Hacker News: morganvachon

New comment by morganvachon in "Tiny Core Linux 13.0 is a full Linux desktop in 22 MB"

morganvachon — Mon, 04 Jul 2022 22:46:23 +0000

As mentioned above that's apparently a parody account that fooled me. His real Twitter shows he's still the raging bigot he always was.

New comment by morganvachon in "Tiny Core Linux 13.0 is a full Linux desktop in 22 MB"

morganvachon — Mon, 04 Jul 2022 19:42:27 +0000

I've seen that and I believe he felt he had to do so to maintain his readership after being called out for his bigotry so often of late. I for one don't believe he's changed at all, but I don't personally know the guy so I can't say for sure he hasn't. Anyway, I'll still refuse to read his articles just to be sure I'm not supporting a bigot with page views.

New comment by morganvachon in "Tiny Core Linux 13.0 is a full Linux desktop in 22 MB"

morganvachon — Mon, 04 Jul 2022 19:40:23 +0000

It's not, but people should be aware of where they get their news sources.

New comment by morganvachon in "Tiny Core Linux 13.0 is a full Linux desktop in 22 MB"

morganvachon — Mon, 04 Jul 2022 19:35:58 +0000

I'm honestly surprised that someone on Ladyada's staff would link to an article by the highly transphobic and racist Bryan Lunduke. As recently as March of this year he was deliberately deadnaming and misgendering a prominent ElementaryOS developer.

https://www.osnews.com/story/134655/elementary-os-is-implodi...

New comment by morganvachon in "Brave’s use of direct mailers"

morganvachon — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 09:51:44 +0000

This is disingenuous at best. The browser itself is open source but show me the source for your data collection servers and crypto scheme servers. What's that? It's not open source? Imagine that!

New comment by morganvachon in "Brave’s use of direct mailers"

morganvachon — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 14:51:14 +0000

I appreciate the attempt to explain your company's bad behavior, but I'm not convinced. And to be fair, you're not alone in making mistakes in the arena of privacy and security; all the major browsers have privacy-averse settings and "anti-features". The difference with your company is that you falsely advertise yourself as the one true private browser, while simultaneously profiting from your users' personal data. It's a lie, it's a scam, and it's morally reprehensible. You only fixed the issues I brought up after being caught and publicly shamed over them; if you hadn't been caught out you'd likely still be doing those things today. Shame on you.

New comment by morganvachon in "Brave’s use of direct mailers"

morganvachon — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 21:49:06 +0000

> or a privacy-focused company is snooping on your devices to steal your personal info (so they can send you mailers?)

I never said that. I don't want Brave on my devices due to their past bad behavior: lying, stealing money from creators in their affiliate program, redirecting legitimate links to shady crypto sites, running a crypto pyramid scheme, and so on. This is just the latest in a long list of reasons not to use their software.

New comment by morganvachon in "Brave’s use of direct mailers"

morganvachon — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 19:21:40 +0000

Here's the fun thing: I have opted out of blind mailers from the USPS, yet I got one of these Brave mailers last week with my name on it (I'm in the Atlanta area). Just one more reason of many for me to never, ever let Brave near any of my devices.

New comment by morganvachon in "Firefly III: A free and open-source finance manager"

morganvachon — Mon, 30 May 2022 23:31:39 +0000

I guess I'm really old school but I just have a spreadsheet for my budgeting, with formulas and charts I've written and maintained over the last 25 years. It's gone from old Microsoft formats (xls/xlsx) to ODS, to Gnumeric, back to ODS, and now I use Apple's Numbers since I have a Mac and an iPhone, and iCloud web works on pretty much any device with a browser I might have in front of me. If I do ever feel like ditching my Mac and going back to an open source OS, I can just export it to ODS again and all my formulas and tools transfer over (I don't use anything proprietary from Numbers, though color fills don't always match right up).

I am salaried with weekly payout, and so I have a weekly chart for where my money goes on payday (bills/loans/cards/savings), an amortization schedule for each account that allows me to see how extra payments will affect the payoff and interest, and a brainstorming sheet for planning future large purchases (cars, maybe a bigger house one day). I can do pretty much anything with this that I could with Firefly III or a paid solution, but (for me at least) this is less hassle and my data stays between me and Apple's iCloud server; I trust them enough with that basic data to not bother with maintaining and securing a VPS just to balance my budget.

New comment by morganvachon in "Ultra compact GAN ATX power supply delivers up to 250 Watts"

morganvachon — Fri, 27 May 2022 14:26:04 +0000

The difference is that this unit does the AC-DC conversion inside itself, whereas your DC-DC power supply relies on an external AC-DC brick that is likely the same size as this entire self contained unit, if not larger.

New comment by morganvachon in "The new and upgraded Framework Laptop"

morganvachon — Thu, 19 May 2022 22:12:22 +0000

Except the M1 Air and 13 inch M1 Pro reverted to left side only (the new models with M1 Pro/Max chips have an extra USB-C on the opposite side). It's my only real gripe with the M1 laptops compared to older Intel Macs.

Of course, the Framework is the polar opposite of the M1 Macs' locked down "appliance" feel. I'm enjoying the progress being made with OpenBSD and Asahi Linux on the M1 platform, but the hardware itself remains impossible to upgrade or repair for mere mortals. The Framework is the pinnacle of truly owning your laptop while not sacrificing speed and a crowd pleasing design.

