Oh, wait until you get a job in most offices. Microsoft, Microsoft everywhere.
BYOD with Linux? “We can’t install the company’s spyware on it, get that security risk out of here.”
I mean they’re not wrong, BYOD is an absolutely ginormous attack vector.
For the user or the company? Assuming the user isn’t a moron with computers?
Edit: guess im out of the loop as a contractor who generally only does BYOD with my linux machine
For the company, and no one should ever assume for a moment that everyone has their guard up at all times and is infallible.
As far as I’ve heard you actually assume quite the opposite.
Assuming the user isn’t a moron with computers?
Lol
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
When you’re supporting ten thousand machines on four continents and confirming to twenty different data protection doctrines the last thing you need is some neckbeard rocking up demanding to store data in their unauditable homebrew fork of Haiku or some shit.
Look! A Linux user! SCATTER, BEFORE HE CATCHES YOU!!
deleted by creator
What if their OS choices aren’t insane?
Listen I work in IT and everyone is getting templeOS and they can like it. If gods own operating system isn’t good enough for you then you can clear off.
I am so looking forward to my daughters to become students. Definitely going to discuss this topic through with every person I have to. I am so not going to use WhatsApp or whatever similar software again. If there’s no other solution, they can call me or write a letter :D
Yeah but if you don’t have brightwheel or seesaw or whatever the fuck, you won’t be getting important notifications. They only only call when you’re late for pickup or your kid shit so bad you have to take them home. Some of these are tied to billing as well. Don’t want to use My School Bucks? No aftercare or cafeteria breakfast/lunch. Sack lunch only.
It’s a huge pain but in many cases there’s no way around it.
I’m aware the original subject matter of this post is different, but the walled garden apps that you have to use no matter what start as soon as they enter preschool
I don’t know any of these apps and I don’t know if they are used in Europe too, but if I really have to use some of these apps (and I understand that can absolutely happen), there will be an old/cheap phone laying around with these apps installed, they won’t be on my primary phone.
I concede that that may not be the case outside of the US. In my experience here, though, there’s a whole world of apps and ecosystems that schools for children use now that I’d previously never heard of.
Oh don’t get me wrong, we have plenty of apps used by schools, I just don’t know them (yet). But in the end I don’t want to have any of them on my - at least - primary phone.
In Europe Whatsapp is the default messaging system. Everything else is cumbersome. Sure Signal is better but only like 3 people have it.
Do what I did and send a message to everyone you care about saying “deleting whatsapp and switching to signal” or something like this.
It’s also a good way to weed out people who aren’t important in your life, I.e people who care about you will most likely install signal to keep in touch.
This is the way. I had a story in WhatsApp for 3 months every day with a picture that I am going to fully switch to Signal and Threema and won’t be available over WhatsApp anymore. As you said, people who want something from me will have to jump over their shadow and write me over one of those. And it absolutely worked, took some time, but it worked. Some people even have signal installed only to text me. The rest just calls or sends SMS. I am from Europe btw. and it worked even though WhatsApp is so strongly used over here.
I have an “Auto-reply” configured for whoever PMs me in whatsapp. Still no one cares surprises me
Telegram is the best. Whatsapp copies everything from it.
deleted by creator
The only downside to Telegram is it is centralized and you just have to trust them with no e2e encryption. E2E encryption is device locked AFAIK. I want Matrix to be as good as Telegram, then I could just completely switch to Matrix only.
Telegram becomes more and more popular too. They now have 800 m active users.
They’re going to rewrite Element Android/iOS from scratch and it’s looking cool. Desktop apps are going in great direction, with NeoChat, Fractal and Nheko, I see improvements month by month. Calls are still only good working on Element Web, hope that would change.
You should try beeper, it has a waitlist tho
It has Telegram, Matrix, Discord and Android SMS. But I only use Telegram most of the time. And although I found open sourced bridges (backend) I didn’t found frontend. I’m not a target user anyway. But the project does have a potential.
This exactly. If I can’t audit whatsapp to be e2ee, it’s not.
/subscribe
Yeah some of my University classes mandated the use of this “Lockdown Browser” last year. Pretty sure it’s just spyware that, conveniently, can render HTML
It’s actually a rootkit on Windows which is the worst part.
Such a waste of public resources, to not develop (or fund) free and open tools for everyone, instead of paying for temporary licenses for closed software.
Well, we have tor
If they want you to use WhatsApp they can provide you with a device to use it on, then at least it’s completely isolated from your own data and can’t do too much harm.
Ok, but this is reality, and in reality schools don’t give a fuck about these subjects, third world country schools at least.
Btw oficially, in my state, schools use their own forked version of ubuntu (KITE Ubuntu), spevifically designed for school use and has foss programs installed and syllabus teaches only that. But still, since the online class started in 2020, google meet, whatsapp and all of them are “required” by students. The problem is that none of the schools or teachers actually knows why “free software only” in schools were introduced
So what do they do when you say “I don’t have a smartphone”?
deleted by creator
How are either of those better?
deleted by creator
Use signal for everyday communication, two problems solved.
Ah fair point. You could run WhatsApp in a work profile or on a second device, but you’d probably have to jump through some hoops with a second phone number.
For me it’s family and friends wich refuse to switch from whatsapp to signal for example
Fuck WhatsApp. All my homies use Signal.
