neobrain

The article is specifically not referring to information that's sent to Apple servers - it's about information on the phone only, accessible through forensics tools with physical device access.

Signal's server-side push notifications only contain a "wakeup" message. The actual message popup is displayed after decrypting the message contents locally on the device. Of the things you mentioned, only the time of notification is visible to Apple/Google.

> If some provider like Proton states they are pricacy-focused and protect your data from governments, but can still offer loads of your private data when ordered to, that damages their privacy claim.

"Loads" of private data? When has this allegedly happened or how would it technically even be possible?

If you create an account, it may be worth looking into "starter packs", which are lists of accounts around specific topics to follow. That's an easy solution if you run into the "I don't know who to follow and there's no algorithm that'll tell me" problem.

> I want a computer where I can basically install every non stock app in its own little world, where it thinks "huh, that is interesting, I seem to be the only app installed on this system".

NixOS containers are the most convenient way to do this, but those will map the entire global nix store into your container. So while only one app would be in your PATH, all other programs are still accessible in principle. From a threat-modelling perspective, this isn't usually a deal-breaker though.

There's also dockerTools, which lets you build bespoke docker/podman images from a set of nix packages. Those will have a fully self-contained and minimal set of files, at the expense of copying those files into the container image instead of just mapping them as a volume.

> NixOS is very impressive but the marketing around it feels misleading. The reproducible claim needs a giant asterisk due to link rot.

It's a valid concern, though perhaps worth mentioning you will be able to restore your 10-year old config as long as the files downloaded from now-broken links are still in the Nix cache. Of course in practice, this is only useful to large organizations that have resources to invest in bespoke infrastructure to ensure supply chain integrity, since any `nix store gc` run will immediately wipe all downloads :(

> Free for 6 months after which it auto-renews if I recall correctly.

They don't ask for credit card information when signing up this way, so even if true you won't be charged if you forget canceling.

Besides what others already mentioned, it's the only smart watch with an open source OS supported by the vendor themselves (that I know of anyway).

For me, it has been ready as a daily driver for more than a year. Battery life is shorter than macos but still long enough that I don't have to think about it (which I can't say about any x86 laptops, even when they use iGPUs).

The notable missing features are external displays (an experimental kernel branch is publicly available though) and the fingerprint sensor. That's about it, though. Given the amount of polish combined with the hardware, it's arguably the most polished Linux laptop experience you'll get.

> - the pandemic tracking app without which you can’t enter an airport

Not sure if airports specifically used another mechanism, but the Android contact tracing APIs were actually reimplemented in microG, allowing these apps to work even on custom roms.

Your other examples don't hold universally either (banking apps are compatible with un-rooted custom ROMs more often than not, and not sure how many sports event apps use integrity checks), but your general point stands that it may come with trade-offs.

> Cargo it's a nightmware to maintain

To my knowledge, the Linux kernel doesn't use Cargo to build Rust code.

Signal has profiles nowadays that can be used to connect with people without sharing phone numbers. The latter are only used for signup and discarded immediately after.

Most of the features in the article are already opt-in. It's not like Firefox just automatically translates articles against your will, for example.

Mozilla is mainly responding to inflammatory comments like yours by adding additional toggles to disable any sort of trace in the UI about those features even existing.

That problem is solved by the subsecond crate (an offspring of the Dioxus UI framework), demo here: https://youtu.be/Kl90J5RmPxY?t=1288

It's not integrated in Nannou specifically, but they're showing off Bevy and ratatui in that demo, both very popular frameworks in the Rust world. (In fact, Nannou is in the process of being rebuilt on top of Bevy.)

Runs pretty smoothly with iwd. I get occasional disconnects (one every few hours) that may equally be down to my local wifi (other devices have issues with it too). iwd instantly papers over them, so it doesn't impact me either way.

Given that you're already using Home Manager: Make sure to also take a look at plasma-manager! [1]

It extends HM's declarative config to KDE/Plasma's config files, which are harder to manage since they also contain volatile state like window geometry. For discovery, there is also a `plasma-manager` executable that prints out most (all?) active settings. In particular the keybindings are included in there.

(This doesn't directly answer your question, but maybe is informative regardless and/or helpful for finding related options)

[1] https://github.com/nix-community/plasma-manager

> I've been pretty happy with it, ever since they made the photo's app actually have shareable libraries it's been just as good as any other Google Mail/Photos/Files thing I've used.

Glad to hear you found a service that's useful to you!

> If I have to encrypt my files before I use the drive, and they continue to build their AI spy into everything, though, then what is the point really?

That would be concerning indeed, but there is no such integration today and it seems unlikely they would integrate non-local models into drive. Even on the mail side, any use of LLMs is optional, opt-in, and limited to text production (i.e. no training on your inbox).

I don't think I can do a better overview than https://ghostty.org/docs/about . It's not world-changing but simply a very polished, well-executed terminal.

