Who's winning here, exactly?
Who's winning here, exactly?
This year we made good progress. You know, Linux gaming becoming better, Reddit fucking up, Metaverse failing etc. But on the other hand Big Tech has or are planning to make some moves. Such as, Google's Web Enviroment Integrity API (EDIT: they backed off), UK's encryption bill, etc.
So what do you think of the future? I'm currently optimistic. I think the best recent event was Reddit fucking up. Obviously one of the biggest information sources going down that path isn't something to celebrate. But it was bound to happen. I believe decentralized social networks becoming more popular is what Aaron Swartz would have wanted if he saw how Reddit was being managed.
I am seeing it as a net positive. Especially because of the Windows 12 bit, the more Windows is an inconvenience, the more will jump ship, and some will land on linux.
What are some good distros these days to dip my toes in as a gamer who is certainly no pro but knows his way around/isn't afraid of a terminal window?
Mint is my go-to recommendation.
Ubuntu is a decent place to start.
Before anybody decides to jump down my throat over it, there are some very good reasons to not use Ubuntu generally. I know.
That said, I still recommend it as a first distro because it's
- well supported - if someone puts out Linux support, it's likely been tested on Ubuntu.
- simple to install - everything from WSL to a live boot USB drive to a full install, you've got lots of options
- pragmatic - yes, it's compromised vs being truly FOSS. Otoh, your consumer grade Windows-supported hardware will likely work out of the box. For a first timer, I think that's critical.
There are many other, better distros out there for specific needs. Manjaro is a great one for gaming in particular, but can be a little harder to get setup with, or to find help for when things go wrong. But I still think Ubuntu is the best "starter" distro I've encountered.
Not the best solution but right now I am using Geforce now. Not gaming on linux but I am gaming while on linux. Didn't need to touch my windows partition for the past 3 months.
Imagine Windoge going subscription or "free" but "ad-supported" or something horrible. I personally doubt that even this would make any of my friends switch to Linux, they'd probably bs more inclined to research adblocking on DNS level or Adguard/Pihole. Or going back to pirating Windoge ...
I wish I was as optimistic as you are about people ditching Windows. I see that happening only with people who are too poor to afford a monthly subscription. The (relatively) poor people are also likely to adopt Linux/BSD more since they have modest expectations that Linux/BSD can meet. The rest find it hard to adapt, even though there are good alternatives. Imagine people complaining that you need a CS degree to use Linux.
Some users are required to use Windows. It could be the professional software for work only runs on Windows. Or system administrator are forced to use it in their IT environment. You don't want it to get worse, as it will be more pain for them. You want the alternatives to be better, easy to get, (like every PC comes with a menu with what OS do you want to install). Full software support for everything would be a dream.
On a Operating system/free software level we're doing fine. Not great (still no true open source phone OS, Firefox has like 3% market share, lots of closed/unfixable hardware) but you can work and have fun using OSS and it's not going anywhere. On a global economy level we're as fucked as always. Big tech isn't going anywhere and 99% of people will choose convenience over ethics every single time. We're a minority here and always will be.
Aren't custom ROM's open source? It would be nice if you could buy a phone from big brands with it preinstalled already. That would make it so much more accesible.
The core is the surveillance advertising, to create incommings with profiling and tracking user data, practiced by practically all large US companies. This is the underlying evil that must be eradicated, not only by putting the user's privacy in question, degrading him to simple raw material and merchandise, but also security by filtering sensitive data, such as medical and banking. This requires a deep review to eliminate it as a means of income for companies. With this, an important step towards a free internet is already achieved.
It is essential to educate users to ALWAYS read the TOS and PP of a software or service before using it, avoiding those who obviously share user data with third parties and looking for alternative products, which there surely are. It is the company's ethics regarding the user that is most important today. If there are more and more users who set these criteria, these companies will have to change or they will run out of users.
eg Google has excellent products that, from a technical aspect, are impeccable and many of them without a real alternative, it is their ethics regarding the user, which makes them unacceptable, this is the point and trying to tell people that, yes, the product is Good, but the price is your sovereignty, look for another one, perhaps not as complete, but it serves you the same and does not turn you into a simple product.
It is the user who determines the market, but only if they learn not to fall into the trap of big companies with products that shine so beautifully. It is the user who must determine what he needs, not the company.
