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fourth
n00b
Joined: 26 Nov 2004
Posts: 48
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 Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2015 6:00 am Post subject: Welcome back me... MIA for ~10 years... ;) |
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I guess I'm 'new' to gentoo... though I used Gentoo many years ago when running a HTPC on a miniitx board. Back then I used gentoo to run the os\decoder as efficiently as possible so I could use a really lowly specced CPU for the HTPC (low specs = less heat = passive heat sinks = quite)
It was a simple system, but did have some tricky bits like using LIRC to record my TV remote to use on both the panel and also the HTPC at the same time. (worked well).
Having being an MCSE since the NT3.50 days I've finally thrown in the towel. While each subsequent windows release just felt ever more obtuse than the last it was never enough to dislodge me. I followed on with the Microsoft vs Linux war of ~10 years ago with interest and considered MS to be an aggressive company. Then came Snowden, and I recalled paranoia 15 years earlier when this was released http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1999/09/21577 . So carefully controlled what came out of machine, 127.0.0.1'ed sites, ad tracker lists, etc,, etc... But it;s near on impossible. Netstat ALWAYS showed enormous amounts of weird connections usually with almost nothing running. rerun malware scanners, etc, recheck running processes, recheck services, autoruns, etc... Reran my data through a VPN, added a second vendor firewall. Rebuilds... Now, MS W10 trumps all this, they own my data once I get windows 10. I can block them, but the next windows update may well silently just disable my OS hack... I could block them on my firewall, a PITA to start with, but I have to admit... MS is now hostile to it's own users. I'll never know the next channel they open back to themselves
For the past year I have watched data flowing out to unknown locations. To be clear I'm a minimalist, and often break something by disabling too many services or by hacking off something needed. I have always done this.
But the Windows 10 intrusion was too much. I vowed to never install it. Then found that win7 updates were pushed to my machine, which I caught in time(thanks slashdot) and disabled windows update. Then I drifted for a while considering my next steps. I always considered gentoo the 'most secure' distro, if only because all source is exposed to the end users. We do this at banks, we force programmers to send source to a release manager who then runs the compile script and stores the source. Just in case something dodgy is in there it can be analysed. Keeps them honest(er). I came close to choosing Arch if it wasn't for this point. It's certainly possible to deliver compromised code to my PC, but thankfully I'm a c++ coder, so worst case I can actually read and understand the code(not that I want to).
It just bothered me that I had to consider my laptop a 'hostile platform' as I had little control over what it did, who ran what and when. Mysterious lockups, constant malware scans looking for what process is revving the CPU fans when unattended just left me unsettled. Not paranoid, just annoyed that I had to consider my own computer potentially hostile to my basic usage.
So, with all gaming now on the console (not much really) I decided to try rebuilding the laptop.
You don't need to know all this... but I imagine sitting on the gentoo side of the fence looking at the Windows 10 mess you HAVE to be wondering about how many people must be getting annoyed by all this. I'd say about 20% of this IT department are concerned about the 'free' upgrade... but it seems I'm the only one jumping to linux. A few more are moving to OSX, a handful at most...
So, at the very least there is one new user directly linked to Windows 10 privacy. |
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Yamakuzure
Advocate
Joined: 21 Jun 2006
Posts: 2283
Location: Adendorf, Germany
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| Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2015 9:45 am Post subject: |
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Welcome back!
Just a few "2 cents" that came to my mind:
A) The free upgrade is for private users only. Windows 7/8 in company domains never get the GWX update.
B) Microsoft always collected data. Nothing new. They just do it openly now, because of
C) Windows 10 is just a lot nearer to what is considered normal on mobile phones and tablets. You can switch it all off. The only thing that annoyed me, is that all this mobile stuff like speach recognizing, camera control and GPS location were enabled by default.
D) Anybody who owns a smart phone with Windows, Android or iOS has it worse for years than anybody using windows 10 who has disabled all the (useless, in my eyes) applications from the mobile world.
Microsoft is not a company of saints, and they surely want data and control, like you said, but calling them "hostile" is a bit much in my opinion. They do not actually try to harm you.
Apart from that I use Windows 10 for gaming only, and for everything serious, Gentoo. 
_________________
Important German:- "Aha" - German reaction to pretend that you are really interested while giving no f*ck.
- "Tja" - German reaction to the apocalypse, nuclear war, an alien invasion or no bread in the house.
