SOULFLY98

There is a national law called in China called PIPL, modeled after the GDPR, that limits what companies can do with the private data collected about individuals.

Outside of California, not much exists in the USA to protect privacy.

I'm not going to pretend that either country is not authoritarian. But a lot of the narrative about China is just propaganda. Here at least I can bicycle safely to work, take an electric car if I need a taxi, not worry about medical bankruptcy from a hospital stay, and not be deported because we are brown or worry that my kids will get shot at school.

Ask me ten years ago and this was a different answer. But conditions change (in both countries), we must adapt, so here we are.

Maybe my perspective is skewed because I live in Beijing and spent most of my life in the USA, but I think the US is worse on privacy.

Install the apparmor profiles and extra profiles packages from the apt repository. They are sensible restrictions on common apps (web browsers) to prevent anything malicious from happening if they are ever hijacked. Make sure apparmor is enabled. This will do more to keep you secure than an antivirus.

If you insist on an AV, install ClamAV and have it scan weekly. It's libre software and works well with Linux.

Yeah when doorbells sell your facial recognition to the USG just because you walked by someone's house, when your wifi password is stored by Google or Microsoft or Apple and sold for profit, when every company under the sun has been breached with no financial or legal repercussion, when everyone is complicit at selling your information while censoring your speech based on Trump's whims, who cares about privacy? China privacy fears? If China wanted your information, they would just buy it from the American companies you "trust" who are selling it on the open market.

When American cars are being recalled because the engines are dying under 20k miles (Chevy V8) and $50k "rugged" vehicles come with plastic oil pans (Ford Bronco), and nobody domestic makes reasonably sized sedans any more, and our only good electric vehicle maker turned out to be run by a fascist, why would you ever buy an American vehicle?

Sounds like the pragmatic thing is to buy a Chinese electric vehicle at half the price of an American vehicle and it will last twice as long. So now the narrative begins to keep them banned, just like they did to Tiktok and Huawei phones.

Fairphone 4 with PostmarketOS?

I love this.

Even a Raspberry Pi Zero is going to be faster than some of the physical beasts that served us pages back in the late 90's and early 2000's and they will run on just the tiniest drip of electricity.

Oh look a western article about China doing something and not casting doubt on it with the phrase "BUT AT WHAT COST?"

Carbon offsets are like net carbs. It's just bullshit to make people feel like they are doing something.

I saw fvwm in a magazine and it had a really cool 3D look to it and I wanted that. I had never seen anything like that. We were very poor and I only had an old computer, a 486, so it was either pirate software (and there was no version of Windows in our language) or use Linux.

I ended up on Red Hat from a magazine and then later Slackware. I liked Window Maker so I stayed on that for two decades. Learning Linux gave me a constructive hobby, introduced me to free software philosophy, and gave me technology skills. We moved to the United States. When I was 15 or 16, I helped a college math professor install hardware on Linux. When he found out that I was dropping out of a very racist high school, he provided support and I ended up graduating from their college. Those Linux skills came in handy and helped start a career.

I have only ever used Windows to upgrade firmware on a laptop or to download an ISO so I could replace Windows. Like everyone else, I was enamoured with macOS back in the 2000's but couldn't afford one and when I finally could, it couldn't do sloppy focus and that was a pet peeve of mine so I just returned it and got a used ThinkPad.

I moved back to Asia. Now I use sway on Debian and get to ride my bicycle to work and my kids grow up better than I did, so life is good.

I deleted TikTok a few days ago and I had lots of videos there. Lots of fond memories and even met some people on the platform and found my barber on that app. But it's going to be another Instagram because the content curators all think the same and promote the same ideology and try to incite people over the same false narratives.

This is going to be like when Fox bought MySpace.

Hah! I actually removed the second comment because it got a little derisive. But I'll stand by my premise that Americans want/need bigger cars and handling was never an important thing in American car culture.

Those are great laptops and were well built. I think the 2011 might have the Radeon GPU issue though but if it's lasted this long, you are probably safe.

My grail was a 17" MacBook Pro from that era. I saw one the other day at a tech market but the vendor wasn't at the booth for me to make an offer =/. I'll swing by again an see if I can get it for around $50. They really do live a second life as Linux machines and OWC keeps me supplied on replacement parts.