GadgeteerZA

I blog about #technology #gadgets #opensource #FOSS #greentech #traditionalwetshaving #LCHF #health #alternativeto #hamradio (ZS1OSS) #southafrica - see https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog. I also blog to various other social networks which I list at https://gadgeteer.co.za/social-networks-i-post-to.

  • 12 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 20th, 2021

help-circle




  • Linux and FLOSS unfortunately don’t have budgets, and rely on logic and common sense. Microsoft has a big lobbying budget, gets in to see senior politicians and decision-makers, and then sponsors training, digital villages, etc. Yes, it costs a country overall much more than Linux, but it is easier for schools/gov depts and middle-men make some actual money in their pockets. That’s what Linux and FLOSS end up against. What would turn it around is having strong local businesses driving training and making tender bids to install and support Linux and FLOSS. A government or school wants to have it done for them. That’s the reality, unfortunately.


  • They know little about open source. Microsoft is exclusively in schools and government, and that is what they grow up with. They probably know more about pirating Windows, than using Linux legally. There is also a good kick-back in terms of MS license mark-ups for middle-men businesses. One would hope there is some mandatory education around different OSs as I’m sure kids would love to explore and modify software.






  • Surely we need some context with this, as what we post is basically publicly visible. Even if we defederate the posts are anyway visible. Our IP addresses are probably visible to the home instance we connect to (or our VPN IP address etc) but how does our IP address then travel off with the federated post to someone following us on Threads? It’s only what travels out through the ActivityPub federation.

    What would help with this post was, instead of just a link, maybe extracting the two or three issues that look problematic, and say why. That gives us something definite to actually debate.

    For those who have friends stuck on Threads still, this maybe a good way for them to stay in contact. The Threads user gets their login times, IP address, location, etc tracked by Meta, and the Lemmy user with their Lemmy app, only identifies with their Lemmy instance. Threads should only be seeing the post and time that a Lemmy user posts something that is followed by a Threads user.


  • I think it is quite well known that only Telegram Secret Chats are true E2EE. That said, Telegram is still not in the business of selling metadata actively like Whatsapp/Facebook/Meta are. As far as plain features go, Telegram is streets ahead of Whatsapp. But if I needed real “secret chat” I’d probably use Threema, SimpleX, Nostr, Jami, etc where I’m not tied to my mobile phone number or e-mail address.


  • Yes and no. It is good and I did one restore of some files that worked fine, but in my case it was noticeably affecting my boot up times, and I reverted to ext4 (boot ups were fast again to less than one minute). For some reason, BTRFS was resulting in quick login, but about 18 mins before my actual desktop was responsive after login. I spend many days trying to troubleshoot that. Maybe you won’t have this problem. I had my SSD system drive on ext4 with Timeshift backups, and my /home partition on BTRFS.

    So I’m back on my ext4 doing a daily automated backup to a second drive with rsync (LuckyBackup app). I think there are further kernel improvements coming to BTRFS later in this year. But I’ll probably only retry it again end of 2023 or in2024. So if you decide to move, just benchmark your boot times, so you can judge if it affects them badly or not.

    That said, BTRFS has some great features, lost no data for me, and I think has a great future.






  • No it’s not more secure going via Gmail. But what I did was to get the paid Proton Mail and I used my own domain name. So yes plenty pain and time now to slowly update my email address everywhere away from Gmail to my own domain name with Proton Mail.

    But hopefully it’s the last time I have to update the email address everywhere, because even if I leave Proton Mail, my mail address is not tied to them, but to my own domain name so I can point that to any other mail provider.

    So every mail address I’m changing now, is one away from Gmail. But if course 99.9% of businesses don’t Encrypt mail, so I’m only really cutting Google out of the loop (assuming the other party is not using Gmail of course).