why cell phones don’t authenticate the towers they connect to.

I believe it's because they assume it's not necessary because it was until now

• prohibitively expensive, but now a "tower" is less than 2k EUR e.g. https://www.crowdsupply.com/ukama/ukama
• prohibitively complex, see above, namely you don't need to be a TelCo engineer to get it going
• probably illegal, namely you needed (and I bet still need in most places) wireless band allocation before you could deploy anything

... so I imagine there was no authentication because there was no practical threat beside few "fun" examples in CCC or DEF Con.

No idea what your analogy about non conventional medicine is about. Feel free to explain.

just be visible to your home network’s ISP instead of your phone’s ISP.

Indeed, which is already what I mentioned, namely another group. It's about the threat model namely if you trust one ISP more than another. I believe your understood that but chose not to acknowledge it and I'm not sure why but maybe it related to your analogy that I didn't get.

Edit: if you and others are interested in the topic I recommend https://splintercon.net/ plenty of resources on the topic.

PS: FWIW I didn't suggest VPN is the solution to all problems but they do alleviate some. The point is one must understand both how they work and their OWN threat model rather than an idealized one.

even programs that may likely just sit there until the next release comes along. ... the only thing you can do is install flatpaks for your preferred programs so that they’d be up to date. ... Wine (gamers, you’re gonna cry a lot unless you work it around with flatpaks

I already posted on this a while ago but that's is a recurring misconception. No distribution, literally 0, provides all software to the latest version or to the version one expects. Consequently IMHO it is perfectly acceptable to go beyond what the official package manager of the distribution offers. It can be flatpaks, am, build from source, etc but the point precisely is that the distribution is about a shared practical common ground to build on top of. A distribution is how to efficiently get to a good place. I also run Debian stable on my desktop and for gaming, I use Steam. It allows me to get Wine, yes, but also Proton and even ProtonFix so that I basically point and click to run games. I do NOT tinker to play Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Clair Obscur, etc and my hardware is well supported.

So... sure if you consider a distribution as something you must accept as-is and NOT rely on any of the available tools to get the latest software you actually need, can be games but can be tools e.g. Blender, Cura, etc, then you WILL have a tough time but that's the case for all distributions anyway.

TL;DR: a distribution is the base layer to build on. Its package manager, on Debian and elsewhere, is not the mandatory and sole way to get the software you need.

Debian stable.

Everybody think they are a special snowflake who needs bleeding edge, or a specific package manager or DE or whatever. Truth is 99.99% do not. They just like to believe they do, claim they do, try it, inflict self pain for longer than they need, convince themselves that truly they are, because of the pain, special.

Chill, just go with stable, it's actually fine.

Edit: posted from Arch, not even sarcasm.

I''d argue changing who can see your data from either a large group to a smaller one or one you do trust vs one you do not trust precisely is protecting your privacy.

Also FWIW you can host your VPN, you do not have to rely on a commercial VPN provider.

a VPN doesn’t protect your privacy

Does from your ISP unless they do deep packet inspection and related techniques.

I'm lazy, bought my phone from Murena, they deGoogled it for me.

Interesting, could be nice to help move away from Firefox Profile by being able to import from it rather than "just" the current installed Firefox instance.

Who in the EU wants a US car

Bunch of people according to most EU capitals where one can see, sadly, plenty of Swatzicars.

move somewhere I can get around with just a bicycle.

So... FWIW that'd be Brussels and I bet most European cities. By bike you can get your food in, get to the nearby Brico to fix pretty much anything in your house, get deliveries with national post service, but you can cycle all the way to the airport (if somehow you don't want to use the train), park there and get... well pretty much anywhere else in the World.

There were and still are into quantum computing.

They are absolute champions of tech-washing and green-washing.

It's literally anything to say, do and spending money on to make people forget that their core business is actually advertising.

What I mean is that MacOS is proprietary and runs on specific hardware, it's by design not meant to be interoperable so it's not "just" popularity.

Proton is built on top of Wine in order to make sure games specifically work well.

You can check https://www.protondb.com/ before buying a game (with Steam or otherwise) to insure it works as expected. A lot will work with 0 tinkering but some might next extra command line parameters.

You might get the same result with Wine directly but Proton it doing everything it can to "hide" away those (hopefully small) challenges away from the final user, a gamer (like me) who wants to just sit down and play.

So... the heuristic is basically :

• games? Proton
• not games but Windows applications that somehow do not have a better open-source equivalent running on Linux? Wine

Edit: for the anecdote I wrote this reply on my SteamDeck, the gaming console by Valve coming with Steam, and Proton, and running Linux to... just play BUT I also use it to work while traveling. So yes, works like a charm!

Isn't it what passthrough is for?

Feels very arbitrary. Why would I care about say MacOS versus FreeBSD or say NeXTSTEP (just to be provocative)?

Anyway I'm being pulled away from the actual argument, the "bare metal" argument is about performances, isn't it?

True but wouldn't also literacy be about knowing what defaults are and how to change them?

Helping others is nice but if it's babysitting rather than raising them up, then they can't in turn help others.

Meanwhile me as a barbarian installing Debian and copying my ~/.bashrc file (and a few others) if not just remounting /home/ in the new installation every few years.

Does it matter if the overhead is practically irrelevant?

A good example to "play" with could be https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ which does highlight the idea of "bits of identifying information" namely :

"A “bit” is a basic unit of information for computers. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values, often represented as "1" or "0", for example. In your results from Cover Your Tracks, some metrics may be listed as “1” or “0”, or “true” or “false”, indicating whether a setting is enabled or disabled. While each individual metric’s details may seem like a small amount of information, when combined with your browser’s other metrics, they can uniquely identify your browser. Your results are measured in “bits of identifying information,” which is a combined summary of all these metrics."

Point being, not all behaviors, conscious or not, explicit or not, lead to the same amount of bits. Some are VERY valuable, others are basically pointless. Knowing the difference means not spending a lot of energy fighting without making a difference.

If you are into that could be interesting to learn about metadata, e.g EXIF data, and how anything can be used for fingerprinting. What's interesting IMHO is to pragmatically know how valuable a specific piece of data or metadata is useful for fingerprinting, namely how identifying it truly is. For example knowing if a file comes from Android or iOS is too generic to be useful whereas timestamp with geolocation data segments the potential space a lot more.