[-] patchwork@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 3 months ago

Fairphone 4 with eOS, escaping Google and Apple's duopoly is quite liberating and not as hard as I thought it would be. Yeah, eOS is technically Android, but deGoogled.

https://e.foundation/

[-] patchwork@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 year ago

I tried to find the video on PeerTube, from the end users perspective I think we should encourage others to choose community over corporate and use platforms like PeerTube to post these videos instead of YouTube (Alphabet).

[-] patchwork@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 year ago

Companies don’t desire to be treated as people under the law, the 1886 Supreme Court decision that interpreted the 14th Amendment as corporate personhood was the most racist decision we still live with today. The amendment was written to grant freed slaves citizenship, but the same greedy capitalists that benefited from slavery used it to begin the neofeudaism that still enriches the few while causing suffering for the masses today and it’s only getting worse. Don’t “love” any corporation, they’re literally born out of the greatest evil in US history.

27

Hi, I need a video upscaling solution to enhance some old family videos. As much as I’d love to use a FOSS program, I can’t find anything that comes close to Topaz Video AI.

I purchased the license and I’ve been battling with the application for a week trying to get it running on Linux. I’ve tried Wine, Bottles, Lutris, ProtonGE and tinkering with prefixes.

I’ve read on the Topaz community forums that people have got it working previously on Linux, but I’ve been unable to replicate their setup.

On the forums they said it takes a performance hit on Linux, but I’m willing to deal with that to avoid Windows. In the end I may have to purchase a copy of Windows for the first time in over decade to run this app, but I’m not going to give up without a good effort.

Does anyone have any experience with this application or know of a similar application working on Linux? I’m also willing to run older versions of the client just to use it, anything but a Windows install please!

Thank you!

[-] patchwork@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 year ago

I think the automotive analogy is relevant, some think using technology means they understand it. I’m a pretty good driver, but it would be unwise to ask me to repair your car’s transmission. My grandmother spends more time on her computer glued to Facebook than I spend using my computer on a given day, but I’m not asking her to build my next gaming rig.

[-] patchwork@lemmy.dbzer0.com 38 points 1 year ago

In the 1990s if you wanted to play a PC game you had install it manually with a CD, typically configure ini files in a text editor and fix irq requests for your peripherals just to play. In the contemporary world a zoomer only needs to tap the install icon on the screen, Gen Z may have more experience usually technology than any previous generation, but the days of asking grandma to fix your computer seem a certainty on the horizon.

[-] patchwork@lemmy.dbzer0.com 46 points 1 year ago

You make an excellent point and it’s easy as a PC gamer like myself to forget, that Apple actually sells a lot more games than Value.

[-] patchwork@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 year ago

Purism’s corporate charter recognizes them as a social purpose corporation, it sounds very good in theory, but I think it’s been a struggle for them to pull off. Under this charter they’re supposed to value creating products and services that benefit society more than simply making profits. Unfortunately, I think being so idealistic has caused them to over promise and under deliver, as was the case with the Librem 5 phone imo.

[-] patchwork@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 year ago

Another Linux tablet is definitely good news. I like Purism’s stated values and their laptops are very solid, the Librem phone was a disappointment for me personally though.

[-] patchwork@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 1 year ago

Services provided by for profit corporations are almost never truly free. It usually means "free" in exchange for access to your user data or "free" if you watch these advertisements. That's not free, it's an exchange of your data that's valuable for resell to a company or your time to watch their ads.

131

Please don't flame me too bad, I understand that although privacy and libre software are important to many in the Linux community, my opinions may be outside the scope of consideration for some and I respect that.

Personally, conscientious consumerism and privacy are some of the primary reasons I use Linux. I prefer community>private business>corporate when I am choosing products and services.

-System76

About 8 years ago I purchased a laptop from System76, the customer service was incredible and the machine exceeded my expectations in build quality and performance.

Recently I've been in the market for a smaller machine, like a Thinkpad X1, StarBook 14 or System76 Lemur.