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fourth
n00b
Joined: 26 Nov 2004
Posts: 48
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| Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2015 11:22 am Post subject: |
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"A) The free upgrade is for private users only. Windows 7/8 in company domains never get the GWX update. "
As an professional who works in banking in this space I agree, but I would presume that the security+compliance guys will have to spend a bit of time nutting through this. When Windows Desktop Search was released back ~2002-3ish I remember the reaction was so strong that most companies blocked it with an AV policy. The reason was potential data leakage of sensitive\customer\etc data. I presume many of the same conversations are being held.
"B) Microsoft always collected data. Nothing new. They just do it openly now, "
The wording on the collection of metadata on the modern equivalent of desktop search and microphone processing(cortana et al) was loose enough IMHO that they would effectively salt the raw data and upload it under the new agreement. To me this takes things to a new level. I have always maintained a conceptual difference between Internet and local machine, and understood where my data lives, and what my locally executing code can (should) be doing. With this new update I'm no longer sure about what is on my machine and what was keyword scanned \uploaded. Of course once microsoft has this data, who do they then pass it on to? Is it possible personal financial data could end up in the dragnet? The EULA will certainly give me no guarantees of this.
"C) Windows 10 is just a lot nearer to what is considered normal on mobile phones and tablets. You can switch it all off. The only thing that annoyed me, is that all this mobile stuff like speach recognizing, camera control and GPS location were enabled by default. "
Many were annoyed by the defaults, but most techo's would eventually get a hold of a select\enterprise iso at some point and 'fix' their home systems. However, once you turn them off on a home system, how long before they are re-enabled? Would you know? Would you even bother rechecking? Would a enterprise build remain disabled if it was registered to a dodgy KMS?
"D) Anybody who owns a smart phone with Windows, Android or iOS has it worse for years than anybody using windows 10 who has disabled all the (useless, in my eyes) applications from the mobile world. "
Completely agree and to me it;s really concerning. I turn everyone I can to Wickr or worst case telegram.org. I've moved to protonmail from gmail, prefer redphone over clear communications, prefer alternative search engines. But I know that it's mostly fruitless. I'll have iceberg sized gaps all over. Android is mostly a black box and I would not even be able to tell if something wanted to upload anything or even if a single thing is private.
"but calling them "hostile" is a bit much in my opinion. They do not actually try to harm you. "
Hostile just means opposed. They are opposed to whats best for me. My privacy is valuable. They openly oppose this, just as google does. Where does that data go besides Google or Microsoft? Is my browsing history just sold off to ad marketers? Are the political views I write about sold to governments? Would they be key word scanned by my governments intelligence department and a 'threat' weighting defined? Just because I want to know about how the Israeli leviathan gas field ties in to the syrian pipeline.
Before you consider it all harmless... My best friend in high school (many years ago) was born in Cambodia. Just a normal Asian country. A radical Junta took over. Everyone considered potential problems was identified, removed and shot. Overall about 5 million from memory... a decent portion of the country. How did they find the 'problem people'? For one... Glasses. They were a sign of 'intellectuals'. He went though hell escaping the country and ended up here as a refugee. At present, almost anything you do online is visible. But black spots exist, direct encrypted communications, tor, etc mask activity. Imagine if you could scan what people read and wrote at the source?
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2974057/windows/how-to-turn-off-windows-10s-keylogger-yes-it-still-has-one.html
"Microsoft pretty much admits it has a keylogger in its Windows 10 speech, inking, typing, and privacy FAQ: “When you interact with your Windows device by speaking, writing (handwriting), or typing, Microsoft collects speech, inking, and typing information—including information about your Calendar and People (also known as contacts)…” "
Idle wondering... when a device (pc\phone\etc) can convert your voice to text, and can send that to a central server, when can you assume it's 'not' doing that? Does the hardware just not record unless you say ok google, siri, etc... or in order to hear those commands is it necessary for it to run continuiously?
What does this have to do with MS or Google scanning everything you do or say? It's not like they are part of the government: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo or represent hostile potential to other nations http://www.wsj.com/articles/eu-court-strikes-down-trans-atlantic-safe-harbor-data-transfer-pact-1444121361
For me personally, I feel put out that being an IT guy I can barely control my own data or systems. Like a nutritionist who subsists on McDonalds, I feel that I 'should' at least try to do whats right. It's certainly easier to just sit back and cross my fingers... I'd find plenty of company... 
