Originally this was a reply to this article about a Windows feature called Recall, but there’s a good argument the author’s concerns resonate far beyond Windows and Meta to proprietary generally.
You must log in or # to comment.
“im a henchman for a bad guy…and lemme tell you…I think we might be starting to do bad stuff…not sure yet…”
Thanks bud
At some point we need to start welcoming people to the Light, instead of demonizing them for having been in the Dark. It’s pretty difficult for me not to dunk on people as they wake up to the nightmare that they voted for, but a lot them ARE actually otherwise decent folks. Making America Great is going to involve deprogramming a lot of people.
That’s all good and well and I agree with you, but I also believe if you have and are continuing to feed the machine, then you don’t get to be put on a pedestal or respected for recognizing how bad the machine is. This person is repeating something that is already very well known and accepted and is simultaneously adding to the alarm while causing it. I have extremely low patience for that particular brand of person. They are continuing to cause the problem they are rallying against.
If I were face to face with this person, I’d genuinely say “either quit working there or shut the fuck up.”
What about when it’s your family? I am estranged from a lot of people that I care deeply for because they refuse to engage with reason. I’m not trying to put anyone on a pedestal, good or bad.
I just want people to know that they are welcome to change their minds, nobody is going to mock them for doing so, or say I told you so. That’s what they expect, and pride is part of what holds many of them back from admitting that they were wrong. Because it’s what they would do. Unfortunately, we’re going to need to take the high road.
The predestal/respect bit in my comment was about this post as a whole. IMO, the screenshotted person does not deserve to be paid attention to. They are not revealing anything new by any means while choosing to make the problem worse.
I don’t know what anyone being in my family has to do with anything. My response is the same: if you are unhappy enough to complain out loud about something you are helping cause, either do something about it or shut the fuck up.
I wonder if employees of evil corporations reading your comment are more likely to quit or chill their speech
I hope that at least one whistleblower stays employed at every evil corp
Okay then. If you appreciate talking that way, then either delete your account or shut the fuck up.
Unfortunately, not everyone has a choice in who they work for in end-stage-capitalism. Work is about survival, not ideology. The majority of Americans are not far-right capitalists, but the vast majority of CEOs are, and it’s not really possible to survive long enough to start a small business in most of the US without investment from a far-right capitalist or inheritance (usually also from a far-right capitalist family member).
If you have the skillset and CV to work at Meta, you have a choice to work somewhere slightly lower on the scale of exploitation.
Dude, look around. Most of us are way, WAY past the “We’re all in this together! We can do it if we try!” method of living and have been operating in survival mode for the past 5 years. And can you blame them? The flood waters are rising and people are wanting to make sure they have a life raft. If that means working for evil people/companies, then so be it. It’s not like working somewhere else will stop or slow the flood. Morals are nice, but they won’t keep you afloat.
Yes morals won’t keep you afloat. But FAANG, military defense contractors, and the other most terrible industries waaaay overpay on cost of living, and other industries are also looking to compensate well for expertise (minus some compensation for all the exploitation you wouldn’t be contributing to).
What you’re describing is the development of a paranoid conservative mindset in response to traumatic global events. This is how my conservative Fox News brainrot parents describe the world, and they are the type to own guns because they’re deathly afraid of home intruders even though their city’s crime index is among the best in the country.
Not really. I can’t think of a major social media software company that isn’t exploitative. If that’s where their specialty lies, then they either learn new skills which takes time, requires partially resetting your career, and money only to have that company then absorbed by an exploitative big company in a decade and do it all again, or just keep your job that started as a decent company and got corrupted already.
“Are we the baddies?!”
“I’m only following orders!”
if they didnt know what they were signing up for, and they cant quit, you cant blame them
Yeah, just like the attorney’s who resigned when asked to drop the charges against Eric Adams.
deleted by creator
Dog, this Linux-Is-Best dipshit almost ruined and ran a local /r/massachusetts subreddit into the ground a couple years back. I remember it because I was there and had a role in getting them removed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS7gw2h5n2o
There’s a bit more to it, someone found out who they were and I forget if they a) didn’t work for FB or b) was just a lowly content control employee or whatever.
