It's like Gmail except it has a proper dark mode, an actually functional search feature, a functional and user-friendly mail filtering system, you can actually block senders, "All Mail" actually shows you all mail, and also Google isn't reading all your emails...
Ultimately, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Been using their paid email, drive and vpn for the last couple of years and their service has been flawless in my experience. Great apps and never had an outage or issues once.
Free versions are available but the paid version is well worth it.
I've been with them for a couple of years too and I use all their services (mail, calendar, drive, VPN, pass and simplelogin) but calling it flawless is a bit of an overstatement.
Their outside communication is nonexistent at best, development speed is unbearably slow and Linux support, the most privacy countious user-base?, is lacking a lot.
Hopefully in the next couple years they sinally manage to release contact sync and a Linux client for Drive.
Their outside communication is nonexistent at best
Eh, they're decently active on Reddit, I guess. They send the occasional newsletter regarding new features if you don't unsubscribe (and they're pretty good at not spamming with those, imo).
development speed is unbearably slow
I see people say this all the time, and while feature updates are kind of slow, I'm also not lacking anything, personally. I would appreciate it if they smoothed-out SimpleLogin's extension, though. That thing is weirdly clunky to use.
Agree on the Linux bit, though. I'm surprised they haven't put more work into that.
Overall, I've been a happy customer for a few years, personally.
can vouch for mega, been using it for 8 years now with no real issues. only sticking point is file download limits with Firefox, and thats just because im too lazy to download the desktop app
I hate services that force you to download an app when the functionality could be provided in browser. Apps have a lot more permissions to access things that wouldn't be accessible in browser.
its cause of the stupid way mega downloads file to your ram, and only when its fully downloaded does it get moved to the drive or something along those lines, its been a while since i've looked into it.
Its megas limitation by intentionally doing shit a stupid way then blaming the browser for it.
Like I said, its intentional. Nothing to fix because its doing exactly what they want. Cause they want you to install the app, which they have much greater control over and ability to harvest from.
chrome doesnt have this restriction is why i think its not as slimy as that, and why i don't have the app since i just paste the link into chrome lol
sounds more like they designed it around chrome and didnt take firefoxes differences into account, and have yet to fix it because in the grand scheme of things it's a small issue
I use a cheap VPS to host my email server. It's a bit easier than running it solely at home, but there's a lot of annoying work to "verify" yourself. Once you get your DNS records good, you shouldn't be blocked after that (unlike a home server). It only costs me $5/month plus the domain, which I think is money well spent. Doing the admin work to make sure I'm secure still needs to happen, but I don't mind that work and find it fun.
Gmail and other big providers tend to consider new domains to be spam until they've proven otherwise. Can't prove otherwise until you've been up and running for a while. Catch-22. The way out of that is to host with an existing provider for a few years.
Does it cut down on spam? Perhaps. Does it favor existing providers like Gmail? Yes, definitely.
Honestly, hosting email has long been difficult to setup, and all the more so if you don't want your box to be a spam host within three seconds of plugging it in.
I've been hosting a personal domain with an established-but-not-large hosting provider for around 6 years, without any troubles sending or receiving mail from that domain (via the provider's servers, of course).
Does that mean my domain is now well established enough to take email hosting to my own server?
Apparently, doing a sync with it just on my documents and photos, it ended up filling up the Proton Drive and giving hundreds of errors on one of my Windows 10 computers.
I recently started using Tresorit, E2E encrypted cloud storage, owned by the swiss post, only downside I can find is price. I haven't used it long enough to really be able to recommend, but there aren't a ton of options out there.
There's an incredible story behind it. But, the short form is that Proton is more expensive because they're not harvesting your private information. In a few months the law will prevent them from doing for as long as the core fiscal law and Proton exist (at least decades).
If price is main concern, you still have options, but you'll need to be a lot more specific about what you need. For example:
direct Drive replacements - OneDrive and Amazon Drive
just file storage - DropBox, and MEGA
backups - NordLocker, Backblaze
hosted and self-hosted cloud platforms - OwnCloud and NextCloud, use Backblaze B2 for storage
I'm doing the last one. I have NextCloud installed on my custom NAS (just openSUSE Leap with some drives) and am working on configuring B2 as a backup service. It's more expensive than Drive, but it's also more versatile (streams movies to TV, use as Linux package cache for faster upgrades, etc).
