Same. And LO cannot do everything MS office does.

It can do major things and Writer is probably 98% there (Calc much lower) but as an example of an obscure feature: Word can do nested tables and last I checked LO cannot. As a major feature Calc cannot do proper tables with headers and sorting and the opinion of the devs is to just use a database which for large sets is fair enough but I semi-often work with smaller sets where it doesn’t make sense and I just need a quick CSV sort. I have also tried to convince not so computer literate people to switch to LO and some of them have missed the proper tables support and telling them to learn to use databases isn’t an acceptable solution as many of these people are older and their needs are things like finances or lists of their collections of stuff.

Word’s styling options are also just leagues ahead if you’re preparing documents for the office it’s just easier to get better looking results. Same with Powerpoint.

Well could be these companies are buying on fascism because they’re either run by fascists or being shaken down by fascists or their friends are fascists encouraging them to do this and they uncritically do so for some vague or not so vague promises. So it’s more a signal of obedience and doubling down on the move to open, naked reaction and taking over open source with fascism.

That or its an intelligence op and the fascism is a bonus but the guy behind it is just pliable or a useful tool and there are larger plans to use this as a vehicle for influence to control open source, insert back-doors, push CIA coder guys into the right positions, steer in anti-China stuff to carve up the world of open source into strictly divided western and non-western code, remove openness and cooperation and militarize the space for American use.

Either way not good as functionally this is a big money pot being created and centralized under reactionary control to bully open source into adopting reactionary politics and other not good things. Could be Linux is seen as increasingly a threat with the open spying on Microsoft driving enough of the public to Linux that corporations, governments, etc feel a need now to seize control of it.

BIOS boot passwords were from another era with different needs and assumptions. In controlled access environments they can still have an impact if you have a proper chassis that has locks on it preventing removal of drives. Most normal people don’t possess such business class chassis. The scenario was a business environment with security teams, other employees, supervisors and locks that while you could cut them with heavy equipment you’d be noticed doing so. In terms of preventing a team of thieves breaking in with power tools and stealing things true it never was meant to prevent that. It’s more authorization and access control within an organization. The idea being perhaps the CEO’s machine or a special machine for accessing sensitive devices would be physically locked and have such a password installed as another layer of security that couldn’t be bypassed surreptitiously.

Additionally back in the day these BIOS boot passwords were paired with chassis intrusion alarms which went off every subsequent boot if the chassis was opened thanks to a sensor and the only way to clear that alarm was logging into the BIOS with an admin password.

Your gaming computer BIOS supports neither of these nor does your gaming motherboard have a chassis intrusion connector nor does your gaming case come with support for such a device.

But it was never about preventing data destruction even in these cases. It was more preventing access and making any such access more time consuming and likely to trip alarms to allow a response including evaluation of compromise by professionals.

If you want to protect your data make backups. If you want it well protected against determined parties who want to destroy all copies and/or thieves then locate a copy off-premises. If you can’t do that at least locate a copy within a bolted down safe.

No. Western governments for decades have been running automated keyword systems on all calls listening for phrases like “bomb” and flagging all such calls. Get flagged enough and a human reviews it.

This is done with full cooperation of the big telephone companies and has gone beyond intelligence use to “lawful access” requests from the police. The Snowden revelations were not that this was being done (I mean it’s mentioned in Enemy of the State so it was an open ‘secret’ by 1998) but rather that the NSA was doing this for all internet traffic, for all emails, for webcam sessions, that they were storing things that were not even flagged in a vast database of innocent people who hit no keywords and thus had no reason to be under suspicion. That was the big outrage, that and the hacking and national security letters to big companies and the fact it was all searchable by humans like Snowden (and now with AI can all be analyzed in detail unfortunately to create detailed records on every single living person).

Linux works with 4k. Jellyfin, Plex, Kodi, etc can all stream 4k streams to Linux assuming you’re using your own content and not content from commercial services that impose DRM.

HDR and Dolby Vision are another matter because even on Windows those are recent and limited implementations.

Linux hasn’t implemented proper Dolby Vision and HDR can be finicky but does mostly work on wayland. This is down to it being a lot of work, closed source and DRM and licensing problems from Nvidia, HDMI forum, etc that make it hard and very slow going. To be fair Dolby Vision doesn’t really work on Windows either for streaming your own videos purposes. I think LG has an application that can sort of make it work with certain models of theirs but I believe it’s mainly for gaming.

