Which is why Javascript also needs to be much more tightly controlled than simply running any damned thing on the page.
Your average web page has 10-20 3rd parties, all of which want to run javascript, flash, set cookies, and do a host of other crap. Advertising has pretty much fucked up the permission model of the internet by saying "you need to let every asshole run anything they want because you have no idea if it's part of the functionality of the site or an ad, but we just assume you'll let it all run".
Yeah, sorry, no. Flash is straight up disabled or uninstalled. I'll selectively whitelist sites who I trust, or at least temporarily do so. But almost no 3rd party scripts or content are EVER allowed... because I don't want ads, and because I don't trust random web pages to run scripts. Because they're not trustworthy.
If Javascript has only one big namespace, then maybe that needs to be fixed? Security holes like cross-site scripting and other stuff are enabled by web sites insisting they be able to write the most presumptively insecure code and then let it be the user's problem.
This stuff needs to be sandboxed, treated like it's potentially hostile, and locked down from being able to do anything to the host computer. Instead what we have is stuff running which we have no idea what it is, which may or may not be malicious, and which can actively impact the host machine.
It's time we stopped treating web pages like they're trusted by default, because so much of the web these days simply can't be trusted.
Stop letting the advertisers tell us how the internet should work, and stop letting them be the ones who cause the damned thing to be insecure in the first place.
Why the heck should Uber be preventing free people from working?
Right, that way if some crazy guy goes on a shooting rampage or starts raping female passengers they can just say "why, we just let free people work and if passengers want safety and assurance we're not sending out psychopaths they're free to conduct their own background checks".
Sorry, but people do kind of expect when they request a cab -- oh, sorry, an illegal car-for-hire pretending it's an unregulated ride sharing service to which laws don't apply -- that a fucking serial killer isn't being sent to them.
See, one of the many fucking laws Uber claims don't apply to it are things like criminal background checks to protect the public safety. Oh, and commercial licenses, proper insurance, vehicle inspections, and shit like that.
Uber's entire business model is basically saying "you know all those laws places have enacted to ensure passenger safety and the life, well, none of them apply to us".
In this case, Uber straight up lied about the safety assurances they could give about drivers, and mislead passengers into thinking they conducted their background checks to a higher standard than other companies, and actually used terms like "safe" in their marketing.
So, yeah, when you lie to the public about how safe you are, and fail to do the level of background checks you suggest you do, people find out about it, and your dumb ass gets fined.
Funny, I use the back button for sites requiring Flash.
The only things I truly need Flash for are work related training, which periodically requires I re-enable it. But I won't even run my work browser with it enabled.
No way in hell I'd ever consider running Flash by default... the idea of letting random websites let random third parties run arbitrary code is so utterly moronic as to defy belief.
To me Flash is primarily an ad platform. If there are useful sites requiring Flash to work, I'm afraid I've never seen them, or don't consider them useful. I don't use video on the intertubes, because I don't care.
It seems like Flash has had at least one major security exploit every month for over 15 years, which tells me the entire platform and its security model are so defective that it has to be in the "don't trust by default" category.
I have no interest in letting advertisers, or anybody else, have access to anything which runs arbitrary code on my machine just because I visited a web page.
Not a zero day exploit in Flash. Why, I'm utterly traumatized by this, my faith in humanity has been utterly ruined, why I... oh, fuck it...
Yawn, yet another zero day exploit in a steaming turd of a technology which has been an endless series of security holes for almost 20 years now.
And, having been largely Flash free for at least 15 of those years, all I can say is "enjoy your quality software, suckers".
Honestly, the only thing which has cumulatively had more security holes than Flash is Windows. I honestly don't know why people keep trusting it, because it really has been a terrible security risk forever, and disabling it is usually the first thing I do in a browser.
Once we become a space-faring civilization, this rarity value attached to non-Earth rocks will seem very quaint.
What a strange way of thinking of it... so we have a Venn diagram, and then it's Earth and non-Earth. That's a little too simplistic.
In your scenario, we'll have Earth, Mars, Venus, Alpha Centauri, Vulcan, Ceti Alpha V, and what have you. But they'll all be boring because they're "not Earth".
They may not be universally valuable, but like people collect souvenirs, they'll have some sentimental attachment. Or they'll be sufficiently rare as toe have a degree of uniqueness.
Even if we were space faring, a rock from the furthest planet in the universe is worth more than the one you're standing on, because it's harder to get another one.
