Sarcasm: 9/10 for effort

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The valid answer is that the Chinese police state has no authority over individuals in the West and is unlikely to share information with Western law enforcement given the geopolitical situation. In narrow terms, that makes for an inadvertent privacy win for individuals in the West.

But the problem you describe is certainly real (whatever other seem to think here) for countries in China’s sphere of influence, in Asia, Africa, Latin America. For them, China is already selling off-the-peg solutions for mass surveillance. If your country’s homegrown dictator gets his hands on this stuff, it’s going to be harder than ever to get rid of him.

For us the problem is rather that China is pioneering and normalizing practices that will certainly be adopted and copied one day by our own police forces with our own technology.

An individual has no privacy to protect if the laws are wrong, and laws cannot be changed by individuals.

But surely the average Zuckerbook user is not so dumb as to miss what this graphic is describing - a crazy utopia where they could talk to people on TikTok and Xitter as well as Zuckerbook?

The government does not “own” Meta. Words have meanings.

And then some of them learn that downvoting is obnoxious and toxic, while others never grow out of infancy.

Possibly it’s about personality types. I was only going on my own experience. Of always being told by a chorus of experts “Oh no you don’t want to do that!” and ending up being terrified to touch anything. When I now know that I usually had nothing to be afraid of, because dangerous things tend to be locked down by design, exactly as they should be.

it depends how secure you want your network to be. Personally I think UFW is easy so you may as well set it up

IMO this attitude is problematic. It encourages people (especially newbies) to think they can’t trust anything, that software is by nature unreliable. I was one of those people once.

Personally, now I understand better how these things work, there’s no way I’m wasting my time putting up multiple firewalls. The router already has a firewall. Next.

PS: Sure, people don’t like this take - you can never have enough security, right? But take account of who you’re talking to - OP didn’t understand that their server is not even on the public internet. That fact makes all the difference here.

This is a just a style thing, EN-GB vs EN-US.

I assure you I am not a robot

No but definitely an American.

The opposite is also dangerous, i.e. believing reflexively in heterodoxies and conspiracy theories. But your point stands.

Immutable distros like NixOS don’t stop you from tweaking stuff, they just record every tweak centrally, so that you can undo them and do rollbacks.

Others can confirm that I’ve got that right. Haven’t tried it but the idea sounds great.

I would like to have a system when I know what I did, what is opened/installed/activated and what is not

Story of my life after 20 years on Linux. Maybe we could call it “modification anxiety”.

I believe this is the case for an immutable OS.

Ha, good analogy.

This sounds like an elaborate way of saying you want to blog.

Or, as the kids call it these days, “to post on my Substack”. The two things being identical except that the latter sounds cooler and allows them to indulge their corporate Stockholm syndrome.

This map shows how this issue is mainly just a symbolic West-vs-Rest struggle by proxy. Nobody much cares about the actual parties involved.

Very interesting perspective! And yes, I keep all my data locally, literally all of it, and the only bits of it that go on my VPS or - worse! - mobile device are either encrypted or not private. So your theory is right on the mark.

Worth remembering that the benefits of open source are less critical with server-side software compared to when it’s your own personal computer. Personally, if it’s SAAS then I’m not much bothered what they’re running it on. Not to invalidate your general point.

Contravenes rule #3. Moderation please.

PS. And rule #1 and IMO even rule #4 because it’s a pretty boring observation.