Sadly all my homies still use WhatsApp. So it’s though for me to switch.
exactly. We are 6 guys, me and one other friend tried a lot, but just couldn’t :/
Maybe it’s because I don’t talk to that many people for it to seem significant, but is there an issue with just sending someone a standard text message?
“Text message”? What are we - barbarians?
Seriously though, using text messages these days means that inevitably you will encounter the green vs blue issue. Android and Apple phones don’t play nice with their text messages. Gods help you if you ever get into a group text message thread with multiple Android and Apple phones. Anytime an Apple user reacts to a message it’s sent as a separate text message, “John 🤣 to ‘Check out this meme’”
At least with WhatsApp it puts everyone in the same texting playground.
This is such a bummer. Recently one of my friends started considering iPhone just because of this blue/green issue. I hate how big corps are trying their best to f*ck their users
laughs in beeper (iMessage on Android, RCS on iPhone, and other chat apps like WhatsApp and signal over Matrix bridges)
Saving this for later investigation. The idea of having a “middle man” for supposedly E2E encrypted messages seems skeevy to me though. Is it all open source?
Nobody here uses text messages anymore. It’s just old tech I guess
The problem with texts is you cannot leave a group chat. So you’re at the mercy of the group to create a new one or forget about the chat.
I didn’t even think of that downside but yeah, that sucks
They don’t even have to switch just install it, I have multiple clients for different people and it doesn’t really effect me negatively other than remembering what to message people on
Sadly my friends won’t even do that. Don’t know about family but knowing them they also probably won’t. I expect rhem to not even understand why i want to switch
Then there’s governments banning encrypted messaging apps cuz all the heckkin terrorists are pro privacy and Foss I guess.
Its almost like banning knifes
What’s easier from the teacher/teachers representative, use 1 widely distributed app, or download 100 different messaging programs/interfaces and make sure every student knows the proper channels to contact every other student?
There will always be someone unhappy, let’s try to keep that from being the person who has to do this dance day in and out for the rest of their underfunded lives?
Fine, use one app but make it the Free Software one, then.
Regardless, it is completely unreasonable to dictate that people consent to onerous third-party corporate terms of service in order to access government services, especially ones enforced by truancy laws!
There will always be someone unhappy, but let’s make them unhappy with mild annoyances and not serious privacy violations. I’d rather prefer the Whatsapp users to be unhappy than the Signal users. In a long run it’s doing them a favor.
I want to agree Meta’s terms of service to get education?
Schools should use a free software messenger instead so that no one is forced to run untrusted apps on their device.
Ours just use email
100 different messaging programs/interfaces
It’s like four or five. We did this back in the late 90s. Some people used AIM. Some used Yahoo Messenger. Some used ICQ. And some used MSN. We survived.
It was such a common thing that multi-protocol clients like Trillian were popular.
You really want your teachers to read your cryptic emo away messages on written with papyrus?
We survived
Reach for the stars!
At the place I work at, we all are given Azure Virtual Desktops, which we use for everything. I’m working remotely from another country, so there is damned input lag too. Copy/paste, any data transfer is disabled too.
The worst part is we need to use “Remote Desktop” app to connect to our VMs, and it is available for EVERY platform except linux. Like they got browser client, windows, mac os, android, iOS. BUT NOT FOR LINUX. So I use VirtualBox to open windows machine, and use that to connect to VM.
This is sad :(
You could try out the Remmina Linux client’s RDP plugin.
This is their choice not to configure it correctly. You can set up Azure RDP and use Remmina as a front end to FreeRDP or just FreeRDP by itself.
Also why are they using a browser “client”? That is also an odd configuration. You don’t need a special client. I use Firefox on Linux (with a container - love those) to connect to the Azure Desktops.
I do all my windows work from a Linux machine. Recently I traveled to another country and did all my clients Windows (Azure remote desktops) work from a Steam Deck (Arch linux), lol.
wow. I’ll look into this, but last time I tried, that VM discovery thing made it unavailable to setup on linux. The remote desktop app shows available VMs after you authenticate with MS account. This most likely is done deliberately to prevent us from using linux.
To work or study at my Univ, you have to give your phone number to Microsoft for the 2fa. They pay shitload of money for Office 365 and they are almist forcing us to use that stupid suite. This year I will give an special course on FOSS alternative to my students. Fuck that bullshit hail corporate.
Decentralised solutions will never be broadly accepted. People care about comfort and ease to use and centralized companies wiill always have the edge in this.
I don’t necessarily need decentralised solutions. I just need free software solutions. There is much comfort and ease in apps like signal
it’s ok just make the account, everyone is using it
🥲
My son’s school created an MS account for him, for christ’s sake! In 1st grade…
What the fuck
Exactly. I was shocked as well. They even wanted us to teach him to memorize the password. In. The. 1st. Grade.
To be frank they probably wanted to have a backup in case we get another corona lockdown so he could use Teams for school. But still!
Your school wants you to use Whatsapp?
Mine too, but it wasn’t forced on me. All of my classmates use whatsapp but not having too deal with all the needless stuff on there is great in my opinion
Important notifications, informing holidays, events special classes, and all communications go through whatsapp.
Also sometimes online/video class links are posted there
I almost cried when they told me AutoCAD was only available on windows.
In my school we use LibreCAD :)
“It’s preparing you for the real world”
Force quits stupid company app
bro sooo true, not to mention gmail as well