The reality is, there's a relatively small amount of material we call "non-Earth" which we can access. You're right, they are deemed special because they come from someplace else, and not everybody can have one.
But you'd have to be a space faring species who can instantaneously travel anywhere in the universe to say that rocks from further away and harder to get won't have some cachet to them.
It's not like we'd become a space faring civilization (assuming we ever actually do before we go extinct) and suddenly all sense of distance and place of origin disappears.
But you sounds jaded about space rock to an extent that seems to imply you figure you'll have access to rocks from the entire universe within a few weeks. Right now, here on planet Earth, in any meaningful sense of the word... "space rocks" are very rare, and to people who really want them, quite valuable.
But it will always be true that the further away it's from, and the harder to get it is, the more value people will assign to it.
The Free Market relies on the fact that is a product is overpriced, consumers will pass it up.
No, the free market relies on suckers who don't know any better getting hoodwinked.
And then makes the absurd claim that a sufficiently large number of suckers will fix the problem of lying bastards hoodwinking suckers.
There is not, never has been, and never will be a free market -- informed consumers making intelligent choices based on good information will simply never happen... and hoping that industry players aren't lying, thieving assholes who do their utmost to deceive, hide information, and collude to rig the game... well, that's simply impossible.
The impossible premises of a free market defy logic, human nature, and reality. You might as well believe in the tooth fairy.
People who talk about the free market are either part of the con game, or have been so utterly conned as to think they're making sense.
The links will look like "m.me/yourusername" and let anyone quickly add you in Messenger without looking up your Facebook account
So, any random idiot will be able to spam you without trying hard?
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong on that one... sorry, you should have to look it up to prove you're allowed to send to me.
The usernames and profile links will also be available to businesses, which are starting to use Messenger as a way to deliver customer support and let you buy things through chatting.
Just any old business gets this because they say so?
Yeah, whatever, yet more crap from Facebook to ensure gets blocked so I don't have to deal with it. Just like I don't consent to being tracked by these assholes, I don't see why I would want any form of interaction with this.
I'm betting the amount of unwanted messages will be epic.
By American Vernacular English, that's not wrong. People frequently substitute "should of" in place of "should've".
Please, don't confuse illiteracy with 'vernacular'.
"Should of" is NOT 'vernacular', it's making random meat noises to approximate language and failing to grasp something they taught you fairly early in school.
It is hearing sloppy speaking, turning that into a sloppy understanding of the words you're using, and then using that in a written form which demonstrates you think the incoherent mumbling you do in the real world corresponds to speaking the language.
Linux on the desktop is almost perfect now, and certainly leagues ahead of Windows and macOS.
Do you sincerely believe that crap? Or have you convinced yourself of it and need to convince the rest of us?
It certainly isn't leagues ahead, and there are things where the ability to manage via GUI is pretty much non-existent.
I've been using Linux since the mid 90s, FreeBSD since the late 90s, and Windows (grudgingly at first) since the early 00's... I've used Android, iOS, and others... and unless Linux has jumped forwards in the last few years by huge amounts, it is in no way "leagues" ahead of anything, and the absence of certain things except in a toy OSS version which may or may not work is a big limiting step.
I can't take you seriously as someone who isn't a raving fanboi. Because the last I saw, the Linux desktop still has some glaring holes and stuff you can't do from within a GUI, doesn't do auto-detection of things nearly as well, and still requires you to drop down to being root in a command line for many things.
When you can put my mother in front of it, and every admin task she could ever need to do is intuitive, easy to find, and accessible via GUI, and she can buy something at Staples, plug it in and use it withing 15 minutes... Well, I might believe you.
Not so long ago, on an Ubuntu VM (I think), I was trying to change some system configuration or another.
There simply was no interface to edit whatever it was I was trying to do. You just sort of ran off the end of the earth, and then you were on your own.
Sometimes what Linux (or even FreeBSD) desktops lack is the actual ability to fully control the machine from the GUI, and then you rely on someone being able to drop to the command line and do the real magic -- which is fine if you can do it, and useless if you can't.
What is still needs is to have all of the functionality, instead of most of the functionality. It needs to stop being something you build in a kit or have to endless search the interwebs for trying to solve how to do it.
And, like it or not, it needs better support from software vendors... I've used the same tax program for over a decade, I rely on that... don't tell me to use Penguin Tax 0.1 because it's kind almost the same thing and doesn't work in my country and hasn't been updated in 4 years... don't tell me I can use a web interface, I'm not submitting my fucking tax information on a web interface to a company I don't trust.
