If you are an admin and or instance operator are you protecting yourself legally? A great deal of people have simply spun up instances and treat them like Discord servers and subreddits, but Discord and Reddit are the ones that assume legal liability. Here are some good reads to assist by lawyers and experts that are on the fedi...
I don’t think DMCA stuff will be very relevant for most Fediverse servers (though being careful about federating with piracy focused communities may be wise), but this one stands out:
Service providers are required to report any CSAM on their servers to the CyberTipline operated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a private, nonprofit organization established by the U.S. Congress, and can be criminally prosecuted for knowingly facilitating its distribution. NCMEC shares those reports with law enforcement. However, you are not required to affirmatively monitor your instance for CSAM.
While I don’t think the NCMEC would appreciate being flooded with thousands of reports from federating servers all reporting the same content uploaded from one specific server once the next CSAM troll appears, this does pose more significant risks. The people who left their Fediverse servers running after kind of dropping out of the Fediverse (the many servers that were used to generate the spam waves we recently saw, for example) can easily accumulate a significant portion of illegal material to the point law enforcement actually starts caring.
(Picture alt text: a screenshot of my phone’s call log, with numbers redacted (just in case). The phone numbers (except for one) are all spam calls)...
As a talk by Deviant Ollam indicated: watch out with those settings. If someone you know is incarcerated and needs help, they may just get filtered out without you ever knowing.
Be mindful of the spam filtering settings you have in case something bad happens!
(I don’t see why prison calls need to be filtered out by spam filters, but unfortunately this has happened in the past and will probably happen again)
So does iMessage, to be fair. The problem is that Apple decided not build clients for alternative platforms, but the app itself is quite competent.
Hopefully Apple can convince the telco people to implement E2EE in RCS (though good luck getting that through with wiretap laws all around the world, lol) so there’s some kind of cross-platform standard here. Apple is going to implement RCS to save Americans from blurry videos at the very least, but it won’t add Google’s proprietary encryption standard.
RCS is controlled by GSMA, not Google. I’m sure they’ll welcome Google’s extensions, but Google doesn’t get to decide.
Google can try to do the same thing they did to XMPP, but then they get the same “Androids don’t receive our pictures” problem that’s driving teenagers to buy iOS in the USA in the first place.
It definitely is, but “better” does not mean “good” unfortunately.
Hopefully Nvidia will push harder for decent drivers now that corporate Linux servers are in route to disabling X11, but as you can still get X11 back with just a simple package, I expect this process to take years.
Aluminium cans have a thin plastic liner inside them that’s almost impossible to recycle. I’m not sure if you’re fixing much by switching to cans, here…
Glass is better, but any carbonated drink turns into a bomb if you put more than half a liter or so in a closed glass container.
I can’t root my phone because I don’t have an image for it (Moto G73) although I’d like to, but for some reason my banking app thinks it’s rooted and refuses to work. This happened just after I updated it, it wasn’t happening before.
An app with root access can easily bypass the statistics gathered by these apps, unless those apps are run as root.
I don’t know Hypathia, I’d suggest grabbing something from the Play Store (through Aurora, if you must).
If you degoogled your phone through a different ROM, the app is probably triggering on the fact you’re running with an unlocked bootloader rather than just root access.
It used to be very convenient that when searching for something that had a geographic location, Google searches used to show a small map which linked to Google maps when pressed....
That makes a lot of sense. It sucks that they removed the feature all together rather than letting the user choose to embed Apple/Bing/Openstreetmaps in the results, but at least they’re not tricking people into staying inside their walled garden anymore.
WebDAV has been around a lot longer and does many of the same things as object storage. It also has support for random access read/writes where object storage requires you to download, edit, and re-upload the whole file. Seems like a no-brainer if you wanted to offer cloud storage to customers....
They’re forced by the DMA to open their network to alternative chat clients, so that you could, for example, use Signal to chat with people who use WhatsApp. Of course Signal would need to implement the protocol, but Facebook isn’t allowed to stop them from joining up, the way Apple did when Beeper joined iMessage.
This doesn’t need to include any security vulnerabilities. If anything, an open implementation of the WhatsApp protocol will work to prove that WhatsApp’s protocol is as secure as Facebook claims.
There’s an open standard (MLS) for secure inter-app messaging formats. Google uses this for RCS group chats, for example. The IETF is still working on MIMI, an addition to also standardise the protocol for actual cross-app communication, but that’s still being designed right now.
The protocols they intend to support have not been published yet, as far as I understand it. However, at least one person on the design team for MLS has an @fb.com email address, so unless Facebook Messenger is planning on implementing cross app communications as well, I’ll assume they work on WhatsApp.
