I asked nicely why do I need to give my phone number and I was told that to register me as a member so I can get the discount.

I declined and said I don’t want to join and would like to just pay.

I’ve just said “I don’t have one” when asked this for awhile. This never seems the phase the cashiers, I’m guessing they know what that really means. Half the time I still get whatever discount, though I’ve never tried to sign up for a membership saying that.

If it’s an online form my phone number is just (local area code)555–5555. I’ve never had that not take, except for one case where it automatically enabled 2-factor auth and I had to create a new account.

You’re an Agnostic.

Agnosticism is the view or belief that the existence of God, the divine, or the supernatural is either unknowable in principle or unknown in fact.

Point to point wireless network link: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/all-wireless/products/af-24

As for what it’s for, it could be anything. Possibly just for the camera that’s also on that pole?

As someone who is currently hiring: Anything

Beyond that it depends on what you know and what kind of work you want to do.

IMO, the best free option is https://freedns.afraid.org/. The biggest downside of that one is that you have to login a couple times a year (IIRC?) to keep it active. I actually still use this even though I have a paid domain, I just CNAME my real domains to the afraid dynamic name. That was easier than changing the config every time I become unhappy with my domain registrar and have to reconfigure everything after swapping.

I’ll start off with a proviso, I haven’t s much touched my Librem 5 in at least a year (maybe even 2?), so if they’ve had some massive turn around in that time I don’t know about it. All of this post is just what I think I remember, if you want actual facts go dig around in the wayback machine or something.

The promise of the L5 was super grandiose. They were going to create this mobile device that could completely replace your android device. It was going to launch with a custom matrix client that would let you make voice and video calls, which no other matrix client at the time could do. It was gonna be great and it was going to be delivered in a year.

Now clearly that was never going to go off without a hitch. I don’t blame them for being late nor for not delivering all their promises right at launch. But when things started getting delayed they seemed to be doing everything in their power to not communicate with backers. And anytime they would say something, they would say “well we didn’t hit that deadline, but we promise we’re totally super duper close now”. And then they’d blow through that deadline without a word too.

I did eventually get my phone, obviously, but it wasn’t anything like a usable device. The battery that it came with was smaller than advertised and it didn’t have any power management so you got a few hours of battery life. The cameras just didn’t exist as far as the software was concerned. The privacy switches would randomly kill power to the modem when you lightly brushed against them without the switch moving out of the ‘on’ position. Which was super annoying since you had to reboot the phone any time you wanted to turn the modem back on. And rebooting took ages.

Even at this point I was still rooting for them to succeed. I really want a proper Linux phone and have since 2008.

But ever since then, I really haven’t seen much of anything change with the software, at least for as long as I was paying attention to it. One of the cameras got support added by a community member at some point, but the pictures it was taking were so bad it looked like some 1999 digital camera taking pictures in a dimly lit room even in full sunlight. There was no way to know if an application in their store was going to work or not, most didn’t, mostly because they were meant for a larger screen & a mouse.

I pulled it out a few times on and off over the years, but the last time I did, I couldn’t even figure out how to get it to update. So, I haven’t really even touched it since then. (I’ve got it out connected to power to see what it’s like now. Though, I’m not sure it’s charging, is flashing green (with an occasional flicker of red) a good thing?)

Since receiving it, the only communication I’ve gotten from Purism has been “Investment Opportunities”. I’m not sure why I’d invest in a company that still hasn’t delivered what it promised me over 5 years ago.

I absolutely want them to succeed, and I hope they prove my pessimism wrong, but at this point I absolutely would not put my money on that happening.

As the owner of a Birch batch Librem 5 and former defender I’m sad to say, agreed.

For the purposes of data collection, the US basically isn’t foreign for AU: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

We tried that in the 90s, it went poorly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat#History

You’re not mistaken, it is definitely possible with at least RSA, though, I would guess it may not always be possible. It also sounds like it’s still a bad idea unless you know all of the parameters used to generate the keys and can be sure what information is actually encoded in the keys.

Less commercial interest means only hobby level development

Podman is developed by RedHat: https://github.com/containers/podman/graphs/contributors

As others have said, it’s quite good on privacy. For the truly paranoid, IIRC you can even self-host the sync server.

From the security perspective of privacy, do make sure to use a good password for the Mozilla account, the account password is also the encryption key for the E2E encryption.

It supports them already, there just aren’t any provided by default. They’re called Bookmark Keywords: https://github.com/jameshealyio/bang-bookmarks

I’d suggest not importing all of them from that list though, there’s a crap load, just pick the ones you want and put them in manually.

Unfortunately, no. Samba needs a different label. Doing that relabels things so that only containers (and anything unrestriced) can access those files.

IMO, yes. Docker (or at least OCI containers) aren’t going anywhere. Though one big warning to start with, as a sysadmin, you’re going to be absolutely aghast at the security practices that most docker tutorials suggest. Just know that it’s really not that hard to do things right (for the most part^[1]).

I personally suggest using rootless podman with docker-compose via the podman-system-service.

Podman re-implements the docker cli using the system namespacing (etc.) features directly instead of through a daemon that runs as root. (You can run the docker daemon rootless, but it clearly wasn’t designed for it and it just creates way more headaches.) The Podman System Service re-implements the docker daemon’s UDS API which allows real Docker Compose to run without the docker-daemon.

Preferring private spaces doesn’t mean being “pro car”. I very much prefer private spaces, but still overall prefer public transit. That just means I spring for a private roomette on amtrak even when it’s a non-overnight 8 hour trip to Chicago.

That’s a problem anywhere with user generated content & user defined communities. The usual example is that when BOTW came out there were at least half a dozen subreddits created and more than one survived, so there were two that were both really popular at the same time and that’s in addition to multiple Zelda and multiple Nintendo subs that might all get the same links/posts.

Its a non-powered version of a hot shoe, both of which are the thing you use to mount an external flash that’s on the top of a lot of (all?) full sized cameras.

It’s for a hook to keep the handset on when the phone is mounted flat on a wall. It can usually be slid/folded down or removed when its not need.

As far as I’m aware something like that isn’t really possible.

• it would prevent one person from making multiple fake accounts

How do you define ‘a person’ and how do you ensure that they only have one account? Short of government control of accounts, I don’t think you can really guarantee this and even then there’s still fraud that gets past the current government systems.

Then, how do you verify that the review is coming from the person that the account is for?

IMO, we’d all be better off going back to smaller scale social interactions, think ‘social media towns’ you trust a smaller number of people and over time develop trust in some. Then you can scale this out to more people than you can directly know with some sort of web-of-trust model. You know you trust Alice, and you know Alice trusts Bob, so therefore you can trust Bob, but not necessarily quite as much as you trust Alice. Then you have this web of trust relationships that decay a bit with each hop away from you.

It’s a rather thorny problem to solve especially since for that to work optimally you’d want to know how much Alice trusts bob, but that amounts to everyone documenting how much they trust each of their friends, which seems socially… well… difficult.

Though the rest is actually easy™:

• reviews wouldn’t be suppressed or promoted by paid algorithms
• the algorithm WOULD help connect people to items they are interested in. But maybe the workings of it would be open source, so it can be audited for bad acting.

You do what the fediverse does, you have all the information available to everyone, then you run your own ‘algorithm’ that you wrote/audited/trust. The hard part is getting others to give away access to all ‘their’ data.