Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

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  • 244 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • It’s meant to protect the software, not the hardware. Of course you can still put a hardware keylogger on it.

    You’re also only considering the use case of the owner and user being the same person. In a business context, the user and the owner are two different persons. It can be used to ensure the company’s MDM and security software aren’t tampered with, for example if you try to exfiltrate company data. In that situation, even if you have a keylogger, it doesn’t help you much, it still won’t allow you root access on the machine, because the user of the machine doesn’t have root access either.

    Same with servers: you don’t even care if the hardware is keylogged, nobody’s ever using the local console anyway. But it’ll tell you if a tech at the datacentre opened the case, and they can’t backdoor the OS during a planned hardware maintenance.

    Same with kiosk machines: you can deface the hardware all you want, the machine’s still not gonna let you order a free sandwich. If you buy one off eBay you can bypass secure boot and wipe it and use it, but it won’t let you sneak a USB on it while nobody’s watching and attack the network or anything like that.

    But yes, for most consumers it’s a bit less useful and often exploited in anti-consumer ways.




  • If we deleted everything written by insufficiently pure developers, we wouldn’t have a Linux desktop. Especially if we count the ones that were smart enough to not bring up anything political in public.

    Not a fan of DHH, but then you delete Rails then there’s no GitHub, GitLab, Mastodon, and many many other things given how popular Rails is, and that’s just that one guy.

    If you include all the sketchy stuff that happens in the supply chain mining the minerals, processing, assembly all the way up to the final computer product, you just can’t morally justify supporting any manufacturer either.

    This really doesn’t do anything useful other than feeling good to not support one of those guys. If anything it just adds extra political drama that feeds into a much bigger worldwide division problem.





  • Apps from outside the Play Store? No, because previously your phone had no reason to ask Google anything. You could always not sign in to Google and disable Play Protect and use F-Droid and Obtainium.

    But now, it needs to check developer signatures to know if it’s a verified developer, and it obviously can’t cache all of them as the size would be insane.

    And that in turn implies that your phone needs to reach out to Google and be like yo, is this app banned?

    That query gives them at minimum the IP of the user, the package name, and the time at which it happened.

    And thus they can effectively track anyone using say, privacy apps, making it that much riskier to use them in places where they’re not allowed.

    For your “safety”.



  • Arguably, if it was normal to sideload apps it wouldn’t be as much of a barrier to users, but they’ve been conditionned to think they need an app and the only place you can ever get them is the store.

    It’s a technical hurdle only because Apple decided they want to control everything, and same on Android because of Google’s ever increasing war on sideloading. You used to download an APK from the browser and it would go like “This is an app! Install?”, but now you have to go enable third party installation and all that, and now the whole Play Protect forcing developer validation coming up.




  • No way. iPhones don’t exactly allow bootloader unlocking to begin with, but even if you could, it would be in no better state than Asahi on the M1 Apple computers. Every driver would have to be written from scratch.

    Pixels are a good platform for custom ROMs because until the recent drama, you could literally just build AOSP as-is and use it. So the GrapheneOS team only really need to focus on their changes to the OS and their apps and none of the drivers and modem interface and all that. That’s also why GrapheneOS runs so well on it: Google provided everything, it just works.

    iPhones would be the absolute worst phone to develop for: zero support from Apple, no drivers no documentation, no nothing. Not even a Linux kernel! At least for Android, the Linux license forces manufacturers to publish the source code, so at minimum you start with something that should boot and contain all the stuff to talk to the hardware already, just need to wire it in with userspace drivers. CPU manufacturers like Qualcomm also provide a fair chunk of the userspace drivers open-source too, so you can just pull that and have audio and video working.

    Not impossible, but definitely really hard and impractical.



  • You can mostly backup everything but it’s impossible to make a perfect backup like the old days anymore because of the TEE. Flashing a new ROM will change the keys and permanently make the old data worthless. Stuff like Google Authenticator for example simply won’t backup even with a perfect bit copy.

    Apps will restore okay but many will be logged out and have lost their permissions and push notification registration with Google.


  • No, I would simply give them a box of condoms or whatever.

    If they’re gonna do it, they’re gonna do it, and as a parent, you’re way better off with your kids comfortable not hiding it because if there’s complications you can intervene quickly. If the condom broke, you want the kid to come to you so you can get plan B and not have to deal with an abortion a couple weeks or even months later. It’s also way better they get caught doing it at home vs in a car and now be on the sex offender registry.

    What you’re describing is abstinance and is common in religious families, and well know for being ineffective. Plus as you’ve described, it completely falls apart when bisexuality is involved, and it makes even less sense if it’s physically impossible to even get pregnant.

    The same extends to alcohol, drugs, porn, whatever evil vice people are worried. If your kid’s gonna do drugs, you want them to feel comfortable calling you if they have a bad trip, and also feel comfortable giving you the drugs so you can get them to the hospital and they can quickly identify what you’re on and give the necessary medications.

    They’re gonna learn about all that eventually, better they learn it from you. Punishment and “you’ll understand when you’re grown up” doesn’t work. If they’re old enough to ask, they’re old enough for the answers too.