Google Search is Garbage Designed to Show Ads Instead of What You Searched For.
Wired published and then immediately retracted an op-ed (Archive Today, Wayback Machine) about how Google quietly manipulated what you searched for by turning it into something designed to bring back a lot of ads instead, using machinery that is invisible to the user.
These “imperceptible” manipulations are actually one reason (alongside manually censoring billions of Web resources so that they can’t show up no matter what you search for, at the behest of the American government and Copyright trolls) why Google Search has descended into “garbage” quality over about the last five years or so.
The article was deleted and replaced with a message saying “it did not meet editorial standards” and was removed, but we can only really guess the real reason why.
Google, with 93% of the search engine market, has the ability to punish Web sites that are pissing it off.
Ending up being ranked lower as a way to harass sites into not saying anything bad about them is one possibility that comes to my mind, although I cannot say that’s what happened. All you have to do to destroy a site financially is cut off its ad impressions, which would be ironic if that is what’s going on, since that’s exactly the sort of thing that leads to an Anti-Trust trial in the first place.
Google is basically running the trial anyway, and this is something that leaked out that was put on a projector for a few seconds and then was whisked away.
Things that make you go “hmm”.
I don’t have a hard time believing that, with how everything in this world is designed to make it, basically illegal to exist anywhere without spending money, and also to subject you to advertising every waking moment, that Google has gotten very good with “shaking the couch cushions”.
They’re very desperate now, with the economy in the US failing and millions of people losing their jobs (Google itself recently fired over 12,000), and with express elevator inflation, and consumers pulling back, ad revenue hasn’t looked this bad since the DotCom Bubble collapse.
So Google is, getting very aggressive lately. Maybe you’ve already seen the manipulations and anti-adblock shit over at YouTube?
I doubt DuckDuckGo (which is a skin for Bing) is even this bad. First of all, Microsoft would have to invest a lot of money into being this rapacious, and they’ve been on a layoffs spree at Bing and Edge anyway, and even if they were, they’re only a few percent. A rounding error.
Google is definitely in more of a position to cause harm. Uniquely positioned to cause harm.
Again, when I saw that Wired retracted this, there was only one real plausible (to me) answer that popped into my head.
In “Being the Ricardo’s”, a dramatized documentary of sorts about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Desi argues with the studio about something and has to go to an executive that was higher up. The higher-up sends a letter to the lower official that simply reads, “Don’t fuck with the Cuban!”
And I think that’s what’s going on here.
I think that people are too afraid to make Google angry.
Now, maybe Google tapped someone on the shoulder, and maybe it didn’t have to.
Either way, I think we just witnessed part of the implosion of what remained of journalistic integrity.
The Google Problem. (It’s so much worse than you think.)
Google is a nasty, nasty company. They’re basically the Facebook of search engines.
They’ve branched out into everything now, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.
The problem with search monopolies that the US government, and others, take advantage of, is that when it’s only really Microsoft and Google that have their own actual Web index, then other engines come along and ask the big ones questions for you.
This is a problem because it’s where all of the censorship and disinformation was coming from, to begin with.
I suppose that probably a fat bunch of nothing good for the users will come from the Google Anti-Trust Trial, which is essentially looking to me like a sham proceeding where the presiding judge, Amit Mehta, has been a thrall of Google’s attorneys and has granted basically everything that Google has asked for.
Judge Mehta has essentially locked what little of the American press remains out of the court proceedings. You can go in, if you can physically attend, but there’s still not a lot to make notes about, because Judge Mehta has allowed Google to seal almost everything important.
Following this, the main “witnesses” are all getting something from Google, in exchange for “friendly” testimony. Apple gets paid a lot of money to make Google the default search on its products, and it’s pretty much Mozilla’s only source of income.
If anyone has any incentive to actually testify against Google, trying to crack open “search choice”, it’s probably going to be Microsoft, which runs another censored search engine full of misinformation and spyware.
So the proceedings are playing out in a rather unfortunate way.
Normally, if the government puts someone on trial and then finds out that at least 2/3rds of the major witnesses have essentially taken enormous bribes to testify to their “good behavior”, and there is the stench of judicial corruption too, then more charges are inbound, and the trial starts over, but not in this case.
People, the users, are being harmed by Google every day in numerous ways, but there is nobody there in court to fight for the user.
The judge is clearly very friendly to the defendant and the witnesses have been tampered with, and some would even say bribed in broad daylight.
(Billions of dollars each to Mozilla and Apple over the years….Would they risk losing this by ruining Google or pissing Google off with their honest testimony?)
It looks very much like Google will just go right on doing what they always do.
They’ve barely bothered to even adjust their behavior with the trial going on in front of them, in fact they’ve stepped on the gas and gone further into the territory of DRM and making sure GAFAM browsers will be the only ones that can access the Web (Widevine, WEI), and interfering with the user’s ad blocker (ManifestV3), and implementing a nasty new tracking system called “Privacy Sandbox”.
“FLoC” got so toxic they just renamed it, but that is what “Privacy Sandbox” is.
This is, of course, on top of making Web browsers enormous and packed with dangerous bloatware. (They’ve even compromised Tor Browser when running in the Safest mode.)
By the way, I tried a ManifestV3 ad blocker the other day.
I might talk more about it in another post, but it was uBlock Origin Lite, and it’s pretty terrible. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that Raymond Hill has done everything he can possibly do to make use of ManifestV3, but Google has made it all so much worse. In many cases, you can see the elements load and then get hidden, which is not a problem with uBO. It also broke Old Reddit Redirect.
I was evaluating a Japanese Firefox fork called Floorp and decided to try uBO Lite while I was at it, and I went screaming right back to the ManifestV2 version of uBO.
The Biden Administration clearly has no interest in destroying Google, as it’s essentially acting as an arm of the US government and the ironically-named Democratic Party.
(That would be the one accusing everyone else of being Russian sympathizers who act like Putin while they put their political opponents on trial.)
Search for anything that contradicts what this administration says about a lot of issues, Google will just claim that it has no results.
Billions of links per year are censored from their index from DMCA complaints all by themselves. The only “news” sites may as well be spam and State Media.
Everything about this trial is tainted, including the judge, who is a Democrat Obama-appointee, and wears his politics on his sleeve.
(Judge Mehta even ruled against the American people in a consumer protection rule that was going to require prescription drug companies to provide their cash price on television ads.)
Mehta is even such a corrupt “deep state” judge that John Roberts put him on the FISA Court, which is a rubber stamp for when the NSA or other federal agencies are getting information from online service providers (including Microsoft and Google) about their users as part of a massive surveillance dragnet, and also gagging them so it’s illegal to tell the victims.
Being on the FISA court in the first place means he’s “one of them”, one of the ones that will allow the NSA to spy on Americans and call it “incidental intelligence gathering”.
Which is their code term for “Whoops”. But they never delete it when they find out.
Truth be told, they have a “whoops” every second because there’s no punishment for it.
Nothing about this trial seems very legitimate to me. It will not correct the problem that Google is spying on you and helping the government lie to and otherwise brainwash the American public.
It’s getting difficult, really, to even use Google Search at all.
All of this kowtowing to the MAFIAA and the Biden Administration makes it very difficult to find any actual information though the bullshit and noise. It’s spam farms and bullshitting.
There’s this huge, I hate to use the term, but “conspiracy”, to deplatform anyone that big corporations want off the Web.
They’re taking it, and they’ll really use anything that they can get ahold of, including insane people and degenerates. Anyone they can get to make it seem like whatever they do to your platform on the Web is legitimate.
A big reason they’ve turned on Twitter, not that Twitter was ever good, but a big reason is because they’re not calling the shots there. Having any online forum where the “Cancel Karens” can’t just hit a button and remove you from the Web just burns them all alive.
Libera Chat continues to allow itself to be de facto owned and operated by a homophobic “Cancel Karen” who is completely off his rocker.
