• 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I would say, if anything, the fear is likely under-blown.

    Sure, you’ll find many users here on Lemmy who hate what Google are doing… but we’re not the typical internet user. I mean, we specifically found this niche platform called Lemmy rather than use one of the mainstream social media platforms. The typical “normie” who uses Chrome probably has no idea about the privacy risks of using it (either in its current form or when the Topics API is being used). We need to help others understand, and hopefully convince these people to move over to Firefox.


  • Except you’re giving your passwords in an encrypted format. So if the company is trustworthy, it’s safe to let them store your passwords because it’s encrypted in such a way that even the company who own the password manager couldn’t access your passwords even if they wanted to.

    (Note the caveat of “IF the company is trustworthy”, which rules out Lastpass)

    Now I accept that there are legitimate arguments against storing passwords in the cloud via a password manager… so in that case, you may wish to use a local password manager (like Keepass) instead. But realistically, a typical person isn’t capable of memorising lots of unique, secure passwords… so the passwords need to be written down or stored in a password manager, just to avoid weak passwords or password reuse.


  • You don’t need to apologise. The comment OP asked how Canada was doing, then the next commenter gave their opinion on the UK, not Canada.

    It confused me as I read through the comment chain, as I was also expecting a comment on Canada (not UK).

    It’s probably worth mentioning that the UK has a parliamentary system, not a presidential system. So the people elect a party, and the party leader then becomes prime minister (but the party can decide amongst itself who the next party leader should be, and this is usually done by a vote among party members).

    Now there are legitimate criticisms of whether this is a democratic process, but the person who you replied to seemed to suggest that the recent change of prime ministers without elections was unusual and evidence of the UK “plummeting”. This user is entitled to his/her opinion, of course, but I just wanted to point out that this is actually constitutional and common practice in the UK.

    “Far from being unusual, it’s actually the norm for Prime Ministers to enter office outside of a general election.”

    Source: https://fullfact.org/news/unelected-prime-ministers-common-or-not/


  • Apple devices are only more “private” in the sense that the prevent third parties from collecting your data (don’t get me wrong, this is great), but then proceed to go and collect the same data for their own uses instead.

    While I accept that Apple are far from perfect, my understanding is that even their data collection for their own purposes is still less than the data collection that Google use for their own purposes. And since their are only two major phone OS (Android and iOS), we can only choose between the lesser of the two evils.

    After all, do you want to give your data to a company which is the world’s biggest ad company? Or instead give your data to a company whose business model is convincing people to buy $1000+ phone every year?

    But yeah, I agree that Apple’s anti-consumer practices are awful. I wasn’t aware of the aftermarket parts re-using chips just for the serial numbers and I’m not even the least bit surprised. We need governments to bring in legislation to protect right to repair, because companies like Apple can’t be reasonable.


  • I hate the tribalism regarding Apple products. There are loyal fanboys who won’t hear a bad word about Apple, and then there are Apple haters who criticise everything about them.

    I wish we had some more nuance in this debate. The reality is that there are advantages and disadvantages to Apple products. I’ll outline a few:

    Advantages

    • Long iOS support. Typically you can expect an iPhone to be supported for 5-7 years, which is well above the average in the industry.
    • No bloatware or adverts on the iPhone
    • Better privacy than Google Android/Microsoft Windows
    • High-end hardware, e.g. M1 chip in MacBooks.
    • User friendly design. Nice user experience.

    Disadvantages

    • Overpriced. Seriously all Apple products are more expensive than the competition.
    • Anti-consumer business practices that influence the industry. They normalised removing the headphone jack and using non-removable batteries, which other manufacturers followed. Another anti-consumer practice is using their proprietary Lighting port, rather than USB (luckily the EU should be forcing them to adopt USB-C and removable batteries soon). Also, no SD card slot because they want you to use iCloud
    • Walled garden. No support for side-loading apps
    • Required to use iTunes to add/remove music to the iPhone, which is a problem if you use Linux (you’d have to use Wine to install the Windows version as a workaround)