[-] communism@lemmy.ml 5 points 16 hours ago

fwiw, the latest pixels have 7 years of support which should be long enough to cover the phone till it breaks. But yeah, I'm with you about the e-waste, it's awful for the environment to have to throw away a perfectly usable phone because of a lack of security updates.

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 1 points 17 hours ago

Linux phones definitely are a thing, but depending on your threat model, they may not be enough. There isn't a smartphone which is 100% open-source from all hardware, to firmware, to software. But there's a variety of phones that are known to run Linux. The Google Pixel 3a is known for working very well with Ubuntu Touch. There's also the PinePhone, Purism phones, and there will be others too that support "desktop Linux" (specified for pedantry, since Android is also a type of Linux I guess).

You also don't need a smartphone. They do still sell "dumb mobile phones" that just do SMS and phone calls; I've bought some recently. You can get them for really cheap too, like in the range of 20 USD/EUR kind of price. I don't think that particularly contributes to privacy since these phones are also proprietary and easily backdoored, but I suppose then it's missing out on much of the spyware that smartphones have installed as software. If it's location data you're worried about, sticking it in a faraday cage should be good enough, but if you need to receive unexpected calls that won't work. If you're paranoid about the mic recording, while I think that would be an unlikely and unfeasible way of spying, you could also physically block that by putting the phone in something soundproof, but again you'd need some way to hear that the phone is ringing. For camera paranoia just tape over the camera.

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 1 points 17 hours ago

You mean getting a privacy-respecting phone? You could get a Pixel with GrapheneOS as one of the most popular options. There are also a number of OSes and phone manufacturers competing in the privacy-concerned market you could look into. Note that privacy is not the same thing as security, and for security, GrapheneOS is the clear winner.

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 1 points 17 hours ago

I don't think it will have any particularly interesting or consequential impact really. It's not really having any impact except giving marketers some new favourite words at the moment, and I don't foresee that changing, until consumers become tired of it and it stops being profitable to say your product contains some vacuous "AI", and then we all forget about it, is my prediction. LLMs would likely persist as just a fun toy some people like to use, occasionally used as a search engine with better comprehension of human grammar, and occasionally used by students to cheat on assignments, but not used for anything super serious or plastered over every ad for a tech product.

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 2 points 18 hours ago

Use end-to-end encrypted email if the people you're emailing are willing to set that up (not hard, but a lot of people have learned helplessness when it comes to tech), and/or you could host your own email. I don't think there's much point to looking for an email provider that "respects privacy" because that's simply working on a pinkie promise that they don't read your unencrypted emails. I suppose it's better if they claim they don't read your emails, than if they don't make that claim at all, but beyond that I don't think it matters with external email providers.

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 43 points 18 hours ago

No fun allowed

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 34 points 2 days ago

Can't believe a McD's worker snitched... you are not getting paid enough for that

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 19 points 2 days ago

That being said, he says Waiter not Waitress. Kind of putting words into the post to assume it’s about hitting on waitresses.

Yeah, my reading of the tweet is that Luigi thinks if people would get used to interacting with people through being served by a person instead of a conveyor belt, maybe people would socialise more and couple up more? Which is still reactionary but not super weird

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 54 points 2 days ago

I mean the type of person to do assassinations would probably have a nuts incoherent ideology. I think most communists can think of more productive/worthwhile political activities to do than assassinating one CEO.

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 4 points 4 days ago

Honestly don't remember why I signed up. I like it though. Kind of similar vibe to when I used Reddit except much better. It's got some nice small-ish (but not too small) communities for FOSS stuff.

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 43 points 4 days ago

Not really "secretly" bad for you, but all the plastic in our lives. I wonder how we'll ever replace it cause everything you buy at the supermarket (in developed countries) is wrapped in plastic.

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 16 points 5 days ago

It's really easy to go mouseless on Linux/Unix. Just use as many TUI programs as possible since none of them will be mouse-oriented.

Also check out this list: https://github.com/erikw/vim-keybindings-everywhere-the-ultimate-list

A lot of people (myself included) like vim keybindings and want them in other programs, and of course using vim keybindings is inherently mouseless.

Off the top of my head, some software I use:

  • river as my wayland compositor
  • lf for a file browser
  • imv for an image viewer
  • Librewolf with Vimium-C to browse the web
  • mpd + ncmpcpp for listening to music (you can also use cmus if you don't want to use mpd)

I don't use them, but you can also use something like Mutt, Neomutt, or Aerc for an email client, and use CLI bittorrent clients and password managers.

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Duck typing (web.archive.org)
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I've been thinking about this for a while, that there's kind of not a great solution, that I know of or can think of, for long-form internal political discussions within an organisation. There are of course existing platforms that are not private (like you could have a Facebook group for instance).

There's obviously a lot of encrypted chat apps out there but they're all more "texting" form and are not great for like forum-style discussion.

The best I can think of might be Matrix, but it's more of a chatroom style format and I've not tried using it for this forum-style of discussion which I'm not sure if it works smoothly for.

