Both solutions would make it safer, but not impossible to get around. Someone can get the PIN Code in some more analog (getting the paper with the PIN) or digital way (interception with physical access to a phone) and getting into the persons mailbox.
Even if those attacks wouldn’t happen there’s always the chance of something more complex like calling the carrier support and saying you’ve change your address and then a week later ask for a new SIM. It can go wrong very quickly, asking for a govt ID is the easy way to solve it all.
To be fair we can have a better solution, we simply force the fucktards that run banks and other places who send SMS codes to use a simple 2FA method without bullshit apps, just provide a QR code and live with it.
Yes but this a problem, you get very fragmented systems, tons of wasted space and resources (because your CPU/RAM will pay as well) and even worse you create a situation where developing Linux desktop apps isn’t just attractive to anyone.
Just to prove this point I’m sure you’ve noticed that the largest growth in Linux “desktop” apps (be it single developer apps or more “professional” stuff) was around the time Java desktop app became popular and then later on with Electron because at that point those packing solutions were dealing with the Linux DE mess (the constant updates and breaking of things) behind the scenes and the developers only had to add a very few checks into their code to handle all Linux systems.
What I’m saying is that by have all that DE choice and constant fuckery we’re making our lives worse in the sense that nobody same wants to develop to such platform thus getting less software and making Linux less of an alternative. Until we don’t get a single DE with a single solid and well designed theme, UI library, developer friendly frameworks and whatnot Linux won’t be getting any meaningful traction among regular people and professional developers.
GNOME and their large backing was a way to fix this mess and make all other DEs fade away but then their purist vision and CSS themes got in the way of optimizing the DE for the mass market and take over everything as they should have had.
The DE that will take Linux to succeed in the desktop doesn’t need themes, customization and all the personalization that would make it really hard to create. Hell it don’t need to be much, it can even be a simple 1:1 copy of the macOS desktop experience (and keep it updated) and it will likely become very popular in no time and send GNOME, KDE and others into oblivion.
If you live in a country where carriers are required to identify phone numbers and do identity checks for SIM swaps they’ll never, ever, allow someone to get a SIM with your number without providing valid govt ID. That’s why it solves the issue and its safe. Just look at the numbers / stats and you’ll find that the SIM swapping attacks happen on countries where no identification is required.
It seems like a dystopian system, that we litterely can not hide from our governments without turning off our smartphones
That’s basically it.
However SIM cards that aren’t tied to people usually ends up scenarios like the US have where SIM swap attacks are common and you’ve a LOT of identity fraud. Note that we’ve an increasing number of services sending information and validation codes via SMS like banking apps and whatnot and you don’t secure the SIMs anyone will be able to get a replacement SIM because “I got my phone stolen” and you’ll have zero security.
Its all about companies re-creating and reconfiguring the way people develop software so everyone will be hostage of their platforms. We see this in everything now Docker/DockerHub/Kubernetes and GitHub actions were the first sign of this cancer.
We now have a generation of developers that doesn’t understand the basic of their tech stack, about networking, about DNS, about how to deploy a simple thing into a server that doesn’t use some Docker or isn’t a 3rd party cloud xyz deploy-from-github service.
oh but the underlying technologies aren’t proprietary
True, but this Docker hype invariably and inevitably leads people down a path that will then require some proprietary solution or dependency somewhere that is only required because the “new” technology itself alone doesn’t deliver as others did in the past. In this particular case is Docker Hub / Kubernetes BS and all the cloud garbage around it.
oh but there are alternatives like podman
It doesn’t really matter if there are truly open-source and open ecosystems of containerization technologies because in the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term. This happened with CentOS vs Debian is currently unfolding with Docker vs LXC/RKT/Podman and will happen with Ubuntu vs Debian for all those who moved from CentOS to Ubuntu.
lots of mess in the system (mounts, fake networks, rules…)
Yes, a total mess of devices hard to audit, constant ram wasting and worse than all it isn’t as easy change a docker image / develop things as it used to be.
What’s the real difference between an “anarchist communist” and a “communist”? The first one can have “personal property” while the second cant? So… an anarchist communist can own a car but not a house? According to the internet “personal property” is everything that can be moved (not real estate) and isn’t considered for production of something…
Linux already beats Windows in some areas (Resource usage, Telemetry or lack thereof, CLI experience) even though most users don’t care about any of these.
Microsoft did a good job with Windows Terminal and WSL, one of the reasons I use less macOS today is precisely that. I would love to run full Linux and I’ve given it a few attempts but then when there’s no (real) MS Office, Adobe etc. things go downhill. To be fair if one has to virtualize to get stuff done I would rather be on macOS, at least I would have less to virtualize.
I tried using QEMU with those scripts that make it easy to set up MacOS inside QEMU but it was still just too slow
Yeah that’s a common issue with virtualizing macOS. Even on VMWare it can be painful, the issue isn’t lack of resources it’s a 3D acceleration / GPU thing. macOS has limited support for GPUs as well know and with Apple “ARM” CPUs things will get even worse, so what happen is that the drivers and virtualization solutions can’t provide anything compatible to the OS that will render 3D graphics at a recent framerate and with Metal support.
If you don’t want to run macOS and have the time / access to hardware / interest / money an hackintosh is an interesting solution. My latest attempt on that was a HP EliteDesk 800 G6 Mini that I was able to get second hand for 300€. Intel Core i5-10500T / 16 GB RAM / 256GB NVME.
That machine runs macOS very well, mostly because the CPU is supported out of the box by macOS and the iGPU was also the same of some other intel CPU included on some real mac. The trick with hackintosh is making sure your CPU and GPU are supported by the system natively otherwise it will be painful and never work properly.
Obviously not the fastest Mac out there but for web surfing in general, editing documents and some light coding it will get the job done. I got everything working including sleep/wake, filevault, iservices, dual display, 4k output and internal speakers on the first attempt without much effort and I can share the config with you or someone with this machine that comes across this post.
Relax, Microsoft will eventually fix Windows 11, release a decent Windows 12 or extend the support for Windows 10 for so long you won’t be needing Linux anytime soon. :P
My recommendation goes for Debian and install all your software using Flatpak. This way you can get a rock solid OS and all the latest software. Ubuntu might be interesting as it is mostly beginner friendly and has a more cohesive all-in-one solution ou of the box.
Maybe it will be best to give up right now and use GNOME. I hate it, but let’s be honest most of the time people are running KDE and others will end up with a bunch of GNOME/GTK/libadwaita components and creating a Frankenstein of a system because some specific App depends on said components.
There’s no point on running anything else if you’ll end up with parts of GNOME and inconsistencies all over the place.