If this is the same person, I think they’re legitimately unwell.
It’s funny how they’re saying “You need to use Linux” and not “You need to get off Facebook”. How’s Linux going to save you from Facebook spying on you?
They literally work for the Fediverse branch of meta, sure its an evil corp and zucks intentions aren’t exactly pure (more than likely an effort to lower server costs) but it is something likely to put more eyes onto the fediverse which I definitely think will benefit the fediverse in the long run.
I read the post like you at first, but I don’t think he works on the fediverse. I think it was just a poor/unclear sequence of clauses in his post.
My uncle works at the fediverse and gets all the games before they come out
Threads has fediverse integration, the fediverse like the internet is decentralised its not an entity.
That first comma is a bit out of place - ‘why won’t you just try, Linux?’
‘seriously Linux, just try your vegetables’.It can’t. Its just a kernel. Maybe with the right gnu core utils…
Or maybe with busybox :3 (I use Alpine)
I was thinking one of those bio powered military robots
Protests crack down on the internet has been going on for quite some time, don’t just blame it on trump but on the whole government and its infrastructure.
And Facebook as an integrated part of the international surveillance state has been firmly established since Snowden leaked the PRISM program.
Like, there are a lot of reasons to switch to linux and plenty of them are compelling. But its an absolute fantasy to believe you’re somehow immune to surveillance because you’re using the same software as Amazon’s EC2. Does anyone really believe the NSA hasn’t cracked Linux Mint yet?
Or, for that matter, that using a linux desktop is going to insulate you from being spied on via a public facing 3rd party social media forum?
You mean with the USA Intel or AMD CPUs?
Think that it doesn’t matter what you use as OS as the microchip inside the CPU chip can read anything it wants
Sure. Although that’s just a matter of unplugging your computer from the Internet. Also, at least in theory, Linux isn’t actively leaking all your data into various Cloud services. Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive are just invitations for the NSA to paw through your file system.
I just can’t imagine how Linux protects you from posting on Facebook.
It wont protect there.
Also, I remember articles back then mentioning 5G Towers could create a dystopia because every company could easily put a 5G chip into the product and secretly track you regardless of Wifi.
I’ll just make my own cpu with a breadboard and a few wires!
Didnt google actually provide a service to create custom Silicon Chips with to 107nm and open source some Risk-V things?
I think it would be actually possible to create your own CPU through sich thing but unsure if they are able to backdoor it too. I think less likey
Not my case (ARM) and maybe is time to give some love to RISC-V.
Unsure if qualcom has some backdoor too.
Broadcom. It’s a RPi.
Like, there are a lot of reasons to switch to linux and plenty of them are compelling. But its an absolute fantasy to believe you’re somehow immune to surveillance because you’re using the same software as Amazon’s EC2. Does anyone really believe the NSA hasn’t cracked Linux Mint yet?
It’s much harder for the government and bad actors to hide backdoors in open source software than making a deal with a private company
For the proprietary software, a lot of it is front-doors. Literally just pay-to-prey. Government agencies pay the big data companies to access their warehouses of scrapped data that come directly off their clients’ machines through explicit information harvesting protocols.
That said, it is technically harder to have a covert backdoor in an open source system. But it isn’t impossible, or even particularly impractical, so long as the vulnerability remains reasonably obscure. It would be naive to assume your standard array of linux oses are unassailable.
If this is the same person I think it is, I would take their comments with a huge pile of salt. Not saying they’re wrong, but…
A couple years ago this Linux-Is-Best dipshit somehow got onboarded as a mod of the /r/massachusetts subreddit, started banning a ton of users for pretty unreasonable reasons, brought a few other seemingly random moderators on board and almost nuked it out of existence by being an unhinged little weirdo. They claimed to have worked at Facebook/Meta and I forget which, but they were found out either to have made it up or they were just a bottom tier content moderation employee.