The photo editing software which came with my Canon camera... I want to use that. Not some abandoned piece of crap which kinda sorta does some of what I need. The software to control my TomTom and do updates? Or update the GPS I use for golf? I need all of those things. There is no Linux version.
Computers are tools, not toys. I have some tasks I need to do, and either the platform does them, using the tools I want, or it doesn't. And I don't wish to spend hours trying to re-discover some arcanum I knew in the late 90s about UNIX.
For a good chunk of ordinary desktop stuff, sure, Linux has most of that covered. But as soon as you go off the path, or into something which requires commercial software (which exists and gets used no matter what your ideology tells you)... then it becomes a largely useless thing.
I still keep VMs around to play with, or because I can shred through some data better with a UNIX command line than with anything else.
But I have yet to be able to rid myself of Windows entirely, which means my Windows machine is more likely to be where I run my Linux VMs
Seems to me you guys end your anthem with something about "land of the free"? I think it's pretty safe to remove any references to that one.
For the last 15 years it's been the land of the scared and desperate who will happily give up their rights and freedoms and believe that is helping protect their rights and freedoms.
The extent to which the average American seems to accept "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" is absolutely alarming.
They'll still tell you they're free, because you won't get hauled off for criticizing the government (yet), but they're ignoring that the FBI et al have decided the Constitution is just too damned inconvenient, and that the only way to have a "free" society is to live in a police state.
And pretty much all political parties are pushing for the massive surveillance society to protect them from the terrorists. Sadly, if the goal was to destroy the way of life, the battle has been lost.
So I'm a little rusty on doing shady things on the intertubes which could get me banned...
For attackers, the whole automated system would cost only $110 a day, per IP address, and would allow them to crack around 63,000 CAPTCHAs in 24 hours from one IP address without being detected and getting banned.
And I would be doing this... why?
So I can spam Google and Facebook? Really, it's that lucrative that you'd spend $110/day/IP?
I've never even seen a Captcha for Google, and I really have no idea of when you'd see them, or why you'd pay to break them.
Is the interweb so utterly broken that people are paying to get past to spam discussion boards? Oh, hell, what am I saying, of course it is.
i have to say that you're definitely not using the terms "100%" and "brick" in ways that agree with common usage
I've already said it's not technically "bricking", in that an update leaves a device inoperable. This is more like leaving it completely inoperable in some other way.
But this is from Revolv's own damned website:
What happens to my Revolv service?
As of May 15, 2016, Revolv service will no longer be available. The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work.
When I say 100%, I mean it in the mathematically exact sense. The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work.
Read that again, one more damned time: The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work.
That's right, the hub will have ZERO functionality. It is a useless blob, with no function. It is, bricked.
Make absolutely no bones about it, unless you can give me a different fucking definition for this device will no longer function in an way shape or form, and refute the fact that the company themselves say on their own web site The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work, then, please, do fucking tell me in which my usage of "100%" and "brick" fail to agree with common usage.
Unless you reverse engineer the entire infrastructure, reconfigure the hub to use your infrastructure, and build yourself a control mechanism, are you asserting a non-functioning item is still semantically, a functioning item?
Because Revolv themselves says in no uncertain terms that The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work.
Nada. Zip. Dead. Finito. No more anything.
I'd call that, for all intents and purposes, bricked. Because the device you purchased is essentially a paper weight.
So, please, feel free to provide alternate facts, but don't just fucking claim I'm using the terms wrong, because if you can't offer anything beyond that, I don't give a shit.
and the FBI's top attorney is worried some of the platform's more than 1 billion global users will take advantage of the move to hide their crime- or terrorism-related communications
The problem is user may attempt to take advantage of the move to hide their perfectly legal and private endeavors which in no way break the law.
As usual, FBI General Counsel James Baker and his kind are outright lying, and asserting you do not have a legal right to do things anonymously or without your government knowing, and that many of those people don't give a fuck what the FBI wants because our rights are not defined by assholes who feel we should have no right to privacy if it impedes the ability of government spy on us.
Why, FBI General Counsel James Baker and his entire family need to be sure their entire lives are made public so that we can be assured he is not misusing his office to conduct illegal business.
The short version of this is: too fucking bad, there are legally valid reasons to have encryption, the world isn't subject to this asshole's definition of "valid", and he doesn't get to decide without oversight or process that he is entitled to any of this data.
But like all these modern fascists, he wants the right to see everything we do, and then decide if it's legal.
