cmatthias

I think there are some very rational reasons for hating or at least strongly disapproving of the new owner.

For example, if the new owner of the company I worked for demanded on a Saturday that a new feature needs to be ready for testing by Monday, I'd be pretty upset.

Or, if I was on a team working on the problem of trust and ethics, and the new owner personally and un-ironically posted a completely false and inflammatory "news article" about a current event, and then several days later laid off my entire team, I wouldn't consider it irrational to be quite upset.

The author of the guide linked to by OP has a series of docs for resetting the 6610 to factory settings and licensing all the ports. My understanding is that especially for the old switches like the 6610, it’s not possible to buy licenses anymore so you can just unlock them.

For copper 10gbe connections, you have two main choices: you can use DAC cables which end up being cheap but are hard or impossible to fish through walls or terminate at a patch panel, or you can use a 10G-BASET transceiver which gives you standard RJ45 jack but costs about $50 for each end of the connection plus the cost of a cat6 or better cable.

Edit: obviously if you already have a device with a copper 10gbit port, then you only need one transceiver (for the switch port), and using a DAC is a no-go since DACs require SFP ports at both ends of the connection.

I read a bunch of the author’s guides and purchased an ICX6610 as my main switch for home and an ICX7150-C12P for my attic, with a 10gbe fiber link between the two. It’s total overkill but both are really nice pieces of equipment. I use the PoE features for my UniFi wifi setup, and plan to hook up a home server I run to one of the 40gbit ports.

The ICX6610 is pretty loud so it needs to be away from living areas, but the 7150 is fanless and silent.

This is incorrect; see my response elsewhere in the thread for details. Express written consent is always required to send marketing messages or make marketing calls to personal (residential land-line or mobile) phone numbers.

This definitely makes the situation quite a bit more sticky, however hope is not completely lost IMHO. For example, there have been several cases recently dealing with binding arbitration clauses and the TCPA, and in several of them, the binding arbitration clause was found to be unenforceable [1].

If it were me, I'd still send the demand letter and see how it plays out.

[1] https://www.dnc.com/news/compelled-arbitration-tcpa-defense-...

Yep. Since I'm not a lawyer it probably wasn't necessary to include the "not legal advice" bit, but I'm just trying to be clear.

The TCPA requires express written consent to send marketing messages or phone calls to any personal phone number. Legal precedent dictates that online, this usually takes the form of a specific checkbox on the form where you're giving your phone number saying that you agree that the company can use the phone number for marketing purposes. I doubt Meta collects this type of express written consent for your 2FA phone number, but I guess it's possible.

There indeed used to be an exemption to the law involving an existing business relationship, but 1) this was only for residential land lines and never applied to cell phones, and 2) it was revoked on October 16, 2013. [1]

[1] https://tcpablog.com/new-tcpa-regulations-take-effect-on-oct...

If you are in the USA, then what you received are unsolicited marketing phone calls under the TCPA, a law which allows you to personally collect up to $1500 per violation of the law or associated regulations, per phone call that you received. If your personal phone is on the federal "Do Not Call" registry, it's possible that there are at least two violations of the law per phone call you received.

I would suggest sending a demand letter to Meta's legal department offering to settle for somewhat less than $1500 per violation. Here's an example: https://www.junkfax.org/w/images/0/0b/SampleDemandLetter.pdf

If they ignore you, be prepared to file a local case in small claims court (which you can do yourself without an attorney). The court can force them to pay you if you present evidence of the calls and the law(s) or regulations that were broken.

Disclaimer: I am not a laywer and this is not legal advice, but I have collected money from TCPA legal settlements in the past, each without needing to go to court.

I said it was more relevant than nefarious hackers or government agencies, not relevant in some subjective general sense. So whether or not they care is irrelevant to my point.

Your scenario is oddly specific -- I didn't say anything about a Google search, or about ensuring that the user doesn't log in. In fact, going to www.google.com in an incognito window pops up a little animated box on the right hand side encouraging me to sign in, so I'd expect there's a good chance that my guest user _would_ sign in if they visit a Google-owned site.

