I don’t see who would be better off in that scenario, except microsoft, and I feel they’re worse for their users and the world than ubuntu

You don’t think some people who consider trying linux make a web search or ask a question somewhere only to get turned off by people immediately arguing about distros and calling them brain damaged?

Right now it’s ubuntu that’s the meme target, but there’s always something like this. If everyone stopped using ubuntu tomorrow, the people who somehow get their self esteem from having a better distro will find something else to fuel that. They will never be happy

I’m happy if people use linux. I’m even happy if they use WSL or homebrew rather than plain windows or os x as it’s a gateway drug, even though having windows in particular as a base system seems needlessly painful

Gives it a fallback to send surveillance data to samsung, even if you don’t connect it to a network

This silly infighting serves to perpetuate people staying on windows or mac os

Distro wars are silly. If someone is happy using Ubuntu, I’m happy they’re a linux user.

Tailscale is very popular among people I know who have similar problems. Supposedly it’s pretty transparent and easy to use.

If you want to do it yourself, setting up dyndns and a wireguard node on your network (with the wireguard udp port forwarded to it) is probably the easiest path. The official wireguard vpn app is pretty good at least for android and mac, and for a linux client you can just set up the wireguard thing directly. There are pretty good tutorials for this iirc.

Some dns name pointing to your home IP might in theory be an indication to potential hackers that there’s something there, but just having an alive IP on the internet will already get you malicious scans. Wireguard doesn’t respond unless the incoming packet is properly signed so it doesn’t show up in a regular scan.

Geo-restriction might just give a false sense of security. Fail2ban is probably overkill for a single udp port. Better to invest in having automatic security upgrades on and making your internal network more zero trust

Some of the people you share experiences with on instagram might be up for sharing an experience in real life. Pick someone who seems nice and suggest something that might be fun

Bring a friend

It’s pretty good at starting services. It just keeps adding bundled things people wouldn’t use otherwise, in a fairly microsoft fashion

You know how you start hallucinating in a sensory deprivation situation? I feel a lot of UX people just aren’t talking to users directly and thus we get whatever they hallucinate is a good design, disconnected from any actual user needs. Any user feedback only comes after they’ve made their mind up and is seen as the users being wrong, as the alternative is harder to deal with.

It’s free so I can’t really complain, but I can use KDE instead.

The headline overreaches as the article doesn’t support the passport dying as much as some early exploration into potential digital variants, and some convenience efforts to not have to show the passport.

Dying would be “most people use the digital variant, it’s accepted everywhere and we’re phasing out the paper variant”… which sounds like it might happen on the same timeline as large scale fusion energy

I remember a bunch of people seeming sincere about it, and a lot of money was wasted on it, including from companies like apple.

I never understood why. It was so obviously a doomed idea from day 1

The only amazing thing about the metaverse was that some people believed the hype, and that people paid to promote it could do it with a straight face.

I remember a lot of fanboys who just uncritically believe whatever the latest hype is. The problem for the metaverse is that those people move on quickly and are probaly all talking about “AI” nowadays

Is iCloud a file sharing service or social network in some way? If it isn’t, comparing them with such services makes no sense

You should have though. This type of scanning is the thin end of the wedge to complete surveillance. If it’s added, next year it’s extended to cover terrorism. Then to look for missing people. Then “illegal content” in general.

The reason most people seem to disagree with you in this case is that you’re wrong

I didn’t claim there are any nazis, read again.

There are certainly nazis on twitter though, now that you brought it up, and Musk seems to like them

I get it, My point was needlessly pedantic. Sorry about that