Fuck that. I think the entire rest of the world should start using real, hardened encryption the US has no access, and send a big "fuck off" and say it's none of your damned business.
Stop pretending that undermining our rights is necessary to protect our rights. Because that's a fucking lie.
As much as it sounds like I'm flippantly describing a level of hyper-vigilance and paranoia which sounds absurd, anything less than that is going to sooner or later bite you on the ass.
Everybody keeps saying "stupid users, it's their own fault". And, really, it's increasingly hard to say that.
You literally have to act like a paranoid nut job around incoming emails these days. It's anything but a normal state for humans. People just don't consistently maintain this level of distrust over a long period of time.
The problem is it takes only about a 1-2% success rate to make spam effective. Probably far far less when it's this targeted.
Say you're in an organization of 1000 people... the security of your network is determined by the 10-20 most gullible people in your organization... at least 5 of which will be in management. Think about the dumbest 1-2% of your organization, and think "dear god, are we really depending on them for our overall security?"
And, really, "effort" is a relative term when it's a computer doing all the heavy lifting. It's not like someone has to individually type all of those messages.
It clearly works, or it would have stopped on its won by now.
But the more convincing it looks, and the more information is has about you, the more likely people will fall for this.
By the time you're talking about phishing crafted to this level of detail, it has more than enough information in it to make you think "holy crap, this shit looks real".
The problem is the level of paranoia internet safety seems to require would almost be a clinical condition in meatspace... and that isn't something normal people have.
I mean, it's definitely not a normal state to consider everything anybody says to you to likely to be a conspiracy to defraud you. But increasingly email, and even incoming telephone calls, require a level of paranoia, distrust, and misanthropy as to make you crazy by more normal standards. The world IS full of assholes who ARE out to get you and ARE actively lying to you.
To your average person who just wants some email and access to the intertubes, doing that would require a level of cognitive dissonance which would cause you to never leave your house.
Fortunately, many of us here already exhibit these traits naturally, and already don't leave the house, so we can adjust to it. But for more normal people, it really is a big leap.
I mean, picture trying to get your grandmother to exhibit as much paranoia as avoiding this stuff would require. Next time you went to visit she'd meet you with a shotgun and refuse to let you in.
In the US, the Democrats and those that support them are oppressive of individual rights
Oh, bullshit.
In the US most Republicans want to overturn the right of women to have abortions. In the US the Republicans want to entrench the right of Christians to discriminate, while wanting to ensure they can't be discriminated against.
Both sides of US politics want to control some aspects of individual rights. But don't fucking tell me that the Republicans do not also wish to do things which are oppressive of individual rights.
Because it is so much a steaming pile of delusional bullshit is isn't fucking funny.
From the outside looking in, US Republicans largely to seek exceptionalism for Christian values, and impose those on others. That's not supporting individual rights. That's some asshole saying that "his" individual rights should trump the individual rights of someone else.
That shit may fly in the US where people believe this stupid narrative. But there is no way in hell you can argue that Republicans and the Tea Party are anything BUT advancing the rights of one group at the expense of another.
But, hey, if you want to defend the right to be a racist douchebag who retains the right to discriminate because you feel god has personally given you permission to be an asshole... then you should be OK with giving the rest of society the ability to say "sorry, we don't serve bigoted assholes here".
If you think you get to discriminate, while being free from being discriminated against, then I'm afraid you really are just acting like your "individual rights" are more important than someone else because your religion makes you special.
And, I'm afraid ISIS and the Taliban think the same bullshit. And don't give us the bullshit that your Democrats are some evil oppressive regime while your own Republicans want to do the same thing on different issues.
Your hypocrisy and bullshit is your own damned problem.
Liberalism is all about centralizing power in a large government structure and keeping a very short leash on all citizens, convservatism on the other hand is about keeping power decentralized and in the hands of the individual and ensuring that nobody can ever be a slave to an authoritarian central regime.
Do you actually know the definition of those words except as they pertain to US politics and how you think they work?
In many places, "conservatism" is the authoritarian central regime. ISIS and the Taliban are "conservative".
And if you think American conservatives around about centralized power, look at it from the perspective of not being a Christian. "Conservative" in the US means "entrenching Christianity as being the highest authority with the ability to control the lives of others according to that".
Sorry, but you are so clueless it isn't funny. And the fact that you think "conservatism" in the US means any of that shit says you have no real understanding of it, just the fiction "conservatives" in the US like to tell themselves.
