Smoking cigarettes

Expiration dates on packaged food are almost always about how enjoyable the food is to eat, not safety. Donating expired packaged food with legal protection from liability would be good for the world.

Locked bootloaders

From what I can tell, all the karma thresholds are dynamic and probably only knowable by admins. If nearly 1000 isn’t enough to avoid rate limiting then they sound pretty aggressive.

From my perspective HN’s approach seems to do pretty well at mitigating bad behavior, but might be a little too hard on newcomers and casual users.

Low-karma accounts are rate-limited. I don’t know what the threshold is, but that goes away after you gain some karma.

I think the main appeal is that it would auto-delete the nudes you send to someone you don’t quite trust. I’m too sober to contemplate why you’d send nudes to someone you don’t quite trust, but I know it’s a thing.

Of course, once it’s on someone else’s device, Snapchat can’t really guarantee they haven’t kept a copy. From what I’ve read about the implementation, it doesn’t even try very hard. The fact that you can’t trust the client is basic network security.

Hate is a strong word.

I prefer to avoid their services due to privacy, and because over the long term, they’re unreliable. Any other for-profit corporation that tries to offer a bunch of free SASS products is going to end up with privacy issues as well; knowing the incentives lets us predict the outcome.

I’m keeping my Pixel 4a as long as I possibly can though.

If an update to the proprietary Nvidia driver causes Linux to crash, that’s an Nvidia problem, not a Linux problem.

I’m a little surprised by Twitter restricting an account for that. Of course I never believed Musk’s free speech rhetoric, but this isn’t a specific issue where I’d expect them to put their thumb on the scale so blatantly.

Much like many of the iPhone users when you asked the converse question, it’s not so much that something is stopping me, but that I have no interest in it. I don’t see any benefits that I care about, and it would cost time and money to switch.

Let’s pretend for a moment that I did have some desire to switch, perhaps due to some new hardware from Apple or changes to Android I found unpalatable. Here are some things I’d consider major barriers:

• Sideloading - I want to install stuff without permission from the hardware or OS vendor. Maybe I’ll even write a niche app without asking permission.
• Administrative access - I have root on my Android phone, and I didn’t have to fight it to gain root (I know that’s not true of every device). If I don’t have root or can’t get it easily, it’s not really mine.

That’s… basically it, but those are big things and Apple’s position on them is so opposite mine that they’re risking severe sanctions from the EU to comply with the EU’s sideloading regulations in the most useless way they can.

It is unfortunate that manufacturers, Google, and app makers have all engaged in behaviors that make running a third-party OS less viable for most people.

That’s true, but hardware drivers are a much smaller attack surface area.

That seems like a concern for the IT department of a large organization, but not something end users should care about.

My Pixel 4a has LineageOS on it, and is installing an update from two days ago right now.

That may technically be true, but it’s currently very normalized. Do we actually want to denormalize it? Should the government know about every trivial transaction?

The alternative is safeStorage, which uses the operating system’s credential management facility if available. On Mac OS and sometimes Linux, this means another process running in the user’s account is prevented from accessing it. Windows doesn’t have a protection against that, but all three systems do protect the credentials if someone copies data offline.

Signal should change this, but it isn’t a major security flaw. If an attacker can copy your home directory or run arbitrary code on your device, you’re already in big trouble.

You’d need write access to the user’s home directory, but doing something with desktop notifications on modern Linux is as simple as

dbus-monitor "interface='org.freedesktop.Notifications'" | grep --line-buffered "member=Notify\|string" | [insert command here]

Replacing the Signal app for that user also doesn’t require elevated privileges unless the home directory is mounted noexec.

I don’t recall Signal ever claiming their desktop app provided encryption at rest.

I’m not sure if they’ve claimed that, but it does that using SQLCipher.

If someone can read my Signal keys on my desktop, they can also:

• Replace my Signal app with a maliciously modified version
• Install a program that sends the contents of my desktop notifications (likely including Signal messages) somewhere
• Install a keylogger
• Run a program that captures screenshots when certain conditions are met
• [a long list of other malware things]

Signal should change this because it would add a little friction to a certain type of attack, but a messaging app designed for ease of use and mainstream acceptance cannot provide a lot of protection against an attacker who has already gained the ability to run arbitrary code on your user account.

I find it important to have some tools with me. Even if I’m really unlikely to use them, being a useful person who can fix stuff and solve problems is a major component of my self concept.

I also find the tools interesting in their own right. Lots of people like trinkets and gadgets, and there may be no explaining it to someone who doesn’t immediately find that sort of thing appealing.