Yeah, yeah... ship me a roll of tin foil... I'll make 'em myself |
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Yamakuzure
Advocate
Joined: 21 Jun 2006
Posts: 2283
Location: Adendorf, Germany
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| Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2015 6:33 am Post subject: |
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| fourth wrote: | "A) The free upgrade is for private users only. Windows 7/8 in company domains never get the GWX update. "
As an professional who works in banking in this space I agree, but I would presume that the security+compliance guys will have to spend a bit of time nutting through this. When Windows Desktop Search was released back ~2002-3ish I remember the reaction was so strong that most companies blocked it with an AV policy. The reason was potential data leakage of sensitive\customer\etc data. I presume many of the same conversations are being held. |
Makes perfect sense to me to be extremely suspicious with such features. Looks nice for the average users at home, but in companies, no matter the size, the IT security guys normally go nuts over something like this. (And hell, they should!)
| fourth wrote: | "B) Microsoft always collected data. Nothing new. They just do it openly now, "
The wording on the collection of metadata on the modern equivalent of desktop search and microphone processing(cortana et al) was loose enough IMHO that they would effectively salt the raw data and upload it under the new agreement. To me this takes things to a new level. I have always maintained a conceptual difference between Internet and local machine, and understood where my data lives, and what my locally executing code can (should) be doing. With this new update I'm no longer sure about what is on my machine and what was keyword scanned \uploaded. Of course once microsoft has this data, who do they then pass it on to? Is it possible personal financial data could end up in the dragnet? The EULA will certainly give me no guarantees of this. |
+1 on the "knowing where my data is" issue. That's so true...
| fourth wrote: | "C) Windows 10 is just a lot nearer to what is considered normal on mobile phones and tablets. You can switch it all off. The only thing that annoyed me, is that all this mobile stuff like speach recognizing, camera control and GPS location were enabled by default. "
Many were annoyed by the defaults, but most techo's would eventually get a hold of a select\enterprise iso at some point and 'fix' their home systems. However, once you turn them off on a home system, how long before they are re-enabled? Would you know? Would you even bother rechecking? Would a enterprise build remain disabled if it was registered to a dodgy KMS? |
I do not think that reverting user settings is exactly legal in all countries. However, this should be checked. The real problem is, that Microsoft can trust most users to never bother anyway...
| fourth wrote: | "D) Anybody who owns a smart phone with Windows, Android or iOS has it worse for years than anybody using windows 10 who has disabled all the (useless, in my eyes) applications from the mobile world. "
Completely agree and to me it;s really concerning. I turn everyone I can to Wickr or worst case telegram.org. I've moved to protonmail from gmail, prefer redphone over clear communications, prefer alternative search engines. But I know that it's mostly fruitless. I'll have iceberg sized gaps all over. Android is mostly a black box and I would not even be able to tell if something wanted to upload anything or even if a single thing is private. |
All you can do is running a few apps that you can consider to be trustworthy to (at least) take a look. Like Comodo or Malware Bytes. Beyond that, all mobile OSs are as blacked boxes as Windows is. Or MacOS. A shame, really. My solution is simple: Never do anything important on your phone.
| fourth wrote: | "but calling them "hostile" is a bit much in my opinion. They do not actually try to harm you. "
Hostile just means opposed. They are opposed to whats best for me. My privacy is valuable. They openly oppose this, just as google does. Where does that data go besides Google or Microsoft? Is my browsing history just sold off to ad marketers? Are the political views I write about sold to governments? Would they be key word scanned by my governments intelligence department and a 'threat' weighting defined? Just because I want to know about how the Israeli leviathan gas field ties in to the syrian pipeline. |
There are always two sides of the medal.
An example: There are ads all over. I actually think its nice if my recorded browsing behaviour is used to (at least) show ads that might be interesting for me. The other side of the medal is, that my browsing behaviour is nobody else's business. Period.
| fourth wrote: | Before you consider it all harmless...
(...) |
No. Harmless is something else. Something we can not get back for over 30 years now. 
_________________
Important German:- "Aha" - German reaction to pretend that you are really interested while giving no f*ck.
- "Tja" - German reaction to the apocalypse, nuclear war, an alien invasion or no bread in the house.
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Roman_Gruber
Advocate
Joined: 03 Oct 2006
Posts: 3846
Location: Austro Bavaria
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| Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2015 9:47 am Post subject: |
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welcome back.
| Quote: | | A few more are moving to OSX, a handful at most... |
If going for apple is that wise, i hightly doubt it.
