MudMan

You keep mixing up concepts, though.

Yes, MS embeds OneDrive into its OS in annoying ways. OneDrive sucks and that sucks.

But that’s not a security issue when you work with a company that uses Windows to handle your sensitive data. If the company you’re working with is using a default Windows image that accidentally stores your sensitive, legally protected records in a default OneDrive that’s not a Windows issue, that’s an issue with giving your medical records to what seems to be an IT department run by somebody’s cousin who knows computers. If they aren’t savvy enough to avoid that issue they’re not savvy enough to keep your data secure in a Linux system either. And, once again, there is definitely no indication that OneDrive is systematically not secure or that data stored in it is being manipulated or accessed by Microsoft for commercial purposes. I mean, it’s widely used professionally, so I imagine if that was the case Microsoft would get sued to hell and back.

Does that mean I like Microsoft’s choice? Nope. I loathe OneDrive. As I kept telling MS in their annoying user surveys when I was forced to use it for work, it is the one piece of software that cost me the most hours of productivity, bar none, and I dropped it like a rock the moment I didn’t have a contractual obligation to use it.

But holy crap, that absolutely isn’t a valid reason why it’d be a security OR privacy problem that a vendor you use is running Windows.

And that’s the thing, you don’t need to equivocate, make up stuff or jumble concepts like this to point out the ways in which Windows’ implementation of things is sub-par. There are plenty of legitimate examples. Granted, may of those examples are definitely not dealbreakers and plenty of Windows users are aware of them and don’t particularly mind. Just like many MacOS users or Linux users don’t mind their own quirks. But the quirks and shortcomings do exist. You don’t need to make them up or be hyperbolic about them.

This just makes you sound paranoid and kind of unreasonable. It makes it easier to dismiss the legitimate arguments because man, a lot of that is clearly not a reasonable argument, so why would you assume some of it is?

Not a pop culture thing, it just sounds… self deprecating, I suppose.

Like, was that his legal name? Because man, that’s ballsy.

Anyway, I mostly agree with you, I am more at home here than on all the microblog platforms. I do feel Bsky does a better job at being that than Masto. Masto is insular and man, I hate to say it, but the way its firehose “Home” feed works convinced me that you need at least some options to handle post sorting beyond raw chronological. I don’t hate it, but if I wanted a social network entirely predicated on arguing about Twitter I’d be on Twitter (and for people in denial about the popularity of their open source alternative we have the Linux forums here, so I’m good there, too).

Holy crap, that was a hard pivot. Is your neck OK?

I mean, Bluesky is a private company, it seems to be incorporated in Delaware as a PBC and they claim it is owned by members of Bluesky itself. It’s unclear if that means Dorsey divested from it when he left the board or not, and since they’re not a public company they don’t have an obligation to say. You know as much about Bluesky as you do about Valve or Ikea.

I don’t actively support them or root for them, but it’s not a particularly huge mystery, and my paticipation on it doesn’t imply my moral support to their board members (who are public and known) or their investors.

You can bridge them together and call it a day. Otherwise, presumably because a bunch of the interesting people who left Twitter are there and not on Masto.

I mean, don’t ask questions you don’t want to hear the answers to, I suppose.

Well, for one, I have no information regarding MS keeping mandatory telemetry of Windows application usage or data (at least outside their own software suite). As far as I know what is there is opt-in and does not extend to keeping any copies of your computer data, which is the point where you’d be worried about something like your medical records. One of the reasons the Recall nonsense drew so much attention is that it was an unusual instance of something approximating that.

But the other side of your argument is a bit confusing, because it seems to be coming from the angle of… proselytism, I suppose? As in, what is more useful to convince somebody who doesn’t care about the privacy side that they should avoid Windows.

And to be clear, that’s not my goal, or at least not a goal I think is worthwhile in absolute or abstract terms, for its own sake. I’m not an OS activist, use whatever the hell you want and works for you. The closest I have is a distaste for Apple’s pricing and ecosystem-focused tactics but, man, that 600 bucks M4 Mac Mini is nice value, I’ll think about it.

On the merits of the argument, I’m not sure it tracks, either. If someone attacks a legitimate holder of your data the part I care about is how secure their data storage is (because, again, nobody is sharing your medical records over Microsoft telemetry gathering, that’s not a real thing).

I trust a third party’s security setup as far as I can throw it, I don’t care if it’s on Azure, Google, Amazon or a self-hosted Linux server. Hell, I may trust the self-hosted Linux server of a provider least of all of those. Not because of Linux, but because of the self-hosting.

I think there’s some confusion at play here. That argument is about security, not privacy.

Is the concern that Microsoft is ingesting your data and thus your actions aren’t private? Or is it that Windows is not secure and so you don’t think data stored in Windows systems is safe from third party access? That distinction matters, because in both cases the way it’s framed here isn’t really accurate but for different reasons.