to hack it. This has been determined generally to be legal as simply being detained or entering restricted areas is considered probable cause for a search, just like a physical search of your person or purse or whatever is legal.

    Assuming Austria does something similar and now they additionally can install illicit malware, I think they absolutely will as a blanket policy.


  • And just like that Austrian citizens will be the target of every hacker group on the world as the state malware will be a weak link in every device’s security layers and once they crack it, they’ll have deep access to thousands or maybe even millions of people’s devices depending on ho w broadly police decide to deploy it (likely on every device of every person who is arrested, detained, or has any contact with police for any reason like perhaps just visiting prisoners or entering government buildings to renew a passport.)


  • Caveat, any reputable brand of thermal paste is basically the same. I’ve experienced many cheapo brands, especially stuff included with cheapo hardware, that had texture issues or nearly liquefied at high temperatures and made a mess. Also, had one that evaporated partly and tested positive for lead, so not the most healthy. Though one time is not a big deal, it is a big deal if you used it a lot.

    Anyway, stick to reputable brands and most are the same. Slight differences are usually in max temperature, but that doesn’t really apply to computer hardware much, but does affect some other moderately high temperature hardware that needs even cooling that I work with, like 3D printing.


  • The only thing you gain from VPN is that the target server does not know your IP.

    Not necessarily true. A VPN also prevents the ISP from collecting data on all of your connections. Currently ISPs (in the US at least) collect and sell what sites you visit even if they can’t see the data due to HTTPS. Additionally, some have implemented, but then removed due to backlash but may implement again some day, MitM attacks on HTTPS connections in order to insert ads. Using a trusted DNS server that they don’t also intercept can help avoid this, though. With a VPN the ISP won’t see any of this, only the connection to the VPN server and have no way to insert themselves as long as they don’t intercept the VPN connection itself before it’s established.


  • It’s not that kind of breaking change. It’s a change that won’t affect most people. Only those who chose to use a custom location for their media location and chose to set that to a relative path instead of an absolute one which caused the application to have trouble resolving the paths. The change eliminates a bug by preventing people from doing something that was not intended to be supported. So it’s not a “breaking” change necessarily in the sense that they are changing documented functionality. They are eliminating a way that people can misconfigure the application which may in some cases cause the application to break if someone successfully configured the application in this unintended way.


  • Problem is that Apple has always been even more about lock-in and user tracking than Google, though Google has been catching up on that front quite a bit. But at least Android has some open source components to allow knowing what’s tracking you. Problem is the manufacturers then add another layer of tracking and lock-in if you use phones from manufacturers like Samsung. So you may or may not be reducing the number of companies tracking you by moving from Samsung to Apple, but you’re increasing the amount of data that can be captured and linked to you and preventing yourself from using privacy apps that might be able to block some of that since iOS has much more strict control over what the user can do with their device at the OS level and forces developers to use their tracking systems in a lot of cases for things like error handling. So overall, moving to Apple is increasing your exposure to tracking, even if reducing the number of companies who have the info for free, of course they all sell all that info, so that’s not really an advantage.

    A year ago I would have suggested getting a Pixel phone and installing GrapheneOS, but it looks like Google is moving to kill off alternative OSes on Pixels, so not sure what’s the best bet at this point.

    But Apple has always been of the mindset of controlling user experience and security over configurability and privacy which many prefer since they want it to “just work”.

    Remember, security, privacy, and usability always have to be balanced. For example, if you want a chat app that is both secure and private, then the app servers have no information to make things more usable, like how do you share your hardware address for communication to go to if there are no user IDs for privacy. You have to do that outside the app, thus less usable. So if you see an app that is very secure and usable, it likely is not very private. Signal is a good example on the chat application side since it uses a phone number which is then linked to lots of personal info, but it has very secure messages and is very easy to find your friends on it (usable).

    Apple generally prioritizes user usability and user security with the detriment of user privacy and developer usability and privacy.





  • This is why I never used their images for any of my projects and do everything I can to use official charts made by the software vendor itself or create my own and put them in my personal git repo for automated deployments.

    Any business that gives away middleware for free, likely does that in the hopes of monetizing that pretty directly and eventually will be pressured to increase monetization of those things by those investors or will be forced to stop developing those products due to lack of funding. Middleware really doesn’t have many other good ways to monetize.


  • The laws aren’t about protecting children, though. Only legitimate sites will implement it, and legitimate sites generally aren’t the most problematics sites.

    The laws are actually designed to allow for the tracking of adults’ activity and link them to that activity in a way that is provable in court. Anyone who wants to use the sites for nefarious purposes can just impersonate others and frame them for the use. So, there’s no real value in any of it, just a way to get campaign funding. The real solutions would be too expensive to implement and require experts to design who are much more likely to be highly educated and thus unwilling to help a fascist state, so they’ll never happen.





  • I don’t know that very many people would understand the limitations of it just like they didn’t with ChromeOS. Just need a major hardware manufacturer to start putting a Linux distro on their machines and make a more stable application installation system than KDE Discover or shore up Discover a bit and it would be great to consolidate rpm, deb, etc., rather than adding new systems like Snap and Flatpak.



  • Also make sure to uninstall the Facebook app from your devices as well as any other Meta owned apps like Instagram. It was somewhat recently discovered they are using it as a backdoor to your web browsing history on any websites with Meta plugins, even when the browser isn’t tracking you directly. Though GrapheneOS should prevent that communication between apps if you don’t give the web browser extra permissions, better to be safe.