Because you can choose to leave your phone at home and are travel everywhere by car if you don't want to be tracked. But you can't leave your car at home and travel anywhere.
It is true that we don't need cars sending telemetry to track us since there is a conveniently placed identification number on the front and rear of the car, the number plate (used by government), but this is physically broadcasted and that limits its reach.
So why should the manufacturer of my car have access (and the right to sell) a lot of my personal data like location, weight, age indefinitely just because I own a product manufactured by them?
It is an unnecessary overreach on very sensitive data and I can't really opt out (if buying a modern car) since all manufacturers are doing it.
Yes I also carried a phone everywhere the last 20years, but that doesn't make the tracking right (also on phone I think we should be tracked less).
I understand and agree in general, but the root issue is in the laws and what's permitted to companies. Giving your data to car manufacturers and 3rd parties should be mandated to be disabled by default by law and only enabled with proper informed consent.
My car does not have a cellular modem in it, and my phone runs GrapheneOS. I use airplane mode extensively and rotate SIMs regularly. Data brokers aren't getting any anything from me.
Funny that you say that because of all the big tech companies, Apple has the best track record at fighting for consumer privacy. And you certainly cannot say that for any of the car makers that currently have an EV lineup.
Apple has a terrible reputation if you don't cherrypick news. Most of their 'security' stuff is PR work. Its just that rest of competition is even worse.
The power of a tablet is far more than is required for an infotainment system. Make a standard, like we used to have for radios and regulate everything to expose all the controls via a standard connection. Standard parts for replacing and sizes for fitting.
The only way we can have nice things is by regulating. I don't want proprietary tyres either.
> Finally, there's the issue of privacy. Most manufacturers contract with analytics vendors to send your data back to them. You can't even turn it off.
You absolutely can. Pull the fuse of the cellular modem aka "telematics unit" or even completely remove it. Some vehicles don't have a separate fuse, in which case you will need to physically unplug the modem. Do your research and don't buy any car where this can't be done more or less painlessly.
Yeah unless its integrated into another module. Or you remove or unplug it, and suddenly it throws an annoying error because a module is missing. Or even your car goes into limp mode because of some kind of weird cascade failure.
There might be some cars this works on now, but it's going to be harder and harder to do over time as things get more integrated, and the more they realize they want that sweet location data money.
Well thats a nice theory but do you yourself give guarantee to all models that they will keep working after such potentially destructive 'hack' ? I don't think so. Its trivial for manufacturer to make it stop working because of ie some security blah and just having a big warning on the screen to go to the repair shop.
So a typical internet advice - don't listen to it uncritically, or not at all.
I am not sure I fully understand the usability trade-offs when it comes to these "atomic" distros. One the one hand, security seems to improve markedly, since the root filesystem is largely immutable. On the other hand, it does seem that a lot of straightforward things become harder. I generally dislike flatpaks and favor a low-level, bare-metal approach to things and atomic distros seem to go against that. Maybe I should just run some experiments in a VM.
The idea is that the immutability of the operating system leads to greater stability. The partition should (in theory) be exactly as the distribution expects on every computer it’s installed to, which limits the potential for user changes breaking anything. The benefit to the user is that it’s a lot harder to shoot yourself in the foot by running the wrong script.
For me, the point is not security, but maintenance. Whenever system upgrades have gone wrong, it's almost always been a partial update, and that just no longer happens.
I've found doing work in containers made things straightforward enough, as a developer. Though I still somewhat think that that's just moving the problem - I'm not quite keeping those containers up-to-date. `distrobox assemble` helps a bit though.
> dislike flatpaks and favor a low-level, bare-metal approach
Flatpaks are sandboxed with bubblewrap[1]. I would still call that bare-metal. And flatpaks aren't particularly bloated either, there's no need for a flatpak to be any bigger than a regular binary if it only depends on the kde/gnome/freedesktop runtime.
I used to prefer installing apps via my distro directly, but I now prefer using flatpaks because of the way it sandboxes the applications. When I delete a flatpak I know for sure any configuration or cache files for that app are also gone (unless you opt to keep them).
If you want to play with atomic distro's, there's a bunch of different approaches out there. For instance GnomeOS is not package based at all. OpenSUSE works via btrfs snapshots, Fedora Atomic uses rpm-ostree currently.
If you manage enough diverse servers, then patching will break something critical fairly frequently. Back when I was a sysadmin, Windows updates would break some server every 2 months, and Redhat every 6 months.
Being able to just reboot the server back into a working state, and then fix it at a later time would have been nice.
It's also a big deal for desktops, especially when they're operated by people who ain't experts at troubleshooting software issues. Aeon's my go-to when setting up computers for non-technical folks specifically because I can have it auto-update fearlessly, knowing that the absolute worst case scenario is having to talk someone through booting into a known-good snapshot.
Same remark here. This reads more like paid promotion for UniFi than anything. It should be mentioned that any Linux box can trivially accommodate multiple WAN interfaces. You don't need to pay the UniFi tax for this.
People like unifi because it’s relatively easy to configure. My Netgear R7000 from at least a decade ago running Fresh Tomato firmware will also happily let you have 1-4 WAN interfaces depending on how many of its Ethernet ports you want to dedicate. It won’t let you use all 5 ports for WAN though!
It's almost criminal that the article does not mention network-wide DNS blocklists as an obvious solution to this problem. I stop nearly 100% of ads in their tracks using the Hagezi ultimate list, and run uBlock on desktop for cosmetic filtering and YouTube.
I should really run some to tests to figure out how much lighter the load on my link is thanks to the filter.
I also manually added some additional domains (mostly fonts by Google and Adobe) to further reduce load and improve privacy.
It does indeed work pretty well today, but they have already developed ways to circumvent it. For example, serving ads from the same domain as the main page.
AFAIK, YouTube has been doing that for years and uBlock has consistently adapted. It's also easier for Google to do that since it owns the ad network and doesn't need to verify ad prints are legitimate and not inflated by the third party that displays them.
The point is that you still need uBlock, this can't be done via DNS filtering. I expect this kind of stuff to become more common in the future if adblocker usage grows. It might be CDNs doing that, too.
> You specify an age at account creation that sites and apps must query.
The Internet has been a free place for 30+ years and I don't see a reason to change that. I grew up with the ability to access all kinds of content on the Internet, in an unrestricted manner, and it is sad to see that decision makers now want to take this away from younger generations.
We must absolutely resist any attempt at profiling Internet users. Age is only the first step. If people give in now, the next step will be other personal information, and it will also be done in the name of "protecting children" or "catching terrorists" as always. The writing is on the wall.
You grew up without parental oversight. I did too. This is an attempt to give parents the tools to manage what their children see on the internet. I disagree with that parental oversight probably far, far more than you do. I think it should be a crime when a parent indoctrinates their child into a religion. But this is a counter to far worse laws like requiring you to upload your photo ID to websites to get access. This explicitly forbids that sort of privacy violating situation.
> This is an attempt to give parents the tools to manage what their children see on the internet.
You're just gullible.
There is no website that I've ever uploaded my driving license or other ID to, the only place that I need that for is my bank and that's about a real world relationship, not about an online one.
Any website that wants me to verify my age is going to have to do without me, that's just none of their business. What children see on the internet is not going to change because of this, any parent that wants to modify their kids' behavior is going to have to do some actual parenting rather than to rely on gatekeeping technology because kids are far more capable than their parents when it comes to circumventing such restrictions.
The last thing I need is Apple spying on me when I am driving.
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