I don’t see why the EU would require an insecure protocol per se. They have some idiotic plans (that are still stuck in parliament) but they also stay clear of enforcing specific protocols for these kinds of things, until everyone but one company is using the same protocol (i.e. Apple and USB C).
All of that said, in the recent Wired interview one of the WhatsApp engineering leads suggested opening and documenting the client-server API for WhatsApp rather than implementing a different protocol.
I would be very susprised if WhatsApp wouldn’t go for MLS, but I see no indication of Meta adding any form of unencrypted protocol to their service.
I don’t think so. They use the same protocol anyway, so now you can use Signal without being that one guy that has everyone install an app to chat with them. People can also move to other chat apps (or, if Google and Apple play ball, their built in chat app) to talk to everyone around them.
Excluding RCS (I don’t actually use that), I have apps for five different communication platforms on my phone because other people won’t switch away from the app’s they’re using. If it were up to me, everyone would be either on Signal or Matrix, but I can’t possibly convince that many people to switch, especially not the group chats.
XMPP/Matrix bridging only gets you so far, because none of the bridges I’ve seen support things like video calling, so I still end up with apps on my phone. At least I can send the majority of my messages from one single client now. My experience would be a lot better if I didn’t need to deal with these bridges, though, because they require constant maintenance and don’t support encryption well.
Licensing is literally the only way the people who make HDMI can make money. They have a monetary incentive to sell as many licenses as possible. That’s why they make new versions for minor features, because pasting the sticker with the new number on the box will pay their paychecks.
What I don’t get, though, is why the open source approach would be a problem. I don’t think the HDMI people have that many business secrets in software form, it’s all patents and licensing.
I have a Lenovo Yoga running Windows 10 on a 1TB SSD and at some point will probably have to upgrade it to Windows 11. I use it for school and have to keep Windows on it for now because of what I’m currently doing. I want to start getting into Linux in hopes of making the switch sometime down the line. Is partitioning the disk...
Windows likes to hijack the bootloader making it difficult to boot into Linux. I would make sure that Windows is installed first and have a live linux disk/jumpdrive available in case Windows decides to hijack the boot loader at a later date.
This isn’t very common these days. The only bootloader it hijacks on a modern system is the fallback UEFI bootloader for when the motherboard configuration is broken or reset. Some distros also have Grub hijack this bootloader for broken motherboards, but nobody is right or wrong in that case…
This was a huge pain in the MBR days, but these days it’s really not that bad. There are some broken motherboards out there, but I have to wonder how pleasant your experience will be running any kind of non-Windows OS on a motherboard thst doesn’t even function properly…
Dual booting is pretty easy these days. However, I’ve seen an NTFS partition die relatively recently, so my suggestion would be to shrink the Windows partition to make space from inside Windows.
Alternatively, use a VM first. It’s great that you’re interested in Linux, but your interest will probably fade away pretty quickly when you accidentally wipe out all of your homework during a Linux install.
If you have the space, this will also let you experiment with dual booting. For instance, you can install Windows in a VM and then try out the installation process to see how dual booting will work, without risking all of your files.
As for what distro: good beginner options are Linux Mint (very Windows like), Ubuntu (different but the most popular option overal), Fedora (the popular distro that isn’t Ubuntu), or maybe Debian (like Ubuntu but if you’re really into software freedom, to the point of some hardware not working). I’d steer clear of Arch and Arch-likes that the enthusiasts here like to talk about, because they and their documentation expect a certain level of understanding of Linux that you may struggle with.
This is another reason to try messing with a VM first: you can experiment with distros.
If you want to experiment with distros on your own hardware, there’s also this tool that can add a whole bunch of Linux images onto a flash drive from Windows: pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/You can boot most Linux installers into a try out/test environment where you can try a distro, verify that your hardware works with your distro, and all that. With the tool I linked, you can download any distro that looks interesting, add all of them to a flash drive, and get an interactive boot menu where you can pick the distro you’d like to start.
For technical reasons (MBR vs GPT) I wouldn’t recommend using the tool above to actually install the distro from, but it’s a great little tool for creating (data) recovery flash drives and experimenting with distros.
When you (and everyone else here) say shrink the partition from inside windows, do you mean from within the disk management software?
Yes, indeed! The Linux installer will also offer to do this resizing, but the file system drivers in Linux are mostly painfully reverse engineered stuff, whereas Microsoft can actually write stable code. So it’s better to go to disk management and do the resizing there, so you don’t accidentally corrupt times
Nvidia stuff
Nvidia stuff can work fine, but you’ll have to read up on it after installing Linux. For almost all hardware, you install a distro and all drivers are installed. On Windows, drivers are installed during first boot. On Linux, proprietary drivers, like Nvidia’s, need to be installed manually. How this is done, depends on the distro.
