We live in a very strange world when "piracy" has gone from "armed crews of criminal specialists seizing tonnage shipments of goods on the high seas with cannon and sword" to "a regular schmo paying the regular price to use a regular product in the regular way in his regular living room."

the signs of the rot were there when they went after DVD Jon for having the audacity to provide a work around so that he could watch DVD's he'd legally bought on his own personal computer that just didn't have their blessing as it was running Linux...

*sigh*

The conversation was about it being so very cheap to roll out SSL because its trivial to get free SSL certificates. I'm not criticising StartSSL, I'm simply stating that it *isn't* trivial to get wildcard certificates. So the whole "you should use SSL everywhere coz it's free" premise kinda falls down there, since it isn't in fact free.

Not true. Firefox blocked _short_ self signed certs (and yes, it's a stupid move - stick up a big warning by all means, but blocking them completely is insane. Lots of people now can't use FireFox to access legitimate networking hardware that uses short self signed certs). However, make a sensibly long self signed cert and it works fine as it always did.

If your browser is vulnerable to injected malware then you're pretty much screwed already - an attacker just needs to trick you into visiting their site (which can have a perfectly legitimate SSL cert), no MITM injection required.

IE taught us that this kind of thing doesn't happen quickly - web developers _still_ have to deal with IE's buggy rendering, despite good alternatives having been available for 15 years. Ok, IE has got better but it's still not great. Users don't see this stuff as a browser problem - if your website doesn't work right then the users see it as a problem with your website.

And whilst I use StartSSL, it's a pain that you can't get free wildcard certs for your domain...

Well, it is pretty much like real life, but I'm not sure we want to be teaching kids "this is the crap you can expect fom life" rather than inspiring them to do more.

I did take a slight exception to this though:

As far as I can tell from the story, Steven and Brian did nothing wrong at all - clueless Barbie fucks things up and then asks them to fix it, which they do. This bit of the story would probably be pretty similar if you replace Barbie with any clueless person (male or female) who's just infected a bunch of computers with a virus. What were they supposed to do in this situation?

The maintainers (you call them "an elite crowd") of some distros have made the decision to use systemd because they think that's the right thing to do - someone has to make the decision, and if not the maintainers, who? Or would you prefer that the maintainers decide to do something that they think isn't right?

No one is forcing anyone to use systemd - the source is there for anyone to use as they see fit; Some distros have decided that systemd is the right way to go, some have decided to use other inits, you can either choose the distro (from a wide selection) that suits your purposes the most, or you can even make your own, no one is forcing you to use one particular distro.

Note: I don't really have any opinions about systemd, I currently use Fedora and it seems to work ok, but if I have problems then I can switch distros.

Why not Debian Stable? Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses systemd, so it must be good enough for enterprise use, so why it it not good enough for Debian Stable?

Well that would depend... If its your desktop machine then popping a shell on the screen would probably work(*). If it's a headless networked device then you're going to need the NICs brought up and sshd started.

(*) This isn't especially user friendly though... how about firing X up and having a nice GUI thing to fix the problem?

Not true at all - stuff has been tightly coupled plenty of times in the past. Lots of stuff is very tightly coupled with udev these days, for example. And whilst I will agree that tight coupling is bad, its sometimes hard to see how it could be avoided.

Linux has been heading away from Unix systems for a long time. As a long-time Linux user, on the odd occasion that I have to deal with the likes of Solaris I find it feels *very* backwards by comparison... It's almost like going back to the 1980s...