Apple does the job which microsoft fails. Providing one working platform for the average user. The average user is just happy when he gets something done. He does not really bother about security. Apple does good marketing with the hype for its products.
I am very happy that someone who went from Windows 10 to apple sold me his gaming laptop at a decent price. Thank you microsoft for decent hardware for 2/3rds of the price I saw others askings for it. The seller told me he will buy an apple notebook and he showed me some webpages and asked me about processors. He did not have any clue about i5 or i7, and gpus. Spending 2200 euros for apple hardware and than he claims he gets the student decreased price. Too expensive in my eyes for hardware without decent gpu. Nothing is upgradeable. When the mainboard fails the hardware is worthless. As everything is soldered on the mainboard.
Well the things which annoys me on this ASUS-G75VW laptop. The trackpoint is in a bad spot(I will have to disable it on the next reboot in the bios). The bios, its uefi, is really the worst I have ever seen. Therefore i needed gpt and it took me several days to clone my installation from my ASUS G70SG notebook. Two rubber feets are missing on the bottom. It seems Asus still uses no proper glue for those. I need to replace them so the notebook has proper mounting and the speaker can be enjoyed. The costs for just two rubber feets are as much as for 1TB 2.5" HDD from a shop.
I bothered with windows 10 on this laptop, g75vw, and I was not that impressed. Half things were not working. |
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fourth
n00b
Joined: 26 Nov 2004
Posts: 48
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| Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2015 10:08 am Post subject: |
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I think we're pretty much on the same page
As someone living in Germany you may have your own local cultural idea's over excessive government monitoring of the population from a historical perspective.
Over here you may or may not know our 'public servants' pretending to be overlords have decided that everything I do and say should be recorded to be used against me forever:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/28/ours_once_ours_forever_asio_doesnt_have_to_delete_your_data/
Sorry to go off on such a tangent... overall I just wanted to mention that whilst you might imagine that at least some Windows users should have left due to the new policies and toolsets installed I'm living proof that at least one per did get off . A good friend of mine runs a SMB consulting firm here in sydney. His business is close to 100% linux these days. We used to sit shoulder to shoulder in a an aussie bank running the Windows server fleet... so I'm not the only one....
| Quote: | | An example: There are ads all over. I actually think its nice if my recorded browsing behaviour is used to (at least) show ads that might be interesting for me. The other side of the medal is, that my browsing behaviour is nobody else's business. Period. |
I think thats a very moderate view. However the flipside is that ad companies at the biggest users of trackers, and ad data aggregators rejoin your profiles and find that the 'you' from work, is the 'you' from the phone to the 'you' at home, and so on. That links you email access to your phone data to your GPS history, to your banking patterns(every bank I check in Australia has google analytics on the front page), to you shopping history Google is probabaly worst at this. Last year I logged on to gmail from work once. 9 month later I open a google app on my phone and noticed that the last search query was on hot datacentres... a query from 20 mins earlier from a bank workstation. A few month ago I booked a restaurant from a google search. When driving along the street(passanger) I recall I didn't know the street number. I open up google maps and there is only one place of interest on the busy street, the restaurant I booked, not the most popular establishment on the street at all, it was practically in a laneway off the main street. The search giant knew why I was opening up maps. It was cool, but also creepy. Since then I have slowly removed myself from gmail, chrome google search.
An idea... This 'fourth' guy, is actually YYYY XXXXX, this is his phone number AAAAAAA. He sent his wife on ZZZZZZZZ a message indicating that he was unhappy about immigration, then on a separate device 1 hour later he purchased a Becker Bk7 combat knife from Amazon. Later that day data collected from ingress indicates he frequently visited a church near his workplace. Precrime statistics indicate a highly elevated chance of a knife attack against an immigrant. Dispatch officers to address 22 blah street to conduct an illegal weapons search under Anti Terror Laws.
Whats the reality? Fourth purchased the knife to use camping out on the family farm, and he bought the farm just to 'get away from the city madness'. Visiting a church is just a portal in the game ingress(an gps tracker as a phone app game). Such trivial things can become sinister when viewed from the wrong angle. So, IMHO, the less information about me in the tracking networks the better. I'm sure something I have said somewhere can be misconstrued, or laws can change or cultural values.