> If you believe that having the guest user run their search on a typical Linux, Windows, or macOS machine would be better for their privacy, I would be interested to hear how.

The main reason is that Google controls the entire environment on a ChromeOS device (kernel, userland, browser), and ChromeOS is closed source so it's not possible for me to easily know what is going on. In addition, Google makes money by collecting data about users, so there is an incentive to collect as much information as they can get away with (and they've shown repeatedly in the past that they do just that). Maybe there's a daemon running in the background shipping URL history off to some Google endpoint in the name of "telemetry", or maybe not. Or maybe it's something more innocuous-sounding like hashed or anonymized data (which could be reconstructed given Google's immense amount of data). But I don't know, and I don't think it's reasonable for anyone to implicitly trust ChromeOS at all given the business model of the company that makes it.

On most Linux distributions, nearly everything is open source and I'm free to audit what's going on. On macOS devices, the software is closed source, but the company's business model does not involve building a dossier on each and every person on the planet, so I trust them more (not fully, but more). In the past I would have said the same about Windows, but lately I'm not so sure and I tend to put them in the same bucket as Google.

edit: Also see my reply to you in a different sub-thread where I explain this in terms of threat models. If you were building a secure OS to protect high-risk individuals like journalists reporting on intelligence leaks, you would be crazy to recommend that the journalists to use an OS built for them by the NSA, MI5, or FSB. Would you feel any better about the recommendation if the government agency said "Don't worry, as long as you use guest mode and don't sign in, we won't collect any data about you"?

What if the attacker is the one who built and shipped the OS to begin with? Everything you say is true, but it doesn't matter as long as user data (history, location, etc) is being shipped off to Google.

Or, put another way: your threat model is a nefarious hacker or three-letter-agency who might secretly modify your hardware/software to get your data. Mine is surveillance capitalism. ChromeOS is secure under your threat model, but is _built by the attacker_ under mine.

Both of these threat models are important to consider, but one is much more relevant to a larger portion of the population than the other.

Then you are either uninformed or willfully ignorant of 1) how operating systems and browsers work and 2) your employer's past actions relating to collecting and storing user data.

Would you be at all concerned about the security and privacy of your guest user’s data, given your employer’s propensity for slurping up and storing whatever user data they can get their hands on? What if your guest user was searching for terms related to abortion in a US state where that procedure is (or will shortly be) illegal? What if they’re doing that and you happen to be physically near a provider of abortions?[1]

Security does not only mean security of your own data stored on the device. A device made by Google will never be secure.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/18/google-data-states-...

It wouldn’t. It could support USB 3 or some lower standard. But the key is that under a redesigned versioning scheme, every new standard is fully backward compatible with the old, with no optional bits tacked on. This makes it easy to understand for an end user (“okay, my headphones have USB3, and my computer and cables are USB4, so I know it will work fine.”)

Again, this sounds like a nightmare and more confusing than the current naming scheme.

I agree that in theory the USB working group should just standardize the ports, but if they’re doing that right, there’s no need for 500 different versions at all. Just mandate that for your device/port/cable to be called USB4, it must support all alternate modes, all PD voltages, etc.

There are still holes in this scheme which would require more fields and/or just leaving data out. Ports/cables can support multiple (but not necessarily all!) voltages for PD. This scheme as written doesn’t capture Thunderbolt compatibility at all, or alternate modes for DisplayPort.

My point is, while it’s certainly possible to come up with an unwieldy naming scheme that covers everything, given the current state of what USB supports, it’s not possible to have a scheme that’s simple and unambiguous. Major changes would be required to the protocol/certification requirements to make that happen.

OK let’s say we do that. For the sake of argument, let’s define USB14 as what we call “Thunderbolt 4” today (basically USB4 plus a few extra things that are optional under the USB4 spec), with 100W of PD. And let’s define USB63 as plain old USB 3.1, at 10gbps with no alternate modes, with 30W of PD.

I buy my mom (who is not technically savvy) a computer with 2 USB14 ports and 2 USB63 ports. She wants to buy a cable that will charge her USB34 (yet another version of USB corresponding to USB-C at 2.0 speeds with no PD) headphones. How does she know what cable to buy, and what port to plug it into?

