Skull giver

Administrator is not root. NT AUTHORIRY\System probably comes closest. You rarely need to interact with that account because Window’s security system doesn’t have the same mix of authentication systems most Linux systems have (users + container APIs + PolKit).

Windows also supports mixed case filesystems just fine. It’s not the default, so your programs will probably screw up, but it’s just a flag. You can also mount filesystems like ext4 and btrfs on Windows (though booting from them doesn’t really work).

Also, Windows runs Libreoffice and GIMP just fine. You don’t need to, because you have better sofware available (pirated or paid).

As for security, Windows is MUCH better unless you’re a cybersecurity specialist with too much time in their hands. Most major distros don’t even come with a firewall enabled by default, let alone a firewall for outgoing traffic. And the best AV I’ve seen for Linux is Microsoft’s enterprise version of Windows defender. In terms of hacking tools, they’re mostly written in languages Python, most of them work on either platform.

For development, Linux has a slight edge, but with WSL2 it really doesn’t matter much.

Running Linux on computers with Nvidia hardware proves that Linux and Windows both have their problems dealing with device drivers. Linux’ benefit is that is has higher standards because the kernel devs need to sign off on driver, but that has downsides of turning away potential driver developers (as getting your code into Linux is a quite a complex thing just on its own). Linux also doesn’t have many drivers in general it seems, unless your device has some kind of generic fallback that disables any special features.

My kernel panics generally don’t display anything, the display just freezes and I need to force reboot the computer.

They’re teachers, they already have a full time job, they don’t need a side job of syadminning their own laptops.

Votes federate, but only for communities followed. I won’t see your votes in a community that I don’t follow, but I can see when you upvoted or downvoted what post in the community.

A scraper could simply follow every community on a Lemmy server and, barring Lemmy performance issues, will receive all comments and votes.

Just a quick and dirty SQL query of which votes of yours are in my server’s database:

select comment_like.score as score,comment_like.published as when, person.actor_id as who, comment.ap_id as what from comment_like join person on person.id = comment_like.person_id join comment on comment.id = comment_like.comment_id where person.actor_id = 'https://lemmy.ml/u/GolfNovemberUniform' order by comment_like.published desc; 

The same info is also available for posts, of course, I just didn’t want to bother making the query any longer.

Server admins/mods on Lemmy also have a button to see who upvoted and downvoted each post. This is just the inverse of that.

deleted by creator

Seems to me like they just want to greenwash (open wash?) their company by making it work with others. Saves a hell of a lot of trouble with legislators when it comes to stuff like the Digital Markets Act.

I’m sure they’re selling ads to their users, but I think that’s about it. There’s no money to be made analysing random internet accounts if you can’t show them ads when you’re big enough for EU regulators to care.

Why would they need threads for that? A whole bunch of companies are already doing that without running actual social media services.

They can analyse your likes and you wouldn’t even know it. All they need to do is follow the same servers you do here on Lemmy. On Mastodon they can set up a basic puppet domain, follow every user they can find, and then your Mastodon server will deliver your posts, likes, and re-tweet for them, no scraping or interaction necessary.

If you’re trying not to get analysed, the Fediverse is not for you. It’s simply not designed for privacy.

A factor in favour of jet fuel is that as the plane burns fuel if becomes lighter, thus consuming less fuel. Batteries stay the same weight. The difference between a full plane and an empty plane can be 18 metric tonnes. Super cheap operators tend to carry only a small extra margin of fuel over the amount technically necessary to make a trip, because it makes a real difference.

That means the energy density you need in this comparison isn’t really linear. If you’re doing Taylor Swift flights to the couch and back, you can save a lot of weight by having a minimal amount of fuel in the tank, but with an electric plane you’ll always have to have the full battery in case you need to go somewhere further away.

If you still use MBR, and Windows has an update to its bootloader, yeah.

I don’t even know if Windows 11 still supports MBR, though. Maybe it’ll happen if your firmware is broken and always boots from the fallback bootloader instead of the normal boot entry? But in that case Windows is right and the firmware needs an update.

My GPU is a 10 series, actually. Same generation as my laptop’s GPU, though that’s technically a Quadro I think.

I’ve been using Wayland on Ubuntu 24.04 with Nvidia’s 555 driver and I have yet to see something seriously break because of it. 545 was unstable as hell, but 555 has been running perfectly. I’ve even got a working external display on my laptop with the 555 drivers, something I’d previously given up on with Wayland.

Plasma is much further along (having stuff like HDR and VRR working for instance) but things have gotten a lot better quickly with Nvidia+Wayland.

Even if they’re marketing BS, some decent mainline support for Qualcomm chips is always welcome. It’ll help projects like postmarketOS and mobile Linux distros massively to have more usable Qualcomm code.

Damn, they really overfit their music models. With image generation and text prediction it’s very hard to prove a direct connection, but with four or five of those songs it’s unmistakable that the original songs were used to generate the music output

I wonder what the effect will be of fixing the models’ overfitting. I’m guessing it’ll generate worse music, or they would’ve done so already.