You can go find some posts about it, but this person’s not well at all even if you happen to agree with them. If this is the same person. They’re not trust worthy. Privacy’s important, big companies are creepy, do what you can to protect yourself and use linux if that’s what gets you there, but again I would take anything this dipshit says with a grain of salt.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Massachusetts_US/comments/11wnjsk/removed_by_reddit/
https://www.reddit.com/r/massachusetts/comments/11xw44r/linux_is_gone/
I’ve done OSINT research and that alone converted me into a privacy advocate. Seeing how Alphabet, Meta, and MS have allowed creep to get training data… Whew. It’s breathtaking and complicated beyond the ability to explain in 114 characters.
Y’all, we are cooked. Currently. Present tense. If you aren’t freaked out already, you’re missing about 85% of reality.
Yeah OSINT existing is proof that no backdoor is secure, not even mentioning what you can buy from data brokers, something authorities wouldn’t need warrants for.
deleted by creator
Well, to be fair it’s also proof that people do not value privacy, and that the means by which actual privacy can be obtained are few and narrow.
It also really drives home the fact that our systems of IDs, licensure, taxes, property purchase, etc. are designed for an analog 20th century world. We need new systems based on modern technology, bit not in a way that simply contracts out to the very companies that put us here.
They’ll be forced to care when their freedom’s inevitably on the line (in the states)
You can’t force people to care or act in their own self interest. The US will sooner adopt the metric system and mandatory digital IDs.
US corporate “leadership” has a rapists mentality. Consent is not needed. They will do the crime either way. and daddy sam let’s them get away with it.
deleted by creator
It’s called the Cassandra Complex, named after Cassandra/Kassandra of Troy.
If you think this is new, you’re very naive. They just have better tools to spy on you now.
deleted by creator
nah you can totally stop the surveillance. Just use tailsOS, live in the basement of a building under an aluminum ceiling (to hide from synthetic-aperture radar spy sats), near a busy highway (so the LIGO gravity-wave observatory cant record the sound of your footsteps), get food deliveries so you don’t have to leave, and connect to the internet using a neighbors wifi.
\j
deleted by creator
This is one of those cases where you’d really rather have been wrong.
dismissed as a conspiracy nut.
The government and bad actors use this as a strategy to attack their opponents and control public opinion.
Switching from Windows to Linux isn’t going to block them from monitoring your use of online services. Facebook doesn’t even do anything in the OS space.
I think what they are getting at is that Meta does this and they find it likely Microsoft might be doing something similar.
deleted by creator
They have an agreement with MS, so they are definitely doing something there.
Yeah, this was a weird way for them to phrase this. You can use Meta stuff on Linux and Fediverse stuff on Windows.
To all the people who are criticising this guy for working for Meta, I would like to remind you of the phrase, “Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer”.
I am very much a left-winger, but I still read right-wing papers and articles, I like to know what the other side is thinking.
deleted by creator
If you can get a job at Facebook then you could easily find employment elsewhere. And no it’s not Game of Thrones, but I would love to see Zuckerberg get the Joffrey treatment.
Less criticism and more pity.
Sheryl Sandberg seems like a Grade A asshole to work for - possibly the only woman CEO I’ve ever heard of getting #MeToo’d. Zuckerberg is an absolute baby-brain completely up his own asshole with delusions of grandeur, outright comparing himself to Roman Emperors.
But if you get into the tell-all released by Sarah Wynn-Williams, all you really take away from it is that this company is as corrosive to the body public as it is ravenous for economic expansion. There’s no “keeping close” that’s going to be good for you in the long run. Might as well try to keep a rabid dog on a short leash.
I am very much a left-winger, but I still read right-wing papers and articles, I like to know what the other side is thinking.