If you think about this some more, you might agree with me that it’s likely worse than the current naming scheme.

The poster didn't suggest suffixes like this. I took their point to be the opposite: let's have short, easy-to-read, meaningful names for each possible combination of port.

But regardless, this is what I was getting at when I said "I don’t think there’s a way to convey all the info that should be conveyed in a short, easy to remember way." The spec is far too overloaded with functionality to have any kind of naming system that is both sane and unambiguous.

For example, USB40DHMTV.60W (rolls right off the tongue!) doesn't specify what PD voltages are supported, or whether the "T" component is Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4.

Yeah, if we could totally re-do everything, something like this would be ideal. But the problem is, under the current spec it’s possible, and quite common (at least on the PC side of things) to have a 20gbps USB-C port that doesn’t support displays at all.

I’m not giving Apple a pass here either; the product info pages for all of the M1 (non-Pro) Macs all make reference to “Thunderbolt / USB 4” ports, which is imprecise at best, and intentionally deceptive at worst.

This isn’t specific enough for some situations. Let’s say you have a “USB-C 40G 45W” port. For power, your port could supply either 15V 3A, or 20V 2.25A, or both. If I have a device that wants 45W but only supports 20V, and your port only supports 15V via PD, it’s going to fall back to 5V and you’ll get a max of 15W out of the port.

Similarly, on the data side, can your “USB-C 40G 45W” port be used to directly connect to a display via a USB-C to DisplayPort cable? Will it support Thunderbolt 4, e.g., can it connect to a TB4 dock and drive two 4K 60hz displays from a single cable?

USB is a mess. Your suggestion is admirable, but given what the spec already supports, I don’t think there’s a way to convey all the info that should be conveyed in a short, easy to remember way.

> DYI

Do Yourself It?

I just went through trying to install Linux on my 2015 15” retina MacBook Pro (model 11,5 with Radeon dGPU) and it was not usable. Every distro I tried (Ubuntu, Pop OS, Fedora, and NixOS) had severe Bluetooth instability (most times the computer booted, Bluetooth worked for about 15 seconds after boot and then it would die completely until the next reboot). Graphics switching seems non functional on this model as well.

I’m looking for an alternative when Apple stops supporting Mac OS on this machine, and I was surprised at how flakey the hardware was in Linux on a 7 year old machine.

I think we are actually saying the same thing, and my language was imprecise, so I apologize.

My point is that in the US, the narrower legal/constitutional concept of free speech is often implied, inadvertently or deliberately, when people are actually only referring to it in the broader sense that you describe. For example, a banned Twitter user might say things like "Twitter is a disgrace to democracy"[0] which confuses others into thinking there is some constitutional or legal harm being done when in fact there is none.

I have no problem with having a debate about whether the core concept of free speech is a universal right that should be guaranteed everywhere (surprise: I don't think it should be a universal right and I think it's downright dangerous to society to force all private entities to respect it). But I see the two meanings get confused so much that I felt a need to call it out.

[0] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-news-twitter-marjorie-...

> surely you must recognize that you are likely in the minority of e-mail users?

No, I don't recognize that. Citation needed.

> didn't trump's twitter platform get banned from all the common cloud providers? is it that much more ridiculous to think that they would be unable to colo with anyone?

I don't know, but as to your last question, yes, that's ridiculous, as there are thousands of datacenters out there.

Besides, Trump's twitter platform is not a person. It's a business with many more resources than the the vast majority of individuals have. It's dangerous to start from the principle that this organization should have the same rights as a natural person.

> two or three, really. and many areas in the US are limited to one or two.

You're talking about mobile providers. I specifically mentioned mobile and VoIP and you cut that part out. I'm done here as you don't seem to be willing to have an honest discussion.

> No, you can not create your own website.

Yes, in the US, you can. Giving me an example of one site that was booted off a small set of providers does not disprove that.

I do completely agree with you that having e.g. Apple be the sole gatekeeper of what users can install on their platform is problematic, but I view this as somewhat orthogonal to the Twitter censorship question. IMHO Apple should be required to allow users to install apps downloaded from alternative sources, however I still don't feel they should be compelled to host apps in their own store.

