Version 1.0 of the openKylin Linux distro for the domestic Chinese market is here – and it works pretty well in English, too.

As The Reg reported last year, openKylin has been in development for some years. The FOSS desk took openKylin 0.7 for a spin soon afterwards. It reached version 0.9.5 at the start of 2023, and now the finished release 1.0 is available, codenamed "Yangtze" after the great river of China, the longest watercourse in Eurasia.

OpenKylin is an Ubuntu remix and it has the UKUI desktop. UKUI is one of the most polished Linux desktops around, and puts most of the more mainstream Western desktops to shame. The desktop looks very similar to the one in Ubuntu Kylin 22.04, but it had no problems with VirtualBox's 3D acceleration and didn't default to dark mode as that release did.

There was a decision made quite a few years ago at one of the BRICS summits in Brazil, that the BRICS nations would actually look at doing exactly this. In other words, they were going to each produce their own national operating system. All of those countries did in fact start such initiatives, but for some reason South Africa never did, and South Africa still sits in a very expense strangle-hold by Microsoft. Ironically enough, long before this in the mid-2000's, South Africa did have it's own government funded Linux distro that was called Impi Linux. Back then, South Africa had quite a big drive towards open source software, and for it to be a way of boosting local economic investment. This drive was actually what introduced me to open source software, but the difference is I stuck with that philosophy, while the government did not (I've saved a lot of money and learnt a lot about software in this time).

See https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/07/openkylin_is_ubuntu/

#technology #opensource #Linux #China

Hard drives have typically been the go-to storage medium for loading up a NAS with data, but flash storage in the form of SSDs have grown in popularity as NAS owners look for quieter and faster drives (and lower power consumption). The best SSDs for NAS have dropped in price in recent years, allowing for a substantially better price-per-GB.

I last bought 2.5" notebook hard drives for my NAS mainly because they could be powered directly off their USB Cables (compared to the previous larger hard drives I had which required separate power), but I can see next time around I'm pretty sure I'll be going with SSD drives.

See https://www.androidpolice.com/best-ssds-for-nas/

#technology #NAS #SSD

Apart from you apparently not being able to delete your Threads profile, it contains similar metadata spying clauses that the other Meta products do about all sorts of metadata that can be tracked and passed upstream to Facebook and Meta (the reason why I deleted my Instagram and Whatsapp accounts years ago).

We've seen before though from Facebook, that it does not stop with "using the information to improve our offerings to you", and that the information also gets passed to 3rd parties ('partners') as well. Meta is also based in a country famed for its data collection.

Your metadata is data collected that is not related to the information you consciously put in your profile, posts, and comments. It includes your location throughout the day, your contacts, WiFi and Bluetooth connections, search history, purchases, when you are active, and importantly specific identifiers for your device (so that this behaviour can be matched to data collected by other 'partners'). This all starts to build up a pretty valuable profile about your behaviour outside of the app.

I also collect visitor data on my website (and did a video about it showing what I can see), but I use a self-hosted open source service, the data does not get sold or given to anyone, and I only aggregate the data to determine what pages are popular, what search terms are finding my site, etc. I'm not profiling people or selling data to 3rd parties.

So, although I love testing out new social networks (and use about 17 at any time) I won't be touching Threads. But if you're a Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp user, this really won't interest you much as your data is already sucked in.

I know many in the Fediverse won't like this, but I will consider reconnecting to some Meta users once Threads gets ActivityPub support. The reason is that all the behaviour side information is safely on a non-Meta app. All Meta will see is who I'm contacting on their side, and what I message to them through the open protocol. There is nothing stopping anyone already doing that through the ActivityPub protocol. However if Meta finds some devious way of inserting adverts (or anything else) into that connection, then I'll once again isolate myself fully from them.

I've long been on Mastodon already as my Twitter alternative, and over the last few months especially it has matured well in terms of a richness of information and news, meaningful interaction, and also working through its moderation controls that you can execute yourself.

See https://mashable.com/article/threads-tracking-data

#technology #privacy #Threads #metadata #socialnetworks