Onihikage

Onihikage@beehaw.org · 4 days ago

They were trying to send this link and I’m going to strongly disagree with them - that system is a substantial downgrade from a Steam Deck. The GPU is a GT 1030; on top of being Nvidia, it’s 8 years and 4 generations old and was bottom-tier when it was new.

That said, the idea is sound. Buying an actual gaming desktop PC from a few generations ago can be a very budget-friendly option, but shipping an assembled PC is a nightmare for multiple reasons, and even more risky secondhand. If you’re going to buy a used prebuilt PC, find one locally and pick it up yourself, don’t have it shipped to you.

Onihikage@beehaw.org · 4 days ago

If you were planning to buy parts new and build the computer yourself, I threw together a parts list for an all-AMD system that’s appropriate for Linux (I recommend Bazzite) and has a good price-to-performance ratio; $1200 to beat the pants off a Steam Deck and be very future-proof in terms of hardware features, platform support, and general performance.

If you’re thinking about buying used older-gen parts or a prebuilt system, compare gaming benchmarks of the GPU or CPU you’re looking at to the components in this build to see if it’s an upgrade or downgrade. This is probably the best price-to-performance prebuilt I’ve found in a few minutes on Amazon, couple hundred less than the parts list above, but it’s on the older AM4 platform (5000-series Ryzen), an older generation GPU (6600), and much less storage.

Lastly, obligatory mention of the last PC build guide you’ll ever need. Good luck!

Onihikage@beehaw.org · 2 months ago

[…] I’d like to be able to backup to my home server. The main thing would probably just be my photos […]

For the photos, since you have a home server, have you heard of Immich? For anything else, there was a time when I could have recommended syncthing-android, but development on that has been discontinued, though you can still try using it. Some privacy-conscious cloud services may allow you to sync app folders, backing up WhatsApp that way, but I have no experience with that.

is the 8a likely to drop much in price after that? I don’t know how quickly the prices drop but considering the 8a is currently £500 I can’t see it dropping to <£300

Instead of buying straight from Google, you can consider buying a refurbished 8a off ebay or something local - my last two Pixel purchases have been through that method. It tends to be substantially cheaper than buying new, even as little as 6 months after the product launch, and the 8a launched 9 months ago. Just be cautious of seller ratings, reputations, and consistency - prices are lower there because it’s more of a risk for the buyer.

Onihikage@beehaw.org · 2 months ago

https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e

Thanks for the link, that’s a lot more context than the usual reactionary “Andy Yen said one nice thing about a Republican therefore he’s fascist pro-Trump MAGA” takes I’ve been seeing. Not only does it more or less disprove that narrative, it makes me question how much of the hate against him lately is genuine and how much of it has been seeded and signal-boosted by nation-state actors who don’t want people to use encrypted communications.

Yen is clearly trying to be nonpartisan and praise what he sees as good for privacy while pointing out abuses of power, regardless of who has the power at the moment. He sees this as his way of adding weight to the scale in favor of better privacy and tearing down big tech. I know many in my country and on the web are hyper-polarized and addicted to anger, to the point that if someone says anything even slightly positive about their perceived political enemy, it’s seen as legitimizing and aligning with that enemy, but I don’t believe that’s a healthy or productive mindset to have. I believe that kind of divisive attitude is preventing us from uniting with those who should be agreeable to our cause, and that’s exactly what the oligarchs want. It’s making us weak.

I’ve been on the fence for a while since this whole thing started, because I do use a paid Proton email, and it sounded bad, but I kept getting this nagging feeling I wasn’t seeing the full picture. That’s gone now - Andy may be politically and/or socially inept, and he may have a different perspective on what it means to support privacy and democracy, but I think it’s clear his heart is in the right place, and the work he and Proton are continuing to do for tech privacy is helping to erode authoritarian power structures, including Trump’s.

Onihikage@beehaw.org · 3 months ago

Always has been.

Onihikage@beehaw.org · 9 months ago

Try KittyToy (itch.io).

Onihikage@beehaw.org · 11 months ago

The ELI5 for Fedora’s atomic desktops is that if Windows had an Atomic Desktop version, Program Files and most of the Windows folder would be read only, and each program you installed yourself would go into its own folder in your user directory. That’s the basic idea. It’s harder to screw up an Atomic system as long as you stick to containerized app formats like flatpak/appimage whenever possible. It makes it easier for everyone to diagnose problems, and easier for users to roll back if an update has problems. Even if you were to install it right now, you could use one simple command to “roll back” to any image from the last three months.

