Hacker News Reader

Comment by citizenpaul | Hacker News Reader

I've been wrestling with this and I don't think it matters. Fascism is here. There is no escape.

Eventually anything that connects to a network will be crippled to the point of uselessness unless you submit to constant monitoring. If you try to avoid it you will be guilty until proven innocent by default.

By eventually I mean in 2-3 years.

View on HN

I’m basically with you. Even if i switch to Linux I have to trust the company behind the distro to act in good faith, I have to trust Cryptomator to encrypt my files without backdoors, I have to trust Mozilla to securely save my passwords and so on. On the other hand I don’t want Apple to scan my own files on my own machines. Like… wtf…

> I have to trust Mozilla to securely save my passwords and so on

You don't.

Pass, CLI tool from Wireguard's Donenfeld, Bitwarden gets good reviews, etc.

Why would you save passwords in a browser when there are FOSS utilities like keepass?

Technically, you don't. The beauty of FOSS software is that you don't need to trust the author. I know that auditing the source code of something as large as a Linux Distro may be prohibitively difficult for one person to do alone. Groups of people do audit them though, and they have found nefarious things in the past, in the case of Google.

It will likely take a lot longer than that. Most in the public ( or even in Tech ) wont care much about this scanning. And Apple's performance will be so good they will write this off as a small beep in their history. It will then take another few years of "good intention" before anything really happen. So I say this is going to take a good 5 to 10 years.

I’m less pessimistic. I see a similar trend but think it will take longer and there will likely be push back, at least in the west. It will become a political issue and then will depend on how the argument plays out with the public. Start early to help set the agenda for pro privacy.

Why? Today in only one day we get "law enforcement" installing pre-crime spyware on your apple device. In addition to congress enacting more crypto currency laws.

What's the best option for running a totally offline computer? There's like a thousand Linux distros floating around and not one focused on allowing for maintaining and installing software on a 100% offline computer.

Don’t plug it in or connect to wifi. That mitigates most threats, and probably some usefulness. But depends on your use case.

I just mean, let's say I want to install some package, and there's like 200 dependancies and still more packages to update. How do I get that one package I really want installed?

You go get those 200 dependencies. It's not easy but not that hard either, just time consuming.

Reminds me of trying to get software onto air gapped systems at my past job. I'd have to request each package along with all dependencies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com