I know ; just mocking the marketing terms

I’m sure they would call OSX a BSD replacement

No they wouldn’t. That’s Linux, among other things, because when it was gaining popularity, BSDs were defending from lawsuits and rewriting litigious parts belonging to AT&T (that is, preserved from original Unix sources).

Right now the biggest wall from wider consumer adoption of Linux. Is honestly, simply the lack of systems offered to consumers with it. Outside of a few games with kernel level anti cheat. Or highly proprietary specialized softwares. There’s very little that you cannot currently do on Linux that you can do on Windows.

No. Actually no, that’s not the biggest wall.

Under modern Windows you can run software compiled for Windows XP. Under Linux you’ll have a lot of sex with your system before achieving that kind of backwards compatibility.

Since you mentioned BSDs, and they are similar to Linux in daily usage, with FreeBSD you may install compat4x, compat5x and so on packages and run rather old binaries. FreeBSD version of Opera browser (yep, they made a FreeBSD version), which was a binary from Opera Software, didn’t receive an update since 2013 and till 2021 and it was in working condition.

This wall for your typical Windows user is hard to describe. They are doing something the only normal way they understand and are told that they are holding it wrong. Say, they install a package for the previous major version of their distribution. Or just try to run some binary downloaded from somewhere and it tells them angry things about libc version and possibly other libraries.

Also the “advanced” things under Linux are not usable for many people, and the “user-friendly” things are complex and buggy.

Of course, Windows users also would really like to use their familiar Windows applications, but that’s not as important, Wine solves a lot of it.

It actually is a profit-driven ecosystem, otherwise Mr Poettering’s creations would still be something as weird and unpopular as Leechcraft, if somebody remembers that software, and so would Gnome after 2.* and KDE after 3.*, and we would probably have something more interesting instead of Wayland as the coming X11 replacement, but you are right, waiting for the rest of the world to move to Linux before you do is an illogical position to say the least.

If you go to Google and search for xview mailtool screenshots, you might realize just how fucked up today’s email UIs are.

Because they don’t know that MAC is media access control, and Mac is Macintosh.

I suspect it’s the “Mac vs PC” stereotype, and they think C stands for computer and MA stands hell knows for what. Because a PowerPC PC is not a PC, and an ARM PC is not a PC, and a SPARC PC is not a PC (OK, it’s a workstation, of the noble blood, not like the rest), and I think I’ve lost my thought.

My reaction would not be switching to MacOS, because for something the users of which look down on Linux and FreeBSD, with all that “just works” and “made for Terrans” pathos, it surely is frustrating to use.

Just some well-supported enough Linux would do.

And don’t favor resilience in function.

They are still needed, so that non-sociopathic humans would never forget how this works. But just like with fire, it shouldn’t be allowed to spread. Or, as we are talking about sociopaths, cockroach infestation is a fitting analogy. One can breed cockroaches, for, I dunno, some food of the future, but never forget they are very pervasive pests.

Most likely he didn’t clearly see what was hitting him till the end, it’s a common thing with various scheming things. So he expressed what he saw on the façade, while it was some social pressure, possibly even intended for suicidal outcome.

I actually have such a story in my life, and it’s interesting that the person I remember saying most evil sh*t to me during that doesn’t seem logical ; I have a suspicion they were trying to evoke a response in me to some unseen pressure, thus actually help. Possibly even relaying words of my actual enemy in rather grotesque way.

profs using classes as stable of free pussy. admins did not do shit.

I mean, willpower probably kinda leaves the chat when you are put above many young women enthusiastically looking up to you, especially considering how authority affects women, and especially since they are listening to what you have to say.

But! Profs probably should know something about Ulysses and the mast. Or about things you can do, but shouldn’t.

I knew of three instances where professors had affairs with their students, divorced their spouses, married said students, and repeated the process over again a few years later.

Wow.

Yes, that seems like a place I would avoid.

You think a nearly trillion dollar public company has an internal division that writes malware against flaws in its own software in order to harvest data from its own apps. It does this to gain just a bit more data about people it already has a lot of data on, because why not purposely leave active zero days in your own software, right?

You think you are being the smart one here?

No, that’s not what I said. Also cypherpunks and other hobbyists are not that much smarter than corporations and nation-states, to be the only ones to think about plausible deniability.

For example, the whole Windows sources have been given officially for various 3-letter agencies of various countries (Russia included) to study, and of course there are vulnerabilities with the size of such codebase. MS might not have left obvious backdoors and informed FSB of them, but it has given interested parties the ability to find those themselves, which is only a question of work, or maybe make tampered versions of DLLs and what not easier.