The people who want to overturn the right of women to have abortions, or entrench the right of religious people to be assholes... they only are interested in protecting the rights of a specific group of people, but they actually wish to control the rights of others.
Most highly liberal governments are also highly oppressive? You haven't got a fucking clue what that word means.
The US Constitution is the most liberal document you can imagine.
Slashdot Mirror
And, as usual, you're a hot headed asshole, and I don't give a fuck to read any of the rest of your bullshit.
You consistently act like a childish idiot, so go fuck yourself.
You want to use your big-boy words and act civil, great. Otherwise go back to fucking your sister.
Which is why Javascript also needs to be much more tightly controlled than simply running any damned thing on the page.
Your average web page has 10-20 3rd parties, all of which want to run javascript, flash, set cookies, and do a host of other crap. Advertising has pretty much fucked up the permission model of the internet by saying "you need to let every asshole run anything they want because you have no idea if it's part of the functionality of the site or an ad, but we just assume you'll let it all run".
Yeah, sorry, no. Flash is straight up disabled or uninstalled. I'll selectively whitelist sites who I trust, or at least temporarily do so. But almost no 3rd party scripts or content are EVER allowed ... because I don't want ads, and because I don't trust random web pages to run scripts. Because they're not trustworthy.
If Javascript has only one big namespace, then maybe that needs to be fixed? Security holes like cross-site scripting and other stuff are enabled by web sites insisting they be able to write the most presumptively insecure code and then let it be the user's problem.
This stuff needs to be sandboxed, treated like it's potentially hostile, and locked down from being able to do anything to the host computer. Instead what we have is stuff running which we have no idea what it is, which may or may not be malicious, and which can actively impact the host machine.
It's time we stopped treating web pages like they're trusted by default, because so much of the web these days simply can't be trusted.
Stop letting the advertisers tell us how the internet should work, and stop letting them be the ones who cause the damned thing to be insecure in the first place.
Right, that way if some crazy guy goes on a shooting rampage or starts raping female passengers they can just say "why, we just let free people work and if passengers want safety and assurance we're not sending out psychopaths they're free to conduct their own background checks".
Sorry, but people do kind of expect when they request a cab -- oh, sorry, an illegal car-for-hire pretending it's an unregulated ride sharing service to which laws don't apply -- that a fucking serial killer isn't being sent to them.
See, one of the many fucking laws Uber claims don't apply to it are things like criminal background checks to protect the public safety. Oh, and commercial licenses, proper insurance, vehicle inspections, and shit like that.
Uber's entire business model is basically saying "you know all those laws places have enacted to ensure passenger safety and the life, well, none of them apply to us".
In this case, Uber straight up lied about the safety assurances they could give about drivers, and mislead passengers into thinking they conducted their background checks to a higher standard than other companies, and actually used terms like "safe" in their marketing.
So, yeah, when you lie to the public about how safe you are, and fail to do the level of background checks you suggest you do, people find out about it, and your dumb ass gets fined.
Funny, I use the back button for sites requiring Flash.
The only things I truly need Flash for are work related training, which periodically requires I re-enable it. But I won't even run my work browser with it enabled.
No way in hell I'd ever consider running Flash by default ... the idea of letting random websites let random third parties run arbitrary code is so utterly moronic as to defy belief.
To me Flash is primarily an ad platform. If there are useful sites requiring Flash to work, I'm afraid I've never seen them, or don't consider them useful. I don't use video on the intertubes, because I don't care.
It seems like Flash has had at least one major security exploit every month for over 15 years, which tells me the entire platform and its security model are so defective that it has to be in the "don't trust by default" category.
I have no interest in letting advertisers, or anybody else, have access to anything which runs arbitrary code on my machine just because I visited a web page.
Not a zero day exploit in Flash. Why, I'm utterly traumatized by this, my faith in humanity has been utterly ruined, why I ... oh, fuck it ...
Yawn, yet another zero day exploit in a steaming turd of a technology which has been an endless series of security holes for almost 20 years now.
And, having been largely Flash free for at least 15 of those years, all I can say is "enjoy your quality software, suckers".
Honestly, the only thing which has cumulatively had more security holes than Flash is Windows. I honestly don't know why people keep trusting it, because it really has been a terrible security risk forever, and disabling it is usually the first thing I do in a browser.
What a strange way of thinking of it ... so we have a Venn diagram, and then it's Earth and non-Earth. That's a little too simplistic.
