“I’m sorry too, Dmitri. I’m very sorry. All right, you’re sorrier than I am. But I am sorry as well. I am as sorry as you are, Dmitri. Don’t say that you’re the more sorry than I am because I am capable of being just as sorry as you are. So we’re both sorry, all right? All right.”

I’m a fan of blocking all sources, and then just unblocking every so often to install updates.

Delightful update. Thanks!

I don’t follow either closely enough to make a rank list or anything.

In the same ballpark as some moments that Torvalds has apologized for. Milder than Torvald’s worst, but also unrepentant, as far as I’ve seen.

its lead dev is a bit socially awkward

Heh. You’re being gentle, and that’s good. But that’s maybe understating it a bit.

I’ve seen the GrapheneOS official Mastodon account being an antisocial uncollegial mess.

It’s okay to acknowledge that we wish some of our open source contributors were better community members.

Yeah. I’ve been trying to get the word out.

I’ve been screwing with Linux for decades, but somewhere along the line, Linux got easier and more reliable than Windows. I was as surprised as anyone. My last couple Linux installs were a cake walk.

I also like Linux more than Mac, but I’m a tinkerer at heart, and Mac’s (relative) lack of fiddly bits (customization options) has kept me from staying on it long.

Even if you never run software that can benefit from it, you may get benefits indirectly, such as, if someone uses a quantum computer to help improve medicine and you later need that medicine.

Agreed absolutely.

They hard part to predict is whether there will ever be a quantum home device, since current home devices are already ludicrously powerfulv for typical uses. Maybe if we ever unlock true general purpose AI, some of that’ll need to run at home.

That was pretty interesting. I was expecting cost/benefit on adopting quantum computing, which I suspect isn’t going to be terribly useful to the everyday person soon. But it was refreshingly targeted on the Cybersecurity impacts, which are valid for the everyday person, already.

TL;DR - Quantum computing is great, if you’re the bad guy. For the rest of us, there’s a cost/value tradeoff in defending against quantum computing threats. People will tell us it’s too much hassle to upgrade our encryption, but it can be done with reasonable effort.

Good recommendation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb also has a bunch of useful writing on taking risks that applies very well to financial choices like investments and career choice.

Or am I reading this wrong and this is just because they have to send your data to the brokers to process deletions?

You are reading it correctly.

If they only used your data to process deletions, it would read along the lines of “data shared with partners as necessary to provide (data deletion, etc) services.”

It should also normally be followed by a sentence that links to each partners privacy policies, and says that each partner complies with similar restrictions on using your data only for the same purposes listed in the earlier sentence.

It’s the vape pen of the soda world!

They have my permission to use this, heh.

Yeah. Their own lawyers have the best chance, but there’s so many pages, combined, I wonder if even one of their lawyers has read everything

Great write up. Thanks for sharing it here.

Exactly. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that Google’s clever privacy engineering isn’t enough to keep any of us safe.

Google’s expectation that we be okay with these practices feels like corporate gaslighting, to me.

To the best of my knowledge - from a spirited but doomed attempt to read Google’s privacy policies - Google is committed to deleting your location history after sharing it with 10,000 or so vendor partners.

Each of those vendor partners have pinky promised to comply with the rules outlined in the same privacy policy that I failed to read.

For context, I’m not convinced any living person has read the entirety of Google’s privacy policies.

Sadly, I’m quite confident - by the law of averages, human nature, and corporate corruption - that not all 10,000 trusted partners also deletes our location data history.

Google does take privacy preserving steps to anonymyze what it shares.

My educated opinion is that no amount of attempted anonymozation is sufficient for the breadth, scope and quantity of data that Google collects.

Shorter answer for you: yes, I believe that is a corporate lie. True only in technicality, but likely false by any reasonable persons expectation of what “delete” means.

Ooh, great point!

Simon Tatham’s Puzzles contains many classic puzzle games and many more that are destined to be future classics.

Pixel Dungeon a rogue-like that is very like Rogue.

Luanti a game engine that runs an Open Source massively moddable Minecraft clone, among other games.

TL;DR - Google makes (arguably insane) claim that it previously acted responsibly with regards to fingerprinting, and says they will begin acting irresponsibility with fingerprinting in February.

Practical take-aways you probably already knew:

• Today’s Google may do or say anything to make an extra nickel.
• Today’s Google, while it employs some excellent privacy minded engineers, has not demonstrated an organizational commitment to user privacy.
• It is probably wise to assume that the next serious data breach at Google will end marriages, get politicians arrested, get famous people canceled, fuel successful scammers, and have every other privacy impact you can imagine. We know the Google data pool is massive, and we have reason to believe it is incredibly personal. I’m aware that Google has anonymozation solutions in play, and I do not believe those solutions will be effective in a breach scenario.
• I believe that the average person will likely be better off ten years from now if they interact less with Google services.