Each of these are similar in price to Google Drive, but with a different feature set. Some are cheaper.
Sorry for not being more specific about what I need, I will explain it here.
With Google Drive, it gets assigned to a drive letter on my computer which is H: here and I'm not sure if any other Drive alternatives do that or not.
Right now, I currently pay $3 USD a month for 300 GBs of Google Drive space and they appear to go up with 5TBs for $25 USD a month and $10TBs for $50 USD a month.
I'm not interested in One Drive as that is Microsoft's Shit.
Here are options for to mount Backblaze B2 as a drive. It's $6/TB/month, and I think they allow <1TB, so for 300GB you'd pay ~$2/month. So I think they're pretty competitive, but I'm not familiar with Google Drive's terms. They're certainly in the same ballpark, if not cheaper, but it depends on your egress and Google Drive's policies around that (how much you download from their service).
Well, for one thing, I would want to find out if there is a way to mount a remote drive service to a drive letter on a Windows machine like Google Drive so that I can have it as a backup option that would keep my stuff privacy, and not scraped by some AI LLM.
Because the system is set up to prevent any real change for the benefit of the common people. So your choice is between the friendly, somewhat reasonable oligarchy stooge and the utterly deranged oligarchy stooge.
Like in the 2016 election? Or in 2000? The system is set up to prevent the will of the people from being enacted and it takes a massive crisis for everyone to be pissed off enough to do something. Add to that the control of nearly all media by the oligarchy and you get to where we are today.
The federal system is set up to favor State power, which is why the US presidential election isn't decided by popular vote. By design, Wyoming and California are considered equals in many respects.
It's a bad system, but it's very much entrenched in the constitution.
And it also requires critical mass. It's basically impossible to enact meaningful change with a 50-55% majority.
You need 60% or more to get big changes. And a majority of states.
I thought about mentioning it in my previous comment. But basically, it's another example that States hold most of the power. The States actually have the power to effectively replace the current system with a national popular vote if they choose.
Other examples are the IRV in Alaska and the district system in Maine and Nebraska.
The US government system was set up to be better than the monarchies its designers had grown up under. In this sense it has been wildly successful. But... it wasn't really designed to scale to the size it has, nor to account for the massive changes in technology that have occurred since it was written.
The leaders of the time decided to replace the first attempt only 6 years after it was ratified, and I believe they fully expected any future government to do the same if they found the current system wasn't working. They did try to make the new system more adaptable by adding the Amendment process, which was frankly genius and unprecedented in government systems prior to that.
I think it's very important to remember where and when the system we have came from, and to try to think like the people who wrote it, and to remember that at the time they had no other models for successful government beyond the writings of Enlightenment-period historians. It's very easy to criticize the current system. It's far more difficult (and substantially more important) to draft a better system.
I've often thought that America suffers from being the first successful iteration of our style of government. It was great and a huge improvement over all the other examples at the time. So much so that much of the world eventually followed in its footsteps.
But where other countries looked at our first successful attempt and further improved and refined the idea, we're still stuck on that very first version. What was once a radically new idea that worked so much better than everyone else, is now an old, outdated and barely functional relic. We're the early prototype iPhone 3g, while several other countries have iPhone 6/10/etc
I'm not sure if anyone could conclusively declare a certain country's democracy is totally better than ours, but several more recently created democracies have avoided many of the pitfalls that have been discovered with American implementation. Things like mandatory voting, ranked choice voting, better and stronger rules around money and political campaigns, more comprehensive list of citizen rights, etc. Most of those countries have their own missteps as well, but a lot of our issues have been solved, we just haven't adopted the methods and improvements already shown to work. Typically because they'd require pretty extensive reform, which is incredibly hard to achieve with our government especially in the current political climate.
