Are there any sufficient FLOSS firewalls that can block all of the reporting back to Microsoft for Windows 7, 8, and 10, without breaking the automatic updates?
How is it trolling? What with the spyware that was quietly implemented in Windows 7 and 8.1, it's a perfectly legitimate question.
My coworker had a problem recently with a bit of malware that kept changing Chrome's search engine to Bing whenever Chrome was installed. It was a bitch to remove it (it was nestled in some obscure registry, and I had to decompile the bastard to find out where). The kicker is that he got it off of a program that Microsoft recommended to him to open a certain file extension.
Oh, the debunked "religion impedes scientific progress" argument. Right. I'm sure the mass murders of scientists by atheist dictators like Mao and Pol Pot have done wonders for science in comparison to irrational religious fanatics like Isaac Newton, Ibn al-Haytham and Roger Bacon. Religion ruins everything!
I guess puritanism is a pretty good thing, if it's so all-encompassing that it can include frowning upon adultery, as opposed to the extreme social rigidity of the Puritans of colonial America.
Furthermore, I'm trying to see who in this case is forcing their beliefs on anybody? The hackers didn't, all they did was steal something valuable (private information) and turn it over.
So then I assume you missed the part where the hackers basically said "we're in 'yer interrubes, we've got 'yer stuff.. close down 'yer immoralz or we're gonna release teh customer info".
This was either someone trying to force their beliefs on someone, or a disgruntled employee who decided to be an asshole and punish the site users instead of the company.
But don't believe for a minute all these guys did was steal some information and release it without their own agenda here. Because that's complete crap.
I'm sorry, but how is that forcing anybody to do anything? Who here had a gun pointed to their head?
Look, if you cheat on your wife, that's NOT OUR BUSINESS.
You don't get the right to vilify and laugh and insult someone because they betrayed someone else.
Why do you think everyone has a right to cheat on their spouses, but nobody has the right to the free speech of criticizing that behavior?
Yes, blame the victim because they violated our society's moral code, rather than an actual law.
Worst of all, I have never seen a case where someone cheated on a virtuous spouse. Every single case of cheating I have ever heard of or seen among my friends was one shallow shmuck marrying a clear and obvious player and then getting upset that the player played.
My sister married her law professor - after he divorced his 2nd wife (yes, she slept with him before he was divorced). Surprise surprise, he cheated on her also. What happened to her is pretty much exactly like what happens most of the time.
Why do others not to get to blame the victim, but you do when you think they deserved it?
100% of the worlds pain and misery come from these people who find glee in forcing their beliefs on others.
While I can see how you could (very, very, very widely) stretch "forcing their beliefs on others" to encompass rape, thievery, etc., I am wondering how you also include natural disasters, plagues, and famines into that categorization.
Furthermore, I'm trying to see who in this case is forcing their beliefs on anybody? The hackers didn't, all they did was steal something valuable (private information) and turn it over. No force involved there. Editorialists that have come to the support of the hackers? Not at all, they are just voicing their opinion (even if you seem to disagree with it).
Um, ok? So you think that Mozilla being a registered nonprofit means it cannot be the case that their board of directors are getting under-the-table money?
IANAL, but skimming over the link you provided, I can find some loopholes in any case. For instance, in the three-step process to determine appropriate compensation, #2 is: "[an] independent body should take a look at "comparable" salary and benefits data, such as data available from salary and benefit surveys, to learn what employers of a SIMILAR BUDGET SIZE that are located in the same, or a similar geographic region, pay their senior leaders" (caps added by me).
So if Mozilla increases their budget size by monetizing the balls out of Firefox and inserting ads and third-party binaries, then they can pay themselves more, no?
[T]he board of directors decided to just monetize the balls out of Firefox and ride a golden parachute down to its destruction.
The IRS has some pretty rigorously enforced guidelines about executive and employee compensation at 501(c)(3) nonprofits, like Mozilla. It's a complicated topic, but this gives a good introduction to the overall idea: https://www.councilofnonprofit...