Media company DRM refuses to allow it. They fear the pirates (who bypass their DRM regardless using hacked android streaming devices) will use it to pirate their stuff more easily.

Even on Windows which has a locked down DRM pipeline you have to use Google Chrome or Microslop Edge with widevine for this and a few services STILL refuse to let you watch above 1080p on anything but a streaming box/stick or mobile OS because of their incredible fear of pirates and incredible hatred of general computing devices and user freedom.

Do you need works out of the box without a ton of work on your part but the privacy isn’t totally perfect? Then Apple TV 4k.

Do you use no major commercial streaming services and only your own hosted content from Plex/Jellyfin and you want to do some very light cloud gaming from the couch/bed? Then an Intel N150 mini PC or AMD equivalent (at present with RAM prices expect to pay at least $400 though if you want you can probably get a used SFF PC made recently (important for energy saving hardware decoding of video codecs) may work for you with either Jellyfin client or Kodi.

Caveat: HDR on Linux isn’t happening anytime soon and forget Dolby Vision. Also forget above 720p, maybe 1080p in Google Chrome for online streaming services.

Vero V by the OSMC people is also an option but won’t work with commercial streaming services though it is more private but you have to use your own content. It’s more plug and play than the mini-pc route and does support HDR and such. But unlike mini-pcs you can’t even open a browser to jankily watch commercial streaming services using it.

These stores host flock and other cameras on the premise of: it deters crime, decreases theft, shoplifting, and other criminal acts and is a net benefit on that basis. Privacy makes them no money. As far as they’re concerned they’d put cameras in your cars and homes to make sure you’re not stealing from them.

You have to break that calculation so it costs far more than it can save to host these. Cutting down cameras doesn’t incur anywhere near large enough a cost to change that calculus and there’s a good chance Flock pays for the new cameras not the store. A boycott would be hard to get them to acknowledge as being connected to their hosting these kinds of surveillance systems and the people who put them in and keep them there would try to strongly deny a correlation so it would need to be a militantly disciplined, well organized campaign.

The problem is you need the media to help you organize such a widespread and well-telegraphed in message boycott campaign and the media is fully on the side of Flock and regarding any vandalism of Flock and similar ALPRs as a case where they desperately want the person caught and will air their photos to attempt to help catch such a criminal monster. So the media would never broadcast such a campaign, would never even acknowledge it. Local news makes so much money off police stories, local crime fear-mongering, etc.

Of course there are other options to change the cost calculus but they’re not preferable due to legality issues.

Follow the steps here to perform a secure erase that resets the cells and wipes any on-device encryption keys:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_state_drive/Memory_cell_clearing

You can do this from a live-boot environment if you wish. I would very strongly recommend disconnecting ALL other drives before performing this step as the best precaution against accidentally nuking the wrong drive. However if you choose to do this with other drives connected triple check you have the right drive selected before each step.

Doesn’t matter. They’ve been replacing the content people with repost bots and AI bots for years and most people won’t notice if half those power posters leave as a result. Many of the power posters would stay on Reddit anyways short of being charged $10/post simply for the feeling of being important which they derive from being influential.

Thats not even getting into how the US Air Force has been astroturfing Reddit for over a decade with most active city Eglin Air Force base and would therefore put paid effort in to keep it afloat and their psyops reaching minds. Heck tons of organic posters leaving gives them a chance to seize mod positions and make trustworthy names for accounts under their control.

It’s actually very easy. Don’t use your TV as anything but a display. Don’t connect it to the internet ever.

If you need to watch content on it get an appropriate device. If you want to watch BluRays buy a BluRay player. If you want to do streaming buy a streaming device at a price point and privacy level to your liking. Yes the streaming devices collect some data too but they don’t have mics and cameras and they can’t tell corporations and the government the contents of the vacation photo slide show off your laptop which you plugged in. Also you can in future often neuter many of the more expensive streaming devices and if you get sick of the streaming device you have, you can just buy a different one and sell the old one.

As to librelec and “sucking”. If you’re trying to do yo-ho stuff with free streaming sites and services it isn’t going to be great. Frankly if you want some quality and good experience either pay for a commercial streaming service (or a good IPTV one*) or invest in learning how to host your own content with an Arr stack. This used to be a lot cheaper but AI has ruined everything. Nothing we can do about that.

