Look up the paradox of tolerance.

if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance, thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945),[1] where he argued that a truly tolerant society must retain the right to deny tolerance to those who promote intolerance. Popper posited that if intolerant ideologies are allowed unchecked expression, they could exploit open society values to erode or destroy tolerance itself through authoritarian or oppressive practices

That is exactly what tolerating Nazi ideology within a society leads to. If you allow objectively harmful ideology on the grounds of balance or fairness, they are allowed to continue and eventually take over.

Even if you’re a 100% centrist, you should never allow anyone to undermine or remove basic constititional or human rights. Yet that is exactly what Nazis do. Tolerating them means tolerating that.

What this also means: you cannot have any private conversations with windows users anymore. They all have to be considered fully backdoored. Even if the agent runs locally, you don’t know what it all sends back to MS servers.

For people who have any slice of privacy consciousness left, this is the death of Windows. The difference between this and using a desktop directly from MS’ cloud is negligible - MS can get access to potentially everything that’s visible or readable on your desktop.

If you read “national security” as a reason anywhere, you can read that as “bullshit”. True for any administration.

After you’ve already established security, you can add obscurity (without compromising security) on top for an even bigger gain in security overall. But you can’t do obscurity in place of security.

This is not just a dark chapter. If they also get this power, they can eliminate or disappear anyone at will. It’s one of the last major things they need to gain full dictatorial powers.

Fascism doesn’t want education or truth. It just wants loyalists who follow the fascist doctrine

In this particular case, I don’t get what’s in it for them. Of course they generally want more power and wealth, while ignoring everything else. But is this also really about that? If so, how? Also they are alienating even a big portion of their stupid base with stunts like this. It doesn’t seem useful, any way I look at it. It doesn’t seem lawful evil or neutral evil like they usually are. It seems chaotic evil.

GrapheneOS is the best mobile OS. Even though the Graphene team has weird habits of communication which might be off-putting for some, the OS technically still is the most secure AND most private mobile OS distribution you can have on any phone. It’s literally at the top, according to many technical and data protection experts. It’s so good that Cellebrite can’t crack it even with physical access, and some police in some country (I think it was Portugal) will assume you’re a criminal for using it, because it’s so secure and private and they can’t stand the thought of someone fully utilizing their personal rights. Plus, it has great documentation and is easy to install. Despite it being so secure and private by default, it still allows you to shoot yourself in the foot by installing the sandboxed Google services and so on, if you really want to. So it can also be used like an off-the-shelf Android, just with some additional hardening and extra protections on top which you benefit from, but the benefit will be much smaller of course when you install and use spyware apps.

Generally, a Samsung phone isn’t great for privacy. Consider getting a Pixel and put GrapheneOS on it. Much better Android baseline. More secure as well.

Any connection to Samsung’s servers is likely non-essential, but do check that OS updates work.

Google Play Services is Google’s main surveillance stack on every commercial Android distribution. It transmits a lot of unique device info to Google, every 20 minutes or so. The minimum data being transmitted is:

Phone #
SIM #
IMEI (world-wide unique device ID)
S/N of your device
WIFI MAC address
Android ID
Mail Address of your logged in Google account
IP address

However, this app might be required for Google Play to function. And also for some other apps. So check those dependency issues. In general, you should prefer using open source apps or any apps which don’t have such stupid dependencies. Some apps merely complain when you don’t have the Play Services app running (by displaying a popup) but still work.

There’s also the issue with Google’s DRM called “Play Integrity”. Some apps use Google’s Play Integrity API to “verify” that the device is an “officially sanctioned Android” and then act like any other Android is “unsafe” and then refuse to work. If you encounter this, be sure to complain to the app developers about this.

If you need the Google Play store but want to block network access for the Play Services app (which you should do), you should probably use the third-party Aurora store app.

About the Ironfox connections: not sure, but the “firefox-settings” hosts from Mozilla sound related to the Firefox Sync feature which syncs your settings/bookmarks/… with Mozilla. If that’s the case it’s also non-essential and can be blocked.

My take on it: most people do have foresight or at least understand the issue, but they still don’t act on it or ignore it as long as the status quo is still convenient enough. So it’s purely a matter of pain and inconvenience. Once enough pain and inconvenience has accumulated, they’re much more ready to make an actual switch. Thankfully, with Microsoft’s services also becoming increasingly enshittified (forced AI chatbot integrations everywhere, even more cloud dependencies, ever more expensive subscriptions, …) there’s also Microsoft shooting itself in the foot a bit in order to accelerate this process. Vile actions from the current US regime are also accelerating the process of course.

