Always makes me laugh when I see employees of Google, Amazon etc. claiming to be “anti-fascist” and “standing in solidarity with the common man” etc etc…
Having had the pleasure of sharing the elevator with said individuals in shared office buildings the "common man" part almost made me lose my coffee.
I really wish it wasn’t so, but when your company serves the advertiser you aren’t serving humanity. The balance is off and which each passing year it isn’t getting better.
Big Tech monopolies need to be resisted
I can't fault them too badly for that. I consider myself personally against the horrors that go into gathering the constituent materials for, and the assembly of, computers. This position co-exists with the fact that I, like most others here, derive the majority of my livelihood from Doing Things With Computers, which wouldn't be possible without the computers themselves, which wouldn't be possible without the horrors.
Worse still, I live a provably better life than those of my peers whose youth did not, for whatever reason, revolve around Doing Things With Computers, let alone the far-flung people whose labour provides me with the computers on which I do those profitable things.
It's difficult to morally reason about.
In my personal view the internet became one big country with overlapping laws and government policies and collusion by corporations. Ever so often I use google to see what search results they can muster but otherwise I don't use cloud storage and do not find myself depending on google. For email I try to teach my friends how to use Thunderbird so they can click a button and their email is mostly GPG encrypted.
If I wanted to share files with someone that will not fit in that GPG encrypted email then I plonk them down on a mini-PC or a VM and share them over HTTPS with cache-control headers to reduce risk of file caches or SFTP with authentication. This is just my own preference and I am a stodgy cranky old bastard but if someone decides that basic auth is too much friction then it was not important for them to receive the files. I implement my own data retention and destruction policies. How my doctor or lawyer decides to store the files is up to them. I can only hope they are wise enough to not store things on their fondle-slab. An intelligent doctor should be able to handle basic authentication and/or be able to follow simple instructions for creating and sharing a GPG public key with me.
Or I could just snail-mail them an encrypted USB drive, however a GPG encrypted email should suffice for sending a few little images to a doctor. Some will bring up rubber hoses and wrenches but there are mitigations for such things. Some might even want legislation to to bandage these dark patterns but experience has taught me to not trust that corporations would be held to account at the same level and standards as citizens.
Not having an internet connection is NOT an option. There is a legal process to get a special permit to avoid having to use these state mandated electronic systems but it is almost only theoretically in that you will need to have a doctor's note saying that you are unable to use such systems. E.g., by suffering by severe dementia or similar.
They serve the fiction of confirmed mail delivery. If you don't pick it up from this mailbox, it is considered delivered anyway and your problem, if you miss something here.
Governments have accessibility obligations and so their key services should absolutely be usable with something like Chromium/Linux. And it definitely shouldn't be more onerous than using a smartphone.
It is the portal for Slovak republic. You are supposed to have your national ID card, which is a smart card. To use it, you need a smartcard reader and an application, which basically listens on localhost and is kind of a intermediate between your browser, the pages than need authentication and the department of state, which handles IAM.
That application runs on Windows, Mac and Debian (9,10)/Ubuntu (18.04,20.04)/Mint (19.20) (it is not open source). Other distributions are not supported, forget ChromeOS.
It is quite onerous. You have to enter your PIN for smartcard about four times, before you see the content of the inbox.
Having helped my 92 years old grandmother sorting out her tax returns on the government’s website, I can confirm that this is exactly what it means. And it’s the only practical way of communicating with the administration. Most local branches have been closed to the public, and the phone lines are congested all day (and cut you off after one hour waiting, which is always fun).
Most of the jobs I've worked for have come via old school phone calls.
I learned it like this, its since recently that applying by email more commonly an option.
People on Hacker News like to propose "just use low-tech!" or "just self host!" often and I don't get how that's a solution. I _could_ spend hours of my day printing out and mailing my resume to companies (if they allowed me to) and waiting days-weeks for my response _after_ they made their decision (during which time I still have to pay bills and have no job) or I could apply with one button on Linkedin and get my response back instantly. It just saves so much time.
Others will say that that's a small price to pay to retain my freedom, which might be true. But what's not true is the other qualities of life that internet and big data affords me. If I don't have instagram or snapchat I literally lose all spontaneous contact with my friends and family. Sure, I _could_ mail them a letter, but with the delay in communication a lot of the intimacy is lost, and we would truthfully just talk a lot less. This, along with a lot of other problems (how do I contact my professor for help after class? go to their house?). Combined with the fact that I would have to be _extremely_ thorough and make sure that my data is scrubbed from all of Facebook/Google/Twitter/Whatever and it's subcompanies, it's just not a real solution. It's actually really annoying that so many are content with infeasible individual solutions instead of advocating for things like pushing against the EARN IT act or the like. I shouldn't have to have a computer science or cyber security degree to be private online - it should be done for me by the government. I don't know what the fuck is in that vaccine (or any medicine I take for that matter) but I can trust that it does me good because of regulations.
So you are forced to use an iPhone or Pixel phone, forced to search with Google, forced to use AWS.
Even though open alternatives exist for all these who would love your support.
I would better let Google have all my photos and track my location than my father ...