I'm not sure there's a great way to map the above opinion to Twitter -- maybe something like forcing twitter to become federated/decentralized would be the closest. But I am not convinced that Twitter is of the same size as Apple where we should mandate that. I don't regularly use twitter and I don't feel that we, as a society, are nearly as dependent on it as we are on phone manufacturers.

> i'm sorry, i interpreted your point to broadly be "free speech with limits", which i understand to be at-odds with the constitutional definition.

Ugh, my main point is that the concept of "free speech" in the US is not relevant at all to the question of whether a private entity can remove you from their platform for saying something they don't like.

You can claim that in the colloquial sense, the phrase is used more liberally to mean any censorship whatsoever, and that may be true. But in my opinion that is conflating two concepts, and those doing so are either 1) confused or 2) being deliberately dishonest by trying to smuggle some sense of constitutional/government mandate into the conversation.

> when was the last time you sent (or received) an e-mail outside of the context of work, or to interact with a company?

This morning, a few hours ago.

> apple and google make the phones! my network provider is also a private company, too, they have no requirement to provide me a phone service.

No, there are plenty of other phone manufacturers besides Apple and Google. Just as there are plenty of phone service providers, both mobile and VoIP. If they are all blocking/refusing you service, that would be quite a story, and I might change my opinion, but I've never heard of that happening.

> millennials (my generation) aren't great at spontaneity in this regard. gen Z are even worse.

I'm a older/early millenial (Xennial to some people). I agree with you but I don't see how you'd ever be completely blocked from using a phone.

> private social media isn't the problem (although it is a problem). i'm saying that so much of our lives are very tightly embedded with a handful of private companies, and them having control over that isn't a great way to be.

I agree with you 100%. The way to regain control is not to use the government to force them to provide a platform to racists, it's to ensure that you disentangle yourself from their systems as much as you can. Make sure you have a plan for what to do if your Whatsapp or iCloud account is banned by an algorithm with no recourse.

Are irreversible algorithmic bans the best way for companies to operate? Clearly not, it sucks. And maybe there's room for legal solutions to mandate open appeals processes, etc. But the alternative of forcing companies to give everyone a platform is way worse, IMHO.

> citation needed

Uh, the US constitution and a few centuries of case law?

> perhaps, but how much pressure do you think they could take, if pressured to take down your content by other private individuals & corporations?

The one example host I gave has been around 20 years. I trust that they have a good legal team and have faced mobs of angry people before, and that they'll continue to be around for a while longer.

One problem that I didn't bring up in my original post is that as soon as someone can be heard on twitter, their content is subject to algorithmic manipulation. So someone's fringe opinion could be broadcast to thousands or millions of eyeballs and made to seem like much more of a mainstream opinion like than it actually is.

In a perfect world, where no manipulation is possible, I do agree with you that making sure people can be heard is the correct solution. But until or unless we get there, my opinion is that letting the platform have leeway to moderate content is the best path forward. If people tweeting about covid lab leaks (which I'm still not sure would be considered a non-fringe opinion in 2022) get caught up in that, then that sucks for them, but the alternative is worse. They are still free to set up their own site to discuss their theories.

I'm sorry if "hate/conspiracy bullshit" was too inflammatory or specific here. I meant it as a stand in for "any content that most would find objectionable." I've edited my post to remove that language. You are correct that I do believe that what is being censored is unimportant.

Please don't presume what I am or am not willing to do.

I am perfectly willing to confront the idea that Twitter is censoring true things that I agree with: it's fine with me. I'm not sure if they're already doing that, but they have every right to, just as I have every right to use (or create) an alternative platform.

I disagree that we're close to the end of the slope, but I guess if you're right we'll find out soon enough.

I'm not a libertarian by any means but I do have some amount of faith that if what you're describing comes to pass, the free market will provide alternatives, if demand exists. VPNs are one such alternative.

I truly believe that it's harmful to society to guarantee free reach to everyone. It's kind of like the paradox of tolerance, if you've heard of that -- if private entities are barred from moderating content on their systems, the discourse will devolve more than it already has into conspiracy, hate, and other forms of unwanted content.