In the case of email, security is more important than privacy. The country your provider is based in doesn’t matter.

Hypothetically if we were talking about something like a VPN, it would need to be a country which values privacy and which has a vaguely hostile attitude to America. I have no idea what country that would be.

Steak

I’d have paid the fee for ad-free YouTube if it didn’t also come with an (expensive) subscription to YouTube music.

Nowadays though I don’t want to give Google money for anything, even incidentally. I just use Ublock Origin.

Annexation by Canada.

That made me do a double take too. Normally to levy tolls on ships you need to go to war with the US and/or Israel (like Panama, Egypt, Iran, etc.).

EDIT: Turns out there are many canals which don’t serve as maritime chokepoints and which did not involve any major wars.

The carbon intensity wont make the product go away, but the economic cost will.

The product won’t go away either way. I can’t foresee a scenario where Musk kills Grok. Short of a catastrophic global energy crisis that makes anything AI basically impossible to sustain, but that’d never happen.

Inference is dirt cheap. Short of a botnet, nothing we do will at all impact Grok’s finances.

EDIT: I haven’t actually done the math if it is actually dirt cheap. But assuming it isn’t, then that makes it even more important not to use such a carbon-intensive AI.

Grok is one of the worst AI’s you could possibly be using. The electricity used in training it is dirtier than any other company’s and it is owned by a Nazi.

Firstly, the ID requirements for renting a place to live are a more apt example.

Secondly, it depends how the ID is used. If my ID isn’t being associated with my online traffic then it isn’t the end of the world.

I’ve been running an RX580 for years. It’s worked fine for 99% of games, but recently I played RV There Yet and Umigari, both ran poorly. RV There Yet seemed to improve with a Proton update, but Umigari says the RX580 is the bare minimum.

Point is, it’s never the games I expect that I end up falling short on, so a heads up from Steam would actually be helpful. I really wish I could still get a refund for Umigari.

You need ID to drive a car, which is essential in modern America. Worse still you need ID to rent a house and that’s normally getting fed straight into a massive insecure database. The advantage of Linux is that we could theoretically choose who we give our ID to (whether that’s Red Hat, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Debian, Arch, etc). Handing over your ID is necessary for some essential parts of modern life, and while I wouldn’t want to hand it over to access my operating system, I would be able to accept it.

Thinking critically, let’s imagine that only government approved companies could verify your ID and those companies are Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Persona. At that point I’d … really hate it but I’d hand over my ID. Then I’d double check my operating system isn’t logging and sharing my internet traffic.

There’s no indication that our online traffic will be required by law to be linked with our proven ID. If such a thing does happen, then firstly we are totally screwed, and secondly it would likely involve all major websites participating. We fundamentally won’t be able to get around it in that case.

Your response again doesn’t really follow from what I wrote. It retains some key words but not the ideas.

Browser fingerprinting which exists because the average person can’t be bothered concealing it and the theoretical sharing of your ID with the sites you visit due to a government mandate are two entirely different things. The relevant difference is that the government doesn’t mandate browser fingerprinting, it exists because it is technologically possible and the mitigation measures are more inconvenient than the average user is willing to deal with.

As for normalizing OS-level ID checks as a slippery slope towards sharing your full ID as part of a HTTP request … firstly that is not something you can get around with an alternative distro anyway, because it would involve all major websites. Secondly, that is a hypothetical within a hypothetical. Thirdly, if that really is the path that we’re on, now is not is not the most effective time to oppose it, because the slippery slope argument is far more persuasive from the bottom of the slope.

EDIT: I think I just did the same thing I accused you of, talking past you. My response basically just rejects your core conceit, that being a distinction between the private power-user experience and the non-private normie experience, and nothing else. I’ll need to edit this.

EDIT 2: Okay, fixed.

Parts of what you just said are not really a proper response to what I said, either because of accuracy or relevance. So I’m just going to address the one important part of what you said, metadata.

I didn’t consider metadata because I treat proof of age as what it is, proof of age with proof of identity being incidental. If visiting a website requires handing over my full birthday, “hardware ID”, or real identity then I would be concerned, but we’re not there yet.

It’s a widely held view in the general public that you should be able to browse the internet privately just like you should be able to browse a library without the government seeing a log of every book you read, and I hope that would be enough to resolve this. The general public is not very concerned about browser fingerprinting, which effectively erases user privacy, but government mandated sharing of your identity online would be a red line that would get the normies involved.

I think it’s helpful to put some thought into why you use Linux and what you really need from it. I use it primarily for choice, privacy, and to just not be using anything by Microsoft/Apple/Google. Security is nice to have but it’s not the reason I’m using Linux, so handing over my photo ID to a third party I trust is an acceptable if disappointing risk.

Sure, my OS will be tied to my ID, but as long as my online traffic isn’t that should be fine. If they wanted to monitor my online traffic it would make far more sense to do it at the VPN level instead. Not by having my open source operating system redirect my traffic so that it’s associated with my ID.

The big risk is social media requiring proof of ID. Bots are becoming more and more common and proof of ID available at the OS level on Windows, Mac, and Android would be very tempting for social media. That’s a different concern though.

The stereotype of pedophiles in cop shows is that they use desktop computers anyway, not phones. Don’t know how true to reality that is though.

I think both approaches are too extreme. Supporting every device leads to poor security, poor stability, and therefore a poor user experience, but only supporting just Google devices (while there is a good reason for that) is a step too far for most people.

If I were in the position of e/os I’d just support probably three manufacturers. Going through the major ones that I know of: Motorola and Google are obvious picks. Next would need to be something cheap and popular. Samsung is way out of the question. Xiaomi and Vivo I’ve never seen their phones mentioned outside of China (which is a country that generally doesn’t have the same privacy considerations as people in the west do). That leaves Oneplus and Tecno Mobile for the third model.

They’re two sides of the same coin. Can’t have privacy without security and can’t have security without privacy.

Looking at the post though he’s specifically talking about advanced security as a means of preserving privacy, security you’d need if (based on his model) targeted by a government (whether foreign or your local police forensics team). I don’t think his model is correct though because while extra hardened security is useful to protect privacy in such an instance, it’s also just best practice because it’s better to have too much security than not enough, just to keep your bank account secure at least.

The fact is we need cameras. I know being in favour of any form of law enforcement is heresy here but there are murderers who were arrested only because of CCTV. The question is not “cameras or no cameras” because cameras will win for the average person 9 times out of 10 (to the extent that Ring doorbell cameras sell like hotcakes), the question is whether the cameras are internet connected.

I find iPhones themselves dystopian.

I tried to think of an exception, but no dice.

Hypothetically though, if Canada invaded and annexed the United States then gave them free universal healthcare, that would probably be completely justifie. Basically any action against the US government is acceptable if I think about it.