In a vacuum, the problem is “Well, just don’t use that site/service/whatever.”, but the problem is that we’re running out of Web sites and resources, especially the ones that the likes of Google or Microsoft are going to show you, that are operated by normal mentally healthy (even by the standards of 2005) people.
What they’ve all gone in and done, in some cases, is they’ve manually removed that Web site so that no matter what you do to search for it, it just will not show up.
In one case, the only search engine I was able to have return a Web site that I know exists, was Mojeek and it was only at the bottom of the second page of the results.
There’s nothing illegal on this site, the “Cancel Karens” just don’t like it, yet they won’t shut up about it, so they pique people’s interest and then if you’re determined enough, you’ll find it eventually.
But in 20 years, we’e gone from having search engines take your request and go “Here you go!”, usually on the first 10 results somewhere, to where, they have entire lists, entire lists in America, not the usual Communist Shitholes, where you know, you expect this to happen, but they have lists of billions of pages and tens of thousands of Web sites that you’re not allowed to see no matter what, the search engine has been programmed to not show them to you.
How was this country allowed to get that bad?
So even if this trial for criminal anti-trust against Google does go anywhere, what would we even see it replaced by that’s any better?
I mean, it’s really bad when, and I’m telling you the honest truth here, to find this site, I had to go to Yandex, which is a Russian search engine, and it was at the top of the list.
There’s nothing illegal on this site. People have been trying to get it taken down forever, and making all sorts of lies against it. The guy lives in Florida and hasn’t been arrested for any American crimes, and the site keeps coming back.
The American government can’t take it down. It’s not illegal. So what they do is they have these criminals, like Google and Cloudflare, get together and attack it. And they make it so that you can’t give the site any money, to try to starve it out.
The only way to slip them any money is to use crypto or something. Or use Brave and hand them some BAT tokens.
If you need any convincing that this is not a free country, America is not a free country, wake up. It’s right in front of you.
There are things you’re not allowed to know about which aren’t illegal, which are being illegally suppressed.
This guy hasn’t even committed a single American crime.
In fact, the government sits back and lets criminals go to work vandalizing his site and doxxing the people who use it, and they even exploited a technical problem to try to steal user info to help them send death threats.
Not only is this site not illegal, it’s not even that bad. Where are the police to protect them from the Insane people who are breaking actual laws?
There are no Nazis on the site I am speaking of. They were making fun of the Alt-Right and Scott Adams for crying out loud.
The site has also been massively defamed by people calling themselves “reporters”.
There are just things now that you’re not allowed to say or the mobsters will gang up on you and try to ruin you, and Google is on their side.
But so is Microsoft, so are these “allegedly independent” Brave Search and Mojeek, I mean, you can’t even find this site on dime store engines that are utter crap.
How are they actually independent if they all censor almost the same exact things?
Why should anyone in a free country like America is supposed to be have to go to a Russian search engine that has an English version to get something less ruined than Google?
That’s how bad America is getting for Freedom of Speech.
When you think “There is a regime that says you’re not allowed to search for this, you’re not allowed to know that, we’re watching what you type.” you think “Oh yeah, that f****g Great Chinese Firewall again. When will they be a normal country? When will President Xi let his people live their lives unmolested?”
Matthew Garrett, which slipped Microsoft restricted-boot into GNU/Linux, is making noise about Lenovo locking GNU/Linux out of a laptop after accusing me of “spewing nonsense” for taking action against them for far worse.
In 2016, I took to Reddit and the news media after buying a Lenovo Yoga 900-ISK2 laptop. I bought it because I read a blog post praising how well it ran GNU/Linux after you wiped the godawful Windows 10 OS from it.
Unfortunately, what I didn’t know is that Lenovo did a mid-cycle refresh in late 2016 because the original Intel HD 520 graphics chip was a real slug and could barely run a HiDPI display at its native resolution, thus requiring them to replace it mid-year with a Iris 540, which was roughly 40% faster.
(And even then, it was nothing to write home about. Maybe some games from 2012 running in 720p worked, but asking for more than that from it was too much. I shudder to think what the 520 was like!)
As part of this “upgrade”, Lenovo also refreshed their UEFI firmware, and in the process they put the disk storage controller into a secret undocumented mode that Linux couldn’t use, making it appear as though there was no Solid State Drive in the laptop.
The code to enable AHCI mode was there, but Lenovo also wrote new code to reset it to the secret storage controller mode on every reboot even if you reset it from UEFI shell.
Someone on Lenovo Forums (from which Lenovo banned me 9 different times to try to shut me up) hooked up an external flasher and showed that the option to persistently set AHCI mode was still there and could be re-enabled, but you couldn’t do it with the official firmware flasher program because the firmware wouldn’t allow unsigned images to be flashed if it was running and could prevent it.
Eventually, Lenovo and Matthew Garrett attacked me in public and the pro-Microsoft media ran with it. Lenovo also put out some idiotic article about how their laptop had a 360 degree hinge that was designed for Windows 10 and wouldn’t work with “Linux”, only it did work fine in GNOME, and better than Windows.
(Windows often didn’t bring up the on screen keyboard, because it could only respond and do that with the very few built-in apps that were tablet-mode compatible, such as Edge.)
Mr. Garrett took a different approach than Lenovo to attack me, implying that I was hysterical and that they locked GNU/Linux out “so the laptop would get good battery life”, except that wasn’t the case.
The laptop, new, ran for 4.5 hours from 100% to dead on Windows 10. It just had piss poor battery life on Windows 10. It was completely pathetic. Garrett doesn’t know what he was talking about. I don’t think he even had one of these things.
If you ran GNU/Linux and used powertop’s autotune as a system service, it ran for about 7 hours. Nearly twice as long. After some additional work on the Linux kernel, I think the system eventually was getting like 8-9 hours. So there was room for improvement in Linux at the time, but Windows battery life was a total disaster. Compared to Linux, with Windows you unplugged from the wall and ZIP…dead.
All along, Mr. Garrett has always come up with “reasons” why there is no “conspiracy”. It’s always just some “bug” or they “don’t care” if Linux works, it’s never anything malicious you know.
So this year, with Microsoft’s new Pluton “security” system, the Windows 11 requirements change again. Vendors are required to disable the “Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA” certificate, which is what Mr. Garrett’s jury-rigged “Secure” Boot implementation was relying on in order to work at all.
So now it doesn’t work anymore and he finally criticizes them, mildly.
Better late than never, I guess, but at this point there can be no misunderstanding about the direction Microsoft and their OEM crime partners are heading.
In 2016, I filed an antitrust complaint against Lenovo with the state government of Illinois, which opened an investigation. I believe I still have most of the documents about that. They entered into a settlement agreement with me in which they agreed to release “non-official” firmware that was “Linux-compatible” and arrange to knock it off on their future laptops, in exchange for me dropping my complaint.
Yet here we are in 2022, and I suppose they haven’t technically violated that agreement, however, as you can still run the firmware in a non-default configuration in two ways to get GNU/Linux to load on an affected system. Apparently, there’s an option to re-enable the 3rd party Microsoft key in the UEFI setup, or you can just go in there and turn Secure Boot to “Disabled”.
Linux boots either way on my Lenovo ThinkBook 15 ITL Gen2, which was Ubuntu certified (I am currently writing this in Fedora 36 and pleased as punch with the way my computer is operating.), but I turned off “Secure Boot”. There have been numerous issues with it, since it was designed by shitheads and implemented clumsily on GNU/Linux by another one who even got a Free Software Award for doing so, but when it is off you don’t run into any problems with it and you don’t have to figure out how to administer it and what to do when an OS fucks up something called a “dbx” that I don’t even want to read about.
The whole system sucks. It is over-designed and full of bugs, and even assuming the user had any meaningful and straightforward way of controlling it that was guaranteed to be there (they don’t), more points of failure can only cause more breakdowns in any system.
We’ve seen cases where people just left “Secure” Boot on because that’s what OEMs and people like Garrett recommend to do, and if they boot this OS or that OS in the wrong order, or load Windows, then their other operating systems can become quite unusable without going in there and resetting everything to factory settings and turning it off anyway.