GPU rendering virtually eliminates typing latency. Most terminals that have it don't support native content like tabs, but Ghostty gets minimal latency without having to compromise on essentials since it uses native toolkits under the hood.

The modern TTY has lots of protocol extensions that allow your CLI tools to do things like display high-resolution images. There's tons of good-quality color themes out-of-the-box (with a built-in browser for preview).

Configuration is highly customizable but the defaults are good enough that you barely need it.

Funny timing, I moved to Ghostty this week and just today I ran into OOM crashes in Ghostty while developing a terminal UI app. Coincidentally this TUI has a tab bar that looks like this, where UTF8 icons are used for recognizability and activity indicators (using © and € as placeholders here):

    1|Flakes ©    2|Installed ©    3|Store © €    4|Security © €
   ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

This works fine normally, but resizing the terminal would quickly trigger the crash - easy to avoid but still annoying!

I was already preparing myself to file a bug report with the easy repro, but this sounds suspiciously close to what the blog post is describing. Fingers crossed :)

(EDIT: HN filters unicode, booo :( )

Even more specifically, the full menu chain is System Settings -> Notifications -> Application Settings, which then includes a search bar where you can enter "Donation" or "Request for Donation". (Mentioning it since entering that term in the main search bar doesn't bring up any results)

It's similarly bogus here. Early Asahi development tried to upstream as much as possible but ultimately still maintained a gigantic pile of downsteam patches, which wasn't a sustainable model.

Most of current development is focused on reducing that pile to zero to get things into a tractable state again. So things continue to be active, but the progress has become much less visible.

There's still plenty of options around, Qobuz and 7digital in particular offer drm-free flac downloads.

People are already getting worked up about being prompted to opt into a new feature on update (even if that prompt is hidden behind an icon that doesn't do anything until the user clicks it), so it's not inconceivable that the kill switch just disables those opt-in prompts for AI-related features.

Just in case anyone's tempted to buy one of these now: Support is alright after heroic (and continuing) efforts to improve platform support, but it's flaky. M1/M2 devices offer better performance and the state of Asahi drivers is much better, particularly around audio.

+1. Been running Asahi Linux for half a year now. Everything that's advertized as working is working great.

Sadly compile times of LLVM-based recompilers make it impractical for competitive x86 emulation. We're not just talking a few single-frame stutters here and there, but considerable startup delays and pauses in-game.

LLVM's optimization passes also are less useful than you might think, since the vast majority of them is motivated by source->binary translation (like clang). They don't have much effect when recompiling an already optimized binary to another architecture.

I feel your pain on this one despite being fairly comfortable with nix by now. This is 100% an issue either the documentation or the nix CLI should do a better job at.

The wiki rightfully points towards "roots", i.e. references produced by nix-build or similar. Additionally, there are other places that will keep references and hence block garbage collection though:

1. Your nix profile (`nix profile list` / `nix profile remove`) and its old generations (`nix profile (wipe-)history`)

2. Your NixOS configuration (configuration.nix) and its old generations (`nixos-rebuild list-generations`)

It doesn't help that there's no discoverable way to tell why a particular nix store path is not being garbage collected either.

SUID by itself is not a security liability. Typically, programs using SUID quickly drop their additional privileges during startup to avoid the scenario you're describing. So the vulnerability in firejail would have to be early during startup before any of that.

Still, it can happen of course, particularly with memory-unsafe languages. Conversely without root privileges you have to sacrifice strength of your sandbox, widening the vulnerability window in the app you were trying to constrain to begin with.

Meanwhile bubblewrap relies on user namespaces, which come with their own set of security problems. They are disabled by default in many distributions for that reason.

Conversely, I'd assume this pattern is used rarely enough for spammers to even bother fighting it.

Honestly the name is doing Qt Creator a bit of a disservice, given how fantastic an IDE for any C++ codebase it is, Qt or not.

Yes - it's good for this use case! It even has built-in support for fetching dependencies declared in project conanfiles.

> The repeating behaviour and the 'not now' are two sides of the same coin. Per the original post, and my experience, those 'not now' buttons keep coming back.

So you're using "not now" as a shortcut to identify malicious design. That's fine but personally I'm not. I would go as far as claiming as most people don't feel this way about such a tiny wording detail, but I obviously haven't ran any A/B testing to confirm either interpretation.

> And, for the sake of argument, how should respectful software behave? If I clicked 'not now', are you _ever_ going to ask me again? If so, how do you decide on the time-period?

Honestly this question seems bizarrely focused on making the software give you a definite promise on what it will or will not do. It's a valid design question how to respectfully prompt the user for choices, but if that's your concern then this specific wording choice is an unimportant detail to get stuck on.

> If not, why make 'no' more complicated than 'yes'?

The reason was given my my opening argument: "no/yes" demands a conscious choice whereas "not now" doesn't. "not now" is plausibly less complicated than "yes" for a majority of users, and cognitive overhead generally matters more to people than imaginary contracts about future choice prompts.