Pop_OS will install these drivers quite easily during install time. Ubuntu has a button in their software settings (“additional hardware”) where you can click one single box and the driver should work after a reboot. On other distros, you’ll need to check the distro specific instructions on how to install drivers.
I would not recommend following Nvidia’s guides, which will have a very Windows style howto involving downloading an installer, something thst very rarely happens on Linux. I would also avoid guides/Ask Ubuntu answers that have you insert random lines into config files. Depending on the distro, some terminal work may be required, but many “fixes” seem to involve adding configuration files and settings that haven’t been relevant for years because everyone copy/pastes old advice, and that can cause issues down the line. Generally, I think it’s probably best to try to stick close do official distro manuals as possible.
One other thing: you may have encountered angry discussions about X11 and Wayland here. The details probably aren’t very important for you, but your best bet is probably to use X11. That’s not the default for many distros, but luckily switching back is easy (just click a drop down on the login screen and select X11). Wayland does work on your hardware, but Nvidia’s mediocre software isn’t very good at supporting modern protocols such as Wayland, so crashes and freezes are more common than you would expect/hope.
These days even Nvidia laptops work fine on many distros, something that was almost impossible ten years ago. There are some challenges (mostly involving power management and Wayland) but games work fine as far as Linux gaming is involved.
Not “just”, but there are legal means to become an independent person before you turn 18 in many countries. This is usually done for people who are old and adult enough to be able to take care of their own business, but are a few months short of being adult officially. This sometimes happens to 16 or 17 year olds who become orphans and are otherwise destined for the (locally terrible) foster system, for example.
For most teenagers, this would be an absolutely terrible decision, of course. It also doesn’t help that most teenagers who yell “I’m gonna run away” have absolutely no idea how the world works (and, often, how good they really have it).
Far from every country offers this, and the extent in which teenagers can be declared self sufficient differs per country, but in pressing situations, there may be a way out.
Not really, the organisation behind Manjaro introduces a bug every two years or so (I think their software manager caused excessive requests to the Arch repos at one point?) and sometimes their website’s certificate renewal breaks for a few days, but that’s about it.
The biggest breakage problems occur when the AUR gets ahead of the Manjaro packages and compiles and upgrades fail, but they don’t leave you with an unbootable system unless you ignore a lot of warnings and try to force your way through a doomed upgrade.
It’s no worse than Arch, except installing Arch is so difficult that the people who don’t know why they broke their installs will veer off to another distro instead. Manjaro users also have a tendency to go to the Arch forums for support which annoys the Arch people for good reason, but I doubt they’d be any less annoyed if the people who couldn’t even be bothered to check if they’re on the right forum did install Arch.
Manjaro does tend to distribute code that’s nowhere near stable yet as part of their “standard” releases, which causes annoyances for others (notably the Asahi folks, because the ARM Apple CPUs were nowhere close to prime time yet when Manjaro announced Apple support based on Asahi) but the same can be said for Arch, or any Arch split-off like Endeavour, because bleeding edge support will always be painful for new software packages.
I’ve been running it for years, on a laptop with an Nvidia card no less. Manjaro seems to be more unstable than Ubuntu in terms of regular updates. Even with the AUR, you can just wait for the packages to get updated for the breakages to go away. Every major breakage I’ve encountered was either an upstream issue (yay, rolling releases!) or an AUR package not indicating its dependencies properly (producing errors like “libgarglesplurt.19.0.so not found” on startup). Arch installs have broken for me in the same way, usually at the same time.
If you’re complaining that building shit from source breaks, maybe put the blame on the packages that apparently refuse to build if you’re missing a minor update, or the kernel modules that claim support for the latest kernel but just don’t compile.
Arch isn’t stable. Manjaro is a tiny bit more stable. If you want stable, pick Fedora or SUSE or Ubuntu.
Phones are developed to store as much in RAM as possible. Storage is slow, and users are expected to switch between apps constantly. It’s not uncommon for hundreds of apps to be loaded, including their state, at the same time. Apps that don’t fit into memory are saved to storage, but the most common apps and services are kept around.
Common files are also cached in memory for performance reasons. If you don’t have any RAM available, browsing files or photos would be terribly slow.
The GPU shares RAM on many devices, and that’ll take a significant chunk out of your system memory. Rendering 60 frames per second on a 1440p screen isn’t cheap, especially if you have ten different apps ready to render full screen at all times.