A while ago I read the book Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge about the process of starting a political movement in Sweden, and some aspects of how their democracy works seemed comparatively impressive to me, and better capable of genuine representation because the barriers to getting started are not so insurmountable. Still, I'm not convinced overall of the narrative of changes to the structure of government being generally positive. You used a technology metaphor, but it's been a clear trend for tech platforms to actually become worse over time in terms of user agency, privacy and exploitation, something that to me seems mirrored in government. A lot of what people see as solutions to problems take the form of an increase in centralized control and a weakening of barriers to that control, and I see those barriers as the ideological core of how the US was originally designed to work. A specific law might be shown to have positive results in itself, but be achieved by an unsafe concentrating of power. In particular, I think the way the executive branch has been expanding over the last century is very concerning especially with stuff like the Patriot Act and everything associated with it.
Basically, especially right now it's clear that a lot of the people in power are malevolently insane, incompetent and demented, and it's really important that we maintain and improve protections to keep them from doing too much damage, so I am skeptical about ideas for major reform especially when the idea is to take the shortest path to policy goals.
Oh, I absolutely agree with you on the probable outcomes if America did implement structural changes these days. That has like a 1% chance of actually being something positive. I think perhaps the most recent, best possible time for significant reforms was somewhere between 1930-1990. It depends mostly on the specific kind of reform (basically whether or not women or minorities were relevant to the change, farther in the past would be worse outcomes for them).
But some things like campaign finance reform, how many seats there are in the House, Supreme Court Reform, etc could've been accomplished with a relatively high likelihood of positive outcomes.
Basically before the complete collapse of proper journalism, when broadcast media was still king and most politicians still tended to compromise and were at least mostly interested in actually governing. It feels like post 90s, our governing body has passed some sort of tipping point where the majority of members are simply gaming the system, obstructing others from actually doing anything and shooting down any and all reasonable compromises. The actual productivity of Congress seems to be in total free fall. Bad actors pretty much always existed, but they only became a crippling number somewhat recently. (Or at least this seems true for the last 100 years, I have no idea if Congress was this dysfunctional in the early 1800s or something)
Everything you said is true, fair and I do agree. But I feel compelled to add that many of the issues built into the current structure of governance are a direct result of racism, white supremacy and slavery.
The reason the system is so incredibly resistant to change is that the anti-democratic parts of the Constitution are there because of slavery. Giving disproportionate power to the slave holding class then leads directly to a Senate that is almost always going to be 50%+ Republican today despite that party not winning a national majority in 30+ years.
I understand and appreciate that the system has safeguards against rapid and radical changes where 50%+1 can otherwise dominate the other half of the country. But we must acknowledge that the current framework is a poor facsimile of that and the reason is the original sin of this country.
Lastly, this is a bit of an aside, but this clip of Reggie Jackson (Hall of Fame baseball player) is really worth watching and remembering that what he experienced happened not that long ago and is indictive of the type of America that so many people on the right want to return to. https://youtu.be/R4mWOVy_02s?si=9irk_TD_JKWInMkt
And it was also designed so that States would have most of the power, not the Federal government.
Yeah, but then we changed it because of the civil war...
The system was designed for the president to be a mostly performative figurehead. Then we gave the president real power, but left determination like the president didn't matter.
Why does the Superbowl only have two teams? It seems unfair since I don't know how the two teams were selected and I don't really care enough to pay attention / find out.
NO. The question is, if we had a viable (sane and cognizant) third choice fit for the job, why would it STILL be one of these two BOZOS getting elected in November?
Look at the last handful of democratic presidential losses to see this in action:
Gore gets nominated due to familiarity. He has the charisma of a warm sponge. He loses (barely, and not the popular vote; by the way, FUCK the electoral college) to George W. "I'd have a beer with him and hey wasn't his dad president?" Bush.
Kerry somehow rises to the top of the next democratic primary, a fact that I will never understand, because he also has the charisma of a warm sponge. Bush is familiar and a wartime president. He is re-elected in defiance of God and nature.
Obama comes along and is a once in a generation political talent. Things are pretty good for a while.
