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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • x230 with x220 keyboard also is pretty nice - but unfortunately no longer suitable as main notebook. As nothing useful came out of lenovo after that, others are even worse, nobody has a decent trackpoint and sensible amount of RAM only exist for macs I ended up with one of those for work few months ago.


  • Pretty much same here - I kept an x230 alive until I had to accept earlier this year that it just is bad for overall productivity, and ended up getting a macbook. None of the newer thinkpads are good - and they’re still one of the less bad manufacturers.

    There’s also enough stuff I don’t like about the mac - but the current keyboard is one of the better notebook keyboards available right now, and if you want long battery life, lots of RAM and a lot of CPU power available in a compact device they’re the only manufacturer currently offering that.


  • I’m not super familiar with MacOS, but do you know if Gatekeeper or XProtect run at ring 0?

    Gatekeeper does mainly signature checking. XProtect does signature checking on an applications first launch. Both of those things would be pretty stupid to implement in ring 0, so I’m pretty sure they are not.

    If they do run at ring 0, would you consider that anticompetitive?

    No, as they’re not doing any active monitoring. They’re pretty much the “you downloaded this file from the internet, do you really want to run it?” of MacOS.

    I’m almost certain Apple will move or did move to depreciate kernel extensions. Which means it would be the same situation Microsoft wanted to force as you described.

    That is indeed the case, but I’m not aware of any Apple products relying on being a kernel extension. Apple is facing action from the EU for locking down devices from device owners, though - mainly applying to phones/tablets. On Macs you can turn pretty much everything off and do whatever you want.

    The other argument with Defender is you could at least have a choice to use it or not.

    Without providing a proper API Defender (both the free one, and the paid one offering more features) would be able to provide more features than 3rd parties. Microsoft also wouldn’t have an incentive to fix the APIs, as bugs don’t impact them.

    The correct way forward here is introducing an API, and moving Defender to it as well - and recent comments from Microsoft point in that direction. If they don’t they’ll probably be forced by the EU in the long run - back then it was just a decision on fair competition, without looking at the technical details: Typically those rulings are just “look, you need to give everybody the same access you have, but we’ll leave it up to you how to do it”. Now we have a lot of damage, so now another department will get active and say “you’ve proven that you can’t make the correct technical decision, so we’ll make it for you”.

    A recent precedent for that would be the USB-C charger cable mandate - originally this was “guys, agree on something, we don’t care what”, which mostly worked - we first had pretty much everything micro USB, and then everything USB-C. But as Apple refused the EU went “look, you had a decade to sort it out, so now we’re just telling you that you have to use USB-C”




  • It should work - possible that it won’t let you create a one disk raid 0, but creating a one disk raid 1 and then converting it to a two disk raid 0 should word. It’s been years since I played with a pure raid 0 (don’t see much sense in them), but managed conversion back then.


  • If your install is using LVM (which anything installed over a bit more than a decade should be) you can set up the new second drive as a RAID with a missing device, add it as additional PV, use pvmove to move all PEs to the RAID, remove the old PV, and now add that disk to the RAID.



  • AMD keeps some older generations in production as their budget options - and as they had excellent CPUs for multiple generations now you also get pretty good computers out of that. Even better - with some planning you’ll be able to upgrade to another CPU later when checking chipset lifecycle.

    AMD has established by now that they deliver what they promise - and intel couldn’t compete with them for a few generations over pretty much the complete product line - so they can afford now to have the bleeding edge hardware at higher prices. It’s still far away from what intel was charging when they were dominant 10 years ago - and if you need that performance for work well worth the money. For most private systems I’d always recommend getting last gen, though.


  • aard@kyu.detoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldQuick overview
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    3 months ago

    Just read her wikipedia page - as I’m not from the US I’ve been mostly treating US politics as a bad comedy show for the last two decades or so, and even though she’s vice president she was too much of a side character to register.

    The one thing that did rech me over there was that she’s a bad candidate as VP as she’ll erect a police state when biden dies. After reading her bio I can’t find problems there, though. I disagree with some details - like seeking life imprisonment - but can give her a pass due to the environment she’s operating in which probably wouldn’t allow anything else (if you’re confused: all convicts should undergo rehabilitation attempts with goal of release. If you stay locked up it’ll be due to you still posing a danger to society, in which case you still get more privileges than a prisoner as at that stage it is considered a mental health issue, and treating you as prisoner for that would be a human rights violation).

    For sticking to not seeking death penalty she deserves respect, though, and generally she seemed to be focused on putting actual criminals to prison.


  • This doesn’t have anything to do with user control - modern windows versions need drivers to be WHQL signed to get that kind of access. Alternatively you’ll need to enable developer mode on your system, and install your own developer certificate into its keyring for running own code, which has its own drawbacks.

    Crowdstrike is implemented as a device driver - but as there is no device Microsoft could’ve argued that this is abusing the APIs, and refused the WHQL certification. Microsofts own security solution (Defender) also is implemented as a device driver, though, and that’s what the EU ruling is about: Microsoft needs to provide the same access they’re using in their own products to competitors. Which is a good thing - but if Microsoft didn’t have Defender, or they’d have done it without that type of access it’d have been fully legal for them to deny the certification for Crowdstrike.

    Both MacOS and Linux have the ability to run the type of thing that requires those privileges on Windows in an unprivileged process - and on newer Linux versions Crowdstrike is using that (older versions got broken by them the same way they now broke Windows). So Microsoft now trying to blame the EU can be seen as an attempt to keep people from questioning why Microsoft didn’t implement a low privilege API as well, which would’ve prevented this whole mess.