*yeah good ones are hard to find and one should never pay ahead as many of them vanish suddenly.

Then you’re very ignorant.

Apple’s presence is good because it’s a privacy anonymizing service that obscures your email and forwards anything to an email of your choice and logins/connections can be deleted at any time.

And it was introduced in response to the long existing proliferation of login with Google and Facebook and similar schemes. They forced it using their App Store because otherwise no company would go for the user identity obfuscation over the already existed for years privacy invasive alternatives. Apple came late and forced companies to allow their privacy obfuscation alternative. Note: though it often is more private some sites can request additional data from Apple same as from Google and Facebook such as your name. Apple is no worse and often better overall as a choice just the same though it’s best to avoid these types of login IMO.

I admit my mind went to this too. It’s a shame I just can’t view this thing with anything but anger since learning it is horrendous-tier dehumanizing zionist propaganda from a rabid zionist writer. The game and the show. Shame on the actors for continuing to participate in that zionist agit-prop in the middle of a genocide carried out by the people the writer is doing apologia for.

Unfortunately with AI induced RAM pricing prices are up across the board so cheap is out if you want extra functionality.

You can get as someone suggested the OSMC device. As well as various other third party streamer devices that support OSMC or CoreElec though the Vero does hit near the top for features for video watching as per the spreadsheet linked here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=385600

But if you want general purpose distros that allow emulation you probably want an N150 or similar mini-PC. The tricky part there is that while you can get lets of cheaper older used mini-PCs for emulation if you want to do hardware 4K HDR video content decoding then you need something more recently made for efficiency sake so you’re not pushing the processor to the max just watching videos.

If it has to be under $250 then your options are things like the Vero V or other streaming focused devices but you give up general purpose distro and emulation (I think, Kodi does technically offer a games feature but I’ve never used it and am not familiar) OR else you’re going with a used mini-PC that will okay for general purpose distro and light emulation may struggle with your 4K HDR content depending on video codec used and bitrate.

If you can afford a bit more >$250 but <$350 you can get an N150 or similar intel system that should handle all of the above.

A caveat on the N150 route though is currently there is no support for Dolby Vision, HDR+, etc. You only get plain old HDR and that’s not likely to change anytime soon as it’s a driver issue and no one makes one.

If streaming your own video content is your most important goal and you may need things like DV and other HDR+ formats then go with the Vero V or another item listed near the top of the Kodi list like the Ugoos or Homatics.

It’s not a fallacy when multiple countries/states have passed laws that explicitly demand some form of ID confirmation/scanning and others have stated an intent for it. It’s not a fallacy when you understand what the purpose of this push actually is.

The fact is the end result isn’t going to be compliance with the least restrictive standard but the most. That’s how regulatory compliance always works. You always comply with the most restrictive because it encompasses the least restrictive as well. Further if you stopped to think and analyzed history scientifically instead of it being a series of great man events or whatever you’d understand how capitalism in crisis reacts by crushing the working class using tools like fascism. That the 5-eyes spying abuse far from being some deviation from liberalism embody the deeper desires and wants of the modern western world to spy on and control their citizens and the world and that a free internet has been an incredible threat to state power since day one.

It’s just the first big moment where their propaganda failed, where their narrative was undermined was the Gaza genocide and they will do anything to prop up the Zio-Nazi entity occupying Palestine and prevent their other narratives from suffering the same fate in future. A man in the “free speech” loving EU was unpersoned FFS and can’t be given money, buy food, stay at hotels, use banks, anything for deviating too far from the approved EU narrative. These are the people we’re dealing with.

It’s also not a fallacy when AI has created a crisis for private/government spy fusion platforms like Meta, Google, etc in both gaining ad dollars due to AI bots being hard to discern so hard identifying humans is a must for not only spying but profits from ads.

For a long time the material interests of the massive tech companies and their financial backers and shareholders did not particularly benefit from this kind of ID law and so they pushed back and disallowed it. Now thanks to AI their interests align with those of the state, the capitalist propaganda organs, the moral crusaders. There is in other words nothing major standing in their way and tons of power centers pushing for this as a result of AI, the Gaze genocide breaking containment, etc and it has gained momentum.

I’m afraid this isn’t the win you think it is.