Hillary enters the primary and wins mainly based on name recognition. She presents herself as having the charisma of a warm sponge, when we all know full well that she has the charisma of a wood chipper, and since we're pretty good at detecting artifice she loses.
In 2019 we've got a pretty good set of primary choices, but Biden gets into the ring and that's pretty much fucking it, because, again, he has name recognition, so he blows past some better, younger choices and manages to leverage his name and Trump's fuck-ups enough to win.
The pattern is that name recognition will get you a real long way, especially with low information voters, and that is a real goddamn problem when there are objectively better options who aren't as famous.
So anyway, I think we need a constitutional amendment forbidding members of one's immediate family from running for president after one has been president. No sons, daughters, husbands, wives, etc. Fuck dynasties. Fucking fundamentally un-American.
Do you think it’s just that, or that maybe the fact that too many people don’t give a shit in-between election years might play a role as well? Because from what I’ve seen over the decades- is that a lot of SJWs enjoy rising up every four years to complain about shit- then disappear until the next election.
It worries me that people can listen to trump say "we have the most unsafe border in history when I was president we had the most safe border in history" and not question that statement in the slightest.
It's like when Trump ran campaign ads about police brutality and crimes going up in inner cities....that all happened under Trump with the tag, "This is Biden's America".
It is true what they say: truth has a liberal bias.
I turned on the radio in my car to tune into the debate. The first thing I heard was Trump saying "we had the most immaculate air, we had the most immaculate water".
They're still pretty good at least here in Asia. The horror stories I hear of Asus support in the US is a might and day difference from what I experienced. Their Taiwan HQ needs to smash some sense into the US office and clean house.
Yes. This is like opening a random door and discovering an axe murder in progress. It makes you wonder what’s going on behind all the doors that didn’t get opened.
One of the worst states a society can be in is one where it seems normal on the surface, but there’s massive hidden injustice happening under the surface. With something like the Battle of Britain, they truly were all in it together. But with the way our policing system works, people are getting horribly treated and their stories just aren’t known.
A society based on human sacrifice is invalid. If there’s a monster eating people, we need to all be aware of it. Currently the monster is eating people and getting away with it, because we have a cultural assumption that anyone talking about the monster is to be avoided and shunned.
Yeah, some folks don't want to tinker and do like to play games with DRM that won't work on Linux. It's also a little more powerful than the Deck.
I love my deck so much that I broke my tinkering with computers outside of work hours rule in order to set up some Steam remote play boxes (HoloISO based) on mini PCs scattered throughout the house so I don't have to be next to my gaming rig to play. I don't really play anything online that has the Windows only DRM so Linux is great for me. But I get it when people have things they want to do and don't have the time, know how, or desire to fuck with their systems.
What's the advantage of the mini PCs over a relatively cheap Android TV with the Steam Link app or even an old Steam Link hardware?
What's the hardware you're using?
I have been doing local streaming from my gaming PC to devices around tbe house (using mostly Steam and Moonlight) for nearly a decade.
I just find the steam stuff maddeningly buggy (setups that worked a month ago suddenly start having some new issue, usually Steam Input or otherwise controller-related). But when things work, it's fantastic. Especially for living room gaming with friends (or my kid)
I've had exactly one problem using the built in remote play with Steam, and that was a bad update that was put out just a few months ago. I've got a few Bee Links with the 680m iGPU (I'm not home to check the model right now) so they were a few hundred bucks apiece which is a huge con for some folks. But that also allows me to play a variety of emulated games and games that aren't graphically intensive locally if someone is streaming from another room.
So if I have a friend with kids over, we can play BG3 couch co-op in the bedroom or garage while the kids play Mario Kart or Hollow Knight in the living room. That's worth it for me.
However, cheap Android TV devices work for a lot of people and I'll never knock them.
It's got better specs on paper but in practice, my Steam Deck just just about everything without issue, even new games and most games that are "unsupported" (at least as far as I've tried).
Some people might also like the layout better or just be fond of Asus as a company from the good old days when they were actually decent.
Ease of use - Ally
Graphical capabilities - Ally
Battery usage - Steam Deck (because less graphical capabilities)
Gaming platforms/launcher availability - Ally
Customization and layout - Steam Deck, and it ain't even close.