In your scenario, we'll have Earth, Mars, Venus, Alpha Centauri, Vulcan, Ceti Alpha V, and what have you. But they'll all be boring because they're "not Earth".
They may not be universally valuable, but like people collect souvenirs, they'll have some sentimental attachment. Or they'll be sufficiently rare as toe have a degree of uniqueness.
Even if we were space faring, a rock from the furthest planet in the universe is worth more than the one you're standing on, because it's harder to get another one.
The reality is, there's a relatively small amount of material we call "non-Earth" which we can access. You're right, they are deemed special because they come from someplace else, and not everybody can have one.
But you'd have to be a space faring species who can instantaneously travel anywhere in the universe to say that rocks from further away and harder to get won't have some cachet to them.
It's not like we'd become a space faring civilization (assuming we ever actually do before we go extinct) and suddenly all sense of distance and place of origin disappears.
But you sounds jaded about space rock to an extent that seems to imply you figure you'll have access to rocks from the entire universe within a few weeks. Right now, here on planet Earth, in any meaningful sense of the word ... "space rocks" are very rare, and to people who really want them, quite valuable.
But it will always be true that the further away it's from, and the harder to get it is, the more value people will assign to it.
No, the free market relies on suckers who don't know any better getting hoodwinked.
And then makes the absurd claim that a sufficiently large number of suckers will fix the problem of lying bastards hoodwinking suckers.
There is not, never has been, and never will be a free market -- informed consumers making intelligent choices based on good information will simply never happen ... and hoping that industry players aren't lying, thieving assholes who do their utmost to deceive, hide information, and collude to rig the game ... well, that's simply impossible.
The impossible premises of a free market defy logic, human nature, and reality. You might as well believe in the tooth fairy.
People who talk about the free market are either part of the con game, or have been so utterly conned as to think they're making sense.
So, any random idiot will be able to spam you without trying hard?
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong on that one ... sorry, you should have to look it up to prove you're allowed to send to me.
Just any old business gets this because they say so?
Yeah, whatever, yet more crap from Facebook to ensure gets blocked so I don't have to deal with it. Just like I don't consent to being tracked by these assholes, I don't see why I would want any form of interaction with this.
I'm betting the amount of unwanted messages will be epic.
Please, don't confuse illiteracy with 'vernacular'.
"Should of" is NOT 'vernacular', it's making random meat noises to approximate language and failing to grasp something they taught you fairly early in school.
It is hearing sloppy speaking, turning that into a sloppy understanding of the words you're using, and then using that in a written form which demonstrates you think the incoherent mumbling you do in the real world corresponds to speaking the language.
"Should of" is so wrong it defies belief.
Do you sincerely believe that crap? Or have you convinced yourself of it and need to convince the rest of us?
It certainly isn't leagues ahead, and there are things where the ability to manage via GUI is pretty much non-existent.
I've been using Linux since the mid 90s, FreeBSD since the late 90s, and Windows (grudgingly at first) since the early 00's ... I've used Android, iOS, and others ... and unless Linux has jumped forwards in the last few years by huge amounts, it is in no way "leagues" ahead of anything, and the absence of certain things except in a toy OSS version which may or may not work is a big limiting step.
I can't take you seriously as someone who isn't a raving fanboi. Because the last I saw, the Linux desktop still has some glaring holes and stuff you can't do from within a GUI, doesn't do auto-detection of things nearly as well, and still requires you to drop down to being root in a command line for many things.
When you can put my mother in front of it, and every admin task she could ever need to do is intuitive, easy to find, and accessible via GUI, and she can buy something at Staples, plug it in and use it withing 15 minutes ... Well, I might believe you.
Until then, you're way over stating the facts.
Sometimes what it lacks is functionality.
Not so long ago, on an Ubuntu VM (I think), I was trying to change some system configuration or another.
There simply was no interface to edit whatever it was I was trying to do. You just sort of ran off the end of the earth, and then you were on your own.
Sometimes what Linux (or even FreeBSD) desktops lack is the actual ability to fully control the machine from the GUI, and then you rely on someone being able to drop to the command line and do the real magic -- which is fine if you can do it, and useless if you can't.
What is still needs is to have all of the functionality, instead of most of the functionality. It needs to stop being something you build in a kit or have to endless search the interwebs for trying to solve how to do it.
And, like it or not, it needs better support from software vendors ... I've used the same tax program for over a decade, I rely on that ... don't tell me to use Penguin Tax 0.1 because it's kind almost the same thing and doesn't work in my country and hasn't been updated in 4 years ... don't tell me I can use a web interface, I'm not submitting my fucking tax information on a web interface to a company I don't trust.