“Secure” Boot is a disaster waiting for a time and place to happen if you leave it on and for most users, especially ones that use competently designed operating systems, it brings nothing good to the table.
I’m just crazy and want my computer to load what I tell it to.
And I’m not even the first one to notice Lenovo and their insane defaults, btw.
In 2012(?), Mr. Garrett himself blogged on whatever he was using back then that there was a Lenovo laptop that only booted if the boot manager was called “Windows” or “Red Hat Enterprise Linux”, and I don’t think they ever fixed that.
In a response to his Twitter complaint about the current Lenovo debacle, people have noted that some Lenovo laptops don’t make any sense at all. One guy says he bought a Carbon X1 Gen10 and found Secure Boot and Virtualization (needed for other alleged Windows 11 “security”) turned off by default.
My laptop’s Lenovo firmware setup program has typos and Engrish all over the place. Fedora hides the complaints about firmware bugs that get printed to the screen by the Linux kernel. Debian doesn’t.
There’s a couple things to note about Lenovo, Microsoft’s “OEM Partner of the Year”. They’re incompetent and they’re nasty.
On TechRights IRC recently, Roy Schestowitz says he got his wife a Lenovo laptop years back and it’s been beeping about overheating for several years now, but never seems to just go ahead and fail.
I had to disassemble the Yoga 900 ISK2 to replace the keyboard module and battery a couple of years ago due to missing keys and battery wear, but it still works.
I’m just playing it by ear at this point. I keep hoping someone will build a PC that doesn’t suck, but I may also have to consider that my next computer may very well not be a PC. It certainly won’t be a PC if I can’t remove Windows from it, which I don’t want and never asked for, and would have declined if I had the option to be billed separately and take it or leave it.
Every year, Windows loses about 2 more percentage points of the desktop/laptop market, sometimes level for a year or two and then drastically down.
Like all of a sudden with the Russian-Ukraine war or Coronavirus recession….if anything good comes out of the coming recession, maybe Windows will dip again and have a bad year….seems their most dire numbers are coming from Pornhub’s statistics, but I have no reason not to trust that.
The more people who quit using Windows, the more will learn that they don’t need it anyway, and won’t come back when times are better. It’s best that Microsoft dies or becomes mostly irrelevant sooner rather than later, so there will be less of a mess to clean up.
Locking the door may influence where people go, but not that they will leave. Maybe they’ll buy a Mac or a Chromebook. Maybe they’ll use GNU/Linux on those. Maybe they’ll finally just buy a cheap ARM laptop and use GNU/Linux on that. It doesn’t take a lot to run it well.
x86 PCs are real gas guzzlers when it comes to power.
They need a lot of power and a lot of performance just to keep traction when it comes to Windows because it wastes so much of what the hardware resources could otherwise be doing, with bloat and spyware.
Why would Microsoft care? It can just train you to spend thousands trying to overcome it.
Most people are shocked to learn that a cheap $199 Chromebook feels faster than a $1,200 Windows PC. They shouldn’t be.
It’s the same concept as a lighter car with a small turbocharged engine being faster than a big gas guzzler with an engine twice as big.
As for Matthew Garrett, I think maybe he fears being exposed as a liar.
All these years he said Microsoft had no intention of locking out “Linux” with “Secure” Boot, and now they move it all to a non-default configuration with toggles that will obviously be removed 3-5 years from now when legacy Microsoft products that need them go end of life.
In the default configuration, his Jury Rigged solution doesn’t work anymore.
Maybe he believed that he made things better by implementing it? I doubt it. I really do doubt it.
Notice that he never mentions me, because he doesn’t like me. He considers himself to be in some sort of feud with me because I just don’t think he’s a very well balanced individual, honestly. But here’s the article he cited, and you can very clearly see it was me that Adrian Kingsley-Hughes cited, and specifically my post on Reddit.
(I was later banned from /r/linux after it was completely taken over by Microsoft trolls.)
Lenovo support admitting that they locked out other operating systems on the Yoga 900-ISK2 on orders from Microsoft. In 2016.
Here’s some screenshots from the case I filed with the Attorney General of Illinois in 2016, which got their attention and finally got them to agree to solve it. I also got a letter from the Attorney General in hard copy that’s tucked away that includes the particulars of the settlement we reached with Lenovo. They didn’t admit wrongdoing, but agreed to fix the issue.
As you can see, other than Lenovo spelling Illinois wrong in their internal email system before reaching out to me, Lenovo did get contacted by the State of Illinois and it panicked them. Had they not fixed the system, the state may have opened an antitrust investigation, so they hurried up and did whatever they needed to behind-the-scenes to get permission from Microsoft to unlock the computer.
This is all evidence that Matthew Garrett is incorrect when he states that Lenovo simply bungled this because they didn’t care or that it had something to do with “power management” (LOL). Here we have Lenovo admitting in public that there was a Microsoft deal to lock the system, and then here we also have them e-mailing me asking if I’ve had time to look at their updated BIOS that unlocks the computer, so that I could talk to the State government again.
Six years later, we have Matthew Garrett on Twitter:
As you can see from Lenovo’s documentation, like I stated before, you can enable the Microsoft 3rd Party UEFI CA, but a better solution is to just toggle “Secure Boot” to “Off” and never worry about it again.
At least until Microsoft changes their minds again and it’s some other song and dance, or you really have no choice but to use Windows if that’s what it came with. Again, I give this like maybe 5 years before we’re there.
Lenovo claims there isn’t anything special about Microsoft Pluton, which is what they’re calling Microsoft’s latest pretend security.
(Windows is a security shithole where virtually all computer malware that exists resides.)
Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. What is clear is that the Free Software community needs to be ready for that day with credible alternatives that can run GNU/Linux because the days of buying cheap commodity PCs with Windows, going “Ughh, this again!” but at least being able to wipe the disk of it, are likely numbered.
For what it’s worth, I’d like to remind everyone that I was taking legal action six years ago to buy the Free Software community some time, and all I ever got in thanks for it was essentially slandered by people like Matthew Garrett, who deserves at least to have Richard Stallman step in and revoke his Free Software Award, and booted out of /r/linux by the cancel mob of Microsoft moles who are there pitching Microsoft’s Fake Linux system, WSL.
Again, I don’t know what happened with Garrett. He’s always been Microsoft’s huckleberry. I don’t know what happened to him this week.
T-Mobile Home Internet has been getting worse in my area, to the point it was intolerable. I finally applied for the Affordable Community Broadband program and was approved.
The ACB credit qualified me for free 60 Mbps down / 11 Mbps up on Comcast, and free is good, so I ditched the T-Mobile.
The T-Mobile Home Internet Nokia modem is absolute garbage. It could almost never reliably lock on to a 5G signal, and when it could, it usually didn’t even perform at the minimum speed that they guarantee in an area. They say they won’t sell service in an area unless you can get 25 Mbps, but routinely I was left with half or two thirds of that, and that was in between modem crashes. Sometimes six or seven per day.
I finally realized why it would crash so much. It’s because the thing is so full of bugs and they roll out new firmware constantly and it’s never any better than it was before, but also this modem is a portable space heater and eventually it will just fry itself. Before it konks out totally, it will just become unstable because of heat buildup, so you have to set it on top of a fan just so it won’t crash so much.
Anyway, with the free broadband from Comcast and the ACB program, I finally have a stable Internet connection again for the first time in a while and I’m not fighting with my spouse over the “worse than DSL in 2005” experience that T-Mobile Home Internet brings with it.
When I called to cancel T-Mobile, they got it canceled, but they made me figure out how to print off a shipping label, which means I had to forward it to FedEx near where my spouse works as a print job (because I hate printers), and I’ll pick it up on Monday (my birthday) along with a Buick that I’m closing a deal on. It’s going to be a very good day.
Just out of spite, I added “Super Crappy T-Mobile Home Internet Pod Enclosed. May it toast in the fires of Silicon Hell.” to the bottom of the shipping return label.
