elagost

At that point, IE was so technically far behind that you could easily point to reasons why Firefox was better: Add-ons, usable tabbed browsing, incredible speed increases, more customization, and websites actually working.

Nowadays, we're asking people to choose, for all appearances, a slower browser that's not as technically advanced in some ways, with no clear merits and a lot of changes to workflow. The choice today is between freedom and convenience. The reason people flocked to Firefox in the first place was that it was both freedom and convenience.

Lately there's been a lot of relicensing stories this year, mongodb[1] being the one I thought of first. It seems like the GPL is just a way for groups to protect their own assets without getting ripped off, and more permissive licenses (BSD, MIT) don't give the creator of that software the same protection. However, if you do violate the GPL and release a closed-source product, who's to tell? Who will know? Always struck me as weird.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/its-mongodbs-turn-to-change-it...

You could always use pass-tomb, which is an extension that stores the entire tree encrypted.

https://github.com/roddhjav/pass-tomb#readme

In what world is a 28-core xeon with 1.5 TB of RAM and 2 dual GPUs (effectively 4 GPUs) not a powerful spec for a desktop? Aren't we still in the era of most desktops having 4 cores and a single GPU? I don't bear any love for Apple, but this computer is still pretty cool.

Steam hardware survey shows most popular spec these days is 4 cores, 8GB RAM, and a mid-range GPU. I'd argue that most machines running steam are more powerful than average given that they're generally gaming rigs. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Firefox gets a larger swath of the population. 2 cores is by far the most popular with them. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware

For the people who wanted the Mac Pro that I know of (primarily Apple nerds who were waiting for this new updated machine) they wanted to use it ask a desktop computer. For a desktop computer, this thing is pretty insane in every regard - Xeon CPU, ECC RAM, crazy amounts of GPU capabilities, and yes, price too.

It's got a lot extra proprietary components in it that make it attractive for those that want those capabilities, and it runs MacOS. Often MacOS is the extra $500 or so of any Apple machine you buy. If you don't care for MacOS or the security coprocessor or the extra Apple-specific expansion stuff, you can definitely build a cheaper PC that's more powerful.

This is exciting. Glad to know they're focusing on making a stable, secure protocol, and that development is going strong. Great job and keep up the great work!

>Take an iMac Pro, break it down, put its screen in a box (that’ll revive the Cinema Display we miss), add slots to the motherboard, put it in a vintage Mac Pro cheese grater case...

I think a lot of Mac faithful talked around this line like it would be an acceptable minimum, but they really wanted more than that, like "Oh, it'd be fine if they just made a tower, but what we really want is that trademark Apple Innovation!" But what they really wanted was just white-box parts in a PC case that they could swap out, not this insanely powerful, beautiful, kick-ass machine on wheels that costs more than your car. They just wanted a blessed hackintosh.

(edit - just speaking from personal experience and the people I've talked to. I don't know anyone who actually needs this new Mac Pro, but I know a few who want it.)

reCAPTCHA is malware. If a site uses it, I (usually reluctantly) stop using the site. It's not even a privacy issue anymore - I'm logging into the site, usually so I can give them some money (bandcamp, humble bundle) - I just don't want Google all up in my business. Is that too much to ask these days? In order to not have some creepy giant corporation overseeing everything I do, I guess I just have to not use the Internet.

I use it most days - I have a Quassel (https://quassel-irc.org) core set up on my raspberry pi, and connect to it with my phone/laptop. Official support communities for most Linux distros, general chat, and more technically-focused communities are there. It's the only form of 'social network' I use - otherwise I just don't use social networks.

The arguments about power consumption only apply to a specific set of old workstation CPUs. You can buy old hardware that isn't super inefficient. I bought an HP EliteDesk tower on the cheap ($150) last year that had a i7-4790 (an all-around great CPU) and is super quiet. With a lower-power GPU in it (nvidia 1030) it's even decent for light games or video decoding. I've not directly measured the power consumption, but it's not nearly the monster these old Xeons can be.

The main point, from what I gather, is that you can buy older hardware that's just as powerful as something you'd buy today, but you get the benefit of better repairability, cheap replacement parts, and saving a bunch of plastic from the trash. I don't see the need for buying brand-new hardware when the old stuff works just fine. (My main machine is a 6-year-old Thinkpad)

I'd leave Thunderbird in a heartbeat if I could find a contact/calendar syncing terminal client as well. Any recommendations?

It's always sad to see these stories because they always seem like a preventable tragedy. DigitalOcean, Azure, and AWS seem like the go-to for start-ups these days, instead of self-hosting your stuff at home or even in a colocation space. Even though it's a "dirty word" these days, on-prem does have its huge benefits.

Professional stuff is one thing, but that's not to mention anything personal - anything I care about I won't put exclusively on someone else's computer. I want to have absolute control over as much of my stack as I can. Seems really scary that some company has control of your entire infrastructure and can ban-hammer you without notice, permanently, at any time of day or night (or while you're on vacation).

That is a valid point. I don't think Yelp are bad people, just that in the context of this story, they're the "bad guys" doing the data collection.

If you count any sort of data collection as "bad", then you'll never help improve the products you use, can't get mad about features you use being removed, and have no right to complain about bugs. Data collection is important for software developers to improve their products, but it can be done in good ways. There's no visibility here on what Yelp is collecting, but I doubt it's that bad.

From what I understand (haven't set up an iPhone from default in a long time) but the 'limit ad tracking' is off by default, allowing apps to have background app refresh privileges is allowed for any app by default (you must manually disable for any offenders unless you want it off for everything), the privacy features in Safari are off by default, and Apple's own data-collection and location-collection is also on by default.

