They’re just examples of things you could pipe curl into, but no not really. If the download fails you end up with an incomplete file in your tmpfs anyway, and have to retry. Another use I have is curl | mysql to restore a database backup.

If the server supports resuming, I guess that can be better than the pipe, but that still needs temporary disk space, and downloads rarely fail. You can’t corrupt downloads over HTTPS either as the encryption layer would notice it and kill the connection, so it’s safe to assume if it downloaded in full, it’s correct.

With downloads being IO bound these days, it’s nice to not have to read it all back and write the extracted files to disk afterwards. Only writes the final files once.

That’s far from the weirdest thing I’ve done with pipes though, I’ve installed Windows 11 on a friend’s PC across the ocean with a curl | zstd | pv | dd, and it worked. We tried like 5 different USBs and different ISOs and I gave up, I just installed it in a VM and shipped the image.

I’ve had to use that flag.

--silent is useful when you don’t want the progress bar or you’re piping curl into something else. I like to do curl | tar -zxv to download and decompress at the same time, I’ve even tar -zc | curl to upload a backup taking no disk space to do so.

The problem however is it’s really silent: if it fails, it exits with a non-zero code and that’s it. Great when you don’t want debug info to interfere, annoying when you need to debug it.

So you can opt-in to print some errors when in silent mode, but otherwise be silent.

Then why do you have to agree to Google’s ToS to use it if it’s local only?

Especially given how easy it is to bypass Bitlocker anyway: https://youtu.be/Cc6vrQSVMII

The solution there isn’t to give your data to another country, it’s to take control of your data.

Buy an old machine, slap NextCloud on it, done.

They have a poor history of incidents that leaves many people not trust them.

https://manjarno.pages.dev/

Perks of still running bare metal in colo, no issues for any of my stuff. Not seeing anyone say anything in the Lemmy chat on Matrix either.

I bet they’ll eventually get caught using coffee shop cameras and conversations for AI training, say it’s for training a security product or something.

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.

Swap Israel for Russia, and suddenly that would be something completely reasonable nobody talks about. But it’s Israel, so of course they’re gonna play the racism/religion card.

It’s mostly for use cases where you can lose physical access to the computer like overnight at the office, at a hotel while travelling, in a shared server room, etc. It’s extra assurance that the computer runs the software you expect it to run and nothing else without at least being somewhat noisy about it.

This can in turn be used to use the TPM to get a disk encryption key, so you can do full disk encryption but still boot to a normal login screen without entering a password. It will only hand out the key with the correct signed boot chain.

If you have a desktop PC at home that nobody untrusted touches, then yeah there isn’t that much value to it for you.

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.

How much easier can it even get to deploy? You start it, point your domain at it and you’re good to go.

At this point I just net user /add it, which just creates the user manually and then you can reboot and just log into it.

It’s not like you need anything from the OOBE at all, so might as well just skip it entirely.

They said it would require network access and that they would have a handful of popular apps preloaded to avoid too much disruption so those can be installed offline. In practice that probably means Google apps, Meta apps and other big corp apps.

They also have you register package names with them, not just a certificate.

I was hoping it would be a certificate situation but we’re kind of past Google using the least intrusive and privacy preserving options.

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”.

That also means they now will know about every app installs, worldwide. So when the government comes in and ask who have installed this app they decided is bad, they can come get you.

Signal, VPNs, they’ll have a list of everyone opting out of government-mandated backdoors.

LineageOS so worth losing Play Integrity.

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.

Because fear and hypocrisy, and pretending we’re somehow special as humans. It’s okay for us to copy this style, and replicate this drum set, and sample these sounds. We’re okay torrenting stuff because screw the big rich studios. We’re okay buying knockoff stuff because it’s cheaper.

We only care because it’s started crushing small creators struggling to make a living, and AI can gobble up training data faster than any human reasonably can in a lifetime.

Intellectual property has always been broken, AI just exposes the problem more clearly. It’s always been a double-standard.

At least a title would have been nice, at this point that’s just lazy to just paste the link of a repo and click post. Ok cool, but why are you sharing it, what’s cool about it, why should I click on this and spend time reading on it.