It is eye opening what having lousy Internet service for 6 months is like. The only actual reason I could see for buying this product is if you live in the middle of a cornfield and it’s this or satellite Internet.
The one upside is that the customer support people in the Philippines are always so nice to talk to.
I don’t blame them at all for this shitfest that T-Mobile calls an ISP, because they’re obviously not running the company. I just don’t think T-Mobile Home Internet is going to be a thing for much longer if it can’t do better than COMCAST.
While I can’t knock free, I also mistakenly called into the regular Comcast line before realizing that Internet Essentials is operated like another company. I noticed their paying customers don’t get a lot of support anymore.
Comcast has started closing customer service at night (used to be 24 hours a day) and forcing people to deal with a lot of menus and prompts and a chat robot on their website or SMS text messaging system and it takes 30 minutes of poking around telling it none of this applies before it will hand you off to a real person who can actually solve a problem. The rest is just this dumb “Have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in or do you want to pay your bill now?” 500 times along the way.
ZDNet says that McDonalds will be like this pretty soon too.
I wonder what ordering a hamburger will be like when the machine can’t understand you and there’s nobody to help and customers start driving away in frustration. McDonalds is big, but they don’t have a monopoly on hamburgers and fries, so what works for Comcast won’t necessarily work for them.
Sam Walton’s management books should be a required reading everywhere.
My favorite quote was “There is only one boss, and that’s the customer, and he can fire everyone in the company from the CEO to the person stocking the shelves by taking his money elsewhere.”.
Unfortunately, we’re to the point where even Walmart is acting like that’s not true when, if they were a little smarter, they could kick Amazon in the nuts and walk away with all of that lost revenue.
The overall trend here is that big companies that already effectively have a money printing press and are more profitable than ever thanks to fake inflation (raising prices because they can and blaming it on the President or something) are also cutting customer service to the bone.
This mentality is a diseased way of thinking about customer service. They consider it a “department” instead of a way of running their business. An expense to be trimmed.
You’ll probably hang up the phone before you talk to a person after being filibustered by chat robots for so long that it puts Strom Thurmond’s action against the Civil Rights Act in a distant second place.
The whole scheme is to send you to a human as a last resort so that everyone who is too busy to deal with an issue goes away. If you’re calling to cancel something, you’re also not a priority even though good customer service means taking care of the customer when they don’t want to be your customer anymore.
In a free market, or at least one with some competition, this could never work. People could tell their friends, “Don’t use that business. It sucks. Can you believe how much it sucks?”, but when you have a monopoly on cable internet or have traditionally been a monopolist and public menace like Microsoft, you can get away with lousy customer service at that point, because you don’t have to please customers if you make it hard to run away.
Linus Torvalds once joked that if you manage to crash the Linux kernel with a program, it gets investigated, but if you tell someone you’ve crashed the Windows kernel, they just stare at you and say “I’ve got programs like that and they came with Windows.”.
It’s very clear why Comcast doesn’t fight Internet Essentials.
They have no reason to. Even at $10 a month they at least break even on you, and the ACB program even pays them for that.
The alternative is to draw serious regulatory attention to themselves and maybe get broken apart by the Sherman Antitrust Act.
To actually get to the “free Internet”, you have to sign up for three different things. Internet Essentials, which kicks you out to the FCC website for Lifeline, then you fill out an application with the National Verifier, and once approved, you get a code. You take it back to Comcast, they approve you for Internet Essentials, you activate your Internet account, and maybe pay your first bill of $9.95, and then you go back, apply for Comcast’s ACB program, and paste in the same National Verifier code, and then hopefully it takes you down to $0 a month for a while.
They don’t want that to be easy. If it was extremely easy, everyone would just click a button and go “$100 a month to Comcast for Internet? Click click, BULLSHIT!”.
In fact, they used to have a cool down period where you couldn’t have been a regular Comcast subscriber in the past 6 months, so that people wouldn’t cancel their paid service even if they qualified for Internet Essentials. Nasty.
I also noticed that Comcast is offering “low cost” PCs.
The Windows 11 model has slightly higher specs than the Chromebook. I’d suggest the Windows 11 model if Windows can be wiped off of a Dell Latitude 3120. They call it an educational laptop and their marketing page says “lesson learned”.
The only lesson with a $150 Windows computer is how poorly Windows runs on a $150 computer. It doesn’t run well on a good computer. How well do you think a “Celery” processor and 4 GB of RAM are going to hold up?
Fedora, on the other hand, could actually work out fine in this case.
I’ve been meaning to write a post about Fedora 36, which I’m using right now. The GNOME 42 and KDE spins have both come a long way towards being less bloated and far less notorious for memory leaks and more performant. KDE is even used on Pinebooks now.
Add in the fact that Fedora is also using ZRAM and Early-OOM, and it should hold up okay on 4 GB RAM. Windows 11 won’t.
One of the truly awful things about Windows 11 isn’t just that it’s a big rusty pig of the operating system world, it’s that the compressed memory setup isn’t even using an algorithm that is optimized for speed, so it slows you down so your OEM can screw you on RAM.
Fedora uses ZSTD compression for ZRAM and the BtrFS file system (which also reduces disk writes).
I think it would work fine on the Dell Latitude 3120, and it could turn a miserable experience the government is propping up Microsoft with into an enjoyable little computer that may even in fact run some old console emulators and Free Software games (including GZDOOM, obviously).
If the government is in the business of supporting low and lower-middle income people with computers, it ought not be spamming those people with malicious proprietary software like Windows 11, and then the other malicious software, such as ransomware, which inevitably ends up setting up camp in Windows 11, but as long as the user can at least fix it (which I don’t know if you can, so you’ll need to research this) by turning off “Secure Boot” and installing a Free and Open Source operating system, then they may want to take advantage of the super cheap hardware.
The Comcast xFI gateway wanted me to use an app to activate it, so I had the lineman take care of that for me before he left. Comcast could easily make it so your modem worked without installing spyware on your Android or iPhone, but they don’t.
Remember when they demanded to run a Windows program and then carpet bombed you with browser toolbars and trialware?
Luckily, I could just call an agent back then and say “Look, I don’t have Windows. Can you activate it on your end?”.
I don’t know what’s to like. Edge is basically just Chrome with Google’s spyware scooped out and Microsoft’s spyware put in.
On GNU/Linux it is even more absurd. We didn’t stop using Windows so we could start using the browser that Windows users don’t open unless it’s with one of these damned accidental clicks that’s all over Windows “11”.
Windows “11” is the most malicious OS Microsoft has ever released, just like every new version is.
Their official statement on breaking EdgeDeflector is basically that it’s their operating system, and if you don’t like it, up yours.
With Windows “11” barely a month old and not even registering in stat counters yet, over 500,000 people had already downloaded EdgeDeflector, according to Daniel Aleksandersen, the author of the program.
Given numbers like these, it’s obvious why Microsoft is being a bag of dicks and heading it off at the pass. This would have been where Edge stalled out and bled to death. Millions would have used EdgeDeflector because it’s easier to stuff a cork in it if Microsoft leaves this “issue” unaddressed than it is to make Windows take its medicine and put a real OS on the PC, like GNU/Linux. Edge only has 4% of users now, even with all of these ports.
EdgeDeflector users are a lot of people compared to the paltry number of Windows “11” victims so far. Some get conned into ‘free bait’ downgrade offers, some wake up and it found its way onto their computer, and OEMs will ship computers with it and not offer a choice at some point…..this is the only way new Windows versions gain any serious traction…Everyone knows they’re worse than the thing they already have and puts them off as long as possible.
In fact, there’s a perverse incentive to stay on an unsupported release of Windows. Microsoft will stop bricking it every month with crap updates they test on you.
Microsoft is minimizing (the number of users who think Edge is a dodgy spying piece of junk), denying, and blaming others. Which are the hallmarks of an abuser, as any victim of domestic violence will know if they’ve gone to a therapist about it.
