Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Ffs. Don't you collect enough data from your users you greedy fucks?
If people actively pay for this, they are bloody idiots.
Well...guess there's going to be loads of people paying for this then.....
Did you make that?
No, I'm a lazy shite, I just did an image search for clippy 1984. I feel bad now I didn't make more of an effort 😕
Don't feel bad. I love it! Thanks for finding it and sharing it.
I hate this but I also get it.
A little while ago on the TWIT podcast one of the guests, or maybe Leo himself, was talking about how this is exactly what they want out of AI, for it to be able to know how they use their computer and just streamline everything. Some people are really excited about the possibilities, and yeah, the AI needs to track whatever you're doing to know how to help you with your work flow.
That said, I don't want Microsoft keeping track of everything I'm doing. They've already shown that they're willing to sell our data and shove ads down our throats, so as much as they say we can filter out what we don't want tracked, I'm not inclined to trust or believe them.
I'm honestly kinda excited about the possibilities in the greater scheme of things, but the fact that Microsoft will pretty much record whatever people are doing on their systems is just nuts nd slightly terifying. This is something that should ideally be done locally, without big corporations looking in - but that's for sure not what they are doing.
I've spent a lot of time with offline open source AI running on my computer. About the only thing it can't infer off of interactions is your body language. This is the most invasive way anyone could ever know another person. The way a persons profile is built across the context dialogue, it can create statistical relationships that would make no sense to a human but these are far higher than a 50% probability. This information is the key to making people easily manipulated in an information bubble. Sharing that kind of information is as stupid as streaking the Superbowl. There will be consequences that come after and they won't be pretty. This isn't data collection, it is the keys to how a person thinks, and on a level better than their own self awareness.
What's your offline open source AI?
Whatever is the latest from Hugging Face. Right now a combo of a Mixtral 8×7B, Llama 3 8B, and sometimes an old Llama 2 70B.
I mean this data will most likely be more useful for surveillance/ads than for AI. Nowadays with AI they can make it look like they are only a couple steps away from a very intelligent personal assistant and therefore make it seem more plausible that they need your data to make that leap. But in reality I feel like it is not the level of AI that could leverage personalization, at least not in the context of personal assistance. In the context of behavioural mapping it is of course a super lucrative deal for them. There are already very useful tons of AI stuff that they can add which does not require personal behaviour info (at least not to this generality) and yet they don't seem to spend as much effort into those and instead they are like "we need all your info stored somewhere for this very super (and mandatory) AI search assistant". Big red flag.
Yeah, maybe some kind of situation where you turn it on for "training time" with access to only specified files and systems on the computer, no internet access, etc. At the same time though, I wonder how much an AI could really streamline things. Would it just pre-load my frequent files and programs? Make suggestions or reminders on tasks? I don't think we're anywhere near the level where it could actually be doing work for me yet.
Interesting possibilities, but I'm not sure how useful yet.
I kept wondering what would keep me from updating to newer versions of Windows.
Yeahhhh…this is it. This and the inevitable forced Microsoft accounts that will come with this.
The Microsoft of the past was evil, but at least you could pay for an upgrade to the enterprise version that didn’t include this bullshit, but even the enterprise versions suffer from this stuff too!
I just reinstalled Windows 11 and holy shit was it hard to setup without a Microsoft account. Like they even use a fake boot up screen weeks later to "finish the install" to trick you into making an account. This can be deactivated, but it is still super shady.
Holy shit that's annoying. Say I installed Win11 for my elderly parents. They'd get this sign-up screen after I would have thought everything was setup and ready to use.
Glad I installed elementary OS for them a few years ago, it's been completely painless (they are used to apple-UX)
Nice. Upgraded a Thinkpad, installed Linux Mint and gave it to my dad. I have not heard anything from him about it for a couple of months. Was reminded of it with your post.
So wrote him right now and asked how it was going, and he replied that he loved it and uses it every day.
And that he had not had any problems he could not solve on his own. He's 70 and a windows only heavy user - until now 🙂
As you said. Compelety painless.
Yup, I know what I'm doing, but someone else might have just assumed it was required. I was up and running for a week before a reboot sent me to the smiling windows install screen.
I found it's a pretty simple "don't ask to finish installing" switch in the settings, but escaping the install screen was the hard part. I think I had to do a hard power down and force safe mode to access the settings again.
This will make Windows 11 a target for hacker and government agencies, since this will be treasure of data. Windows already is bad at security. Let's see how this backfires at Microsoft.
Microsoft will be the "hackers". On days when outside hackers aren't breaking in, MS will be data mining and selling the data themselves
"But they’ll be reserved for premium models starting at $999."
Translation: "We want to start with the data of people that can spend, then we'll move to the rest".
The last Windows computer in my house was my wife's, and she's been extremely happy on Fedora Gnome for the last couple of months, asking me why I didn't tell her about it before (I did, lol).
my girlfriends like fedora gnome too. I do all the technical stuff anyway so she really doesn't have know to know that much about the os she uses
Google rolled out a retooled search engine that periodically puts AI-generated summaries over website links at the top of the results page; while also showing off a still-in-development AI assistant Astra that will be able to “see” and converse about things shown through a smartphone’s camera lens
What worries me the most is that this AI hype is coming strongly to the smartphone market too, and we don't have something solid like Linux distributions to change to and be free
I think demand will come soon for either manufacturers to open their boot loaders or new manufacturers cropping up to fill that gap.
I'm running graphene os on a pixel 8 pro and haven't looked back.
In the 1990s, I transitioned from Windows to Linux as my primary operating system. Since then, Linux has consistently exhibited advancements in the desktop and software space, whereas Windows and Mac operating systems appear to have experienced a decline in terms of user experience and functionality.
As someone regularly using Arch, Ubuntu, MacOS and Windows I agree.
The advances Linux has made, especially in the last few years is just amazing. I can run the majority of my games through Proton, there are even some preconfigured packages with Illustrator and Photoshop CC that Adobe doesn‘t seem to care about at all.
Yeah, fuck that.
Sometimes I like sitting in my Unix-based ivory tower, but then I remember my daily driver uses macOS and that it’s only a matter of time before they employ something similar/worse.
When the inevitable inevitably evits, the toughest choice for me will be fedora vs tumbleweed.
It's not going to get better. I nuked 10 and switched to Linux permanently around the Windows 11 launch. My only regret is not switching sooner, like around Windows 8 times.
Yuuup, never switching to Windows 11 Windows 10 till something doesn't work, them back to Linux
🐧
then law enforcement gets a hold of it
"how many cars did this user download"
Thats it! My Gaming PC is going Linux
There go all the government installs.
Is there a single person who is like “wow I love it”?
*Microsoft to train AI chatbot on everything you do
*Microsoft will show you ads