Thanks, that is useful. Roughly what I was thinking.

Can someone do a quick explainer of what this move to ARM means for free computing? The prospects for hassle-free installation of alternative OSs? Is it good news or bad?

Completely agree. Training normies to click OK on warnings like this is a no-good terrible idea.

In rc.conf put map f shell -tf $SHELL ~/myscript.sh. When you press f it will launch myscript.sh in a new terminal with the selection as an argument.

man ranger and check shell command for appropriate flags. For example, skip the -t if your script is in turn going to launch a GUI application.

Shell commands can easily be integrated into ranger.

I hope the EU fines them for hampering interoperability.

This depends on there being enough greens and liberals in the European Parliament.

PSA: EU citizens, you may still have an hour or so to go out and VOTE. It matters.

Same. Did it in a Waydroid container on desktop. IIRC I created a WA business account using a rented landline number, which is the recommended way to get round the SIM requirement. But the account still quickly got banned. Not gonna waste any more time on it, for me Whatsapp is out.

Sure. I personally find cynicism intensely irritating. It’s infectious so it inevitably ends up poisoning everything. Nobody ever solved any problem with cynicism. In fact I’d go further: all the world’s backward societies (i.e. most of them) are characterized by all-pervasive cynicism (“they’re in it for themselves”, “they’re all crooks”, “nothing will ever change”), whereas the successful countries (few in number) are the ones where people have a more optimistic view of others’ motives. Cynicism is so obviously a self-fulfilling prophesy that I struggle to understand why so many choose to indulge it. I’ve heard a theory that it makes people feel better about their own helplessness. Perhaps I’m too logical but I wish people would choose not to wallow in pessimism - after all, nobody can prove anything one way or the other when it comes to the motivations of others. And oddly, most humans tend to trust others that they know personally. Personally don’t see why strangers would somehow be a different variety of human. Rant over.

Cynicism like this is completely unfalsifiable not to mention unproductive.

IMO the “ownership” thing is a red herring. It has its roots in a specifically American obsession with private property.

If everybody “demands ownership of goods”, that means we share nothing. Hardly a model of “sustainable consumption”. There are loads of examples of redundant private ownership of goods. My favorite stat: the average electric drill is used for 7 minutes in its entire life. All because every household in every building on every street must have its own one, instead of us finding a way to share them.

In the context of digital “goods”, “ownership” really just means control. I wish we would use that word instead.

You shouldn’t opine

To “opine” is to have an opinion. Are you suggesting I should refrain from having an opinion? Does this apply to your own opinions too? Odd place to make such an argument.

Otherwise: interesting point. To me, a state that can obtain personal data by leaning on its owns corporations is, by definition, more threatening than one that has to negotiate for it with a hostile power. But perhaps I underestimate the scale of that practice.

Even if it were encrypted and the backdoor was controlled by the Russian state, logically that would make it safer than Facebook for anyone living in Western jurisdictions. The Russian government cannot get them and is hardly going to exchanging intelligence with its enemies.

In contrast to those “many reviews”, this reviewer says that Ubuntu is fine and always has been.

Seriously, Ubuntu hate is mostly just Snap hate. The Snap problem is overstated and easily worked around if necessary. Ubuntu remains a very solid choice on desktop.

Good points.

Your points are of course valid but this is getting slightly offtopic.

If your bank really spies on you through its app, I would change bank

What would be nice would be not to have to use a proprietary app on a closed-source software stack in the first place, given that it clearly represents a privacy compromise. And that is possible: almost no bank makes it obligatory. But they would obviously love to. If only to fire their web team and save some money.

And this is not just about banks. Every online service is trying to force us onto the closed platforms of Google and Apple, when an open-standards software platform exists and is perfectly workable. Seems there might be a battle worth fighting here. Nobody much seems to agree. Fair enough.

Just let your password manager fill up the login everytime, it’s not hard.

IME that hardly works any more, as mentioned.

Exactly, the 2FA recourse usually affects browsers and not apps. And comes on top of the password or PIN, rather than replacing it. Which seems like discrimination. And it’s not even secure, as you say.

This all feels very convenient. Like a subtle form of abuse, in the name of security, to push people away from the only platform where they have any serious chance of privacy.

The arguments about the insecurity of the browser context have some merit in the aggregate, but in the end all these considerations are relative to the individual user. Which makes the discrimination a form of collective punishment that might have a legal redress.

Fair enough, but “regulatory requirements” can be a symptom as well as a cause. Bad rules are there for the changing.

So if you add up all that, then they’re more likely to allow long term login sessions on an application that they control than on a desktop/web browser that they don’t.

Again, all true. But this is all just probabilistic, as someone else said. A properly secured browser on a locked down machine can be much more secure than an outdated Android stack in the hands of the kind of person who falls victim to scams.

Here, the effect of “assumptions” is to undermine software freedom and privacy. That feels like a problem that needs a better fix.

The security hole here seems to be remote control of devices, more than the nature of the software used.

So I will offer constructive pushback instead of inane downvotes like everyone else.

clowns

This word does literally nothing except trivialize your argument and so make it less convincing.

don’t give a shit

Ditto. Makes you sound angry and irrational. Not much of an incentive to go on reading.

psychotic

psychopathy

These are medical terms. Presumably you will claim to mean them literally and not figuratively. But really, nobody is going to assume in good faith that you’re a doctor or a psychologist. So, again, the result is to undermine your whole point and make it seem like empty bloviating.

Hope that helps.

Indeed, this is the case with Revolut, a bank which literally requires iOS or Android spyware to sign up and use. But it’s rare. And a reason to NEVER USE that bank.