“Microsoft isn’t a good steward of the Windows operating system. They’re prioritizing ads, bundleware, and service subscriptions over their users’ productivity,” developer Daniel Aleksandersen added in his blog.
For what it’s worth, the Free Software Foundation sent Microsoft a hard drive asking them to open source Windows 7 so that the community could correct it and maintain it. No reply. 😉 It read like a WTF moment, but they were being flippant, pointing out that Microsoft will never share Windows as open source, so the only wise move is to leave it.
Alexsanderson continue to pontificate, as if this were news to anyone who had driven a PC lately…..
“Microsoft still charges 200 USD for a Windows license while simultaneously filling the operating system with ads and crapware. Weeks before launch, Windows 11 wouldn’t even show the taskbar when it failed to display an advertisement dialog. Just last week, first-party apps and features of Windows 11 stopped working due to an expired encryption certificate.
For users, the best action is to complain to their local antitrust regulator or switch to Linux. Your Web browser is probably the most important — if not the only — app you regularly use. Microsoft has made it clear that its priorities for Windows don’t align with its users’.”
In the US, the antitrust regulators are going after Google, and to some extent Apple, and inexplicably (at least on the surface) leaving Microsoft alone.
While these other companies certainly have issues, neither of them are as nasty as Windows. Microsoft managed to water down the aftermath of US v. Microsoft so much that the consent decree eventually expired, and they said they’d behave.
This is much like the southern US states suing to overturn the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law required them to get “pre-clearance” from the Department of Justice before enacting new election restrictions.
They went to the courts and said things had changed since 1965 and they would behave now, and then as soon as the law got struck down, they enacted hundreds of new voting restrictions, aimed largely at minorities and the poor, and criminalized black churches gathering votes from their congregants.
It’s simply revolting that all a bad actor has to do is promise to behave and then whether they’re a convicted criminal monopolist or want to bring back the Jim Crow south, they’re off the hook.
The court systems at the federal level are completely broken, obviously, and with so many Trump holdovers that he packed them with, I really doubt anything will happen to Microsoft there, so States need to take the initiative in enforcing their own laws, and citizens of the several States need to petition their State government to do so.
In 2016, I filed an antitrust and consumer fraud complaint against Lenovo in the State of Illinois, and if anyone wants the emails, I’ll release the damned emails. Nothing else I did got their attention. I posted about them locking GNU/Linux out of the Yoga 900-ISK2 series on Reddit /r/linux (full of Microsoft shills) and was banned and called deceptive, I went to the “tech news” naively, and was dismissed by Microsoft propagandists at ZDNet and elsewhere, which are even more a shitposting outfit now than they were then.
When they did post anything at all before I went to the Attorney General, it was some sort of PR blurb about how Lenovo designed the “360 degree hinge” for Windows 10 and “Linux couldn’t possibly work” with, you know, a hinge. Only, it did. As soon as you flipped it over into tablet mode, GNOME activated the virtual keyboard, screen orientation worked, the touchscreen worked, the physical keyboard was disabled until you put it in laptop mode again.
Actually, Windows 10’s on screen keyboard was a complete nightmare. If I tried using it in Firefox, nothing happened at all. It only worked in Edge (Legacy). Dirty tricks even then!
Nothing worked, until I complained in 16 pages of detail, to Lisa Madigan, the Illinois Attorney General, and THEN Lenovo quickly offered a BIOS repair for the affected models and not to do that again.
That laptop is blacklisted from running Windows “11”. It runs Kubuntu 20.10 fine.
This isn’t the first time I’ve had to take action against a company for things like this. There was also GPL compliance problems at Samsung. I sent them a letter and they refused to comply, and I got the SFLC after them regarding their infringements against BusyBox, and a source code tarball for my Blu Ray player appeared very soon after that.
Back to Edge…. We need a “Don’t use Edge!” campaign. We really do. If people refuse it and boycott it and even change operating systems over it, it will die.
If people really want a Chromium browser, recommend Brave to them instead.
On a strictly technical level, it’s hard to be much more terrible than Microsoft Internet Exploder. The reason “Edge” seems to crash less and get better security fixes is that Microsoft just brings all of those in from Chromium without doing much of anything. To the extent it’s better, it’s because they’ve gotten out of their own way there.
But with all of that spyware in there, and this “shove it in your face” attitude, it’s like, why do it?
We need to gravitate towards Free and Open Source Software, which doesn’t need your private information and doesn’t want it. We need to encourage these programs for others too.
Right now, the only browsers I’m recommending by name to people who ask are Brave, GNOME Web, and LibreWolf. The rest of them deserve each other.
Mozilla in 2021 is so pathetic that they removed support for setting your Windows “11” default browser in one click from the installer you could download from their Web site, and then said it’s because they wanted it to be just as crippled as the Windows Store version. (Mozilla’s blog has also gone straight to hell. They keep talking about things like magic fairy dust called “AI”, which doesn’t exist. They also clearly won’t be around when it does. It’s buzzword bullshit bingo at this point.)
Windows Store is a joke. Most of the apps are fake or are hobbled in some way. Everyone should avoid it.
With GNU/Linux we have real applications, secure applications, from sources like Debian’s Apt repositories, and FlatHub. No fakes in here.
I developed a hobby of collecting Web browsers when I was a child, and switching back and forth, and I still do that quite a bit, on Debian GNU/Linux now.
People would ask me why I tore apart Windows 98 (with a program called “Revenge of Mozilla” by Bruce Jensen, based on a demonstration tool written by Professor Ed Felten to demonstrate Microsoft’s lying to the court) and gutted it of Internet Exploder, the Trident engine, Outlook, and dozens of other things, and put in the FAT32-aware Windows 95 OSR 2.1 shell.
“I like browsers. I just don’t like theirs. Plus, my operating system doesn’t crash anymore now that it’s not causing the shell to leak out until there’s a Blue Screen of Death.”.
-Me (circa 1998)
Bill Gates testified in court that my operating system was broken.
I found that it ran what I wanted it to just fine.
Far from going deep, deep into the plumbing of the OS, an INF file could run through things in 2-3 minutes, unregistering COM objects, deleting files, cleaning registry keys, asking for the Windows 95 Shell, and you reboot and you’re running this greatly improved OS that’s much faster in less memory.
Microsoft added gratuitous dependencies on IE into programs that never needed it before, and created bloat and security hazards in things like Office 97, just to push Windows 95 users into giving up and embracing the horrors, so I switched to Star Office. I bought it at Staples the same day I bought MandrakeLinux.
What does go deep deep into the bowels of Microsoft is the sleazy, disreputable, lying scumbags.
“Creepy Uncle Bill” handpicked his successors and many of them are still there. Who do you think a guy who cheated on his wife every day with a different woman and flew around with Jeff Epstein trying to buy a Nobel Prize is going to pick to replace him?
How much could they have changed? Obviously not much.
Bonus: Here’s a tour of Windows 98 without Internet Explorer and with a Windows 95 shell patched to say Windows 98. Nathan Lineback at ToastyTech used a similar program called 98Lite, which was not freeware. I used RoM because it was freeware and I was a broke kid.
Yes, this Lenovo laptop is compatible with Debian 11, but it took too much work thanks to the crooks at Microsoft, and their devious schemes to keep their users on the hook.
I finally got off Windows again.
It seems like every time I buy a new laptop, Windows is all that really works right on it for a while, and then I find a place to hop off.
Well, Debian 11 is that place for my Lenovo Thinkbook 15 ITL Gen2 (really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?). This laptop is a monster, and Lenovo got a lot of hardware into it cheaply, but they do cut corners in a lot of scary places.
Like that BIOS update that killed Windows 10 a few months ago.
While Lenovo says this laptop has Ubuntu “Certification”, they don’t support it. In fact, they apparently tell people on Lenovo Forums looking for help to “reinstall Windows”. Hard pass.
I managed to figure out why Ubuntu can apparently see the NVME SSD on this laptop and most other Linux distributions (including Debian 11) can’t.
