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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • If you are relatively new to this topic, it just gets worse as you dig deeper.

    In 2012 or around there, it was discovered a few months before being implemented that Google intended to use the content of your gmail account to serve you “better ads”.

    I was appropriately outraged, but no one cared. Even when I told them that it was tantmount to someone opening your paper mail to know what flyers to send you.

    No one cared. And no one continues to care.

    You can tell people all you like, but most folks just. Don’t. Care. That’s how they get away with it.






  • That is correct.

    However, this is a quasi-monopoly by google having quietly overwhelmed the space. Same thing for RCS messaging.

    Neither push notifications nor RCS are proprietary, so there is a possibility to tear oneself from google here.

    For instance, there are several free and paid push notifications services. Pushbullet is a popular paid one, not too expensive. I personally use https://ntfy.sh/, which can be self-hosted.

    RCS is different because trusting the encryption keys makes RCS work, so there would have to be a critical mass of buy-in to use an alternative to google’s RCS implementation.






  • Those are considered firmware, yes. And these can vary in their installation as being updated via the firmware interface itself or some other update mechanism.

    Some firmwares like on certain IBM thinkpads, my surface pro 6 and others can be updated directly via a Linux command called fwupd, but the firmwares must live in specifics public repositories.

    This news means we’ll all have a much better time using fwupd to update these on dell and lenovo machines, but the firmwares themselves will remain proprietary blobs.

    Coreboot replaces the bios/firmware altogether, and it’s not an easy task to get new ones, unfortunately.




  • BTRFS and ZFS both use block compression, ZFS by default. It’s meant to increase both storage efficiency and access speed and has nearly zero impact on performance. The files aren’t compressed from the filesystem point of view, which would satisfy your requirement not to need any other tools.

    I’m confused about your statement that you don’t want to save space with compression, but you indicated that you want to “make the most of your storage”. Are you looking for long-term archiving?