The photo editing software which came with my Canon camera ... I want to use that. Not some abandoned piece of crap which kinda sorta does some of what I need. The software to control my TomTom and do updates? Or update the GPS I use for golf? I need all of those things. There is no Linux version.
Computers are tools, not toys. I have some tasks I need to do, and either the platform does them, using the tools I want, or it doesn't. And I don't wish to spend hours trying to re-discover some arcanum I knew in the late 90s about UNIX.
For a good chunk of ordinary desktop stuff, sure, Linux has most of that covered. But as soon as you go off the path, or into something which requires commercial software (which exists and gets used no matter what your ideology tells you) ... then it becomes a largely useless thing.
I still keep VMs around to play with, or because I can shred through some data better with a UNIX command line than with anything else.
But I have yet to be able to rid myself of Windows entirely, which means my Windows machine is more likely to be where I run my Linux VMs
It's bots and capchtas all the way down. ;-)
Well, it's simple ... hire a bot to solve the captchas for you.
For the last 15 years it's been the land of the scared and desperate who will happily give up their rights and freedoms and believe that is helping protect their rights and freedoms.
The extent to which the average American seems to accept "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" is absolutely alarming.
They'll still tell you they're free, because you won't get hauled off for criticizing the government (yet), but they're ignoring that the FBI et al have decided the Constitution is just too damned inconvenient, and that the only way to have a "free" society is to live in a police state.
And pretty much all political parties are pushing for the massive surveillance society to protect them from the terrorists. Sadly, if the goal was to destroy the way of life, the battle has been lost.
Google has a Room of Requirement?
Oh, man, I never get to have any fun.
So I'm a little rusty on doing shady things on the intertubes which could get me banned ...
And I would be doing this ... why?
So I can spam Google and Facebook? Really, it's that lucrative that you'd spend $110/day/IP?
I've never even seen a Captcha for Google, and I really have no idea of when you'd see them, or why you'd pay to break them.
Is the interweb so utterly broken that people are paying to get past to spam discussion boards? Oh, hell, what am I saying, of course it is.
You really, really do not want to know. But it will definitely make your eyes water.
I've already said it's not technically "bricking", in that an update leaves a device inoperable. This is more like leaving it completely inoperable in some other way.
But this is from Revolv's own damned website:
When I say 100%, I mean it in the mathematically exact sense. The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work.
Read that again, one more damned time: The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work.
That's right, the hub will have ZERO functionality. It is a useless blob, with no function. It is, bricked.
Make absolutely no bones about it, unless you can give me a different fucking definition for this device will no longer function in an way shape or form, and refute the fact that the company themselves say on their own web site The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work, then, please, do fucking tell me in which my usage of "100%" and "brick" fail to agree with common usage.
Unless you reverse engineer the entire infrastructure, reconfigure the hub to use your infrastructure, and build yourself a control mechanism, are you asserting a non-functioning item is still semantically, a functioning item?
Because Revolv themselves says in no uncertain terms that The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work.
Nada. Zip. Dead. Finito. No more anything.
I'd call that, for all intents and purposes, bricked. Because the device you purchased is essentially a paper weight.
So, please, feel free to provide alternate facts, but don't just fucking claim I'm using the terms wrong, because if you can't offer anything beyond that, I don't give a shit.
The problem is user may attempt to take advantage of the move to hide their perfectly legal and private endeavors which in no way break the law.
As usual, FBI General Counsel James Baker and his kind are outright lying, and asserting you do not have a legal right to do things anonymously or without your government knowing, and that many of those people don't give a fuck what the FBI wants because our rights are not defined by assholes who feel we should have no right to privacy if it impedes the ability of government spy on us.
Why, FBI General Counsel James Baker and his entire family need to be sure their entire lives are made public so that we can be assured he is not misusing his office to conduct illegal business.
The short version of this is: too fucking bad, there are legally valid reasons to have encryption, the world isn't subject to this asshole's definition of "valid", and he doesn't get to decide without oversight or process that he is entitled to any of this data.
But like all these modern fascists, he wants the right to see everything we do, and then decide if it's legal.
Fuck that. I think the entire rest of the world should start using real, hardened encryption the US has no access, and send a big "fuck off" and say it's none of your damned business.
Stop pretending that undermining our rights is necessary to protect our rights. Because that's a fucking lie.
You pretty much need to disable it yourself, which means you need to know to do it.