Quite sad that it took the music industry to notice before any lawsuits with a chance of succeeding got off the ground.

Then, what prevents whosoever, to copy that file through cloning the complete disk?

Nothing. At most, you can have a hardware encrypted drive that won’t permit access to the encrypted data without a password, but the file will remain available after unlocking that. Plus, dedicated people (law enforcement, data recovery specialists) may be able to get access to the flash chip itself unless you buy one that self destruct on any tampering attempts (and even those have flaws).

You cannot prevent copying of data if that data is readable at disk level. At most, you can make the data useless by padding a layer of encryption (as well-encrypted data may as well be random data without the key material). That’s why everyone is going for encryption: encrypted files may as well be inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t know the passphrase. There’s no sense in copying a file which you cannot possibly read any bytes from.

If the key is gone (i.e. the real key is a password protected file that gets overwritten so even the password doesn’t work anymore), the file becomes irretrievable. This is sometimes called “cryptographic erase” in the context of disks. There are variations of this, for instance, storing the key in the computer’s processor (fTPM) behind a password, and clearing that key out. There’s no way to get the key out of the fTPM so it cannot be backed up. Even if someone were to guess your password, the file will forever remain locked. Or at least until someone manages to break all cryptography, but even quantum computers don’t know how to do that part yet.

If you’re willing to go deep, you could reprogram the firmware on your SSD/HDD to refuse reading the file. A few years back, someone made a proof of concept firmware that detected disk imaging attempts (because all blocks on the disk were read in order) and had the firmware return garbage while secretly wiping the disk when this detection triggered. You could, in theory, write firmware that refuses to read that block of data. However, if whoever you’re hiding this file from know about that, they can take out the platter/memory chips and dump them directly, bypassing your firmware entirely.

“undoing the protection should include filling in a password” That sounds like an encrypted drive. There are USB keys that’ll require software to enter an encryption password before you can do anything (including deleting the contents).

If you’re on Windows, try Bitlocker or Veracrypt. You can create hard disk images that can be mounted temporarily with a password.

Same can also be done on other operating systems, though I don’t know what tools yours come with.

In a pinch, you can just create a password protected 7zip archive, though viewing and editing those files usually involves a temporary copy.

There’s no way to prevent a file that’s loaded in memory from making it back to the disk. The best you can do is also encrypt the system drive so only people who know the encryption password can boot the computer that’s accessing these files.

Advertising doesn’t need to be privacy infringing. That’s something from the last 20 years. No conflict of interest necessary if all they do is ads.

Actually, Windows has implemented quite a few tricks to make this very difficult without setting off antivirus engines at least. X11’s security model is absolute trash compared to Windows Vista and above. Linux is getting safer with Wayland, but Linux on the desktop hasn’t had the XP SP1 security humiliation that Windows had so almost all of it is opt-in.

Solving the issues Windows has already solved with things like integrity levels will break compatibility with many applications (it also did on Windows, which is why Vista made you run everything as admin) but simply enabling the Flatpak sandbox can solve many problems already.

I wonder if there’s a desktop distro out there that enforces sandboxed applications by default. It would make running Linux a lot less risky.

Shitty companies are selling AI editing tools explicitly for this purpose. Their ads are all over Instagram. They’ve been found in supposedly regulated app stores. Yet, I’ve never seen anyone report on this trash industry.

There is no stopping the existence of these tools when running on local hardware, but it shouldn’t be this easy for teenagers. Somehow these companies manage to make money while real sex workers find themselves shoved into platforms like OnlyFans because no credit card company will process their payments. That’s the wrong way around!

Apple does actually build quite a few privacy preserving technologies into its operating system. The only unique identifier they intend to provide is the ID that the “we want to stalk you” prompts are referring to.

Tracking companies have proven to find new ways to track users, unfortunately, but they are trying their very best. Something you can’t say of Microsoft or Google.

As far as Apple has been capable of so far, the only unique device identifier apps on their platform can get access to is the one that you need to accept a prompt for. However, they know damn well that there are ways of fingerprinting devices that they can’t prevent (without fucking up the user experience) so it would be dishonest to pretend that saying “no” blocks these attempts.

Apps requiring accounts to be useful, for instance, can be tracked by the user ID on the app’s end. That’s not something Apple can ever prevent through technical means.

I’ve got my Mastodon and Lemmy servers hooked up to a postgres server that’s running separately, and the CPU usage between the two is now about the same.

That actually proves that Lemmy is more efficient, because it’s handling a hell of a lot more data. I don’t follow a lot of big accounts, and I’m the only user on my server, so I rarely get more than 40 posts + metadata through Mastodon. On Lemmy, however, each post can easily produce hundreds of events to process because of comments and likes all federating out.

In total, Lemmy seems to be heavier, but only because it does more. Mastodon is super inefficient, especially with things like RAM. I think it has something to do with the framework and language it’s running on; Gitlab seems to be using the same runtime and that eats through RAM like crazy as well.