That whole scene is brilliant commentary on society.

Like so much of their stuff.

I’m tech savvy, been in IT for nearly 40 years. Wrote my first program in Fortran on punched cards.

Linux is no easy switchover. It’s problematic, regardless of the distro (I’ve tried many over the years).

My latest difficulty - went to install Debian and it hung multiple times trying to install wifi drivers.

Mint can’t use my Logitech mouse until I researched it and discovered someone wrote an app to enable it. The most popular mouse on the planet doesn’t work out of the box.

Typical user would be stumped by these problems.

I can go on for days about “Year of the Linux Desktop” (which I first heard in 2000). Can Linux work as a desktop? Definitely. And it can be pretty damn good, too, if your use-case aligns with it’s capabilities. But if you’re an end-user type, what do you do a year in and realize you need a specific app that just doesn’t exist in Linux?

Is it a direct replacement for Windows? No. Because Windows has always been about general use - it trades performance for the ability to do a lot of varied things, it includes capabilities that not everyone needs.

Linux is the opposite, it’s about performance for specific things. If you want a specific capability, it has to be added. This is the challenge these different distros attempt to meet: the question for all of them is which capabilities to include “out of the box” (see my mouse example - Debian handles it just fine).

This is also the power of Linux, and why it’s so great for specific use-cases. Things like Proxmox, TrueNAS, etc, really benefit from this minimalism. No wasted cycles on a BITS service or all the other components Windows runs “just in case”.

Your mountains so lofty,

Your treetops so tall,

Finland, Finland, Finland,

Finland has it all

Yet Another Call Blocker. Works great, though not perfectly. I rarely get calls that ring through, mostly because I only allow contacts to ring.

No one will ever play Wilson so well.

I’ve found speed via USB/MTP is awful because of the instability of MTP, especially with larger files. It’s so unstable that wifi with a sync tool like Resilio is faster in the end (and I don’t have to watch it).

What does your company use for IT services? Do you call Bob In A Truck? Or do you have a relationship with a Small Business IT consulting firm that understands proper long-term management?

Hopefully it’s the latter (or even an MSP) - they’ll (hopefully) have some experience here (it really depends, better consultants have the focus, some just implement what you tell them to implement).

No worries, you still added useful info to the subject.

It’s quite a challenge to wade through all the different tools today. Used to be you found a solution and went with it. Today it’s always changing, with your favorite tool getting changed in some crappy way, making you find something new. It’s tiresome.

Yea, would’ve been a lot better if they demonstrated how someone could be tracked by the cell modem that many cars have had since the early 2000’s.

Or even a MITM for that part, showing how a few vendors security is weak (I bet most have nominal security).

Do you then say “I am Iron Man!”

Check out Teleguard from SwissCow.

I haven’t seen an analysis of their privacy claims, so I’m not really sure (so when I say check it out, maybe you’ll find info that I haven’t).

What I know is I like how the connect new device process works - you essentially restore a backup to a new device, which requires the user ID (not your user name) and a code. Which likely means individual device data isn’t sitting in the open somewhere.

They have a free and a paid tier, which they seem to be marketing toward business.

They claim messages are ephemeral on their servers, but I haven’t found a third-party analysis of them, which is disappointing.

I’ve found Telegram performance to be excellent.

As for privacy with it… I wouldn’t trust it overly much. Which is frustrating, because from a performance standpoint it’s solid. Messages show up instantly, on all devices, Android, iOS, Windows, etc.

I wouldn’t consider Zoom to be privacy minded at all.

It was terrible. But fun terrible. At least everyone involved, and us, the audience, are all in on it together. Tom even occasionally looks right at the camera, acknowledging the inanity of it all. And then we laugh along with him.

And the Bank of Canada just dropped interest rates 25 points.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/article/bank-of-canada-cuts-its-key-interest-rate-to-275-as-tariffs-roil-economy/

While announcing the rate cut, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem warned Canada is “facing a new crisis,” and that the central bank “cannot offset the impacts of a trade war.”

”Depending on the extent and duration of new U.S. tariffs, the economic impact could be severe.” Macklem said that the “pervasive uncertainty” has already shaken business and consumer confidence.

This trade war will hurt the US, for sure. But it can tolerate it much longer than Canada can.

For example, currently the US imports billions of dollars of lumber from Canada, but a bill currently in Congress could significantly change that, which would return those billions to US logging.

Hahahahahahahaha, excellent!

Buried deep in the article:

Hackers stole admin credentials for these devices.

So, yea, you have the creds, you can modify the OS any way you want.

It wasn’t because the devices were EOL (as implied in the beginning of the article), it’s because of poor credential management.

Thought I saw a headline about him living 90 days, implying he didn’t live longer. Sorry, I didn’t click on it to verify that my inference was accurate.

So this worked on Mint before?

If so, what’s changed on either end since then? Had there been an update to either Graphene or Mint since the last time it worked? Maybe Graphene improved a security feature or you need to reset the approval on the phone (maybe toggle the USB debugging setting).

I don’t bother with MTP for file transfer any more - at best it’s clunky and tedious, at worst it’s unreliable. Better to use network.

Setup a share on your PC, and use Mixplorer or any other network-capable file explorer on Android.

Even better, use an app like Syncthing or Resilio, and you’ll never think about file transfer again.

I have a Syncthing sync pair/folder for every folder on my phone to my home server, so I can manage files there and the changes sync back to my phone. This also provides a first step to backing up my phone. (Use Syncthing-Fork for finer control of each sync folder).

There’s one folder I specifically setup for that random file I want to send to my phone. It syncs over any network, under any charge condition, so files show up nearly instantly (at most a minute later). I could tweak that sync folder to scan more frequently, but it’s responsive enough.

Alternatively, using Resilio Sync you can selectively sync files from your PC, from the phone itself. The “Selective Sync” option is something Resilio has that Syncthing doesn’t.

Both of these have an a phone and PC app. Install on PC, Select folders to sync and they’ll index those folders. Install on phone, and select the local folder to connect to the sync jobs (folder) in the app.

I’ve found Resilio is hard on memory for the phone because it keeps the index in RAM, so I only run it when I want to grab files from my home pc. If you only sync a couple small folders, this isn’t an issue. I use it for selective sync of my media folder (which is terabytes), so the index is large. This way I don’t sync my entire media folder but can grab any music or movie file, from anywhere, and then I close Resilio.

I’ll give ya both the upvote