I love my Ally and my wife loves my Steam Deck. But the Ally is better in all the ways above. I will say the Steam deck is easier to open up for repairs, but not by much
I was just refuting the bit that it's not better off the paper. By all the measures above, it's not "meh" better. The steamdeck could drastically improve by taking some notes in what the Ally does well.
I agree though that Asus isn't a company I choose to do business with first, they just had the best product for what I was looking for.
It's not even that their results suck, per se, but they straight up ignore most of my search query and focus on one or two words only. Obviously that makes your search results suck.
Remember Google is paid by advertising dollars. So the incentives are to feed you the maximum amount of ads with the minimum amount of content so that you don't leave for something else.
They've been a shit company for over a decade at least.
I got a laptop for my wife back when we were in college. It developed a problem with the monitor where the screen would look all corrupt after using it for a little bit. My wife, while reciting the prayer of percussive maintenance, would whack it and the problem would go away for a while. So I figured the connection had come loose. No biggie, just reseat it or replace it. The warranty had expired, so I cracked it open to see what was wrong. I reseated the cables in it and it worked... for a bit. Then the problem came back. Eventually we got fed up and bought another one, same model, figuring it was a fluke... It developed the same issue. Come to find out, Asus cheaped out in the ribbon cable for the monitor and installed ones that were too short for the laptop. Looking online, there were a bunch of people complaining about the same thing.
Around the same time as I had gotten her the new laptop, I'd also bought an Asus ZenPad for her to read on. We'll, that suddenly developed a screen issue too! Almost exactly the same as the laptops! My wife, ever eager to apply kinetic reinforcement, found that twisting the tablet a little bit also fixed the issue. I went online and, sure enough, Asus used cheap cables again! They would last just long enough for the warranty to expire before they'd detach.
I swore to myself I'll never buy another Asus product as long as I live. If I ever have kids, I'll disown them if they do too... Fuck these scammers.
I highly doubt they used those cables maliciously knowing they'd go out right when the warranty expired. It was probably a cost thing, and they later realized (too late to fix it) during production sometime that the cables were a warranty issue.
Engineers don't do thing maliciously with their designs. They pick things based on cost, and probably even raised the cable length as a risk/concern during the design and testing phase, and were overruled by the bean counters.
Even in your defense, you point out that someone at the company made the explict choice to sell devices with defective cabling. At no point did he blame the engineers who designed it for that choice.
That's a shit company that doesnt deserve anyone's support, regardless if it was "engineers" or "bean counters" that opted to continue to sell what they knew was a defective product.
The fact that it happened over and over with multiple devices means it's a culture issue with the company, not a one off mistake.
I'm fine not having this conversation anymore. I just gave a perspective from an engineer. No need to continue shitting on me. I'm not even defending the practice.
I haven't shit on you at all. Re- read my comments and point out one negative thing I'e said about you or engineers.
Ive only talked about buisness ethics, and the pervasive negatives that come from misleading customers. If you feel that's a dig on you, some self reflection might be warranted.
So worth the time. She had an aweful 2-days 2-nights for thousands of dollars, and did it so you and I didn't have to lose that money to learn the hard way.
I love that she contextualizes all of this against the backdrop of Disney corporate cowardice and shortsightedness. Also, bless the friggin cast members!
No they fully thought they could get rich nerds to overspend on a cheap hotel because the CEO who was seeing the project was absolutely about maxing profits from the top percentage of park goers.
Surveillance apologists like to make the argument that "in public you have no expectation of privacy." But what they don't seem to understand is that having centralized networks of cameras (and especially ones hooked up to things like facial recognition databases) creates a whole new third level that goes beyond merely "in public" and instead becomes a panopticon.
"In public" a person might remember seeing you at a certain time and location, but that doesn't mean they can trace back your whole location history along with that of everyone who was ever near you at some point along it and feed it into a computer looking for suspicious patterns. When somebody tries to follow you closely enough to do that, we call it "stalking" and it's a crime.