Microsoft still treats auto-run like it's not a terrible idea.
It's actually kind of scary that anybody would keep doing that.
As far as I can see, Windows still excitedly runs anything it sees.
Of course I'm not kidding.
As much as it sounds like I'm flippantly describing a level of hyper-vigilance and paranoia which sounds absurd, anything less than that is going to sooner or later bite you on the ass.
Everybody keeps saying "stupid users, it's their own fault". And, really, it's increasingly hard to say that.
You literally have to act like a paranoid nut job around incoming emails these days. It's anything but a normal state for humans. People just don't consistently maintain this level of distrust over a long period of time.
The problem is it takes only about a 1-2% success rate to make spam effective. Probably far far less when it's this targeted.
Say you're in an organization of 1000 people ... the security of your network is determined by the 10-20 most gullible people in your organization ... at least 5 of which will be in management. Think about the dumbest 1-2% of your organization, and think "dear god, are we really depending on them for our overall security?"
And, really, "effort" is a relative term when it's a computer doing all the heavy lifting. It's not like someone has to individually type all of those messages.
It clearly works, or it would have stopped on its won by now.
But the more convincing it looks, and the more information is has about you, the more likely people will fall for this.
By the time you're talking about phishing crafted to this level of detail, it has more than enough information in it to make you think "holy crap, this shit looks real".
The problem is the level of paranoia internet safety seems to require would almost be a clinical condition in meatspace ... and that isn't something normal people have.
I mean, it's definitely not a normal state to consider everything anybody says to you to likely to be a conspiracy to defraud you. But increasingly email, and even incoming telephone calls, require a level of paranoia, distrust, and misanthropy as to make you crazy by more normal standards. The world IS full of assholes who ARE out to get you and ARE actively lying to you.
To your average person who just wants some email and access to the intertubes, doing that would require a level of cognitive dissonance which would cause you to never leave your house.
Fortunately, many of us here already exhibit these traits naturally, and already don't leave the house, so we can adjust to it. But for more normal people, it really is a big leap.
I mean, picture trying to get your grandmother to exhibit as much paranoia as avoiding this stuff would require. Next time you went to visit she'd meet you with a shotgun and refuse to let you in.
Oh, bullshit.
In the US most Republicans want to overturn the right of women to have abortions. In the US the Republicans want to entrench the right of Christians to discriminate, while wanting to ensure they can't be discriminated against.
Both sides of US politics want to control some aspects of individual rights. But don't fucking tell me that the Republicans do not also wish to do things which are oppressive of individual rights.
Because it is so much a steaming pile of delusional bullshit is isn't fucking funny.
From the outside looking in, US Republicans largely to seek exceptionalism for Christian values, and impose those on others. That's not supporting individual rights. That's some asshole saying that "his" individual rights should trump the individual rights of someone else.
That shit may fly in the US where people believe this stupid narrative. But there is no way in hell you can argue that Republicans and the Tea Party are anything BUT advancing the rights of one group at the expense of another.
But, hey, if you want to defend the right to be a racist douchebag who retains the right to discriminate because you feel god has personally given you permission to be an asshole ... then you should be OK with giving the rest of society the ability to say "sorry, we don't serve bigoted assholes here".
If you think you get to discriminate, while being free from being discriminated against, then I'm afraid you really are just acting like your "individual rights" are more important than someone else because your religion makes you special.
And, I'm afraid ISIS and the Taliban think the same bullshit. And don't give us the bullshit that your Democrats are some evil oppressive regime while your own Republicans want to do the same thing on different issues.
Your hypocrisy and bullshit is your own damned problem.
Do you actually know the definition of those words except as they pertain to US politics and how you think they work?
In many places, "conservatism" is the authoritarian central regime. ISIS and the Taliban are "conservative".
And if you think American conservatives around about centralized power, look at it from the perspective of not being a Christian. "Conservative" in the US means "entrenching Christianity as being the highest authority with the ability to control the lives of others according to that".
Sorry, but you are so clueless it isn't funny. And the fact that you think "conservatism" in the US means any of that shit says you have no real understanding of it, just the fiction "conservatives" in the US like to tell themselves.
The people who want to overturn the right of women to have abortions, or entrench the right of religious people to be assholes ... they only are interested in protecting the rights of a specific group of people, but they actually wish to control the rights of others.
Most highly liberal governments are also highly oppressive? You haven't got a fucking clue what that word means.
The US Constitution is the most liberal document you can imagine.