It turns out that Lenovo is still putting Intel’s “VMD” on laptops. I looked for what in the hell this actually is, and Intel goes on and on about how it’s a “feature” to hide the hardware from the OS which would seem to indicate that it is mostly useful on servers, so when I evaluated Debian and came to the conclusion that everything worked okay, I did a few last steps, including installing one more BIOS update from within Windows. Hoping that it would clean up the mess of warnings that are in seemingly everyone’s system logs if they boot Linux, and which spew a nice bunch of crap about failing to reserve ACPI devices and bogus ACPI AML tables. Alas, it did not.
FWIW, according to at least one Ubuntu developer, they’re an eyesore, but apparently harmless.
Turning off VMD (server article, but after using the NOVO button to get into the BIOS, same deal) managed to make the system log complaints about having access denied go away, which is nice since many people complained that they couldn’t actually boot their computer into Linux until disabling this, even though the installer ran okay.
I also disabled Secure Boot, which has never secured any Linux computer. In fact, about all it ever has done for us is put Microsoft at the “root of trust” and I’d rather trust a hungry bear with a steak in my back pocket than Microsoft.
Oh, and if anyone from the FSF is reading this, feel free to tell Stallman that they can give a Free Software Award to me next time. I haven’t written any Free Software programs, sure, but I also haven’t done anything to sabotage your movement in ways you might never recover from, like Microsoft employee Miguel de Icaza and uEFI “Secure Boot” troll and overall pervert Matthew Garrett have. While you were pinning a medal on Garrett, you also had a page blasting this Security Theater as “Restricted Boots”.
This horrible fake security scheme called Secure Boot has even malfunctioned and caused Linux distros to be impossible to boot before due to the “dbx” being updated by one, and then making it impossible to boot another. So whether you can boot depends on what the last OS you booted was. Great design, I’ll tell you what! Turning it off ensures that it cannot cause a problem.
I’m not sure which part this rigmarole pissed off Bitlocker, because I disabled VMD and “Secure” Boot at the same time, but it demanded my recovery key at that point, which was fine, because that was about the time I held in the power button to force the computer to turn off and then held in the NOVO button to boot off the Debian installer and blow this Windows popsicle stand.
I took the default options in the Calamares installer on the Live CD with “non-Free” device firmware, and rebooted, and EVERYTHING WORKED. Nice!
It was a lot of work to get away from Windows. In the Legacy BIOS days, it was usually just reboot with a CD (then a USB stick) in the drive and tell Linux to take over the computer, but that was then and this is now, and OEMs help Microsoft to keep this Windows garbage on your computer. They may not ultimately stop you, but they can turn it into a process, and then wave “WSL” around like that’s any kind of a solution.
People who have been around Linux for a while know it’s fast and it almost never crashes. It’s also not a corporate toilet full of advertisements on your desktop, like Windows 10 is.
Plus, with Windows 10, there’s spyware, and Bitlocker makes your drive so remarkably fragile that anything can cause data loss if Bitlocker gets messed up, and that’s quite easy to do. Even an official BIOS update from Lenovo did it to me once, after all. (I’m not the only one. Lenovo’s pretend support people can’t even give a straight answer on why this could happen.)
Another nuisance along the way was the first time I booted into Debian’s live environment to evaluate it, my WiFi worked, and then when I rebooted to Windows 10, and back into Debian, it stopped showing up. It turns out that Windows “Fast Startup” leaves the WiFi in a weird state, and I had to figure out how to turn off Fast Startup (oddly, it required hibernation to be on before it would expose this setting!!!) and turn the computer off and on without it and then reboot into Debian. WiFi has worked fine ever since then.
In 2016, I filed an antitrust complaint in Illinois against Microsoft and Lenovo for just outright blocking Linux installs with what Intel is now calling VMD apparently (which has no use really on a linux laptop, but apparently forces Windows to load some other driver that has a power management policy). They had been making it impossible for the user to switch out of this mode, and now they do let you switch out of it. There’s a hill to climb over. They don’t want to let you leave. But you can.
What about Debian itself?
I like it so far. It’s definitely come a long way in the past 10 years. I remember it being very difficult to set up. In fact, so did Linus Torvalds, and that’s why he never revisited it, and I’d say you’re missing a real gem if you don’t give Debian 11 a look. Especially considering that Windows continues to spiral into an even bigger mess than we thought possible (Windows “11” is just every problem you hated already about 10, and more, with less compatibility and more spyware.) every time there’s a release and there’s hardly anyone to cover it except paid shills at ZDNet oohing and ahhing over default wallpapers.
Coming from a mostly Fedora/Enterprise Linux background over the past couple of decades, Debian has always felt sort of weird to me. It never got around to doing the usrmove, for example, so binaries are still arranged all over the place and you just kind of have to figure that out, and the administration tools are different. Apt has certainly gotten a lot better. I had noticed this when I was using the Debian subsystem in a Chromebook.
While Canonical is still trying to dump this Snap garbage on your front door, now with Firefox as a snap, so Mozilla can also dump trash on you directly, Debian is at least staying true to its roots and preferring its own repositories with its own packages, and I feel like this is likely to contribute to the overall security and stability of the system.
In fact, the only other places I’ve been to in order to get software are Flathub (Flatpak format), an AppImage for the Gemini browser LaGrange, and WineHQ to get the Wine Development releases, so I can run some Windows software too.
Snap is just not the right answer for Linux packaging for numerous reasons, and while Flatpak certainly shares some of the problems, it’s just much better designed, and many Linux distributions have tossed Snap as basically unmaintainable and half-broken on anything that’s not Ubuntu. And to the extent that these packaging formats let distribution developers concentrate on their core OS, they’re a good thing.
Too often, pretty much all Canonical has done with a Snap is take someone’s (often Microsoft’s) crappy Electron apps and put them in these gargantuan packages, and I just don’t think that’s ever going to put the dialog where it needs to be. As an aside, even with non-efficient software bundles, the amount of space you get back for not having to deal with Windows hiding its true disk space cost, still puts your head above water on the disk space front.
With Windows, truly no SSD is truly big enough for it, and Microsoft doesn’t care. Hell, their partners sold devices that immediately couldn’t update because they ran out of space, and that was with 64 GB. I got a 512 GB model in both my laptops and before you know it, it’s all gone if you use Windows 10. Linux just really isn’t all that big. Even today, it’s not. Because it’s not written by people who don’t care and just want to push new hardware and new licenses.
Flatpak is very easy to set up, and add Flathub to, and it gets around some pesky Debian packaging policies, and gains you access to new software, including some that they would never package. And a definite upside is that there’s no risk of adding a foreign DEB package repo and having it clobber a system file, which deb-multimedia does.
Before RPM Fusion came along for Fedora, there were similar warnings about adding external repos and if they broke your system, you got to keep both pieces. While RPM Fusion goes to great lengths not to clobber anything on Fedora, deb-multimedia hasn’t, and that can and does cause you more problems than conveniences when you try to upgrade packages later. (FWIW, WineHQ is recommended in the official Debian Wiki, so I felt more confident getting updated copies of Wine.)
Do I have a few non-Free packages? I’m typing this from Vivaldi on Debian. Why? I like it better than what’s happened to Firefox, and I can delete some bookmarks and change the search engine. It even has a spiffy new email client. Nobody has ever _stopped_ you from putting proprietary software on a Linux distribution if it’s what you want to do, but never have I seen what’s going on today at Canonical and Fedora (under IBM) where they just dump it all on top of you like you shouldn’t even consider what the alternatives are.
Debian, on the other hand, doesn’t ship non-Free software. In fact, they’re so strict that they’re stricter than Fedora _used to be_. Remember, I had to get an unofficial image with proprietary device firmware to get my computer working. The problem with firmware is getting so bad that Debian even tells me my SSD, that it’s installed on, wouldn’t work without some.
But I admire them for having their scruples and sticking to it.
Why would I pick Debian over Ubuntu LTS?