One of two things will happen in the near future:

1. Nearly everything you do online from banking to shopping to social media (including online gaming) to paying your electric or internet bill to yes porn will require OS-level attestation to access and use the site. Linux lacking this will become an incredibly private OS that is useless for anything online making this a defeat for Linux having any hopes of real desktop market share and/or forcing it to comply. Microsoft, Apple, Google would love to push Linux as an OS option off the table.

2. Kids will start using liveboot or installing Linux and evading these controls, Christian fascists, tech overlord capitalists, and the government will take notice and write a bill to close this “loophole” and within a few years having already established the idea in the popular conception that age verification is okay will face lesser resistance in quickly ramming it through.

Quickly running out of places where VPN companies can be legally incorporated/based and where exit servers can be located that aren’t subject to advancing laws like these.

All the fools who were saying “lol they can’t ban VPNs, impossible!!!” are looking well ever more foolish and will feel very confused and shocked when the pain actually hits them and they realize it’s not so easy and they were wrong and complacent and too late now to do anything. But these are primarily westerners who’ve never had the western sanctions regime and its full power turned against anything they care about so they can be forgiven a bit for not understanding how powerful it is, its total dominance of financial exchange and how lacking a counter state interest by Russia or China in spinning up their own censorship resistant VPN for western users there isn’t really much counter to it. Russia and China are going to sit and laugh at you flailing about in the tattered remains of your liberal illusions of freedom and not lift a finger to help.

Sure you can pay for a VPS and spin up a VPN on that but that has your credit card on it with your name making it clear its you doing it and providing zero plausible deniability and as a non-residential IP you’re going to be getting increasing amounts of blocks by anti-AI-scraper methods as well as fraud alerts. Also it doesn’t hide you in the crowd so even advertisers who don’t have access to your credit card like authorities would will be able to associate all your activity back to one person and it’s just a short correlation from there via a mistake back to your real identity. Also won’t help much with torrenting copyright content as your provider will drop you at the first sign of trouble. Maybe you can find one that shrugs off DMCAs but I bet you’ll be paying through the nose. No more $5/month long term plan, get ready for $25/month and much higher than that and you still won’t necessarily be able to avoid ISP throttling of your traffic if they move to allow-listing for uncapped speeds only to known services and throttle everything else.

Very grim.

Then they will break you and industry that wants data will win. You vs bourgeois governments, you will lose.

This is a serious push and though children are the cover they’re after surveillance. Take away their talking points, give them what they claim to want but in a privacy-preserving way and this goes away for another 10 years before they can make another push.

If we win this fight by doing a zero knowledge form they have no scaffolding to use on which to build anything further. If we lose and they build something that isn’t zero knowledge it will 100% be used in a few years to iterate on to build more surveillance and control.

Basically if we don’t push for this privacy alternative and instead fight like hell against it entirely they’ll listen to the only voices putting forward a solution which is meta and the other privacy invasive actors who want an invasive approach. If it’s made heard that people will accept this we can shunt them onto this path.

Ideally we’d push onto this path but make demands that it doesn’t require verification. That parents can set it up at phone/computer setup and it cannot be changed without reinstalling the OS or erasing the phone and that on phones it gets tied to a Google/Apple account. That way there’s not even any identity aspect involved but tools given to parents who want to do this. Shove it back to parental responsibility. But this would be a compromise we could live with and still have some privacy with.

For proprietary streaming apps where I want to be able to see what’s going on because I’m allowed a higher resolution than a 720p blurry mess? Apple’s TVos seems pretty great. Zero ads, smooth, devices are overpowered for watching just TV. It does have apps for Jellyfin and Plex though I’d have to suggest infuse instead which is a $12 annual subscription for 4k or any proprietary audio codecs but it does work pretty well.

For everything else some version of libelec or corelec depending on the device in question it’s being installed on. There are also external launchers that keep Android but remove most of the problems.

If you want plug and it works then AppleTV. If you’re interested in putting in some work maybe a custom launcher on an android install. Beyond that libelec, coreleck, and Kodi.

Kodi maintains a big csv list of hardware (and software) with capabilities and suggestions here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=376035

Dust, fingerprints, etc.

Allegedly they may check these things under black lights at the factory for any evidence of opening to attempt to deny warranty. With drive prices having doubled since I bought it and all capacity bought out they’d be extra eager to find any excuse to attempt to deny. Magnuson–Moss warranty act should prevent them from doing that but I don’t have a high power law firm on retainer to sue and intimidate western digital into compliance if they tell me to pound dirt.