[gentoo-amd64] Re: Machine recommendations?

[Duncan]

Randy Barlow posted on Tue, 17 Mar 2015 17:09:43 -0400 as excerpted:

> On 03/17/2015 08:21 AM, Mark Knecht wrote:

>> NetFlix now plays fine in Chrome
>
> It's important to note that Chrome is not open source[.]  The open core
> part of Chrome is Chromium, and Chromium does not have the decryption
> module to play Netflix.

> I wish it were possible to watch Netflix using only Free Software.

Well stated.  My reply would have been very similar.

FWIW, chromium is available in gentoo, and it's an option I'm glad to 
have (as unlike the closed source Chrome I could actually build/install/
run it), but for now at least, I'm a firefox guy.

(It would help if both chromium and firefox upstreams didn't want to 
bundle all sorts of stuff that should be external libs, only some of 
which gentoo maintainers can properly unbundle, so building them takes 
far longer than it should, a situation dissuading me from simply merging 
both so I have alternatives even if I primarily use just one, due to the 
unnecessarily long build time for something I'd not use that much that I 
avoid by having just the one I regularly use merged.)

And as long as FLOSS firefox remains the target product, while the OSS 
(without the FL) chromium remains only a sideline focus while the 
partially closed-source chrome is the real target, I have a big incentive 
to favor firefox, that it'd take a big disincentive elsewhere to 
counteract, before I could favor chromium.

(As for chrome, even if I could run closed source I'd not trust it.  
Google is after all an ad/tracking company at core, which after all does 
own the doubleclick I've NEVER trusted and have blocked about a half-
dozen different ways, and if they're insisting that something stay closed-
source, I'm inclined to believe there's a /reason/ it's closed source, 
that I'd not like were it available to examine, and that I STILL don't 
like, hidden in code I /can't/ examine.  So even if I were to run closed 
source in general, I'd be about as likely to run chrome as I would to run 
closed source from, say, Sony, "The rootkit people!(TM)".)

(As for google in general, I use their search and I spend quite a bit of 
time in minitube and firefox (with youtube's new html5 support) on 
youtube.  And some of my feeds are via feedburner, which I think is 
google's too, but I don't have a google account of any kind, third-party 
cookies are blocked and others are session-only (and unlike some I don't 
have a 50-tab firefox going constantly, so session-only generally means 
only a few hours at most), and I'm pretty strict with disconnect/request-
policy/noscript policies, such that google generally gets no notification 
when I'm browsing other sites, so while I'm not kidding myself that they 
don't have a profile on me, it's much more limited than their profile on 
most users, for sure!)

That google profile mention reminds me, tho...  I really need to set a 
new randomized MAC in my router, so my DHCP-assigned IP address changes 
and those IP-tracked profiles get reset...  Which of course is yet 
another reason to get the new gentoo-based router up and running, so I 
can properly automate MAC randomization without having to fight the not-
entirely-familiar OpenWRT configuration to figure out how to do it.  Then 
my IP will automatically change whenever I reboot the router, or whenever 
I or the cableco's maintenance drops/restarts the connection, which won't 
be daily, but it'll be considerably more often than the years the ISP's 
so-called dynamic IP assignment can remain the same, based on a stable 
MAC address requesting that IP.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman