5 ms·

(Author here) Just a reminder, this article was published in Jan 2021, I'd had the M1 Mac Mini for about a month, and virtualization was still very rough aroun

by Syonyk 4y ago

(Author here) Just a reminder, this article was published in Jan 2021, I'd had the M1 Mac Mini for about a month, and virtualization was still very rough around the edges. My understanding of the state of it today is that it's far better, with VMWare and such having actual working products for it (the very early beta was out, and it wasn't very good). The Speedometer numbers are a bit suspect, it turns out that some of the browser extensions were impacting performance more than I realized, so the "raw" speed is a bit higher on the M1 than I was reporting. However, I stand by my point that it's a properly quick little Linux VM. Unfortunately, I no longer have the M1, so I can't provide any current comparisons. Apple went in some directions I'm not OK with and I've stopped using their stuff pretty much entirely.

woojoo666 4y ago
> Unfortunately, I no longer have the M1, so I can't provide any current comparisons. Apple went in some directions I'm not OK with and I've stopped using their stuff pretty much entirely. As a non-Apple user considering an M1 myself, I'm curious what you mean by this
- Syonyk 4y ago
  You can find some other posts on my blog relating to it - https://www.sevarg.net/2022/05/07/tech-philosophy-2022/ https://www.sevarg.net/2022/05/07/tech-philosophy-2022/ is one such. I'd been somewhat uncomfortable with some of the decisions Apple has been making for a while, mostly related to China. The "iCloud in China" thing in which Apple gave the keys to iCloud in China to the CCP (you can spin it how you wish, but from my point of view, if you've given a Chinese company physical access to the servers, you've granted everything on those servers to the CCP, regardless of how much you go on about keeping the encryption keys yourself) was one issue, the treatment of workers was another. They've supply chained themselves into a corner called China, and are now entirely subject to the whims of the Chinese government, under the "Nice factories, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to those agreements you've got!" logic. So I was considering what I wanted to do, and then they went down the whole on-device CSAM scanning path, complete with the internal email sharing the quote from a third party talking about crushing the "shrieking voices of the minority" who would dare oppose this obviously good thing. That, which I've also written about (doing some experiments in what it takes to change the hash and such), was a giant leap too far for me. I'm not OK with so overtly turning my devices against me with a system that has clearly not seen the slightest bit of adversarial analysis ("How can this be abused?"). Apple hasn't actually forced it out that we know of, but to borrow the punchline from a joke, "Well, we know what kind of company you are, now we're just haggling about timing" (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/07/haggling/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/07/haggling/). They built up quite a "privacy capital" credit with their actions in the debate with the FBI over backdoors, and appear to have decided it was worth burning it all down over the CSAM scanning, which they've yet to deploy. So I've de-Appled my life quite substantially. I swapped from using an iPhone as my daily driver phone to a KaiOS Flip IV (wrote about that if you're curious on my blog), I sold the M1 and LG 5k monitor with it at a rather substantial loss, I don't use the iPad for anything anymore except ForeFlight (aviation software), I picked up a Kobo Elipsa for PDF reference for work to replace the iPad/Goodreader combo, and I've generally de-Appled my life as a result of their actions. It leaves me lurking in the weeds of Linux on ARM small board computers (a weird hobby of mine, but they're quite capable these days if you understand their limits), and Qubes on x86, though I've not entirely purged legacy Linux because I do enjoy Kerbal Space Program and Minecraft on occasion, as do my kids. The M1 Mac Mini was, for the time I had it, the best computer I'd used. It was blisteringly fast, and despite only 16GB RAM, didn't feel like it - you could just keep throwing workloads at it and it would chew through them, only occasionally spinning the fan above idle. The GPU was solid, the CPU performance was world class, and the entire experience, even running x86 binaries, just worked. The M1 MacBook Pro is literally exactly what I want in a laptop. A slab sided machine with a set of useful ports, blisteringly fast ARM CPU, battery life for days, and having abandoned the abomination that the Ive era keyboard was (thin for the sake of thin, functionality be damned). And I will never own one at this point, because I cannot trust Apple anymore not to turn my hardware against me anymore. So, I'm working out how to do my computing on far less. My daily driver laptop is a PineBook Pro, which is... adequate for my needs, if I'm willing to redefine my needs into "That which the PBP can do." Same for most of my desktops being weird little gutless ARM boxes anymore. Spotify won't run on ARM/Linux? Fine, ncspot it is. Etc. Anyway, I don't expect a lot of other people to agree with this path or to take similar actions (though I wish many would), but I simply couldn't be as strongly against Apple's CSAM proposal as I was and continue using their products. And having cracked that box open, we now see the EU proposals that expand drastically on what Apple has done, "because clearly it can be done, nerd harder to solve it!" ... I don't actually like consumer tech and what we've done with computers very much anymore, if it hasn't come through.
  - woojoo666 4y ago
    Thank you for such an honest and in-depth reply. The CSAM stuff was definitely one of my biggest issues with Apple as well. It felt like none of their other privacy efforts really mattered if they were willing to backdoor the device itself. It turned me off to their products as well. And your blog post had a lot of good points about Microsoft and Intel as well. There really is nobody left eh? One of the alternatives I'm looking at is to just use the laptop as a thin client and offloading heavy tasks to a home server. Still can't be too thin a client, just in case I have poor network, but it seems like one of the best ways to get portability + privacy + power nowadays. But I'm also trying to be careful to do proper threat modeling [1] so that I don't burn out, as the rabbit hole goes very deep. Overall it's great to hear from others that they are able to de-Apple their lives, it makes me think maybe I don't really need that M1 after all :) Though it's true that the direction of personal devices and the war on computing [2] is rather disheartening. [1]: https://www.privacyguides.org/basics/threat-modeling/ https://www.privacyguides.org/basics/threat-modeling/ [2]: https://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html https://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-...
    - Syonyk 4y ago
      > There really is nobody left eh? Linux, on the most open hardware you can find? That's about all I'm willing to use anymore, and if that closes, I'll find something else to do with my life. I keep coming back to, "I cannot defend modern consumer electronics from any ethical starting point I pick." They're built on the backs of slave labor, using materials extracted in "What toxic sludge pile about to collapse?" conditions, used to extract behavioral data for tech overlord profits (I've never been a tech overlord, but I certainly have worked for some of those companies over the years), and then get burned in third world countries when they're artificially obsoleted because you ought to buy a new one for more profits. Yay? > Still can't be too thin a client, just in case I have poor network, but it seems like one of the best ways to get portability + privacy + power nowadays. It depends what you're doing, but I don't really need much power "on the go" in my life anymore. The PineBook Pro is remarkably useful for portable light use, and at $200 and "way more open hardware than anything x86 or Apple," it's not a bad little system. It's also quite repariable, though they're less durable than I'd really prefer. > But I'm also trying to be careful to do proper threat modeling [1] so that I don't burn out, as the rabbit hole goes very deep. The rabbit hole goes very deep indeed. The threat modeling is hard when the very foundations of modern computing (process isolation) are cracked and crumbling. If you told someone that VMs were a hard isolation boundary in the Haswell days, you'd have been quite wrong (L1TF). You just wouldn't have known it for a few years yet. The burnout is real, and I'm not convinced it's a bad thing, really. There are a lot of deep technical types I know in my general peer group (call it "mid 30s to mid 40s, have grown up with this stuff, have done it professionally their entire post-college lives") who more and more want no part of what we call consumer electronics, and are doing things like "buying plots of fruit trees" and "no longer carrying smartphones." There will be an entire group of "gentleman farmers who run oddly Amish-seeming farms" in the next decade, and they'll be former security and low level tech types. The threat modeling from a security perspective is hard, but from a behavioral surplus perspective, it's simple enough: "If there is a way something can be collected, it is being collected. If you can't envision a way something can be collected, odds are very good that someone smarter than you has been paid very well to figure out how to collect it anyway." Buy some Field Notes pocket notebooks, carry those instead of a smartphone. I now regularly go out for entire days without a cell phone on me, and with a mechanical watch. It's nice, and I suggest getting in the habit. > it makes me think maybe I don't really need that M1 after all Vote with your wallet. If you object to Apple's CSAM stuff with your words, and buy a M1 with your actions, you don't really object that much - actions speaking louder than words and all. The forum attached to my blog has a small collection of people working through this stuff as well. You're quite welcome to join there!
sneak 4y ago
Any documentation about how to install homebrew that does not remind the user to run the commands to disable its embedded Google spyware is incomplete.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  Link? I didn't include those instructions because I'm not aware of the issue. I'm first and foremost a Linux user when it comes to building stuff, hence my interest in having a hot little ARM VM on the M1. I tended to keep my Macs back when I used them (see another reply for details) rather "clean" in terms of what was installed, so this was the first time I'd had to mess with Homebrew.
  - sneak 4y ago
    https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics

by Syonyk 4y ago

woojoo666 4y ago

> Unfortunately, I no longer have the M1, so I can't provide any current comparisons. Apple went in some directions I'm not OK with and I've stopped using their stuff pretty much entirely. As a non-Apple user considering an M1 myself, I'm curious what you mean by this

Syonyk 4y ago
You can find some other posts on my blog relating to it - https://www.sevarg.net/2022/05/07/tech-philosophy-2022/ https://www.sevarg.net/2022/05/07/tech-philosophy-2022/ is one such. I'd been somewhat uncomfortable with some of the decisions Apple has been making for a while, mostly related to China. The "iCloud in China" thing in which Apple gave the keys to iCloud in China to the CCP (you can spin it how you wish, but from my point of view, if you've given a Chinese company physical access to the servers, you've granted everything on those servers to the CCP, regardless of how much you go on about keeping the encryption keys yourself) was one issue, the treatment of workers was another. They've supply chained themselves into a corner called China, and are now entirely subject to the whims of the Chinese government, under the "Nice factories, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to those agreements you've got!" logic. So I was considering what I wanted to do, and then they went down the whole on-device CSAM scanning path, complete with the internal email sharing the quote from a third party talking about crushing the "shrieking voices of the minority" who would dare oppose this obviously good thing. That, which I've also written about (doing some experiments in what it takes to change the hash and such), was a giant leap too far for me. I'm not OK with so overtly turning my devices against me with a system that has clearly not seen the slightest bit of adversarial analysis ("How can this be abused?"). Apple hasn't actually forced it out that we know of, but to borrow the punchline from a joke, "Well, we know what kind of company you are, now we're just haggling about timing" (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/07/haggling/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/07/haggling/). They built up quite a "privacy capital" credit with their actions in the debate with the FBI over backdoors, and appear to have decided it was worth burning it all down over the CSAM scanning, which they've yet to deploy. So I've de-Appled my life quite substantially. I swapped from using an iPhone as my daily driver phone to a KaiOS Flip IV (wrote about that if you're curious on my blog), I sold the M1 and LG 5k monitor with it at a rather substantial loss, I don't use the iPad for anything anymore except ForeFlight (aviation software), I picked up a Kobo Elipsa for PDF reference for work to replace the iPad/Goodreader combo, and I've generally de-Appled my life as a result of their actions. It leaves me lurking in the weeds of Linux on ARM small board computers (a weird hobby of mine, but they're quite capable these days if you understand their limits), and Qubes on x86, though I've not entirely purged legacy Linux because I do enjoy Kerbal Space Program and Minecraft on occasion, as do my kids. The M1 Mac Mini was, for the time I had it, the best computer I'd used. It was blisteringly fast, and despite only 16GB RAM, didn't feel like it - you could just keep throwing workloads at it and it would chew through them, only occasionally spinning the fan above idle. The GPU was solid, the CPU performance was world class, and the entire experience, even running x86 binaries, just worked. The M1 MacBook Pro is literally exactly what I want in a laptop. A slab sided machine with a set of useful ports, blisteringly fast ARM CPU, battery life for days, and having abandoned the abomination that the Ive era keyboard was (thin for the sake of thin, functionality be damned). And I will never own one at this point, because I cannot trust Apple anymore not to turn my hardware against me anymore. So, I'm working out how to do my computing on far less. My daily driver laptop is a PineBook Pro, which is... adequate for my needs, if I'm willing to redefine my needs into "That which the PBP can do." Same for most of my desktops being weird little gutless ARM boxes anymore. Spotify won't run on ARM/Linux? Fine, ncspot it is. Etc. Anyway, I don't expect a lot of other people to agree with this path or to take similar actions (though I wish many would), but I simply couldn't be as strongly against Apple's CSAM proposal as I was and continue using their products. And having cracked that box open, we now see the EU proposals that expand drastically on what Apple has done, "because clearly it can be done, nerd harder to solve it!" ... I don't actually like consumer tech and what we've done with computers very much anymore, if it hasn't come through.