ganymede

Thanks for the distinctions and links to the other good discussions you've started!

For the invasive bits that are included, it’s easy enough for GrapheneOS to look over the incremental updates in Android and remove the bits that they don’t like.

That's my approximate take as well, but it wasn't quite what I was getting at.

What I meant is, to ask ourselves why is that the case? A LOT of it is because google wills it to be so.

Not only in terms of keeping it open, but also in terms of making it easy or difficult - it's almost entirely up to google how easy or hard it's going to be. Right now we're all reasonably assuming they have no current serious incentives to change their mind. After all, why would they? The miniscule % of users who go to the effort of installing privacy enhanced versions of chromium (or android based os), are a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the vast majority of users running vanilla and probably never even heard of privacy enhanced versions.

For science, medical and engineering degrees, online tuition is just going to produce people vastly underprepared for work in anything that requires the skills & knowledge the degree is meant to provide

excellent writeup with some high quality referencing.

minor quibble

Firefox is insecure

i'm not sure many people would disagree with you that FF is less secure than Chromium (hardly a surprise given the disparity in their budgets and resources)

though i'm not sure it's fair to say FF is insecure if we are by comparison inferring Chromium is secure? ofc Chromium is more secure than FF, as your reference shows.

another minor quibble

projects like linux-libre and Libreboot are worse for security than their counterparts (see coreboot)

does this read like coreboot is proprietary? isn't it GPL2? i might've misunderstood something.

you make some great points about open vs closed source vs proprietary etc. again, it shouldn't surprise us that many proprietary projects or Global500 funded opensource projects, with considerably greater access to resources, often arrive at more robust solutions.

i definitely agree you made a good case for the currently available community privacy enhanced versions based on open source projects from highly commercial entities (Chromium->Vanadium, Android/Pixel->GrapheneOS) etc. something i think to note here is that without these base projects actually being opensource, i'm not sure eg. the graphene team would've been able to achieve the technical goals in the time they have, and likely with even less success legally.

so in essence, in the current forms at least, we have to make some kind of compromise, choosing between something we know is technically more robust and then needing to blindly trust the organisation's (likely malicious) incentives. therefore as you identify, obviously the best answer is to privacy enhance the project, which does then involve some semi-blind trusting the extent of the privacy enhancement process - assuming good faith in the organisation providing the privacy enhancement: there is still an implicit arms race where privacy corroding features might be implemented at various layers and degrees of opacity vs the inevitably less resourced team trying to counter them.

is there some additional semi-blind 'faith' we're also employing where we are probably assuming the corporate entity currently has little financial incentive in undermining the opensource base project because they can simply bolt on whatever nastiness they want downstream? it's probably not a bad assumption overall, though i'm often wondering how long that will remain the case.

and ofc on the other hand, we have organisations who's motivation we supposedly trust (mostly...for now), but we know we have to make a compromise on the technical robustness. eg. while FF lags behind the latest hardening methods, it's somewhat visible to the dedicated user where they stand from a technical perspective (it's all documented, somewhere). so then the blind trust is in the purity of the organisation's incentives, which is where i think the political-motivated wilfully-technically-ignorant mindset can sometimes step in. meanwhile mozilla's credibility will likely continue to be gradually eroded, unless we as a community step up and fund them sufficiently. and even then, who knows.

there's certainly no clear single answer for every person's use-case, and i think you did a great job delineating the different camps. just wanted to add some discussion. i doubt i'm as up to date on these facets as OP, so welcome your thoughts.

I’m sick of privacy being at odds with security

fucking well said.

thank god its illegal then!!

https://i.imgur.com/SuPafFd.gif

and they're using our retirement money to do it

what a fucked timeline

browsers turning off specific extensions which protect us.

they shouldn't even have a horse in this race. i mean we know why they do, but damn is it completely insane.

what's also fucked is how normalised this is becoming.

all of that said, edge who?

our sensory capabilities are probably better than you think

however good our current capabilities are, it's not exactly reasonable to think we're at the apex. we don't know everything - perhaps we never will, but even if we do it'll surely be in 100, 1,000 or 10,000 years, rather than 10 years.

i'm not aware of any sound argument that the final paradigm in sensing capability has already happened.

there is really no scenario where this logic works

assuming you mean there's no known scenario where this logic works? then yes, that's the point - we currently don't know.

this is asklemmy not a scientific journal. there can be value or fun in throwing ideas around about the limits of what we do know, or helping op improve their discussion, rather than shit on it. afaict they've made clear elsewhere in this thread they're just throwing ideas around & not married to any of it.

not defending all op's claims, but....

other cryptids

some cryptids are real. for example in the past 40 years, giant squid have quite literally moved from the pages of 'fun' ghosts and cryptid books into scientific journals. and this process has repeated many times throughout history with other animals.

everyone in here gleefully shitting on op (in a rather unfriendly fashion btw)

getting hung up on the 1:99 thing, when what they actually said was

As long as the percentage is not 100%

obviously i'm not saying op has presented firm evidence of the supernatural. but the irony of supposedly espousing the scientific method, while completely ignoring the critical part of op's argument.

who here is claiming to know 100.000000% of all supernatural evidence is absolutely disproven? that would be an unscientific claim to make, so why infer it?

is the remaining 10^-^^x^ % guaranteed "proof" of ghosts/aliens? imo no, but it isn't unreasonable to consider it may suggest something beyond our current reproducible measurement capacity (which has eg. historically been filed under "ghosts"). therefore the ridicule in this thread - rather than friendly/educational discussion - is quite disappointing.

it's not exactly reasonable to assume we're at the apex of human sensory capability, history is full of this kind of misplaced hubris.

until the invention of the microscope, germs were just "vibes" and "spirits"