European. Liberal. Insufferable green. I never downvote opinions: jeering is poor form. I ignore questions by downvoters. Comments with insulting language, or snark, or gotchas, or other effort-free content, will also be ignored.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • The valid answer is that the Chinese police state has no authority over individuals in the West and is unlikely to share information with Western law enforcement given the geopolitical situation. In narrow terms, that makes for an inadvertent privacy win for individuals in the West.

    But the problem you describe is certainly real (whatever other seem to think here) for countries in China’s sphere of influence, in Asia, Africa, Latin America. For them, China is already selling off-the-peg solutions for mass surveillance. If your country’s homegrown dictator gets his hands on this stuff, it’s going to be harder than ever to get rid of him.

    For us the problem is rather that China is pioneering and normalizing practices that will certainly be adopted and copied one day by our own police forces with our own technology.




  • Most laptops will be more or less fully compatible

    If by “most” you mean only the ones over 500 bucks. Chromebooks have almost completely taken over the bottom end of the market (which is more than adequate if you’re not gaming) and Chromebooks are not compatible with Linux unless you enjoy getting your hands very dirty.




  • The fact that you’re even saying such things as “time constraints” or “to learn new software” suggests an attitude to computing shared by about 0.01% of the population. It cannot be re-stressed enough to the (sadly shrinking) bubble that frequents this community: the vast majority of people in the world have never touched a laptop let alone a desktop computer. Literally everything now happens on mobile, where FOSS is vanishingly insignificant, and soon AI is going to add a whole new layer of dystopia. But that is slightly offtopic.

    It’s a good question IMO. Choosing software freedom - to the small extent that you still can - should not just be about the freedom to tinker, it should also just be easy.

    The answer is Ubuntu or Mint or Fedora.






  • Been using Mailbox for years without any issue. German reliability. But the fact that one of Proton’s directors revealed that he agrees with 75 million Americans does not mean that a whole company, based in Switzerland and with many other stakeholders, has “gone rogue”. I’m not getting into a new fight about this here but I really think American progressives need to drop this religious approach to dissent and heterodoxy and just relax a little. It will be okay.



  • Misinformation. OP is advocating that you shoot yourself in the foot.

    The CEO said something silly on Twitter which revealed either that (a) he shares an exceedingly banal opinion with literally half of America or (b) he’s not above a bit of preemptive sycophancy to advance his (positive) anti-trust agenda.

    There’s nothing particularly scandalous in the offending tweet:

    • Implying that the Democrats are now “the party of big business” is arguably true (and very boring)
    • Implying that the Republicans now “stand for the little guys” is dumb but also arguably true, unfortunately - the working classes swung to Trump in the recent election while the Democrats are fast becoming a party of high-earning elites (which is why they lost)
    • Saying that the antitrust actions began under Trump I is, well, true

    Proton is not owned Zuck-like by its CEO. It’s controlled by a foundation with other stakeholders on the board, including the inventor of the Web himself. In its niche it is still by far the best option. Ditching it for a nebulous non-existent alternative because the CEO expressed a dumb and extremely commonplace opinion is just silly and self-defeating.

    PS: to be clear, OP is peddling misinformation because it’s not true that “Proton took the stance” of anything. It’s the personal opinion of the CEO that’s at issue. It’s a major distinction. I find it disappointing that people interested in privacy would have such little respect for a private individual’s right to have their own thoughts.

    PPS: to be extra clear, my comments are about the post above, not stuff that people are reading elsewhere. But the substance stands. See discussion for detail.