380: No Sur, No Thank You

We review the Dell Precision 5750, a born and bred MacBook killer that runs Linux.

Plus a nasty reminder of how closely Apple monitors its users, and their fatal flaw that we think is outrageous.

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Links:

• New device puts music in your head — no headphones required
• Greg K-H at Linux app Summit 2020: What Linux kernel developers wish application developers would do better — In this talk, a Linux kernel developer gets to complain how his normal "test case" i.e. userspace code, could do better when it comes to a whole range of different things that have been learned over time by maintaining a stable interface to the kernel for 20+ years.
• Linux App Summit 2020 Videos Now Available From Steam/Valve To GNOME Circle - Phoronix
• Seattle GNU/Linux Conference
• Why Linux: Your Mac Isn’t Yours — On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.
• macOS Big Sur launch appears to cause temporary slowdown in even non-Big Sur Macs | Ars Technica
• Apple apps on macOS Big Sur bypass firewall and VPN connections
• Macs are a privacy nightmare – OSnews
• Application Trust is Hard, but Apple does it Well — Security Embedded — It comes down to an argument of trust - do you trust Apple, acting in their best interests, is sufficiently aligned with your best interests too? Or do you believe they're a malevolent entity? It's not feasible for an individual to maintain the list of trustworthy or untrustworthy parties that Apple does.
• Does Apple really log every app you run? A technical look – Jacopo Jannone - blog
• Not all bad news for Arm Macs Tho, might be able to bless Linux kernels — On arm64 macs, there's no all-security-checks-are-off mode. You can however bless your unsigned kernels through kmutil, which adds their hashes to the Secure Boot policy, allowing you to boot them.
• Longhorn on Twitter — So how will you boot third-party operating systems on arm64 Macs? You might have seen that pongoOS has been getting a ton of work in the recent past, and even more is coming. This work will allow us to support pongoOS as a second-stage bootloader for Apple Silicon-based Macs.
• patrick wardle on Twitter — In Big Sur Apple decided to exempt many of its apps from being routed thru the frameworks they now require 3rd-party firewalls to use (LuLu, Little Snitch, etc.) 🧐 Q: Could this be (ab)used by malware to also bypass such firewalls? 🤔 A: Apparently yes, and trivially so 😬😱😭
• All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows
• Precision 5750 17 Inch Mobile Workstation Laptop with AI & VR | Dell USA — The first thin and light 17-inch mobile workstation is also the smartest. Featuring Dell Optimizer for Precision with AI, the latest Intel® Core™ or Xeon® processors and NVIDIA® graphics. Starting at $2,139.00
• Dell vs Ryzen desktop
• ChrisLAS Workstation vs Ryzenbox
• Three way shoot out Ryzen vs Dell vs Chris Wks
• AI Benchmark Alpha Benchmark - OpenBenchmarking.org
• Ryzen 3600 Single/Multithreaded And RAM Tests Performance - OpenBenchmarking.org
• Pick: Yacht — a container management UI with a focus on templates and 1-click deployments.
• Lutris 0.5.8 Release