Well, that’s a good question. In my opinion, so far, Debian feels less bloated and more stable than Ubuntu has typically been. I suppose that the argument in Ubuntu’s favor is that they have a paid support model more like Red Hat’s and are now offering 5 additional years of security patches-only after the first 5 years ends on an LTS. That might be useful in a business context, but then again most businesses don’t need support. Hell, even the US government (high energy physics labs and NASA) were using Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones because it was cheaper to build their own operating system from source RPMs than to pay Red Hat. So for many business people, it’s a moot point. Then, as anyone can tell you, after about 4-5 years on a Long Term Linux distro, things have fallen so far behind that any hope of running modern software basically goes out the window.
So Canonical can release marketing blurbs about how that extra 5 years of security support is free to home users, but I guarantee that none of you will be able to stand it, although it’s at least better than what happens to Windows users (when isn’t it?) where Microsoft may go on for 15 years putting out security updates, but it makes sure you can’t get the ones it still makes because that’s a source of extra blood from corporate types who built an unsupportable mess and are now trapped on Windows XP or 7 or whatever.
Debian does support the last stable release for quite some time after the new stable one goes out, and after 4-5 years most of you are going to want something new. So I’d call it even, honestly. And, some consultants can support you for a price if incidents arise with Debian in a corporate environment that your IT department can’t figure out. For home users, you might ask in the IRC channels.
Another big difference with Ubuntu, is that Debian strives to be a more “universal” operating system. That is, that it’s ported to architectures other than the x86 PC, although it runs on that as well. Ubuntu gave up on this a long time ago and never supported as many of these systems as Debian did in the first place. If you have odd computers laying around, chances are many of them can run Debian that can’t run Ubuntu, so if you “standardize” on Ubuntu, you may figure out that you can’t run it on your hobbyist, specialist, or even non-x86 server/mainframe stuff later and your Ubuntu skills don’t mean much. (Even if the two are somewhat similar due to Ubuntu’s reliance on Debian as an upstream.)
Moreover, Canonical went on trying to make profits off of desktop users and then had huge layoffs when it finally gave up, so the experience between the Debian and Ubuntu desktops aren’t as much of a chasm as they used to be, when Ubuntu was investing in its own desktop technologies and hoped to be a smartphone OS.
Since Debian isn’t trying to make a profit, it’s just trying to make users happy, the desktop spins are never part of some “corporate agenda” where they create problems for, say, KDE, over some crackpot API that they’ve bolted onto GNOME. And since Debian isn’t horrible about hanging onto many bad quality patches that are never going upstream, the stability is better and the experience is more like the upstream author intended.
Finally, there’s just an “ick” factor with Canonical, for me, lately. Whenever I go to their website, it’s less about Ubuntu and what it can do for me, and more logos of “Cloud” computers and Microsoft deals, and whitepapers that go into buzzword overtime. Debian doesn’t do that. Although nothing can stop one from spinning it up in a VM “in the cloud”, and it wouldn’t be Free Software if they tried to stop you, someone who evaluated Ubuntu in a Microsoft Azure VM started getting sales calls from a Canonical employee shortly after.
In short, most of you can probably toss either one on your computer as a daily driver, and it may work out okay in either event, at least as long as Canonical exists….Microsoft partnerships never end well for the victim who was foolish enough to sign one.
(See every Microsoft deal ever, from IBM OS/2 to Linspire and Xandros, to Novell…..Even SCO thought they’d get the better of them, and where are they now?)
But if you really want your computer to be yours and not at odds with you, you want to try Debian.
Is installing Debian “easy”?
I was flat out floored by how easy it was to install on my PC from the Live Image with the firmware. It was no harder than any other modern distribution. Which is saying something for how much progress has been made in the ten years since I’ve looked at this. Ubuntu once took the initiative in making what was a painful and confusing setup process into something that made it easy to “try before installing” and they once had “sane defaults”. Now that almost everyone has an easy installer, and Ubuntu doesn’t have sane defaults, I see very little that they’re doing that I’d call added value.
In fact, I think the only problem I ran into along the way was trying to make a systemd service for powertop –autotune to run at every boot and optimize my power consumption. The Debian family never did the “usrmove”, so I found that the instructions on Arch Linux’s wiki for making the service were mostly correct, except the path to powertop on Debian is /sbin/powertop.
In fact, the only reason why you need to do more work here, as with most things on Linux where a little spit and polish are needed, is that Linux developers are extremely conservative about applying (in this case) power management optimizations, because some of them can end up causing bizarre corruptions and odd behaviors in some cases on certain hardware, but that’s also true on Windows, and of course Windows just turns them on and _if_ it corrupts anything, well that’s just Windows. Linux defaults to “safe” over absolutely optimizing your power usage. And it’s your choice to optimize or play it safe. How about that? Choice!
Gaming on Linux?
Yeah, sure you betcha! Linux has sort of a traditionally poor reputation for gaming. It’s left over from many years ago before there was official support from Gog, Steam (which even lets you run Windows games through Proton), and when Wine was a lot more hit or miss. In addition, there’s lots of Free and Open Source software games in the Debian or Flathub repos, and all the emulators you can shake a stick at seem to work fine.
(I had to grab a DEB file for Gens-GS that was built on Ubuntu, but it was pretty self-contained and works fine. The Genesis was the best classic console. Change my mind!)
Out of the box, you might need to install a controller driver for certain things. Oddly, the xpad module wasn’t in the default kernel image, but installing xpad and loading it worked out well.
Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse and Apple Airpods? Better on Linux.
All those weird delays with the mouse and the dropout glitches that happened on Windows 10 are gone. Windows and Bluetooth are nastier together.
So, in closing….
It took work, most of which was just getting rid of Windows itself, but it paid off in not having to deal with Windows again.
And with some final thoughts, although I don’t own the other models, the Thinkbook 14 ITL is also “Ubuntu Certified” and mostly seems to be this laptop with a smaller screen, and the AMD models apparently work with Linux too (with different caveats) according to this guy, although with Ryzen being a totally different monster than the Intel Tiger Lake, it appears that you need a newer kernel than what ships in Debian 11 (Linux 5.11 or later) or else your touchpad won’t work.
“I didn’t bother testing the fingerprint scanner with Linux knowing the touchpad barely works.”
Well, the fingerprint scanner is probably the same as mine, and that didn’t work on Tiger Lake either, but who cares? Passwords FTFW!
“For Linux, I would totally not recommend this. Lenovo have no plans to provide any kind of Linux support for the Thinkbooks line (Intel and AMD).”
That’s a little harsh. I mean, Lenovo firmware sucks. Their support people suck. Hell, one of them banned every Comcast IP in Illinois to try to get me to stop talking about their Yoga 900 sabotage on their forums in 2016.
But I got this Tiger Lake i7-1165G7 model with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB NVME SSD for $900 on a Black Friday sale last year, and while Dell sells systems that COME WITH Ubuntu and the firmware is probably less of a mess, I think I might rather live with some garbage printed on my screen every boot than pay $500 more for an equivalent Dell laptop. Now, if you just want first class stuff, we all know you have to pony up, but I’m a real fly by the seat of my pants kind of guy.
Oh, one last thing before I go. The Yoga 900 ISK2 from late 2016 is still going strong. I ordered a $48 replacement battery off Amazon last year and it runs Debian 11 great. It doesn’t even print garbage to my screen! If you’re unsure of your skillset, you can always pay Micro Center about $100 to do that for you, with a genuine battery. It’s worth it either way.
This stuff just runs and runs on Linux, and with Windows you’re not even supported at all after 3 years apparently. (That’s what Windows 11 gets you.)
Both “11”, but with Windows, it’s what Microsoft dialed the sucktitude up to. I really hope that people get tired of this shit and pick DEBIAN 11 when they mean “I upgraded to 11.” next month.
India has opened an antitrust investigation into Apple. From AppleInsider.
I commented: “Good. Buying hundreds of other companies just to shut them down and send spam emails telling their users to buy some garbage Apple product that doesn’t even do what they were using the old product for SHOULD be under intense scrutiny in the US, but it isn’t due to a government that’s too corrupt to even pretend to open a proper antitrust investigation anymore.”