Reading TOS and Privacy Policies are a useless endeavor. They aren’t written to empower consumers or inform them abou their meaningful choices, they’re written to disclaim the maximum amount of liability. That said, I agree with everything else you said. Data brokers, surveillance advertising, and the lack of any meaningful regulations are what got us into this mess - but all those wrongs can be righted. California just passed a law to let you delete your information from every registered data broker, forever. When given the choice consumers universally opt out of surveillance advertising. And though they’re aligning on opt out frameworks, more and more states are paying comprehensive consumer privacy laws. There’s some reason to be optimistic - but as someone in those trenches… not THAT optimistic.
No, at least in the EU, what is stated in the TOS and PP must be true by law. If companies pass data to third parties, without specifying it in these legal documents, they may face million-dollar fines and even closure. The same as in all legal documents. As much as everyone at the beginning says that they greatly respect user privacy, or similar, they must say in the rest of the text if they pass data to third parties when they do so. Therefore TOS and PP are reliable documents, and even give the user a legal document of proof, if the company does not comply with these conditions. After all, it is a contract between the company and the user who signs it, if they create an account. But this should bother you to read it, as it surely would also in other contracts.
Google didn't back off. They're going forward with it, but in smaller pieces. Their first piece is going after streamed and stored media, instead of the web as a whole.
How do you control a population? You take away their rights, one little piece at a time, so they don't notice the change. Same concept as how you eat an elephant: one bite at a time.
This time next year, the internet will be unrecognizable and massively corporate (more so than it is now), unless we, the internet population, fight back and win.
The future I want to foresee is one where everybody runs and keeps their data locally (or their dedicated VPS):
- where everyone has access to at least 10Gbps symmetric fiber optic connection to the internet at their home/apartment at affordable price (doesn't have to be unlimited, but pricing per TB of bandwith usage needs to be less than USD $1 as it is the actual cost of operating & peerage)
- whereas net neutrality is a prerequisite to any corporation/organization/government/municipality getting network backbone peerage with other network operators
- whereas registering to a website or service actually creates a local secure database/bucket/pod where that website/service organizes/sort/manipulates our data and stores all generated modified data/metadata within our local personnal server, every time we interact with that same external website/service it gets access to the database/bucket previously created. Look into the Solid protocol specification to get a better idea (it doesn't have to be that specific protocol)
- whereas FIDO2 or WebAuth or their successor is widely accepted for passkey implementation or just multifactor authentication
- whereas all communications are direct peer-to-peer without transiting third party servers (as in not managed by either communicating party)
Moreover, even better would be to teach everyone from elementary school various concepts (from simpler to more complex gradually) of science, programming, critical thinking and empathy.
If I may dare to push even further, with technology (secure authentication, work from home familiarity, collaborative softwares, digital signing, distributed version control), give every citizen (from the age of 12 or earlier; because one has to start learning early to make mistakes, understand and form good habits) the ability to vote/abstain on every proposition, motion, new/modified law and decision regarding their own country. Have a publicly accessible historical account of every vote by everyone (excluding secret ballots obviously). Most importantly, every year end, 4 years, 10 years, 25 years, 60 years have a collective review/retrospective of past motions/decisions that were implemented and let everyone vote on if those were overall beneficial or harmful for the country/state/municipality. Empower those who tend to regularly vote and tend to historically vote beneficially (at least 70% of their votes after they reached 25 years old) for the country/state/municipality to become a local representative.
I know it's getting wordy and perhaps a bit complicated but keep up with me. Give accredited/qualified individual in very specific fields the retractable/overridable power to have their votes on certain very specific motion/law/decision be inherited by active delegation by any other citizens up to a limit of ~290 (Bernard–Killworth number) per qualified inviduals. For example, a citizen could separetely delegate his/her votes:
- relating to healthcare to their own family doctor if they like/respect their judgment or even a familly member who is licensed for medical practice, it doesn't matter who as long as they are qualified for the subject matter
- relating to renovating a specific bridge to their neighbor who is a general contractor or their nephew who is a civil engineer
- relating to military procurement to their veteran uncle still with a sharp mind and keenly informed with world event or even their weekly indoor hockey teammate who is a unstoppable adventurer exploring every part if the world but also a office worker and a reservist
All while always preserving the option to change their vote anytime for any reason; by delegating to someone else for specific issue/concerns or voting on their own (always takes priority over delegation).