BTW, Talking to people I know at telco's as to what they are working on:
- mesh's of wifi ap's that track and triangulate wifi enabled phones in shopping centres. The software then works out the phone carrier and if them, relates the data. This is then 'masked' and sent back to the shopping centre to use in targeted advertising as you walk around, and to track patterns of movement.
- recording gps data and meshing it with phone location triangulation data from towers, and free wifi hotspots. This is then 'productized' and 'scrubbed'.
I think people just haven't worked out what big data is yet, and as they find out there will be a little revolution. Like in the early days computers needed almost no security, and nobody bothered not using their real name on the Internet. Over time society will learn this lesson.
Anyhow... hello from Sydney, Australia ... back to this wifi driver problem... |
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steveL
Watchman
Joined: 13 Sep 2006
Posts: 5153
Location: The Peanut Gallery
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| Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2015 3:46 am Post subject: |
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Welcome back!
Crashing out, but there's some interesting discussion (well, interesting for a crufty like me..;)
This brought back memories, though, and a chuckle: | Quote: | | To be clear I'm a minimalist, and often break something by disabling too many services or by hacking off something needed. I have always done this. |
I think you're going to love desktop Gentoo; give it 6 months to a year[1], on real hw, and you'll never look back.
[1] depending on what you get sidetracked into: avoid systemdbust would be my advice (please, no flames: plenty of other threads where we can discuss it. The advice stands, nonetheless.) |
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fourth
n00b
Joined: 26 Nov 2004
Posts: 48
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| Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2015 4:15 am Post subject: |
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I have a mate who has been doing linux consulting for a few years. He mentioned something about it, and I recalled reading something about Systemd a while back. I knew nothing about it other than apparently the primary dev was a megalomanic etc... So I went off looking and eventually found this:
http://suckless.org/sucks/systemd
... which seems to be a very thorough list of gripes. . I recalled seeing OpenRC on boot, so assumed I had limited exposure to all these problems. Went off and checked and found I had udev despite a -systemd in make.conf
So.. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Without_systemd suggested a mask file. ... and that was that.
When I look around at most of the big problems in the world today it appears as though centralisation is the problem. Corruption, high gini ratio's, war, unbalanced socialism, ideology, mass spying, etc. Pretty much all these problems can only result when you have excess centralisation. So.. I always try and decentralise. Usually, decentralisation also means personal empowerment. I've found it's good for me. Whats the downside? A small loss of convenience had in laziness.
| Quote: | | I think you're going to love desktop Gentoo; give it 6 months to a year[1], on real hw, and you'll never look back. |
Liking it so far, even though it's on 7yo hardware. Bit of a pain getting things setup though, and LXDE has a few bugs that'll need to be reported I think. THings like the GUI gets jammed when resizing windows, after a resize, my mouse can no longer click on anything anywhere and have anything happen, though all the apps are still fully functional via keyboard. Still don't have a repro yet. Still trying to get used to lxterminal not having the usual cut\paste options I'm used on windows consoles. Small problems.. |
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kalebbbb
n00b
Joined: 26 Nov 2015
Posts: 2
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| Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2015 5:05 am Post subject: |
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Welcome back!  |
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gentooP4
Apprentice
Joined: 20 Sep 2010
Posts: 182
Location: NZ
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| Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2015 9:12 am Post subject: Re: Welcome back me... MIA for ~10 years... ;) |
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| fourth wrote: | | A few more are moving to OSX, a handful at most... |
Out of the frying pan and into the fire??
I've actually been using OS-X for the last year on my i7 but recently clubbed over it. I just couldn't live with the weird way in which it goes about things considering I thought Macs were supposed to be intuitive. Disk Utility and iTunes are just non-nonsensical and the Finder is possibly the most award (/quirky?) file manager I've ever used (and I've been using it since the Apple IIGS). 
I'm surprised how many are migrating to Windows 10 despite its obvious pitfalls.
_________________
The United States has announced that it will deploy thoughts and prayers in the battle against online extremism.
If you voted for Trump or Brexit, you were likely influenced by the Cambridge Analytica propaganda machine. |
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Syl20
l33t
Joined: 04 Aug 2005
Posts: 619
Location: France
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Maffblaster
Developer
Joined: 01 May 2007
Posts: 70
Location: Spokane, Washington, USA
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ameko
n00b
Joined: 05 May 2005
Posts: 19
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| Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2016 7:43 pm Post subject: |
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Whatever I do, I always come back to you, Gentoo
Welcome back fourth, I've also been away for a while. |
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