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  Thank you for such an honest and in-depth reply. The CSAM stuff was definitely one of my biggest issues with Apple as well. It felt like none of their other privacy efforts really mattered if they were willing to backdoor the device itself. It turned me off to their products as well. And your blog post had a lot of good points about Microsoft and Intel as well. There really is nobody left eh? One of the alternatives I'm looking at is to just use the laptop as a thin client and offloading heavy tasks to a home server. Still can't be too thin a client, just in case I have poor network, but it seems like one of the best ways to get portability + privacy + power nowadays. But I'm also trying to be careful to do proper threat modeling [1] so that I don't burn out, as the rabbit hole goes very deep. Overall it's great to hear from others that they are able to de-Apple their lives, it makes me think maybe I don't really need that M1 after all :) Though it's true that the direction of personal devices and the war on computing [2] is rather disheartening. [1]: https://www.privacyguides.org/basics/threat-modeling/ https://www.privacyguides.org/basics/threat-modeling/ [2]: https://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html https://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-...
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    > There really is nobody left eh? Linux, on the most open hardware you can find? That's about all I'm willing to use anymore, and if that closes, I'll find something else to do with my life. I keep coming back to, "I cannot defend modern consumer electronics from any ethical starting point I pick." They're built on the backs of slave labor, using materials extracted in "What toxic sludge pile about to collapse?" conditions, used to extract behavioral data for tech overlord profits (I've never been a tech overlord, but I certainly have worked for some of those companies over the years), and then get burned in third world countries when they're artificially obsoleted because you ought to buy a new one for more profits. Yay? > Still can't be too thin a client, just in case I have poor network, but it seems like one of the best ways to get portability + privacy + power nowadays. It depends what you're doing, but I don't really need much power "on the go" in my life anymore. The PineBook Pro is remarkably useful for portable light use, and at $200 and "way more open hardware than anything x86 or Apple," it's not a bad little system. It's also quite repariable, though they're less durable than I'd really prefer. > But I'm also trying to be careful to do proper threat modeling [1] so that I don't burn out, as the rabbit hole goes very deep. The rabbit hole goes very deep indeed. The threat modeling is hard when the very foundations of modern computing (process isolation) are cracked and crumbling. If you told someone that VMs were a hard isolation boundary in the Haswell days, you'd have been quite wrong (L1TF). You just wouldn't have known it for a few years yet. The burnout is real, and I'm not convinced it's a bad thing, really. There are a lot of deep technical types I know in my general peer group (call it "mid 30s to mid 40s, have grown up with this stuff, have done it professionally their entire post-college lives") who more and more want no part of what we call consumer electronics, and are doing things like "buying plots of fruit trees" and "no longer carrying smartphones." There will be an entire group of "gentleman farmers who run oddly Amish-seeming farms" in the next decade, and they'll be former security and low level tech types. The threat modeling from a security perspective is hard, but from a behavioral surplus perspective, it's simple enough: "If there is a way something can be collected, it is being collected. If you can't envision a way something can be collected, odds are very good that someone smarter than you has been paid very well to figure out how to collect it anyway." Buy some Field Notes pocket notebooks, carry those instead of a smartphone. I now regularly go out for entire days without a cell phone on me, and with a mechanical watch. It's nice, and I suggest getting in the habit. > it makes me think maybe I don't really need that M1 after all Vote with your wallet. If you object to Apple's CSAM stuff with your words, and buy a M1 with your actions, you don't really object that much - actions speaking louder than words and all. The forum attached to my blog has a small collection of people working through this stuff as well. You're quite welcome to join there!

sneak 4y ago

Any documentation about how to install homebrew that does not remind the user to run the commands to disable its embedded Google spyware is incomplete.

Syonyk 4y ago
Link? I didn't include those instructions because I'm not aware of the issue. I'm first and foremost a Linux user when it comes to building stuff, hence my interest in having a hot little ARM VM on the M1. I tended to keep my Macs back when I used them (see another reply for details) rather "clean" in terms of what was installed, so this was the first time I'd had to mess with Homebrew.
- sneak 4y ago
  https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics