this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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Just use Firefox
And an alternate email service like ProtonMail.
They also have ProtonDrive as an alternative to Google Drive. Apple's iCloud is also end-to-end encrypted now. pCloud is another popular option. There are a number of choices for secure cloud storage these days.
Web search is a bit more difficult. DuckDuckGo is heavily integrated with Bing. Brave Search is hit-or-miss. Yahoo is just a front-end for Bing.
If you need live document collaboration, you're probably already in a setting where either Sharepoint or GSuite are mandated. If you're not, BitAI may be worth looking into.
๐ค Who runs ProtonMail?
Swiss technology company that focuses on privacy products. Initially funded by a Swiss startup capital firm and now uses a subscription model. ProtonMail is not open source or non-profit, but the product they offer is privacy. Switzerland also has strict privacy laws and resists state-based information requests. Best option is to run one's own email client server, but simple folks like me don't have the skills to do so. (FWIW, I use ProtonMail and think it works great.)
All great advice, but I personally cannot urge people towards pCloud. I have one of the permanent tiers, but I found the service frustratingly buggy and, when contacted, support was rude and unhelpful. There are so many little odd limitations on the pCloud file system it was frustrating. I also worry that their buy-once business model is not sustainable.
Sync.com provides an even more secure service (zero-knowledge across the board) with similar (better than US anyway) privacy protections in the host country (Canada) that has been, so far for 2 years of use, rock solid (I couldn't go a week without pCloud farting out some error). The subscription model is affordable and generous and the customer-facing pages for sharing files are very professional looking (important to me, because I professionally share files and pCloud looked like a hobbyist page in this regard AND leaked private information).
EDIT: Regarding iCloud. Not only is iCloud end-to-end, but you may turn on zero-knowledge encryption now, as well (Advanced Data Protection I think is what they call it) so that Apple doesn't even have the keys to decrypt your data, making it quite similar to sync.com now.
Kagi is also really nice. But it's not free..
I am confused by why everyone thinks this is a big threat?
What stops the FOSS community from just continuing to allow ad blockers and other webpage editing features?
DRM is already applied for certain content in websites such as Netflix, etc, and it makes it waaaay harder to bypass.
For example, Netflix (and the others) use DRM to block Linux computers from higher quality content. Why? I guess "hackers" and "think of the children". Truth is... content is already pirated from the second it gets released on any of these platforms... so they are not really fixing anything... I guess they really want you to use a tracking OS.
Imagine this kind of system but for an entire website. Big companies imposing their devices and software as the only way to access a website... which is really just HTML and Javascript files, entirely platform agnostic... but who cares? They are struggling for money so they are squeezing every little possibility.
Another example is Microsoft's Bing AI, which will only work in Edge. I tried it in Firefox and just changing the user agent header made it fully functional, thus showing that it was deliberately nerfed for other browsers. It wouldn't be too hard to convince people to use an extension to spoof chrome to access non-functional web sites, though in practice any site that accepts Google's DRM is dead to me.
Obligatory fuck Google and Microsoft. I wish I were smart enough to switch to Linux.
You don't need to "be smart" to switch to Linux. Linux for the most part 'just works' these days of you choose the 'right' distro.
Agreed but you do need to be willing to tinker a bit. Even ubuntu required a lot of tinkering to get working on my system. I'm all for getting people to switch, and it's much easier than it was 15 years ago when I started, but for most people they're not going to just install linux. We definitely are in the <1% of users.
You need to mention that NVIDIA GPU is the problem for Linux usage, and even then, just install Nobara (made by Steam's Proton creator) or Garuda which takes care of everything related to NVIDIA GPU better than Ubuntu/Debian non-free firmware would. There is NO issue with Intel/AMD CPU and AMD GPU machines with installing any mainstream Linux distribution. No tinkering needed.
Do you know which is a good starter version?
I'm really tired of Windows and Microsoft's intrusive bullshit. I'll probably keep Windows 10 on my current PC, but I really think it's time to move on whenever I'm ready for a new rig in the future.
I think there's even a way to run it along with Windows, isn't it? Like you can boot into it instead of Windows? Just thinking I could start learning how to use it.
https://lemmy.ml/post/511377?scrollToComments=true
Thank me later ;)
If the web is DRM'd in a way that requires chrome or windows then it could be difficult to bypass.
I remember the days of, "sorry, you must use Internet Explorer to use this website" when visiting my bank.
I remember that government sites were the same way it was frustrating.
It's a big threat because once it's easy to block unapproved browsers, lots of people will do it. Yeah, there will always be a few weirdos like us that don't enable it, but just imagine when it's your bank, your insurance company, your government, and most every linked-to page on Lemmy. You'll be forced to use Chrome to interact with large parts of the internet then.
Shout-out to Librewolf as well (basically Firefox with better privacy focused configs).
People don't care enough about using browsers that reduce Google's influence on web standards (i.e. non chrome-based browsers)