TechNom (nobody)

I know that Hitler was a bad guy. Really! But why detest everything he coopted? Many have a very different meaning in reality. ‘Swastika’ is Sanskrit for a symbol of peace and wellness. Similarly, the Aryans were an ancient race, whose lineage still exists in the world today among a huge population (I’m talking about genealogy, not the eugenics concept). I’m one of them. But we rarely discuss that - not because of the Nazi link, but because it hardly makes any difference today. (However, our language is still very similar to the Aryan language.) What we actually like is to explore other languages, cultures and traditions and absorb their best - something I hope we can all agree isn’t very Nazi-like.

Open devices will be way costlier too. That’s the price of letting these demagogues get away with such abuses. Should have rubbed it in their faces.

Try taking an old git version and applying only the patches you need.

Gitlab is very complex and a heavy resource hog. You probably don’t need it. Most small to medium enterprises can comfortably host their projects on lightweight forgejo or gitea (speaking from experience). They even have functionality similar to github actions. If you need anything more complex, you are better off integrating another self hosted external service to the mix.

Is it legal? There may be alternatives with plausible deniability.

Crowdstrike exists for Linux too. In fact, it apparently crashed RHEL and Debian a few months back. That didn’t get so much attention.

Falcon seems to be a cross between an antivirus and an intrusion detection system (IDS). There are many antiviruses on Linux, but only one FOSS AV is popular - ClamAV. As for IDS, snort is an example.

But in the true sense, Falcon is much more than just an AV and IDS. It’s a way to detect breaches and report it back to CrowdStrike’s threat detection and analysis teams. I don’t think there exists a proper alternative even in the commercial sector.

Google has discovered that FOSS software under their full control is better than pure proprietary software for monopoly abuse and rent seeking. With FOSS software, they enjoy the automatic popularity that they otherwise would have had to market very hard for. At the same time, none of Google’s free software is truly free. Google devs regularly neglect and reject overwhelming user requirements (jpegxl in chrome is probably the best example of this) and choose designs that clearly favor the company monetarily. It isn’t even practical for normal people to fork their projects.

Google often uses their ‘FOSS’ projects to twist open standards or the market to their advantage. Android and Chrome are very significant players in this regard. Using Chrome, Google even managed to make the W3C standard too complicated for others to make alternative browsers easily. Google has similar ambitions in the multimedia market. They want to replace the monopolistic media formats with quasi-monopolistic formats like webp and av1 instead of truly open ones like jpegxl.

It’s still possible on almost any distro with pyenv or asdf-vm.

Nice idea!

In addition, we could have an allowlist for honest bots (like search crawlers).

We need three four things:

1. A way to poison the data that will throw off the training without causing perceptible difference to humans. As I remember it, many image AIs were sensitive to a peculiar noise that was imperceptible to humans.
2. A skiplist of AI data stealers, so that their IPs/domains can be blocked in bulk.
3. Eventually, the above technique will become useless as AI data stealers will start using dynamic IPs and botnets to bypass the skiplists. We’ll need to throttle or block data to visitors based on pattern recognition. For example, if the visitor requests linked pages in rapid succession. Or if the request interval is uniform or pseudo random, instead of genuinely random.
4. If the pattern recognition above is triggered, we could even feed the bots with data from AI models, instead of blocking or throttling. Let the AI eat its own s**t.

Oh! I misunderstood. Sorry! Glad to meet a fellow Gentoo here!

I use Gentoo with OpenRC. So my position in this matter should be clear. Anyway, check the last paragraph again to see what I think about systemd’s modularity.

The kernel isn’t a place to play politics. You can’t just yank a component out like that on short notice, even if it has such a horrible story attached to it.

Back then, ReiserFS was mildly popular and its use would have been widespread (that includes me). The users of ReiserFS and probably even the other kernel devs had no idea that Hans Reiser was capable of such a crime. Infact, he was known as a computer prodigy back then.

There are plenty of users who don’t have the luxury of migrating data on a short notice to a different filesystem. Disabling the filesystem would have left them high and dry. That’s why the devs gave it a long deprecation period.

The OP can make the same argument after replacing sudo with doas or su.

There are other applications that use suid (like newuidmap). And there are programs that use capabilities (like ping). I’m pretty sure that this logic will be used to justify assimilating those applications too. But I’m sure that the crowd will cheer them on as if they did something revolutionary.

That’s rich, coming from a company that sued a child whose website domain name was mikerowesoft.com. (His name was Mike Rowe, and the site was about the software he made).

Systemd is too egotistic to even mention Linux. They will simply name it systemd-defenderd.

Don’t believe me? See this!

The vast majority of Linux users consider systemd as a good thing because it apparently makes system administration easier. They also don’t agree that systemd is monolithic, because it’s actually designed modular.

But of course there are detractors. The only thing I like about systemd is its declarative service definition and parallel service startup. But if I wanted to run an OS with bloated and inscrutable software (even with the source code), my choice wouldn’t be Linux or Systemd.

I also routinely switch parts of my OS. This is harder with systemd. Although it is modular, the modules are so tightly coupled that it will prevent the replacement of modular components with alternatives. Frankly, I think systemd is killing the innovation in system component development.

You can uninstall the sudo application and add sudo as an alias for run0 in your shell initialization script. That’s better than them renaming run0 to sudo, because that will prevent people from running the real sudo if they want it.

Peter Thiel is insolent enough to say out loud what these companies practice - ‘competition is for losers’. These quasi-monopolies aren’t here to provide the best value - quite the opposite. They want to kill all competition by any dirty tactic and then use the diminished choice to wring the customers of every penny they have. They want to extract maximum revenue by making sure that their inferior solution is the only option customers have.

This problem isn’t solvable by market regulation alone. The world has enough a*****es around who will climb to the top of successful companies and find ways around the regulations. They’re being as bad as they can, while skirting the limits of what’s illegal. My main gripe is with the engineers, programmers, technicians and all technical creators who enable these scumbags. It’s not hard to see that supporting a proprietary solution amounts to yielding the consumers’ bargaining power to a monopoly. Despite that, they keep making these choices. For example, it’s not uncommon to hear senior engineering managers or technical-lead level employees saying, “I know that Chrome is spyware and I want to quit it. But this works only on Chrome”. I feel like screaming at them that if they’re too incompetent to demand a change at the level they’re at, they’re in the wrong profession.

If you’re a technical creator, your choices matter. It affects a lot more people than you alone. But more often than not, I see such creators surrendering principles in exchange for convenience. They hold as much responsibility as the market-abusers in making the world the way it is now.