New comment by morganvachon in "Oauth2 support for GMail"

morganvachon — Wed, 18 May 2022 18:41:30 +0000

I'm not saying you shouldn't give up Google services; I did. I'm just saying the unfortunate reality is that you'll never fully escape them.

New comment by morganvachon in "Oauth2 support for GMail"

morganvachon — Wed, 18 May 2022 11:58:53 +0000

I agree wholeheartedly in principle, but the reality is that it's nearly impossible to escape Google getting their hands on yours and your correspondents' messages at some point. So many businesses (and third party email providers!) use Google's services on the back end, and many relays out there are owned by Google/Alphabet even if it's not readily apparent, that the only way to even attempt to avoid them is using encrypted email. Unless everyone you communicate with (including companies, governments, and other organizations) is willing to only communicate via encrypted email as well, it's a lost cause.

New comment by morganvachon in "Payment startup Bolt sued by its most prominent customer"

morganvachon — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 15:49:36 +0000

Thanks for the info. I wonder if, now or at some point in the past, Klarna had mandatory customer DOB as opt-out rather than opt-in for a default card processing setup on the merchant facing side, and many small businesses in my experience either don't have IT staff or it's their cousin's wife's uncle doing IT for them on the cheap, and they just don't see it or understand its significance.

I know there were dozens of switches to flip when we switched to a new storefront and shopping cart vendor a few years ago, and I missed a few initially despite my experience with setting those up in the past. That's what sandboxing is designed to catch, but I can picture PHBs in every industry saying "damn the testing, full speed ahead!" with no thought for consequences.

New comment by morganvachon in "Payment startup Bolt sued by its most prominent customer"

morganvachon — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 11:47:34 +0000

Or, as with anything else privacy related, outside of intellectual bubbles like HN the vast majority of people don't think twice about giving up unnecessary PII to a payment processor because they naively think the entity won't sell or leak their information. Even those who see conspiracies around every corner somehow constantly fall victim to identity theft due to negligence, and divulge way too much information for their own privacy and safety every day.

A movie quote springs to mind: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."

New comment by morganvachon in "Fedora considers deprecating legacy BIOS"

morganvachon — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 11:57:33 +0000

This is fine for you and your use case, but some of us (as pointed out in the article) are forced to stay with BIOS either due to owning legacy hardware that is still fully functional and even necessary, or because we use VMs and/or hosted services that require BIOS and don't support UEFI, or both. I'm one of those; I use a few legacy machines locally and I have VPS instances hosted with Vultr.

Granted, I don't use Fedora so this doesn't directly affect me yet, but the Linux community has a history of too-early adoption of ideas started at Fedora (systemd, pulseaudio) that take years to reach production-ready status, if ever. At some point those of us who still use legacy hardware at home/work will be forced to either throw out perfectly good machines, or switch to a holdout distro like Slackware or Void (not that there's anything wrong with either of those) and lose valuable time moving our workflow. We'll also be at the mercy of our hosting providers as they decide whether to overhaul their entire hosting backend, or else drop Fedora and any other distro that follows their lead.

I get that UEFI is the future of bootstrapping, but it's too early to pull the plug on BIOS.

New comment by morganvachon in "Are you the asshole? – AI powered answer bot"

morganvachon — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 20:26:20 +0000

It seems that way. I did a very simple one: "A car ran a stop sign in front of me and I flipped them the bird."

I got one NTA: "They shouldn't have run the stop sign!", and one YTA: "You shouldn't flip someone the bird just because they flipped you off, you should pull alongside them, assess the situation, and apologize if necessary."

New comment by morganvachon in "Cytopia: Open-source city simulator with pixel-art graphics"

morganvachon — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 13:30:27 +0000

Slightly off-topic (sorry!) but have you considered testing/porting to the BSDs, especially since you have a macOS port? I'm particularly interested in an OpenBSD port. I may try cloning the repo and building it myself; SDL2 and CMake are available on that platform.

New comment by morganvachon in "Assume your devices are compromised"

morganvachon — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 11:47:07 +0000

SecureBoot was as much an attempt by Microsoft to put in place a method to lock out other OSes as it was for local physical security. Most consumer desktop and laptop computer users don't password protect their BIOS/EFI, so an attacker with physical access can simply turn off SecureBoot themselves and then boot whatever toolkit they want to take over the system.

New comment by morganvachon in "Assume your devices are compromised"

morganvachon — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 11:41:07 +0000

And for those of us who aren't wealthy enough to have two different attorneys on retainer, giving your spouse the encrypted password store along with the key to a safety deposit box containing the decryption key would have to do.

Personally, my wife would wonder why I'm going to so much trouble to keep my passwords secret from her until I die; but then my personal password store is for services we share like banking, and any passwords she doesn't know are benign things like my email addresses and various website logins that wouldn't matter anyway when I die. Of course I also have my work passwords (I'm the IT manager), but my supervisor and the company owner each have a secured store of all of my work passwords as well, plus the master password to access them, in the event something happens to me (or I'm just on vacation for a week and temporarily unreachable when access is needed).