Also they are legally obligated to silently comply with a lot of things.

That is wildly conspiratorial thinking, and honestly plain FUD.

WhatsApp and Facebook (before it bought WhatsApp) have both done this, Telegram has done this, MS has done this, even Apple has done this.

when you make up wild cabals that are running double secret malware attacks against themselves inside Google.

You made that up, not me. Should have tried to read what you are being told first.

It was always recognized.

Every time I go to the Interwebs and read what people have to say on security, it’s always the same high horse absolutism.

I’ve read Attwood’s book on Asperger’s syndrome a couple weeks ago. There such absolutism was mentioned as a natural trait of aspies, but one that, when applied to social power dynamics or any military logic, gets you assroped in jail.

People who want to spy on you or read all your communications understand too that general security suffers, but just not having that power is out of question for them, and also with the power they already have the security effect on them personally won’t be too big.

It’s a social problem of the concept of personal freedom being vilified in the Western world via association with organized crime, terrorism, anarchism, you get the idea.

It’s not hard to see that the pattern here is that these things are chosen because they challenge state’s authority and power, because, well, subsets of what’s called organized crime and terrorism that can be prevented by surveillance are not what people generally consider bad, and anarchism is not something bad in any form.

What’s more important, people called that do not need to challenge the state if the state is functional, as in - representative, not oppressive and not a tool for some groups to hurt other groups.

As we’ve seen in all the world history, what’s called organized crime and what’s called terrorism are necessary sometimes to resolve deadlocks in a society. It has never happened in history that a society could function by its formalized laws for long without breaking consistency of those. And it has never happened that an oppressed group\ideology\movement would be able to make its case in accordance with the laws made by its oppressor.

Why I’m typing all this - it’s not a technical problem. It’s a problem of bad people who should be afraid not being afraid and thus acting, and good people who should be afraid not being afraid and thus not acting.

Legal and financial - doubt it. Reputational - counter-propaganda is a thing.

I think your worldview lags behind our current reality. I mean, even in 30-years old reality it would seem a bit naive.

Also you’ve ignored me mentioning things like Pegasus, from our current, not hypothetical, reality.

What do you do? I have been doing some hobby stuff with generating music once a few months.

Nothing serious, but music seems to actually be the only area on desktop (outside of development) where Linux is fully competitive.

Yes. Wars happen. Even corrupt politicians are nicer when their control base is inside the country.

They knew, they were putting backdoors when they needed them.

Now the new administration will take half of the blame in public opinion (that’s how this works) and also half of the profits, so they won’t investigate too strictly those who’ve done such things.

But also words don’t cost anything. They can afford to say the obvious after the deed has been done.

Telegram has its supposedly E2EE protocol which isn’t used by most of Telegram users, but also there have been a few questionable traits found in it.

Google is trusted a bit more than Pavel Durov, but it can well do a similar thing.

And yes, Android is a much larger heap of hay where they can hide a needle.

This is usually used for things like the Moon Landing, where so many folks worked for NASA to make it entirely impossible that the landing was faked.

I think it’s also confirmed by radio transmissions from the Moon received in real time right then by USSR and other countries.

How do spyware services used by nation-state customers, like Pegasus, work?

They use backdoors in commonly used platforms on an industrial scale.

Maybe some of them are vulnerabilities due to honest mistakes, the problem is - the majority of vulnerabilities due to honest mistakes also carry denial of service risks in widespread usage. Which means they get found quickly enough.

Provided they have an open API and don’t ban alternative clients, one can make something kinda similar to TOR in this system, taking from the service provider the identities and channels between them.

Meaning messages routed through a few hops over different users.

Sadly for all these services to have open APIs, there needs to be force applied. And you can’t force someone far stronger than you and with the state on their side.

I laughed so much at that. Encryption is literally just long complicated numbers combined with other long complicated numbers using mathematical formulae. You can’t ban maths.

Now laugh at banning chemistry and physics (guns and explosives and narcotics). Take a laugh at banning murder too - how do you ban every action leading to someone’s death?

and the company must not tell anyone about it

Any “must not tell” law is crap. Unless you signed some NDA knowing full well what it is about.

Any kind of “national secret disclosure” punishment when you didn’t sign anything to get that national secret is the same.

It’s an order given to a free person, not a voluntarily taken obligation.

That said, you can’t fight force with words.