• 0 Posts
  • 126 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle
  • I struggled with this for a long time, and then I just decided to use synology photos.

    It has albums, tagging, geolocation, sharing. It has phone picture backup, it is inherently a backup as it’s on my NAS and I back that data up again.

    I want to keep the thing that I really care about the most friction free and also not too dependent on myself so that I can still experiment.

    I didn’t try PiGallery2 though, maybe I will have a look!







  • What vendor lock-in are you talking about?

    I can take my domain, customize DNS records and in a couple of minutes I am using a new provider. They also allow to export email content, which means I obviously don’t lose anything.

    With a free email account, you are anyway locked-in as with every provider, because you are using their domain. You can set automatic forwarding in that case.

    Vendor lock exists when you invest substantial amount of work to build tools around a specific platform (say, AWS), or where you have no way to easily take the data from one platform out and use something else to do the same thing (say, Meta).

    The fact that you can’t use SMTP, which is a protocol that requires data on the server is not a vendor lock-in in any sense of the word. It’s a decision that depends on having that content e2e encrypted, because the two things are simy incompatible.

    Also the code for all Proton clients and the bridge is open source, and the bridge is essentially a client that emulates being a server so that you can use your preferred tools to access the emails. Even in this scenario, there is no vendor lock and all it takes is changing the configuration of your tool from the local bridge address to whatever SMTP server you want to use elsewhere.

    Can you please describe in which way you are actually locked-in, to show that you have a clue about what the word means?




  • I would consider the lack of a shell a benefit in this scenario. You really don’t want the extra attack surface and tooling.

    Considering you also manage the host, if you want to see what’s going on inside the container (which for such a simple image can be done once while building it the first time more likely), you can use unshare to spawn a bash process in the container namespaces (e.g., unshare -m -p […] -t PID bash, or something like this - I am going by memory).



  • I guess a bunch of things, as they are specialized apps:

    • proper auth. I think with Firefox you can have a password, but a password manager will have multiple options for 2fa including security keys, and on phone fingerprint unlock etc. In general, password managers are more resistant to malicious users gaining access to your device.
    • store all kinds of stuff. Not everything happens in the browser, and it’s just convenient to have an app just for credentials. Many password managers allow to store and autofill credit cards too, for example.
    • on the fly generation of aliases. Password managers have external integrations. For example proton and bitwarden can integrate with simplelogin.io to generate email aliases when you choose to generate a new username.
    • org-like features. Password managers can be also convenient for sharing with family (for example). I do manage a bitwardes organization used by all my immediate family, which means I can share credentials easily with any of them. Besides the sharing I can also ensure my (not tech savvy mom) won’t lock herself out (emergency breakglass access configurable) and technically enforce policies on password strength etc.
    • as banal as it is, self-managing. I like to run my own services and running my own password manager with my own backups gives me peace of mind.
    • another perhaps obvious point. More compatibility? I can use my password manager on whatever device, whatever browser. For some, it might not change anything, but it’s a convenient feature.

    As a personal addition, I would say that I simply want the cornerstone of my online security to be a product for a company that is specialized in doing that. I have no idea how much effort goes into the password manager from Mozilla, for example.


  • Our starting point for design is longevity, which means making our devices more repairable, a very different approach to the electronics industry standard. To support maximum longevity and because of the IP rating, Fairphone 4 does not feature a headphone jack. In the end, it comes down to how we make a product that lasts for at least five years. We needed to eliminate as many vulnerabilities as possible, and the headphone jack is subject to dust and water ingress over time.

    Again, you might disagree, you might know better, I don’t know. But this is their motivation when it comes to longevity and hence sustainability. To me, it seems a reasonable idea: if the jack helps reducing the consumption of batteries in headphones but decreases the lifespan of the phones, it seems a bad tradeoff.





  • Of course, but I assume elderly people getting familiar with a completely new technology need anyway some kind of personal support and introduction from someone close. I don’t think anybody would plan to throw a Mac at some elderly person and say “if any issue call Apple support”, right?

    I get your point though, and I am just saying that there are situations where Linux might work totally fine.

    Also, the used market for apple product is not that big where I lived. Nobody in the family had a Mac also, which means she wouldn’t have had anybody to ask for support at all. It’s a specific situation, but my point is that having an official support is not going to help that much in some cases.


  • I find Mac to be extremely unintuitive in how things are organized tbh, but that’s just me.

    Anyway, you are right, but she wanted to spend just 3-400 euros for a laptop, which is incompatible with Apple prices. Obviously this means being there to support if something goes wrong, but with a minimal install and Linux being stable, it doesn’t happen often (I also have my mom’s laptop running mint). I do have a reverse tunnel script configured that allows me to SSH in their machines using a “panic” icon on their desktop.


  • sudneo@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhy Linux is Best for Most People
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    10 months ago

    My great-aunt asked for a PC when she was 85 and her grandchild moved abroad. I installed Linux mint with a few scripts and shortcuts to ease her life, and she picked that up (check email, Skype, nothing super sophisticated ofc). I guess if it’s a new thing, windows does not the advantage of being already familiar, and Linux is more stable in my experience, which leads to less random errors.


  • This statement makes no sense. Federated search means nothing. Ultimately someone needs to scrape, index, store and retrieve data. At the moment, a handful can do it efficiently, and to have a wide coverage, engines use also other APIs. Kagi does this, for example, by combining Google and others (e.g. brave) with their own indexer.

    How do you imagine a “federated” search would be any different? Using multiple APIs is effectively “federating”.

    As I said in another comment, to be fully ethical you should not run on any major cloud (owned by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM), not run on anything on fossil fuels (few DCs), not use any API of major companies (google, apple, etc.) and so on. So basically if we ever want a new, better, solution (tech) we just need to materialize a few billions of dollars to allow this fully ethical solution with no dependency on immoral parties. Alternatively, the whole market dynamic should be disrupted, because that’s the problem.