The executive summary is that there's nothing anyone can do to make a nontrival personal profit off of anything Mozilla does. So you can sling mud all you want, but accusations that decisions at Mozilla are driven by some kind of profit motive are borne of plain ignorance.
You're technically right that it's born of "ignorance" since I lack any inside information about the matter and I'm speculating. That being said, how naive does one have to be to believe that Mozilla integrated Pocket directly into Firefox (as opposed to ABP, NoScript, Force HTTPS, Privacy Badger, etc.) out of the goodness in the directors' hearts, and not to make a buck?
Chrome does spy on you, but the options which instruct it to do so (telemetry, phishing protection, sentence completion, etc.) can be easily disabled from the Settings menu.
As to your claim that Firefox is NOT spyware: it collects telemetry in the exact same form as Chrome does (default on, can be disabled). Plus it serves you ads based on your browsing history now. Plus there's those closed-source third-party binaries that only God knows what they're doing. One has to be either insane or partisan to say that Chrome is spyware but FF is not.
I'm convinced that either the Mozilla Foundation is run by complete mental midgets or plants by Google who are determined to sabotage the browser until the whole foundation shuts down.
Nah, it's not Google holding the reins. The default search for Firefox used to be Google, but it was switched to Yahoo, which is a front for Bing. So if anybody's hiding under a Trojan horse at Mozilla, it's Microsoft.
But that's unlikely. No, I think what happened is that around the time Brendan Eich was forced to resign due to some manufactured outrage, the board of directors decided to just monetize the balls out of Firefox and ride a golden parachute down to its destruction. Three weeks later they implemented Australis and told the complainers to piss off. Then came Pocket. Then came the spyware ads. Then came the DRM. Soon comes the silently-installed crapware, charging for extensions, directors' resignations with generous severance pay.
Interoperability means everybody will start developing extensions solely for Chrome, since it's less work to make one build for every browser. So what's the point of Firefox after that happens?
I advocate for Pale Moon and Chromium. They're both FLOSS. Firefox no longer is, because it has integrated third-party binaries (Netflix DRM, Pocket). Consequently, Firefox is now less secure (see http://it.slashdot.org/story/1... ). This is also to say nothing about the build-in advertisements that read your browsing history, and the awful performance chokes it suffers from.
Translation: "Linux is free" often does not factor in real-world retraining and retooling costs.
Want to push OpenOffice / Linux as cheaper alternatives? Wonderful. Just dont pretend that theyre actually free when it comes to use in a business, especially with folks used to a different system.
Sure, it costs a bit to train somebody to use Unix and LibreOffice. Of course, that training is basically permanent, because the IT administration can keep them on the same user interfaces forever. Contrast this to MSOffice and Windows, whose shitty and random UI rollercoasters (Ribbon & Metro being the prime offenders) have probably cost the world tens of millions of dollars in retraining.
By all metrics, LiMux has gone extraordinary well for Munich. The complainers are a bunch of politicians being paid off by Microsoft; note how there's no actual bureaucrats expressing dissatisfaction with it.
I know it is ubiquitous in journalism to abbreviate e.g. "two senior members of the city's IT committee" to "Munich", but it is not correct, and the imprecision of such phrases can wildly skew the impression that a reader gets versus the facts.
Examine the headline: "City of Munich Struggling With Basic Linux Functionality". Without any sort of clarifying modifier to "City of Munich", one is liable to take this to mean a significant portion of the populace (millions of people), when in fact the subject aforementioned is really a small group of sabre-rattlers.
Just because you don't use anything but the most basic of features in Office doesn't mean that LibreOffice is equivalent.
The basic functions of LO plus a few custom Python scripts get my work done. On the other hand, if I was trapped on VBA and MSOffice extensions, I would be fucked as soon as Microsoft foisted some shitty compatibility-breaking update, wouldn't I?
