For the past ~5 years or so, I’ve had the choice of a polished web UI to pirate any movie or TV show on demand. Up until the past few months, I have still paid for:
Netflix
Amazon Prime
Apple TV+ (as part of Apple One)
Disney+
YouTube Premium
… because their products and recommendation engines were more user-friendly for my family and I. Since the pattern of price gouging in the last 6-12 months, I now subscribe to:
Netflix (cancelling this imminently)
Apple Music (Apple One cancelled)
I hope the shameless cash grabs result in a mass exodus of users and really hurt these platforms.
what if I, for example, had a job in Google and I liked Linux so much I install Ubuntu on my Chromebook, would that be illegal/send me to prison?? Or, if I had the job, would I be kicked?? I like Chromebooks because they are so smol and nice. But I don’t know if it’s legal to install a Linux distro on it. Thank you!!
Crostini is an official feature built by Google that allows you to run Linux on a tightly integrated hypervisor inside Chrome OS. You keep a lot of Chrome OS’ security benefits while getting a Linux machine to play with.
That said, no, it’s not illegal to install a different operating system on your Chromebook hardware. They are just PCs, under the hood. You might lose some hardware security features though, e.g. the capabilities provided by integration of the Titan silicon.
If you had a job at Google, corporate IT would definitely not be happy if you wiped the company-managed OS and installed an unmanaged Linux distro :)
There are some speculations about TPM uncontrollably sending data to manufacturer servers if a laptop has any Internet connection. Others say it’s not intended/capable of that, like this answer for example (which is 5 years old though)....
Tl;dr: TPMs are very unlikely to make your privacy better or worse, but they could definitely be abused by a company like MS to make end users’ experiences worse. They could also be used for significant security and privacy gains… they’re a tool.
The TPM can be used to provide a cryptographic binding between aspects of your system’s configuration and a unique key which is resident within the TPM (a process called “attestation”). It can also generate secondary keys that are associated with the base key, and use those to do cryptographic operations like encryption/decryption and authentication.
Telemetry wise, the TPM’s only utility might be to “prove” that the data sent from your PC wasn’t tampered with. That said, I don’t think MS is actually doing that, and they don’t need to in order to be incredibly invasive in their telemetry.
The (imo) worst way in which a TPM might be abused in a user-hostile sense is to detect if the OS has been modified by the user, or if an installation isn’t legitimate, etc. That could be used to disable certain features if you try to install unauthorised software, dual boot Linux or whatever. This would be similar to the smartphones of today, which can for example disable access to banking apps if jailbroken/rooted.
TPMs (>2.0 at least) otherwise have the potential to realise a significant improvement in security and privacy for users, if used correctly. They can be used for encryption and credentials that are bound in hardware and therefore practically impossible to steal. And can detect hardware tampering and potentially foil Evil Maid attacks. Imagine if your login sessions for various websites were bound to your hardware, such that a dodgy extension could never steal your cookies.
I use OTP Auth. Syncs via iCloud and has an Apple Watch app. Plus allows export which is convenient for if I ever want to switch platforms back to Android.
Started to move off Google (not strictly self-hosted)
Started to move off Google’s services to proton:...
Amazon's Prime Video will start serving ads on January 29 unless you pay extra
When your kid asks for a switch for Christmas (jemmy.jeena.net)
would it be illegal to download Ubuntu on a Chromebook?
what if I, for example, had a job in Google and I liked Linux so much I install Ubuntu on my Chromebook, would that be illegal/send me to prison?? Or, if I had the job, would I be kicked?? I like Chromebooks because they are so smol and nice. But I don’t know if it’s legal to install a Linux distro on it. Thank you!!
How bad is TPM on a laptop for privacy?
There are some speculations about TPM uncontrollably sending data to manufacturer servers if a laptop has any Internet connection. Others say it’s not intended/capable of that, like this answer for example (which is 5 years old though)....
The Best Two-Factor Authentication App? (iOS)
What’s your prefer two-factor authentication app for iOS?...