As everyone should know already, privacy on an Android phone, in general, is pretty much a joke.
In fact, the more “apps” you install from Google, the worse things get. Not only does every application published in the Play Store phone home, at a minimum, to give Google crash and analytics data about you (even if the underlying program is Free Software), but developers generally have every incentive to include more.
When Facebook was forced to reveal “Off Site Activity Data” under recent privacy laws like the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA, it made them very hard to get at, but when you eventually find the link that gives you limited control over it, you’ll find that most Android apps are spying on you when you open them and are sending them data.
In fact, Facebook publishes a tracking library that app developers can bundle in exchange for money.
When you “learn more”, Facebook admits that it gets more data than it tells you about here, and it’s not even clear what really happens to the data when you clear it and set it so that they don’t use this activity later.
So what does that have to do with apps like GasBuddy? Well, I opened it up and TrackerControl revealed that there are no less than 25 tracker libraries included in this one app, and but one of them is Facebook.
Well, one of the “known” companies that gets your HIV status, or at least knows to sell HIV drug companies, gay cruise ships, and Truvada lawsuit lawyers your data, is Facebook, because Grindr has a Facebook library in their app that sends your activity to them every time you use it.
And you’ll likely never notice unless you check an obscure “Off Facebook Activity” page that is hidden behind half a dozen links that you have to click in the correct order, or monitor app behavior using TrackerControl.
Grindr was a Chinese-owned company (until it sold recently due to the Trump Administration declaring it to be a national security threat) that mostly exists to facilitate sketchy hookups and contribute to public health disasters in countries like the United States. The public health officials refuse to say much about it for fear of angering the “gay community”, but it is what it is. Would people behave this way without Grindr? Sure.
My cousin was tracking STDs in Indiana in the late 90s and early 2000s and they were spreading over AOL, Yahoo chat rooms, and Gay dot com when those were a thing, but there was never an app back then where you could flip it open and see who was how many feet away. (They can see you too, which has led to stalking and death threats and all kinds of fun.)
Oddly, I met my spouse there and things have been going fine with him. We’re happily married for years now and I haven’t had that app since, but when I learned of all of the creepy things it had been telling Facebook, I was pretty outraged. Facebook admitted to Congress that it tracks people who have never even set up an account.
I’ve heard that straight dating apps don’t treat people much better, and that now, people are being snookered into telling the app whether they’ve had a Coronavirus vaccine in exchange for being baited by having “additional swipes” or something stupid like that turned on for a little while. The government often bypasses its own laws by buying data that it can’t otherwise legally collect, and the news admits that the Biden Administration is involved with this. Hmm.
Now you may not be able to even match with someone on a dating app unless you’ve taken a vaccine that’s only authorized under an Emergency Use Waiver. I’m not antivax, but I think that it would be more appropriate to discuss health matters somewhere else.
Look, I’m not telling people what to do on their phone, but I would suggest keeping the number of apps that don’t do anything particularly important from the Google Play Store out of the phone, using alternatives from the F-Droid Store where possible, and setting up TrackerControl.
The state of the “smart” phone industry is pretty awful. With either of the two major choices, you’re going to run into nasty problems that are either unfixable or that you can only hope to put a bandage on.
In an episode of The Orville, a woman’s cell phone was recovered by the crew, and it contained enough information to re-create a simulation of her in their holodeck. In reality, if anyone has that kind of data on you, it’s Google and Facebook on a server, and it’s being used to feed into their advertisement network.
Ads just aren’t worth any money if they mostly get shown to people who aren’t the targeted demographic.
In fact, when Signal took out an ad campaign to show Facebook useds why they were being targeted, it got shut down, because Facebook doesn’t want anyone to be consciously aware of what’s happening to them.
Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature isn’t enough, and while I do indeed believe that Facebook is pissed, as long as you use their apps, load pages with their trackers in them, and run seemingly unrelated apps that share data with them, it’s not going to prevent them from learning about you. In fact, most of what they know isn’t even from the trackers they inject elsewhere. It’s what people tell them.
(I’m not an avid user of Facebook, and Psychology Today reported that studies have shown that people who are tend to be Dark Triad personality types. It helps them learn about people when they tend to be narcissistic exhibitionists anyway, I suppose.)
Where they check-in at, what they say their birthday is, what they say their hobbies are. When you use your phone number or email address with someone else, they can feed data into Facebook. You can shut one door, they’ll open three others. It’s sort of what they do. It’s all they do. (Kyle Reese on the Terminator)
With all of the court actions being taken against Apple and Google (48 states after Google), nobody seems intent on solving more than a few problems that aren’t going to solve the big picture. Just like Microsoft emerged relatively unscathed.
Until someone does something about these Tracker Libraries in Android apps (and good luck with that), the only thing we can do is lean hard on the F-Droid store for alternative apps, and use apps like TrackerControl to defuse the server connections that they attempt to make.
TrackerControl allows users to monitor and control the widespread, ongoing, hidden data collection in mobile apps about user behaviour (‘tracking’).
To detect tracking, TrackerControl combines the power of the Disconnect blocklist, used by Firefox, and our in-house blocklist is used, created from analysing ~2 000 000 apps! Additionally, TrackerControl supports custom blocklists.
This approach – reveals the companies behind tracking, – allows to block tracking selectively, and – exposes the purposes of tracking, such as analytics or advertising.
The application also educates the user about their rights under the EU GDPR and helps them send form letters. Unfortunately, as I’m based in the United States, I was unable to try this out.
After installing the app, it sets itself up as a “pseudo-VPN”, to enable filtering app requests to the internet. This is necessary so that the user doesn’t have to “root” their Android phone in order to allow the filtering process to work.
Once installed, the application defaults to what it considers a relatively safe setting to attempt to block trackers, without bricking apps. While this often works out fine, some apps just appear to break with no obvious explanation, but opening TrackerControl allows you to see what it attempted to do. And in many cases, just enabling access to one server that it should obviously be able to get to fixes the app, while allowing it to block everything else.
In some cases, apps really shouldn’t need to access the internet at all. Android gives users no control over this, for obvious reasons, but TrackerControl does. To disable an app’s access to the internet entirely, one can simply click the app’s icon in TrackerControl and it will gray out and the app will report that it blocked all internet access for that app. Or, you can go into the detailed settings and simply set the slider to revoke internet access for that app.
For example, my Samsung Galaxy S20 FE has a lot of annoying Microsoft crap that you cannot remove. Including an app called “SmartThings” that I’ve never even opened, which sends data about me back to Microsoft anyway. Well, that’s dumb. With TrackerControl, I can just disable internet access to these sorts of things entirely and plug the leaks. Cool!
In other cases, TrackerControl is a real eye opener. One of the restaurants I like to eat at, Cracker Barrel, suggests that if the line is too long, you can install their app to pay for your meal, or order to go. I opened the app after installing TrackerControl to see what it would do, and just by opening it, it tried to contact Facebook, SalesForce, KRXD (a fingerprinter), Microsoft and Google trackers, and Crashlytics.
The app works, even if you block all of these, but I didn’t even consider until now….that they have a website that lets you place orders. It won’t let you pay a bill, but do you really need all of these companies to know when you open an app?
I believe that using TrackerControl will get me to start thinking about privacy with regards to apps more, because even a restaurant app now 13 tracker libraries that try to connect to 6 companies just by opening it.
I also found old apps on my phone that I installed in order to get a coupon or something, that are still apparently opening themselves to send reports somewhere. Yuck.
For apps you want to keep, TrackerControl can partially muzzle the trackers and block ads and the app will still do the things you want it to do.
It’s depressing that such an application should be necessary, but that’s the state of the “smart phone”.
As a final note, you should really be using a web browser with an ad blocker available, and relying on TrackerControl to protect you outside the browser. Leave Google Chrome unopened. It’s an unbelievably bad browser designed to make it impossible to control your privacy. I suggest ublock-origin in Fennec. More in a future review.
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