While I agree that sometimes proprietary software is better than FLOSS, in this case it's not true. There's nothing Office365 does that LibreOffice cannot. And, if you subscribe to the former, you're locked into paying rent (with your data essentially held hostage by MS), having to retrain everyone whensoever Microsoft decides it wants a new ribbon/Metro start screen/whatever else, losing all of your custom scripts, add-ons and extensions because MS scoffs at backwards compatibility, etc.
LibreOffice has much better compatibility with MSOffice documents than OpenOffice does. In fact, it has much better compatibility with MSOffice documents than MSOffice does; everything in my office routinely gets fucked up by Office 2010.
But I agree with your fundamental premise. Why deal with a "veritable fuckfest of reformatting, repaginating, fucked up graphics, etc" when you can just use LibreOffice and not have to deal with whatever stupid updates that Microsoft foists on you this month?
I am an editor of sorts. My coworkers all use MSWord 2010, and the formatting gets thrashed every time they pass a document around. Inevitably I am called to fix it, and do so by opening it in LibreOffice.
Furthermore, I would argue that retraining everybody to Microsoft's cloud docs itself constitutes "a considerable waste of time and productivity", but I guess whoever in Pesaro's IT department that got under-the-table money disagrees.
and use Chromium. It's 100% FLOSS (Firefox no longer is because of all the third-party binaries integrated therein), doesn't choke to death on memory leaks, and the default telemetry collection (spyware) is just as invasive as Firefox's.
I used to like Debian, but sine switching to systemd with Debian 8, I've had all sorts of problems with it, and I've wasted too much of my time trying to debug stupid boot/init issues that just shouldn't happen in a stable release of any distro.... I don't like to admit it, but Windows has come a long way. If they can provide me with an OS that boots consistently,...
Are you really sure you want to exult Windows 10 because its booting "just works" when not even three days ago we had a story about a Windows 10 update (which cannot be turned off in Home edition, btw) that caused an unstoppable reboot cycle? http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
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Are there any sufficient FLOSS firewalls that can block all of the reporting back to Microsoft for Windows 7, 8, and 10, without breaking the automatic updates?
How is it trolling? What with the spyware that was quietly implemented in Windows 7 and 8.1, it's a perfectly legitimate question.
My coworker had a problem recently with a bit of malware that kept changing Chrome's search engine to Bing whenever Chrome was installed. It was a bitch to remove it (it was nestled in some obscure registry, and I had to decompile the bastard to find out where). The kicker is that he got it off of a program that Microsoft recommended to him to open a certain file extension.
Oh, the debunked "religion impedes scientific progress" argument. Right. I'm sure the mass murders of scientists by atheist dictators like Mao and Pol Pot have done wonders for science in comparison to irrational religious fanatics like Isaac Newton, Ibn al-Haytham and Roger Bacon. Religion ruins everything!
Wouldn't it make more sense to have a voice-activated power button on the frame, rather than the CPU doing this?
I guess puritanism is a pretty good thing, if it's so all-encompassing that it can include frowning upon adultery, as opposed to the extreme social rigidity of the Puritans of colonial America.
So then I assume you missed the part where the hackers basically said "we're in 'yer interrubes, we've got 'yer stuff .. close down 'yer immoralz or we're gonna release teh customer info".
This was either someone trying to force their beliefs on someone, or a disgruntled employee who decided to be an asshole and punish the site users instead of the company.
But don't believe for a minute all these guys did was steal some information and release it without their own agenda here. Because that's complete crap.
I'm sorry, but how is that forcing anybody to do anything? Who here had a gun pointed to their head?
Look, if you cheat on your wife, that's NOT OUR BUSINESS.
You don't get the right to vilify and laugh and insult someone because they betrayed someone else.
Why do you think everyone has a right to cheat on their spouses, but nobody has the right to the free speech of criticizing that behavior?
Yes, blame the victim because they violated our society's moral code, rather than an actual law.
Worst of all, I have never seen a case where someone cheated on a virtuous spouse. Every single case of cheating I have ever heard of or seen among my friends was one shallow shmuck marrying a clear and obvious player and then getting upset that the player played.
