Not trying to be a downer, but I’ve worked the trenches of an internal IT help desk for a company, and you should prepare yourself for doing free volunteer tech support if you set something up like this. You’d be shocked at what things can be road blocks to otherwise intelligent, seemingly technical people. The risk of it drops if you use something more standard like Google Sheets, but it doesn’t disappear entirely.

You will probably need to go with something that works for the lowest common denominator of your group. That might be “horrible messy email thread manually turned into a shared Apple or Google calendar once a week by a volunteer”. If you don’t, there will be constant friction with them. I’ve seen similar collaboration efforts fail on a team of professional systems engineers simply due to a difference in how each person wanted to take and maintain their notes. No one could settle on a standard and eventually the person pushing for it gave up.

In short there are multiple angles to this, more than simply privacy vs ease of use.

That said, nextcloud appears to be the current standard for this outside of Google and Microsoft.

Do not speak of the old magics to me…

I have five Gmail accounts. Youngest is 5 years old. Oldest is around 20. Even have the apparently desirable firstname.lastname address for myself. So I’m not familiar with the current hoops to jump through, admittedly.

That said none have been banned, so while I recognize the risk, I don’t agree with that inevitability, especially if you aren’t making heavy use of it.

Any email service that is not self hosted has the same risk, and self hosting isn’t generally in reach for people due to all the unwritten “trust rules” the major providers have quietly implemented.

Imo, if your risk model has to account for nation state actors, you’re not the type of person who needs to ask about this stuff or you’re already screwed.

There are plenty of different options for throwaway emails and defense in depth on that if you don’t want the link to be direct, but the idea is ultimately the same: make what you need to get by, insulate between your real and it to taste.

There’s a lot more to this than lock in and open mindedness. Are you going to cause friction to multiple other people in a collaborative situation? Are you going to do it for something as small as opinions about data collection companies?

Like, go ahead and question it. Go ahead and see if you can get by without it. But if it’s making things significantly more difficult, are you personally capable of compromise? No one is making you sign your whole life and soul over to Google. You can make, use for this one class, and delete the account when you’re done.

While funny, your teacher and school aren’t going to give you kudos for being a smartass.

Just make a Gmail account and set it up to forward to your real one. Only things that live in it will be the stuff for this class, and only temporarily.

What do you actually lose privacy wise from that? They get to know you’re in the class you’re in and see a very small subset of your communications related to it.

Ultimately, you’re the only one who can decide how much extra friction you’re willing to put up with for your principles, but in my experience it’s better to just make whatever bare minimum skeleton account you can to meet the needs and get on with life. Would you rather spend time fighting to make your special case setup work while giving the teacher reasons to evaluate your work more harshly, or learning the material?

Plus, there are benefits to blending in.

Seems pretty competent to me!

I see mobility, two grasping manipulators, at least one non-grasping manipulator (which appears to be double jointed even), paradolia exploiting decorations to use human pattern recognition to encourage better acceptance, binocular visual sensors, what appears to be a projectile delivery device centrally located as the “nose”, wireless communication capability (absolute must), and ample built in storage that is centrally located.

It’s literally the test run/marketing push for this open source chip. Yes they will be available outside of just being built into the badge. On other forums there are people who pre-ordered the chip (before it was announced to be used in the badge) who are saying they have confirmation their order shipped.

For #1, it absolutely is possible, but the technique has changed over time. You pretty much have to look it up every time, and check older methods until you find the way that works with the version you’re using. Last I checked you needed to disconnect any NICs, then hit one of the F keys during setup to get to the command prompt, then put in a specific command, then reboot into setup again. Been years though.

For #2, Command Prompt doesn’t because it’s still the same shit it was from the 90s. They have an open source program called Windows Terminal that supports tabs, multiple environments, most of the nice stuff you’d expect from a good Linux Terminal, but they don’t include it by default so you have to install it yourself.

#3 and #4 are pure bullshit. 1 and 2 are as well, but at least they have reasonably reachable workarounds.

Wish my company allowed that. Everything goes to a licensed secure destruction service that literally puts them through an industrial shredder. Awesome to watch, but wasteful as all hell.

Yes. If I want to organize and dedupe what I have then I need enough storage to work on it, a lot of my storage is spinning rust 7-15 years old, and if I have the space I’m going to use it. I have family photos and a music library going back to 2005. Too many things like old games need custom fixes installed to work correctly on modern hardware, and the internet isn’t as permanent as it was cracked up to be.

There’s plenty of reasons to hold on to older data.

More importantly, to link multiple device fingerprints to a single identity.

The base OS of Android is, but the widely dispersed version maintained by Google with the hardware drivers required for it to work with the actual hardware is not.

That’s why projects like Graphene can’t work on every phone. They have to rely on either reverse engineering hardware drivers or the manufacturers providing the drivers. For many years, Google openly released the drivers for all the hardware in their Pixel line of phones, which allowed Graphene and other customized versions of Android to easily work on Pixel phones.

Manufacturers usually don’t release drivers separately and instead they’re only available built into the manufacturers customized Android version. Android Open Source Project is the open source base, then Google builds their proprietary stuff on top as “Android”, then the various phone manufacturers build their own versions on top of Google’s “Android” with: manufacturer specific crud added, phone specific crud added, and often phone carrier specific crud added.

I think you have a highly idealized idea of the past. Most jobs are, and have always been, a way to make money to fund your life. Any “meaningfulness” is a rare beneficial side-effect for most.

And as far as understaffing and overworked? Every company will attempt to extract the most they can from you for the least amount of money. Pretty much always has been. Sometimes you can find some management that realizes you can get more out by showing some amount of care to their underlings as people, but again that is also rare.

Also, outside of the tech hubs like the SF bay area, or FAANG employment (or the equivalent for the time), you aren’t going to be finding “the grunts” are millionaires still working.

I hope unions take off again. People forgot how much of workers rights were fought for, with literal blood shed in support of them.

This excerpt from a 47 year old IBM manual just keeps being increasingly relevant.

Man, every privacy comm on lemmy could use a sticky about this sort of stuff.

What is your actual risk profile? What are your goals and why? Basics of privacy vs security vs anonymity, practicality, trust.

I’m not a particular fan of npm, but you’ll probably see this kind of thing with any package manager of similar size. More a matter of what’s the most attractive target than the package tech itself.

That’s a pretty important callout, especially when catbox specifically has a non-permanent sister site.

Hearbeat notifications man. “Yes I am online” email once a day or so. Yeah it’s more emails to delete but it can be a lifesaver.

I’m remembering a very not fun discussion my team had about “the monitoring system not sending any alerts doesn’t inherently mean everything is ok” after an outage that was missed by our monitoring system.

You need to make sure you’re monitoring connectivity as well as specific problem states. No data is a problem state often overlooked, and it’s not always considered for every resource type in these systems out of the box.

And you probably want a heartbeat notification. Yes, it’s noise, but if you don’t see anything from monitoring you need to question if monitoring is the thing that broke. It sending out a notification every so often going “yes I am online” is useful.