But somehow once thing "X" becomes "X, but with a computer" lawmakers think it's magic or some shit and previously-criminal stuff suddenly becomes A-OK! So now everybody is being criminally stalked by Ring (i.e. Amazon), Nest (i.e. Google), etc., and too many people are too computer-illiterate to even begin to grasp what a massive problem that is.
The reason it doesn’t seem like a problem isn’t just ignorance, but also form factor. If someone were to start putting stickers that look like staring eyes on ring cameras, it might drive the point home more viscerally.
Still not ok, when there is no downside for lying on a police report. Not everyone will be lucky enough to get dashcam footage contradicting four police offices conspiring to lie
Damn, I guess I'm going to ignore years of evidence that Biden's admin can function just fine and go with my feelings on this one. I mean would you vote constructively if it meant getting over yourself? Of course not. We're Americans. We want a leader with a good jaw, not with good character or good ideas.
Nah but seriously though. Biden and Trump make me feel bad so I'm going to vote in a way that harms the country. That'll show us.
I mean, you'd think the total inability to hide Biden and Trumps' cognitive dysfunction, caught on camera many, many times over the last few years, and now live and in color, would be enough to get people to stop pretending that there's a good option here. Hell, Biden's handlers have been caught on camera making sure he doesn't wander off, like they had for Feinstein before she died.
But then again, Americans have watched the gradual, but now inevitable, slide into fascism over the last 40 years and managed to convince themselves that all is well, provided the guy enabling it is wearing their preferred jersey, so I guess we'll just chill and let Biden and Trumps' unelected handlers rule the country.
It's too bad you all didn't vote for Williamson in the primary. It's been clear neither of these two assholes are fit for a long time, just like it was clear Feinstein wasn't fit when she was falling asleep in hearings.
No, no they don't. Those people jumped ship after Jan 6. The only people left backing Trump are the insane religious cultists and racists that want to turn the country into a theocracy and purge anyone not white, straight and Christian.
What I don't understand about the handlers thing is that when I watch other famous people walking and talking: I see their handlers steer them, give them signals, whisper names in their ear. And you know what? Celebrities in their prime look awkward all the time. People who have nothing to worry about but their craft and being famous screw up all the time.
I wish we went further left, but the reality is that Biden has been a steady hand at the wheel where we've come out of economic unknown of the covid shut downs pretty well. We still have a ways to go, but we're heading in the right direction, and the most glaring problem (namely inflation) was something baked in before he even came into office.
Abroad we actually have the respect of much of the world, and it feels like to our allies that we are actually a partner that can be trusted on. Keep in mind that if you told a republican of the 80s that a US president rally the west against an imperialistic russia invading Europe, without committing a single US or NATO troop, and exposed them for how weak they are, then they would have said he was the second coming of Reagan.
Do I disagree with a lot of what he has done? Yes. But it's been a steady ride. Compared to Trump's presidency, which was a bumpy ride throughout, handing off an economy that looked like it could just go completely into the shitter, and threatening our alliances across the world, he looks like straight up looks like one of the best.
Yeah, I mean, nevermind all the pending criminal charges and evidence of incompetence from Trump's 4 years in office where we had weekly "infrastructure week" failures, a constant stream of garbage tweets parading as "official Presidential communications", and egregious power grabs by the Executive branch. Trump said all his same BS in a more convincing-sounding voice during last night's debate and the guy with a known stuttering issue just didn't have a strong-sounding voice, that's all the convincing I needed. Biden is just so old, I literally can't tell them apart <teeheehee>!
"I'm NOT voting for an entire apparatus of executive government with thousands of employees, I'm ONLY voting for a charismatic messiah godking, because I'm still little more than a medieval peasant looking to be mesmerized.
Then if fascists take over the nation (again) and the most vulnerable among me suffer from it (again and again and again), that's not MY problem. While (somehow) fancying myself as enlightened and special and pure. I'm at the center of my goddamned Universe!"
The Supreme Court, and how republicans effectively staged a coup of it in 2016 by turning their back on Merrick Garland, then packed it with corrupt right-wing zealots? "Not MY problem!"... until it is, but by then it's way too late.
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