My phone has about 4½GB assigned to applications, the rest is cache. I’d say phones with less than 6GB of RAM would work, but not very smoothly.
The more RAM, the easier switching between apps becomes. Websites and apps have become huge, not only because of inefficiencies but also because of how huge the graphics they need to render have become, and the expectation that everything works with a smooth 60-90-120Hz all the time. Do you need 12GB? Hard for me to tell. I can tell that my phone’s 6GB struggles when Firefox is open while Youtube is playing and I need to switch to my password manager. It’ll hold out, but only just, one more app and Firefox gets unloaded. Then again, my password manager seems to be suffering from some kind of memory leak, because there’s no reason it would need this much RAM.
I don’t know what Macbook you have, but if someone is buying a laptop these days, I wouldn’t recommend getting anything with less than 16GB of RAM or an upgrade slot. Web browsers have become operating systems of their own and buying 8GB laptops now will make your device last less than five years, at least comfortably. I would personally advocate for 32GB or more if you’re planning on using your laptop for ten years, based on current trends.
Even still, many people can and do use phones the wag they did desktops ten years ago. It’s not surprise to me that phones have grown to have desktop class RAM specs. Many people don’t know about it, but you van hook up a Samsung phone to a monitor and have a fully featured desktop right there waiting for you in DeX, you just need a Bluetooth keyboard+mouse to control it. I bet my parents could use a phone as a desktop without ever running into any trouble, partially because of how much RAM those phones sport.
If all you need is basic browsing and social media, you can go with 6GB of RAM, or even less. As time goes on, your phone will start to struggle with the ever growing websites and apps, but it’ll keep doing what it always did, you just see a few more loading screens when switching between apps. Any €350 phone will do fine for most people these days, I don’t get why people spend three or four times that on a phone if all they do on it is browse social media.
Legal Liabilities
If you are an admin and or instance operator are you protecting yourself legally? A great deal of people have simply spun up instances and treat them like Discord servers and subreddits, but Discord and Reddit are the ones that assume legal liability. Here are some good reads to assist by lawyers and experts that are on the fedi...
I cannot stand these spam calls any more. (lemm.ee)
(Picture alt text: a screenshot of my phone’s call log, with numbers redacted (just in case). The phone numbers (except for one) are all spam calls)...
To comply with DMA, WhatsApp and Messenger will become interoperable via Signal protocol (techcrunch.com)
Fedora 41 will drop GNOME's X11 session (pagure.io)
Tethered plastic caps (lemmy.sdf.org)
I know they’re supposed to be good for the environment. But… Holy smokes they drive me up the wall. They really do!...
Great, the worst of both worlds. (share.jackgreenearth.org)
I can’t root my phone because I don’t have an image for it (Moto G73) although I’d like to, but for some reason my banking app thinks it’s rooted and refuses to work. This happened just after I updated it, it wasn’t happening before.
Why do Google searches not give maps links anymore? (www.google.com)
It used to be very convenient that when searching for something that had a geographic location, Google searches used to show a small map which linked to Google maps when pressed....
Nightmare on Lemmy Street (A Fediverse GDPR Horror Story) - Michael Altfield's Tech Blog (tech.michaelaltfield.net)
Why did S3/object storage succeed while WebDAV apparently failed?
WebDAV has been around a lot longer and does many of the same things as object storage. It also has support for random access read/writes where object storage requires you to download, edit, and re-upload the whole file. Seems like a no-brainer if you wanted to offer cloud storage to customers....
WhatsApp beta for Android 2.24.5.18: WhatsApp is working on a chat interoperability feature to comply with new EU regulations (wabetainfo.com)
HDMI Forum Rejects Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Driver Support Sought By AMD - Phoronix (www.phoronix.com)
For three years there has been a bug report around 4K@120Hz being unavailable via HDMI 2.1 on the AMD Linux driver....
Can Linux be dual booted on a computer with Windows?
I have a Lenovo Yoga running Windows 10 on a 1TB SSD and at some point will probably have to upgrade it to Windows 11. I use it for school and have to keep Windows on it for now because of what I’m currently doing. I want to start getting into Linux in hopes of making the switch sometime down the line. Is partitioning the disk...
Unexpected Communism (lemmy.world)
Or maybe introduce them to Little Bobby Tables (lemmy.world)
(skeletor is leading by example by adding that unnecessary apostrophe…)
Orange Pi Neo is new handheld powered by AMD and comes preinstalled with Manjaro (neo.manjaro.org)
https://neo.manjaro.org/img/OJ2.png...
Ram in phones?
I don’t get why Android phones have so much ram....
Remember NFC dimples? (dimple.io)
I don’t and I wish I had known about them when they were still a thing....