I’m not above peaking in on Citations Needed or QAnon Anonymous to see how the other side lives. But the actual right-wing material itself is really ugly stuff, particularly in the modern moment. When it isn’t nakedly xenophobic or Mean Girls callously cruel, its just pumping your eyeballs and ear holes full of the dumbest fucking advertisements imaginable.
Not good to ingest that stuff.
Do, or do not, there is no try.
Except there is… live environments
Distrosea would just like to interject for a moment.
I don’t try, I do. Wanna try me?
I mean…if you’re offering
username checks out
Why not both?
std::vector ulUtil {"GNU", "Alpine", "BusyBox", "Toybox"}; int currentUtil = 0; do { try { OS(ulUtil[currentUtil], "Linux").use(); } catch (USER::Bored & err) { currentUtil++; continue; } } while ((currentUtil < ulUtil.size()) || (findMoreUtil(ulUtil)));
FUCK YEAH, YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP
The Linux Foundation itself is in the US jurisdiction - just sayin’.
Which is why I repeatedly called for the Foundation to move into Europe, potentially into Finland, back to its roots.
They do have Linux foundation Europe, which has a hq in Brussels. Afaik, all of the Europe OS projects supported by LFE are hosted in Europe also. They also claim to be independent; though I’m not sure if that means from LF entirely. Checking the job boards show roles in California and Germany however; suggesting they are the same entity. (Though I suppose that could just be collaborative?).
The very nature of open source means someone else could just pick it up even if the entirety of LF were wiped out. (There are 5000+ collaborators on the Linux kernel git repo) But the reality is a large portion of those actively working on the kernel, are likely involved in LF in some capacity. Add the fact that LF fund multiple Open source projects, The impact of losing LF would be drastic for the future development of not just Linux, But the FOSS ecosystem as a whole.
This isn’t the only threat to FOSS either; The fact that GitHub is owned by Microsoft is a concern imo.
Not only that, but it also affects the decision making. For example, quite recently Russian maintainers were removed from the Linux kernel, citing “compliance”.
It’s easy to imagine same thing happening to Chinese maintainers, for example. And then from other countries. This, too, can strongly affect not just Linux, but FOSS landscape as a whole.
Thanks for bringing up the European foundation, I’ll look into it!
I switched from Fedora to openSUSE recently and it has been painless. Would recommend to anyone who are looking to get away from US companies and US jurisdiction. Edit: note that it uses RPM package manager though, I don’t know yet if that is problematic or not. If someone knows then please elaborate on that.
Tumbleweed or Leap or something else?
I’ve been wondering about a similar change, or possibly to Arch. What I’m still wondering about is security: Fedora has Selinux enabled all over the system, and Opensuse and Arch do not. Anyone know what level of risk this mitigates?
I think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has SELinux enabled now too. I’m not sure what you mean by all over the system, as I’m not that familiar with SELinux yet. I believe that Tumbleweed used to use AppArmor but recently switched to SELinux? I also believe that Leap (the stable version of OpenSUSE) still uses AppArmor.
Based on opensuse’s docs, it seems to be in permissive state, whereas on my Fedora by default:
$ selinuxenabled && echo yup yup $ getenforce EnforcingNot sure if the warm fuzzy feelings I get from this are justified (like what are the actual applied rules on apps? I have no idea), but it is a bit warmer and fuzzier.
I see, thanks, I didn’t know the details. I just had a faint recollection that they had switched from AppArmor to SELinux.
I wouldn’t worry about security. Mainly because more security always means less things work as intended, and there’s not really any malware targeting Linux. Just like, pick a distro, use it, and pivot based on things you like or dislike
Shit I was just about to install PopOs! Which is developed by a US company. It’s maddening trying to find the right distro that fits all the requirements.
Edit: Opting for Mint.
According to Distrowatch mint and Zorin are from Ireland, opensuse and manjaro are from Germany and more was lazy for more searching
Canonical/Ubuntu is uk
Suddenly Ubuntu doesn’t seem so terrible now, does it??
Ubuntu gang represent.