Even for companies who are supposedly privacy-forward, their defaults say otherwise. A brand-new iPhone has all these privacy settings that are off by default, and that are usually confusingly labeled and buried several settings screens deep. Nobody really turns them on outside of a very small bubble.

Once companies have your trust, they can't help but break it if it'll earn them another few bucks. Yelp's a household name and doesn't seem like a bad actor, but that's proven false by this article. Furthermore, while they claim to have your best interests in mind, Apple (and Google) let companies perform this kind of shady behavior on their platforms that they completely control. If they let others get away with this, can you really trust that the "don't upload my photos to your servers" switch really does what it says it does? How do you know your phone isn't recording audio and taking photos to send off to a datacenter in the middle of the night?

(To be fair, a lot of this data that's being sent out probably has something to do with background services designed to make the experience better. Weather Channel might be gathering location in the background for more up-to-the-minute forecasts. For things like cloud storage services, scraping your camera roll and uploading the photos is probably something you ask them to do.)

It would be nice to see some technical documentation on exactly what's being looked at, but I doubt it's available given that it would just allow users to game the system.

This is insane.

The issue's primarily addressing distros and projects that ship their own GTK themes as default to users, like Ubuntu and Elementary and System76. My wife's desktop runs Ubuntu, and if something doesn't look right, she doesn't even know she's running something called GNOME - she just knows that the problem is with software (OS, desktop environment, kernel, video drivers, GTK style sheet, whatever).

Most people aren't going to blame GNOME for broken style sheets, they'll be blaming the creator of the style sheet, whether they know what GNOME and GTK is or not.

This show made me realize that there are two distinct groups of people with zero middle ground: Those who enjoy or at least don't see anything wrong with it, and those who feel they are represented (poorly) in the show, and intensely dislike it.

The first group usually tends to compare the second group to the show's characters ("he's such a Sheldon") and doesn't see anything wrong with that, either.

>Higher scores have been found to correlate with students... having better-educated parents.

And this is a problem why?

The pixel phones (and the nexus phones before them) tend to be a little easier on those who unlock bootloaders and load custom ROMs. I use LineageOS on my Pixel, with OsmAnd maps and no Google services. https://lineage.microg.org/

It works quite well! Having not used 'normal' Android (anything that's not Lineage/Cyanogen) for years, I attempted to start out using this phone with the stock Google Android build. I disabled all the bundled crapware (Play Music, Play Movies, Play Games, YouTube) and they all kept re-enabling themselves. If you're looking for a device that will help you avoid Google at least a little bit, look at this page first. https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

Timelines are always fascinating for me to see, given the massive amount of effort that goes into building something like this. Even though it's essentially a "it'll be ready when it's ready" post, and we obviously know CentOS 8 will be released at some point, I'm still very excited about it. Thanks for all your hard work!

If anyone working on this is hanging around here, are there any particular challenges that are unique this time around? The init system not changing again must be quite nice, as mentioned in the post.

You know they're all open-source, right? I understand and identify with your concerns - I've railed against systemd enough myself - but they all work (fairly) well and have made management/administration of systems cleaner and easier. I think that's why Red Hat's pushing them.

I don't think there will ever come a time when 1) savvy users will stop suggesting/recommending clean Windows installs on new computers and 2) OEM bloatware will stop being crap.

I clean-installed Win10 recently. There was no driver installation I had to do - everything works great, and there are no unidentified devices in Device Manager. Say what you will about Windows 10, but that part is really cool. Save for video cards, the pack-in drivers are often better and less hassle. Plus they auto update.

That's interesting. Glad that they mentioned that the old logo always felt "secretive and villainous" - it did to me, too, and struck me as strange why basically the most trusted Enterprise Linux system's logo looked shady and creepy like the incognito-mode guy in Chrome.

These days many people don't know the difference between Facebook and "the Internet". We've handed the reigns to our communication and culture into the greedy palms of about five mega-corporations that put profit above all else. Much better to use community software and platforms - things that people run for people, not companies running for profit.

I've had this happen frequently because my configuration really aggressively blocks this stuff. It's bad enough that I have a separate browser (Gnome Web aka Epiphany) just for logging into and using sites that have Captcha, like Pocket and Bandcamp, and I do everything else in Firefox. Captcha is horrible. I understand why sites use it, but putting a Google-wall in front of your content is a very bad idea.

Similar concerns should be made for Thunderbolt devices, which have direct PCIe access - much more low-level and dangerous than USB could be. The only system I've seen implement this is Gnome3 - it has a section in its system preferences for configuring Thunderbolt devices[0] and the Bolt daemon.[1]

[0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Whiteboards/ThunderboltAccess

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Bolt-Pro...

I don't use the Netflix (Qwikster?) DVD service, but I do still buy lots of DVDs/Blu-Rays. The visual fidelity on a good DVD/Blu-Ray player is much better than a little streaming box that has to buffer every five minutes anyway, and I love having discs that I can watch offline and not have to worry about ownership changing or the content going away. My box sets are always going to be on my shelf, my .mp4 rips are always going to be on my hard drives, no company tracks my viewing habits, and I don't have to pay anyone a monthly fee for the privilege of them sitting on my shelf.

I bet a lot of people use the DVD service to rip all the movies and have them on a hard drive. I've thought about it.

Pi-Hole is great as a caching mechanism and is easy enough for non-techie friends and family to use (just make sure you have it auto-update for them, or do it yourself once in a while).

Bind9, a true dns server, doesn't provide the privacy enhancements that pi-hole does and it is much more opaque for normal users. I think you're right - it's much easier to look at targets that are a little easier to hit rather than suggesting a bind9 setup to everyone. I have the know-how to do both, and I prefer pi-hole anyway!

When I ran Gentoo on my laptop, emerging Firefox took far longer than compiling even the Kernel. Around 90 minutes, I think.