Tbh a mailing list would kind of be my ideal (I assume there's mailing list software out there that integrates with PGP so we can protect our emails) but so many people in organising spaces are pretty tech-resistant boomers (no offence to the older generation, I'm aware it's a generalisation that doesn't apply to everyone) and it'd be hard to get everyone to use PGP I think. Also email is just not very secure in the first place and would expose a lot of metadata, making it not suitable for organisations that are heavily criminalised or otherwise have a higher threat model. Not to mention that the mail server in question would be able to read the emails sent to the mailing list, as it has to decrypt emails sent to the mailing list in order to encrypt it with all recipients' personal PGP keys. And there's just so many points of failure in terms of all messages to the mailing list getting accessed if just one member gets compromised.

Maybe I'm missing an obvious solution, in which case please tell me of course. But this is just an issue that's crossed my mind over the years as I've watched organisations use insecure platforms for long-form discussion, and I cringe, but I don't think I know the ideal solution either.

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submitted 1 month ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

I was interested in hosting my own mail server that provides a similar level of privacy for users as Protonmail, ie the server admin cannot read any emails, even those which are not E2EE with PGP. Is there a self-hostable solution to this?

I'm aware the server admin can't read emails that were sent encrypted using the user's PGP key, but most emails I get are automated emails from companies/services/etc without the option to upload a public key to send the user encrypted email. If you're with a service like Protonmail, the server admin still cannot read even these emails.

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submitted 1 month ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.ml

I don't own any controllers.

I started playing Dark Souls 3 which I now understand has a controller strongly recommended. I may as well just look into getting a controller of some kind as I have a few games that have somewhat janky kbm controls and are better enjoyed with a controller.

I just wanted to ask for general advice about what controller to get in terms of compatibility. Also if someone has made a controller that's more in the spirit of foss that also works fine with Steam and Proton games that would be nice?

I know Steam is pretty good with Playstation controllers and I used to use a PS controller (don't remember what generation) with some native Linux Steam games, not sure how the whole PS vs Xbox controller thing is affected by running games through Proton if at all? If it matters let me know, and I'll see if I can procure a controller for myself.

45
submitted 2 months ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

Hi, was wondering if anyone knew of an app where you can use your camera to scan documents (like Adobe Scan) which is FOSS.

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submitted 3 months ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world

You still have to pay for it because it costs money to make. But it's completely open-source beer so you can recreate it yourself if you don't want to buy it pre-made, or you want to modify the recipe.

I have no idea how to make beer otherwise I'd have a crack at this shitpost myself...

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submitted 3 months ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/unixporn@lemmy.ml
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submitted 3 months ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/technology@hexbear.net

I'm having a bit of trouble researching what country would be best to rent a VPS in, in terms of not getting communist content on there censored. Because obviously if content is deemed illegal in the country the server is hosted in, the VPS host is obligated to take it down (understandable enough, you can't really ask a company to break the law for you).

I'm also concerned with privacy laws too and protection from them.

I've heard various good things about "freedom of speech laws" and privacy laws in Iceland, Romania, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Finland, but I don't know the details.

Does anyone have any input? And if you recommend a certain host country, do you know of reputable VPS providers in that country?

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submitted 3 months ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

I've only ever used desktop Linux and don't have server admin experience (unless you count hosting Minecraft servers on my personal machine lol). Currently using Artix and Void for my desktop computers as I've grown fond of runit.

I'm going to get a VPS for some personal projects and am at the point of deciding what distro I want to use. While I imagine that systemd is generally the best for servers due to the far more widespread support (therefore it's better for the stability needs of a server), I have a somewhat high threat model compared to most people so I was wondering if maybe I should use something like runit instead which is much smaller and less vulnerable. Security needs are also the reason why I'm leaning away from using something like Debian, because how outdated the packages are would likely leave me open to vulnerabilities. Correct me if I'm misunderstanding any of that though.

Other than that I'm not sure what considerations there are to make for my server distro. Maybe a more mainstream distro would be more likely to have the software in its repos that I need to host my various projects. On the other hand, I don't have any experience with, say, Fedora, and it'd probably be a lot easier for me to stick to something I know.

In terms of what I want to do with the VPS, it'll be more general-purpose and hosting a few different projects. Currently thinking of hosting a Matrix instance, a Mastodon instance, a NextCloud instance, an SMTP server, and a light website, but I'm sure I'll want to stick more miscellaneous stuff on there too.

So what distro do you use for your server hosting? What things should I consider when picking a distro?

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submitted 3 months ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/news@hexbear.net
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submitted 3 months ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/palestine@lemmy.ml
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submitted 4 months ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/firefox@lemmy.ml

I use a 14px bitmap font as part of my system theme. It is set to display at 14px in my gtk theme which works for tabs, bookmarks, right-click menus, and other parts of Firefox UI, but the Firefox address bar doesn't seem to be the same size and is blurry.

How do I change the font size of the address bar? Is there an element I can target in userChrome?

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communism

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