My sister married her law professor - after he divorced his 2nd wife (yes, she slept with him before he was divorced). Surprise surprise, he cheated on her also. What happened to her is pretty much exactly like what happens most of the time.
Why do others not to get to blame the victim, but you do when you think they deserved it?
100% of the worlds pain and misery come from these people who find glee in forcing their beliefs on others.
While I can see how you could (very, very, very widely) stretch "forcing their beliefs on others" to encompass rape, thievery, etc., I am wondering how you also include natural disasters, plagues, and famines into that categorization.
Furthermore, I'm trying to see who in this case is forcing their beliefs on anybody? The hackers didn't, all they did was steal something valuable (private information) and turn it over. No force involved there. Editorialists that have come to the support of the hackers? Not at all, they are just voicing their opinion (even if you seem to disagree with it).
Um, ok? So you think that Mozilla being a registered nonprofit means it cannot be the case that their board of directors are getting under-the-table money?
IANAL, but skimming over the link you provided, I can find some loopholes in any case. For instance, in the three-step process to determine appropriate compensation, #2 is: "[an] independent body should take a look at "comparable" salary and benefits data, such as data available from salary and benefit surveys, to learn what employers of a SIMILAR BUDGET SIZE that are located in the same, or a similar geographic region, pay their senior leaders" (caps added by me).
So if Mozilla increases their budget size by monetizing the balls out of Firefox and inserting ads and third-party binaries, then they can pay themselves more, no?
I did say "I think what happened" to indicate speculation on my part, but ok.
[T]he board of directors decided to just monetize the balls out of Firefox and ride a golden parachute down to its destruction.
The IRS has some pretty rigorously enforced guidelines about executive and employee compensation at 501(c)(3) nonprofits, like Mozilla. It's a complicated topic, but this gives a good introduction to the overall idea: https://www.councilofnonprofit...
The executive summary is that there's nothing anyone can do to make a nontrival personal profit off of anything Mozilla does. So you can sling mud all you want, but accusations that decisions at Mozilla are driven by some kind of profit motive are borne of plain ignorance.
You're technically right that it's born of "ignorance" since I lack any inside information about the matter and I'm speculating. That being said, how naive does one have to be to believe that Mozilla integrated Pocket directly into Firefox (as opposed to ABP, NoScript, Force HTTPS, Privacy Badger, etc.) out of the goodness in the directors' hearts, and not to make a buck?
Chrome does spy on you, but the options which instruct it to do so (telemetry, phishing protection, sentence completion, etc.) can be easily disabled from the Settings menu.
As to your claim that Firefox is NOT spyware: it collects telemetry in the exact same form as Chrome does (default on, can be disabled). Plus it serves you ads based on your browsing history now. Plus there's those closed-source third-party binaries that only God knows what they're doing. One has to be either insane or partisan to say that Chrome is spyware but FF is not.
I'm convinced that either the Mozilla Foundation is run by complete mental midgets or plants by Google who are determined to sabotage the browser until the whole foundation shuts down.
Nah, it's not Google holding the reins. The default search for Firefox used to be Google, but it was switched to Yahoo, which is a front for Bing. So if anybody's hiding under a Trojan horse at Mozilla, it's Microsoft.
But that's unlikely. No, I think what happened is that around the time Brendan Eich was forced to resign due to some manufactured outrage, the board of directors decided to just monetize the balls out of Firefox and ride a golden parachute down to its destruction. Three weeks later they implemented Australis and told the complainers to piss off. Then came Pocket. Then came the spyware ads. Then came the DRM. Soon comes the silently-installed crapware, charging for extensions, directors' resignations with generous severance pay.
Interoperability means everybody will start developing extensions solely for Chrome, since it's less work to make one build for every browser. So what's the point of Firefox after that happens?
I advocate for Pale Moon and Chromium. They're both FLOSS. Firefox no longer is, because it has integrated third-party binaries (Netflix DRM, Pocket). Consequently, Firefox is now less secure (see http://it.slashdot.org/story/1... ). This is also to say nothing about the build-in advertisements that read your browsing history, and the awful performance chokes it suffers from.