Well… I am being too hopeful and probably pushed things far beyond what is realistic, but it is nice to make thought experiments on what may be possible with technology.
I can't believe I'm seeing someone mention Solid in the wild on Lemmy. That's awesome. It's an idea that really could change the world. And I hope it really does.
Currently it certainly feels like OS is kicking the crap out of big tech in the AI space. Tech might have the money, but they don’t have enough brains to win the intelligence battle against the collective weight of nerds worldwide lol.
Could you give some examples for us please?
TBH your best bet to check out what is trending on Github everyday for a little bit, it’s roughly 90% OS AI projects of varying states of maturity. One of the more refined ones is taking the form in phind.com, which is a pretty great programming site, supposedly beating GPT-4’s capabilities!
Windows 12 is not going subscription. This was a bad take by a worse source (who apologized).
Stop spreading this shit!
Oops. Sorry mate. I'll edit that out now.
I think decentralization is the key, but not necessarily these new fangled takes like the fediverse which have their own problems.
Just everyone build a damn site for yourself and if I want to know what Jeff Poff is up to I can go to jeffpoff.com and otherwise set up an rss feed for everyone I wanna keep up with. Community sites can cover needs for communities but otherwise why tf do I need Facebook for you to show me you went on vacation last month?
I have hope that spritely.institute is going to address a number of the obvious problems with the current fediverse.
we will lose until big tech gets broken
money begets money is the cancer of the world
I think the TV series Upload is nailing a lot of the future we will all be in store for and how everything will be pay as we go and for those that can't pay, the fee free life is going to be pretty limited and full of ads for the little we can do.
Metaverse never reached a state from which failure became an option.
People are retarded and like being controlled. It's a bleak future
I disagree. People just have bigger things to worry about, like their livelihoods. If you don't know where your next paycheck comes from, you don't have the capacity to care about such abstract issues like the current privacy struggles. I think this is why we need better social policies first and foremost
They do, they just willingly choose not to or they support the oligarchs. We have bills to pay yet we're willing to take the time to understand how things work, so they have no excuse
Privacy is unironcally getting better, it's only bad because of the vulnerability in our current web design we're hardening against. Https and hello encrypt go a long way to hide our traffic, definitely not anonymous though. E2ee has never been as prevalent as it is now.
Corporations spying are obviously bad, but if it's possible, then it's inevitable that it was going to happen regardless and it's a good thing we're hardening our protocols against what was fundamentally a design flaw that would inevitably be exploited eventually.
Decentralization has never been nearly as popular or robust as it is now. I spend 90% of my social media on decentralized apps, which I could never say that before. My phone is as private as it has ever been with GrapheneOS.
Laws are getting more robust for privacy, some of the time anyways. Fascist laws in the name of "think of the children!" are trying to break encryption and privacy and are constantly a battlefield we need to be extremely vigilant over.
Devil's advocate:
Have you guys ever considered that the information these companies are making off of you just isn't that valuable? Your phone number, email, house address, skin color, sexuality, height, gender, fashion, job, and friends are not secrets. Anybody can know these things about you. We're on the Internet and web-based companies want to interact with people, if you don't like that go to a different website. But you'll never have a privacy agnostic internet experience because PEOPLE KNOW THINGS ABOUT EACHOTHER. That's one of the things about being people.
I remember reading somewhere (years ago, too lazy to find a source) that Google might take in $30/year off of a single Google user. That's absolutely pennies, that's not worth anything. Google only works because of their scale, and I bet a tiny drop in user activity of like 10% would destroy them. Most tech companies are just trying to make up more things to base promises on for their investors, those companies have no real value, they're all basically theoretical. So who cares? Just use them while you need it and if they fizzle out then all the data they had on us is worthless if not gone and the opensource community will step up like it always does.
The devil's advocate forgets why the data has a value in the first place. It is used to control and manipulate to the point where elections can be won by the party that has a better understanding of advertisement and the value of the data of their costumers/voters. Thinking you are immune to manipulation because you know you are manipulated sadly doesn't work. Don't use free services if you know they act in bad faith.