Last week, when I visited the System76 website they used Plausible's open source analytics on the home page (which is a great alternative to Google's proprietary hardware fingerprinting algorithm), but once I added the laptop to my cart to checkout, I noticed the third-party trackers, apis.google and ajax.googleapis load on the webpage. Google's reCAPTCHA was also required to complete the purchase. Hell, even Discord has switched to hCaptcha at this point citing their laughable "Gamer Privacy First" policy.

IMHO, I find it hypocritical that System76 does so much great work disabling Intel's IME and contributing to coreboot, but chooses to embed proprietary tracking software on their website when open source alternatives are readily available.

  • Reaching out to System 76

After completing 14 reCAPTCHA's I was finally able to get a dialogue with Stetson at System 76. He said that "System 76 takes user data privacy and security extremely seriously, but they would continue to use Google services." His recommended solution was placing the order over the phone if I wasn't comfortable having third-party tracking during checkout.

This is not a solution for me because I don't want to do business with a company that monetizes user data for profit. In my experience, companies that monetize data (Alphabet, Meta, etc..) offer web services cheaper than competitors that don't, in exchange for access to user data. So, if you're getting a commercial service cheaper from a company that sells your user's data, you're also profiting from the sale by paying a lower premium for those services.

Personally, I do not think you're taking user privacy "extremely" seriously if you're running third party trackers and choosing reCAPTCHA (not a privacy respecting service) over hCaptcha on your website.

I really like System 76 and I want to support them with my next purchase, but presently I feel like they are saying one thing and doing another and choosing privacy respecting libre software some of the time when it suits their marketing, but proprietary anti-consumer tracking services when it's more profitable.

[-] patchwork@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 year ago

A lot of my groups have moved to Signal from FB, feels a lot less dirty using a community platform vs a filthy advertising company. Now I just need to get a phone not developed by an ad company i.e. Alphabet Inc.

[-] patchwork@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I haven't found Google useful as a search engine for years and now Youtube is squeezing creators and pushing so many ads it will become unusable for me once the anti-ad-blocker policy is fully implemented. Paying for Youtube premium isn't the answer either, it will cost as much as Amazon Prime just to watch YT videos, then the price will continue to rise after we subscribe to the service.

We must remember that Alphabet Inc, the parent company of these services is an essentially an advertising company that also sells the data they collect about us to virtually anyone, including police in right-wing states looking to arrest abortion seekers.

https://telegra.ph/How-Big-Tech-Revenue-and-Profit-Breaks-Down-by-Company-12-09

https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-anti-adblocking-feature-3354930/

https://www.businessinsider.com/police-getting-help-social-media-to-prosecute-people-seeking-abortions-2023-2

[-] patchwork@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 year ago

Don't trust any publicly traded company, once a business has completed it's IPO it's owned shareholders and led by a CEO legally obligated to chase profits as the primary objective. Corporations spend money on PR and brand marketing to make us think otherwise, but under US law it's crystal clear they only chase profits.

It's kinda sickening to hear people say they "love" Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc... These corporations derive their "right" to exist from one of the most horrible miscarriages of justice in history. The 14th Amendment was put into law to grant the rights of citizenship to freed slaves after the US Civil War in an effort to abolish a system created by greedy oligarchs to profit from the suffering of others. Unfortunately, the conservative Justices on the US Supreme Court decided in 1886 that a new system could be created to allow greedy oligarchs to profit from the labor of others. That ruling was called Corporate personhood.

Full disclosure, as a computer nerd in the 1990's, I really did fall in love with Google, it seemed it represent everything Apple and Microsoft did not. Back in the Pre-IPO days between 1998-2004 Google engineered some of the most useful and innovative services on the Internet for consumers. Now I view Alphabet Inc as possibly the most dangerous corporation in the realm of technology. Relentlessly striving to control the Internet through DRM tech like Widevine, the AMP framework, and proliferating a Surveillance Capitalist strategy to target everyone online, track them across the Internet and harvest their data for profit.

I do have some faith in companies like Valve and System76 because they are privately owned and do not always act in a "profits above all else" mentality.

view more: next ›

patchwork

joined 1 year ago