Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
This all-or-nothing approach, where compromises are never allowed, is my biggest annoyance with some privacy/security advocates, and also it unfortunately influences many software design choices. Since this is a nice thread for ranting, hereās a few examples:
This has gotten pretty long already, I will stop now. To be clear, this is not a rant against securityā¦ I treat security of my devices seriously. But Iām annoyed that I am forced to have protections in place against threat models that are irrelevant, or at least sufficiently negligible, for my personal use cases. (IMO one root cause is that too much software these days is written for the needs of enterprise IT environments, because thatās where the real money is, but thatās a different rant altogether.)
also, I forgot to point this out earlier, but itās worth saying: the only reason why Iām considering GrapheneOS as a viable path forward is because as an AOSP fork, it isnāt all-or-nothing. I can create a private space or profile for Google Play Services and all my spyware shit and keep it isolated, and ending the session kills all the processes those apps might have been running.
thatās fantastic! I finally donāt have to switch fully to open source apps and do without working non-janky notifications to have a modicum of privacy on Android! the graphene devs assume Iām not gonna be perfect and they ruggedized their fork against that and put a ton of effort into making even stuff thatās deeply reliant on Google safer! why in fuck arenāt they like that for everything?
exactly! and taking this shit seriously is why this overbearing shit sucks, especially when itās theater or enforced for threats that arenāt realistic for your threat model. unlike some of these fuckers, we both actually intend to daily the devices weāre locking down.
oh I fucking hate this. itās the same shit as forcing dark mode off/on as part of fingerprinting protection. not only is this the absolute wrong way to fix that shit, itās pretty monstrous for anyone who needs dark mode or light mode to use their device in anything resembling comfort ā your user may have a visual impairment or severe light sensitivity, and now theyāre fucked cause the developers couldnāt accept a minor fingerprinting risk (and light/dark mode and smooth scrolling are both utterly minor, to be real)
motherfucker yes! the CA infrastructure is nowhere near usable for all cases and we all know it, but locking down the web and making development and self-hosting fucking annoying is the game for the browser vendors and Google in particular. to add to this: why the fuck is my browser acting like me not having a cert for localhost is a tragedy? why does the browser sandbox not allow certain shit unless Iām using https of all things to access localhost? where precisely is the fucking threat here? (Iām sure some well-paid security asshole at one of the browser vendors could snark a list of unlikely shit as reasons why local host needs to be treated as insecure with no toggle or dev tools option to treat it otherwiseā¦ and I just donāt give a fuck)
Iād love good secure boot! the one on PCs aināt it at all, and unfortunately the secure ones tend to be used to lock out device owners from modifying what they own and implement shit like attestation thatās just there to violate your rights and make sure youāre not blocking ads, so unfortunately good secure boot might be incompatible with capitalism. for now though at least graphene seems to benefit from a secure secure boot chain that hasnāt been locked down yet?
100% correct
hey those are my gripes with much of modern computing, give them back! Iām gonna tell mom
so much more software needs a āI know what Iām doing, shut the fuck upā button