Translation: "Linux is free" often does not factor in real-world retraining and retooling costs.
Want to push OpenOffice / Linux as cheaper alternatives? Wonderful. Just dont pretend that theyre actually free when it comes to use in a business, especially with folks used to a different system.
Sure, it costs a bit to train somebody to use Unix and LibreOffice. Of course, that training is basically permanent, because the IT administration can keep them on the same user interfaces forever. Contrast this to MSOffice and Windows, whose shitty and random UI rollercoasters (Ribbon & Metro being the prime offenders) have probably cost the world tens of millions of dollars in retraining.
By all metrics, LiMux has gone extraordinary well for Munich. The complainers are a bunch of politicians being paid off by Microsoft; note how there's no actual bureaucrats expressing dissatisfaction with it.
I know it is ubiquitous in journalism to abbreviate e.g. "two senior members of the city's IT committee" to "Munich", but it is not correct, and the imprecision of such phrases can wildly skew the impression that a reader gets versus the facts.
Examine the headline: "City of Munich Struggling With Basic Linux Functionality". Without any sort of clarifying modifier to "City of Munich", one is liable to take this to mean a significant portion of the populace (millions of people), when in fact the subject aforementioned is really a small group of sabre-rattlers.
why not advertise for System76 and other companies that sell good hardware with Linux pre-installed?
What is the LibreOffice equivalent to PowerPivot?
DataPilot.
Just because you don't use anything but the most basic of features in Office doesn't mean that LibreOffice is equivalent.
The basic functions of LO plus a few custom Python scripts get my work done. On the other hand, if I was trapped on VBA and MSOffice extensions, I would be fucked as soon as Microsoft foisted some shitty compatibility-breaking update, wouldn't I?
While I agree that sometimes proprietary software is better than FLOSS, in this case it's not true. There's nothing Office365 does that LibreOffice cannot. And, if you subscribe to the former, you're locked into paying rent (with your data essentially held hostage by MS), having to retrain everyone whensoever Microsoft decides it wants a new ribbon/Metro start screen/whatever else, losing all of your custom scripts, add-ons and extensions because MS scoffs at backwards compatibility, etc.
LibreOffice has much better compatibility with MSOffice documents than OpenOffice does. In fact, it has much better compatibility with MSOffice documents than MSOffice does; everything in my office routinely gets fucked up by Office 2010.
But I agree with your fundamental premise. Why deal with a "veritable fuckfest of reformatting, repaginating, fucked up graphics, etc" when you can just use LibreOffice and not have to deal with whatever stupid updates that Microsoft foists on you this month?
I am an editor of sorts. My coworkers all use MSWord 2010, and the formatting gets thrashed every time they pass a document around. Inevitably I am called to fix it, and do so by opening it in LibreOffice.
Furthermore, I would argue that retraining everybody to Microsoft's cloud docs itself constitutes "a considerable waste of time and productivity", but I guess whoever in Pesaro's IT department that got under-the-table money disagrees.
and use Chromium. It's 100% FLOSS (Firefox no longer is because of all the third-party binaries integrated therein), doesn't choke to death on memory leaks, and the default telemetry collection (spyware) is just as invasive as Firefox's.
Is it supported merely for legacy systems, or does IBM still find a niche use for AIX? Anybody care to enlighten me?
I used to like Debian, but sine switching to systemd with Debian 8, I've had all sorts of problems with it, and I've wasted too much of my time trying to debug stupid boot/init issues that just shouldn't happen in a stable release of any distro. ... I don't like to admit it, but Windows has come a long way. If they can provide me with an OS that boots consistently, ...
Are you really sure you want to exult Windows 10 because its booting "just works" when not even three days ago we had a story about a Windows 10 update (which cannot be turned off in Home edition, btw) that caused an unstoppable reboot cycle? http://tech.slashdot.org/story...