update-manager --no-focus-on-map ??

[Liam Proven]

On 7 January 2016 at 01:22, rikona <rikona at sonic.net> wrote:
> The folks who have more private Chromium-based browsers ALL say they
> needed to remove things from Chromium to avoid some Google call-homes,
> and other privacy issues. And, in June it was discovered that Chrome
> silently downloads software to permanently listen in to everything in
> the room and send it back to Google.


http://www.zdnet.com/article/revealed-the-crucial-detail-that-windows-10-privacy-critics-are-missing/?tag=nl.e539&s_cid=e539&ttag=e539&ftag=TRE17cfd61

You want better software? You want things that are more reliable, more
helpful, more informative?

Yes?

Then stop complaining and get on with life.

No? You want something secure, private, that you can trust, that you
know will not report anything to anyone?

Then go flash some open-source firmware onto an old Thinkpad and run
OpenBSD on it.

There are ways of doing this, but they are hard, they are a *lot* more
work, and you will have a significantly degraded experience with a lot
of very handy facilities lost.

That is the price of privacy.

And, listen, I am sorry if this is not what you want to hear, but if
you are not technically literate enough to notice that you're running
a browser that has been out of date for 3 years, then I think that you
are not currently capable of running a really secure environment. I am
not being gratuitously rude here! I am merely pointing out facts that
others will be too nervous to do.

You cannot run a mass-market OS like Windows 10, Mac OS X or Ubuntu
with Unity *and* have a totally secure private computer.

You can't. End of. It's over. These are not privacy-oriented platforms.

They do exist. Look at OpenBSD. Look at Qubes OS.

But they are *hard work* and need immense technical skill -- more than
I have, for instance, after doing this stuff for a living for nearly
30y. And even then, you get a much poorer experience, like a faster
1980s computer or something.

As it is, after being on my CIX address for 25 years and my Gmail
address for 12, all my email goes through Gmail now -- the old
address, the Hotmail and Yahoo spamtraps, all of them. I get all my
email, contacts and diary, all in one place, on my Mac and on both my
Linux laptops and on both my Android and Blackberry smartphones. It's
wonderful. Convenient, friendly, powerful, free, cross-platform and
based on FOSS and compatible with FOSS tools.

But it means I must trust Google to store everything.

I am willing to pay that price, for such powerful tools for no money.

I am a trained Microsoft Exchange admin. I could do similar with
Office 365, but I've used it, and it's less cross-platform, it's less
reliable, it's slower, the native client tools are vastly inferior and
it costs money.

Nothing much else could do this unless I hosted my own, which I am
technically competent to do but would involve a huge amount of work,
spending money *and* still trusting my hosting provider.

You have a simple choice. Power and convenience and ease, or, learning
a lot more tech skills and privacy but also inconvenience, loss of
flexibility and capability and simplicity.

You run a closed-source commercial browser on what Ralf correctly
points out is the least-private Linux distro that there is.

You have *already made the choice*.

So please, stop complaining about it. You chose. You are free to
change your mind, but if you do, off to OpenBSD you go. Better start
learning shell script and building from source.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)