The benefit of Bazzite is you have all of the above, plus a lot of gaming-related stuff preinstalled which, if you were to install them yourself in a normal Fedora environment, you’d likely have to spend a lot of time just learning how they’re supposed to be configured, how they interact, which versions have problems, and how to troubleshoot problems when an update to one app breaks a prerequisite for something else; eventually you end up in config hell instead of actually using your computer. With Bazzite, the image maintainers are the ones in config hell - they work out the kinks, app versioning, communicate with upstream to fix issues, all that, so your system should be in the most functional state that a Linux system can be, so you only have to think about using your apps.

tl;dr

Atomic Desktops are more resilient to randomly breaking from updates or user error, and are easier to revert to a prior state if problems do arise
Bazzite is a custom Atomic image with lots of gaming stuff preinstalled and preconfigured to work properly out of the box
If you’re a gamer and wanting to try out Linux, Bazzite is going to be the least painful way to get your feet wet.
Immutable distros are excellent for daily driving. I daily drive one myself!

Onihikage@beehaw.org · 2 years ago

Everyone knowing your identity? The drawbacks would far outweigh the benefits. However, there may be a path to the benefits of a Real ID sign-up system that mitigates the possible harms.

First of all, let’s get this out of the way - this “minimal harm” approach would only be feasible if the government could either reach some level of technical competency or farm out the task to heavily restricted private corporations that do have that competence. If we presume that’s the case (unlikely), the question becomes whether the people would be willing to accept it. If we presume the majority of citizens also want such a thing (a tall order to be sure, I certainly don’t want it), then the question becomes what sort of system would be able to maximize privacy, and thus safety, while still requiring your real identity to be involved in creating online accounts? What would that system look like?

(Collapsed for your convenience because I wrote way too much about this hypothetical)

We’d absolutely need a level of abstraction. The government knows who you are anyway, but the business entity you’re interfacing with would get a unique token from the government that is not your actual Real ID number but which is a hash generated from the business’s (salted) ID number and your own salted ID number (idk I’m not a cryptographer).

Signing up for an account would resemble using Google or Facebook to create an account; you’d be redirected to some third party Identity Verification System (IVS) which would handle identity verification and redirect you back to the account creation with the extra piece of information provided by the third party. You’d still pick a username, password, etc.; the government database would only be used to generate that unique token.

More specifically, the website or service would only be passed a token from the IVS, uniquely generated based on the company ID and the person’s ID, and the government database would only keep the token, not any of the data used to compute it. (That’s not counting China and other authoritarian states, of course - they’d definitely retain all that information and have a list of all the sites you have accounts with. This wouldn’t solve that problem.) This would make the IVS database virtually useless on its own, as an attacker who compromises the database has no way of knowing which token is associated with which website, and cannot derive it themselves unless they’ve also compromised one or more target websites at the same time. The cryptographic stuff would be rotated once it’s known that a breach has occurred, so such breaches would likely be limited to state actors or black-hat groups that hoard zero-days.

Now, what would all this accomplish? What would it make possible that currently isn’t ~~outside of China~~?

Unique website signups - one person, one account, and if it’s banned, that’s it, you don’t get to log in to that site ever again until you’re unbanned. Your only option to get around a ban would be to commit identity fraud, which would be quickly traced back to you if everything really was using this system.
If you block someone, they can’t just make a new account and keep harassing you; they’d have to start committing crimes, and the pattern of behavior would be easily traced back to their original account, and with it, their original identity.
No more sock puppets. If you say something on a platform, you only get one account to say it with. Troll farms would have to openly pay thousands of people to support a particular view, which many websites would likely consider a bannable offense. Troll farms are non-viable.
A website doesn’t need your email address or any personal information from you in order to verify your identity for password resets. If the IVS returns the correct token, that’s good enough.
If a user has committed a crime, and evidence of this is visible on a website or platform, a government with jurisdiction can, with a warrant, request that user’s token. That gives them a specific identity in the ID database to investigate further.
If the government is investigating a particular individual over whom they have jurisdiction, they can query websites or businesses over which they also have jurisdiction for information on whether any of the tokens in their database match a user account’s identity token, and request data from the matching account. It would be a much more focused process than queries based on IP addresses which judges keep having to say are not proof of identity.

What would this system not do? What doesn’t change compared to now?

Companies using this system would still only know for sure who you are if you tell them; at most, they know with certainty what country your identity is associated with, but little more.
Companies could still coordinate information on data such as which accounts sign in from the same IP addresses, which would tell them more about specific users and potentially let them profile you.
Companies will still give up any information they have on you to the government if compelled by a warrant, sometimes even without one.
Websites can be hacked and your data on that website exposed to the world, requiring you to reset your password, etc.
The government can be hacked and information about your identity exposed
Accounts can be hacked, and nefarious people can do nefarious things under your name without having to commit identity fraud (though this act could itself be considered a crime under such a system)
Stalkers can still figure out who you are based on information you post, and go after you in the real world
The government doesn’t know which websites you visit unless they’re actively spying on you.
Oppressive governments can and will continue to monitor and log everything they can about you, and attempt to weaponize this against dissenters or those otherwise deemed “undesirable”

Even in the grandest, best-possible-case scenario I can think of, it still comes down to “Can I trust my government to not take more information than they’re allowed to, and can I trust that they will not abuse the information they do obtain?” For many, I suspect the answer to both questions is no.