Well, their “customisation” of Gnome with that ugly bar on the left side is still ugly as hell.
And GCHQ isn’t also really trustworthy, with them being part of 5 Eyes
That’s part of why I use Xubuntu/Kubuntu mainly and Lubuntu for real low end stuff. Straight vanilla Ubuntu is… not super appealing. Ubuntu server that’s just CLI/headless though, that’s pretty tits, imho.
Ubuntu server is okay, but I’ve come to really appreciate a minimal, stable Debian install instead.
I think I will go for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. But Kubuntu is also nice to keep in mind
That is just a customized version of Dash to Dock. You can move the dock on the bottom if you want or make it auto hide. The same functionality you can expect from Dash to dock but with the Ubuntu theme applied
I don’t want it at all.
But thanks for the Head Up that you can make this ugly thing go away
Snaps still suck
I agree that the backend for snaps being proprietary sucks, but I actually think snaps themselves are pretty useful in server configurations because of the sandboxing and limiting access to system resources. I get the whole argument that it’s doing what flatpak already did yadda yadda, but like… competing standards happens. It’s part of life and always will be.
Mandrake/Mandriva is from France
SUSE is now garbage. Not sure about open suse
What’s garbage about it?
When SLES 12 came out they made everything harder and forced everyone to migrate to 64 bit, even if you were doing legacy development
A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”?
Gee, it’s common even for ‘experienced’ folks. I just went to update to the 6.14 kernel this morning (everything that I use [and monitor for conflicts] was supposedly finally working with it), and apparently that didn’t play well with my desktop manager. Cue the tty at boot and trying different DMs until I finally said screw it and went back to the previous kernel.
I find it weird that there is this whole conversation about new/experienced users, and it’s perhaps a problematic thing with Linux. Many people, myself included, don’t give 2 shits about how their OS works. I don’t want to spend my time tending to it as if it were a fucking garden. I just need it to work, so I can get on with my own stuff. No matter how “experienced” I get, that’s always going to be the case. Maybe I’m just a little traumatized about this because the first Linux distro I used was Gentoo.
I think it’s overblown for the most part. Yes, the OS should just work… but it does, for 99% of users, on windows, and linux, and probably macos, which I haven’t used so can’t speak on.
The ones who blow up their systems are either techies who like futzing with stuff, or are using a ‘bad’ distro for their needs. If you’re switching over granny, you set her up with a long term stable kernel, a vanilla distro, and a browser. The few other stories are when people switch from windows and want something specialized to be the same. Those will need a customized solution, but it’s not much different than windows when something breaks. Whoever is playing IT gets to poke at a stupid amount of settings, registry edits, or esoteric drivers/dependencies.
I 100% agree. Immutable is the way to go for beginners. Source: started on Mint and actually had a few problems. Now I’m on Bluefin (previously Aurora) and I have none.
You should be using OpenKylin or something like that.
Why?
edit: if this is a communism joke it’s bad, and i’m actually an anarchocommunist… look at my avatar
Stop worrying about the country of origin. It’s a FOSS project. The vast majority of Pop’s components are developed independently of the company, and by citizens of various nations. Applying the “USA bad, so product bad” rhetoric is a seriously shortsighted approach. Consider instead the amount of influence exerted by the company. Does Ubuntu still seem like the better choice just because the company is headquartered in the UK?
Besides, if you really want to cut American software out of your life, start with Linux and GNU. Torvalds was born in Finland, but he is a naturalized US citizen, and Linux is developed on American infrastructure and includes significant amount of work from American developers.
They can still sanction your country and then you can’t get updates anymore over official ways, like Fedora and Iran.
It’s just peace of mind to not deal with anything US Based right now
deleted by creator
OpenKylin, or one of the other Kylin(s) is what someone like you needs.
I’ve wanted to switch to OpenSUSE for quite some time now from Fedora for the same reason. Should really do it now
Its so beautifully stable, without giving you ancient software like Debian. Never had an issue using it n its got a grandma level installation.