Data gathering and analysis is still happening in the background. They just won’t show you these 2 things in the frontend.

Just throw it on the already existing mountain of evidence that he should spend the rest of his life behind bars.

That’s the thing with the radioactive waste and it being still dangerous for many thousands of years… We humans manage to ruin the planet within a fraction of that time already. How could we ever manage anything correctly, let alone something that requires attention for tens of thousands of years. It’s like the ultimate technical debt. A burden we can’t handle, among many other problems we also can’t handle. Collectively speaking.

Arch on Desktops&Notebooks, Debian on Servers.

Intelligence in Republicans is a Myth.

KDE Plasma is one of the easiest desktops to use for a user coming from Windows, that’s for sure.

Gnome also has its place. I’ve used it for a few years (up to the Plasma 6 release, where I fully switched to Plasma on Wayland) and I like Gnome in general, its UI is a “modern” mix of the MacOS desktop and a mobile phone UI, whereas Plasma goes the traditional (one might also say boring) Windows desktop look&feel route (although you can also reconfigure Plasma heavily to look and feel however you want, but by default it’s very Windows-like).

Main difference, if you set aside the UI, is that KDE Plasma offers a ton of settings and features (available easily via the GUI), while Gnome intentionally doesn’t - that means to change some things you need to put in more effort in Gnome (use extensions or change settings via dconf editor, or custom CSS files. and so on).

Then there’s the factor of stability - Gnome has always been rock-solid stable for me, while KDE Plasma since 6.x release has been very good but still not rock-solid. I’ve had maybe around 5-7 plasmashell crashes so far during the whole time of using Plasma. Plasma has a recovery feature for this integrated now, so it isn’t as bad, but it’s still not rock-solid. The small price you pay for all the great and many features Plasma has is that it’s (still) slightly less stable, but due to it being able to self-recover most users probably don’t need to worry about it. I’ve had it on Windows as well - whenever the explorer shell crashes, it instantly restarts. You might have noticed this when suddenly the taskbar and everything is shortly gone but then re-appears. It’s kind of the same in Plasma, just that you also get a notification that plasmashell has crashed. I’ve never had any of this happen in several years of Gnome usage.

However, the Gnome devs are doing some weird decisions… they have very strong opinions about things and tend to not agree to things which they should agree to in order to make interoperability with other software easier. There have been a lot of unnecessary discussions about how to handle client-side window decorations, desktop portals, how to implement cerrtain Wayland extensions and things like that and often there are 2 factions at the end: the way Gnome wants to handle it vs. the way everyone else wants to handle it. I don’t like this attitude or selfishness at all from the Gnome project.

But in terms of software and UI quality, I think Gnome definitely has its place. Whether you like its UI or not, is something that every user will see differently. I’d assume that users coming straight from Windows and who maybe also want to continue to use the Windows UI paradigm on Linux will tend to find Gnome a bit alien. That’s understandable. Gnome has its own UI paradigm that doesn’t try to cater to Windows users. So you need to adapt to it, not the other way around. I also never really care that much about what desktop environment I’m using, because I’m doing so much with Emacs, the terminal and the browser, it almost doesn’t matter much what’s “around” that. So take my opinion with a grain of salt - I can probably use any UI paradigm and be fine with it. So maybe I’m not the best person to judge how well a UI is done. But I still wanted to give credit and criticisms where they’re due.

Consequences? (… are only a thing for poor people, unfortunately)

Russia is doing everything they can to destabilize NATO, Europe and the US. With and without actual war. By helping to get Trump elected and by spreading mass propaganda in social media (to get European/US people to vote for their doom) they’ve reached a lot of their goal already. And they also know that the current war in Iran isn’t making USA look good, so they are supporting its adversary so that this war can drag on for longer. If it’s negative for the US or Europe, it’s positive for Russia. Plus, it serves Russia’s economic interests because they are also a major provider of oil and gas.

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/gov.whitehouse.app/latest/

As usual: this can be interpteted as Malware. That said, many apps are like this these days: full of trackers and way too many permissions. Most people never know or care.

Mildly interesting: one of.the trackers seems to be related to Huawei.

EDIT: Someone decompiled and analyzed the app in detail: https://blog.thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app