I'm pretty sure a second Carrington Event will cause many young people and probably a significant fraction of the dumber older adults to take their own lives in much the same fashion as the Wall Street crash of 1929. No one wants to think in terms of reverting to "pre-Internet society" which is silly and stupid but here we are. That's people being people. In any case, I can think of more than a dozen people who freak out if their Spotify or Pandora play lists won't load. I can totally imagine the cognitive dissonance that's going to rain down when (not if) one day the internet ceases to be, even for a couple of hours. Some people's brains will lock up, "preppers" will scramble for their bunkers, it won't take long for people to realize that all financial transactions have ceased, gas is unavailable, and electricity (may or) may not be available for hours or days. The terror and the societal break-down will be swift and terrifying. Don't believe me? Then you didn't experience the immediate aftermath of September 11th, 2001, where a couple of localized attacks on the east coast in the morning sent gas prices soaring in fly-over country by mid-afternoon and there was genuine fear of financial ruin by 5:00pm. Black the whole world out all at once and I'm dead certain that people will start shooting at each other without remorse.

If Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is turning into an Alt-Right weirdo too then he probably deserves to destroy $30 Billion in Reddit valuation as well. Dump Reddit, build something in the Fediverse like Lemmy or Kbin.

CenturyLink DSL, circa 2013-2018, 40Mbps Down / 5Mbps Up: CenturyLink counted upstream and downstream traffic together when computing bandwidth used relative to my cap. If I used 1/50th of the possible bandwidth available per month I was over my cap. Pegging a 1Mbps stream for a month sent me over my cap. I cackled when they sent me the termination letter. "So long, bitches! I'll give someone else my money!" Now I'm 60 linear feet away from a major north-south CenturyLink feeder in the west in of town and I know they'll never consider my neighborhood "economically viable" to horizontally bore fibre for residential use because that's just the way they think. Enter MetroNet, who is working on Fibre-to-the-Premise and I really wouldn't be surprised if they resell to Google Fibre locally at some point in the future, but... 1Gpbs symmetric = $70/month, 2Gpbs symmetric = $110/month, $10/month for a static IPv4 address, IPv6 is available (so I'm told), and NO CAP! Sign me up! They can't horizontally bore fast enough to suit me at this point. And CenturyLink is gonna lose out on any commercial traffic from me as well, long-term. Once upon a time the notion of RBOCs and ILECs were relevant and meaningful ...but not anymore.

Seriously, why isn't Greg Becker barred from ever operating a dollar bill again? And why isn't he and his entire C-Suite going to jail??? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Ethics and Society, in general, get in the way of profits. I'm sure that they're of a mind that "if the technology harms or kills someone then we'll cross that bridge when we come to it." Unbridled capitalism's hallmark is killing people for profit, especially when it will be difficult to lay blame or prosecute the really vague legal areas. See also; Robber Barons of the late 1800s, 1900s.

...have to diversify as Microsoft moves to permanently screw up Windows into an OSaaS platform no one wants. FreeBSD or Ubuntu Desktop with WINE do almost everything I could ever want for a WIN32 environment without the rot and with a lot more security and versatility.

Let us not forget that the SCO boondoggle was a proxy war by Microsoft in no uncertain terms. You can slather all of the "historical perspective" you want on it but it was still the worst kind of garbage to come out of Corporate America since the Robber Barons of the late 1800s. Then again, us BSD Heads were over here going, "Yup, legally vetted in '94. We're good!" with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.

With Slashdot stories like "Intimate Photos By Roomba Vacuums Leaked Online" and "Roomba Testers Feel Misled After Intimate Images Ended Up on Facebook" is it any wonder? Home Automation still sucks Roomba brushes by any measure of security posture. And AI doesn't stand for "Artificial Intelligence", it stands for "Advertising Intelligence", so the devices aren't really smart, they're just pandering to us on the manufacturer's behalf. Not in my house, ever, until it's secure and auditable.

In a recent review for some home automation gear I wrote, "Because these home automation devices require a "cloud" account to interact with them it's like the manufacture shipped e-waste directly from the factory to my garbage can. And why wouldn't they demand that you create yet another account on yet another server under the guise of "voluntary" (it's not) and "the cloud" (it's not), even though the device(s) can run locally just fine without a "cloud" account on your local mobile device that knows what to do with Bluetooth?

Why spend time and money engineering covert utilization data monitoring or back doors into your application only to be discovered by some pesky security researcher later. Better to just force the user to register the product in a cloud account somewhere so you can exfiltrate that user data the easy way using "the cloud" as a plausible excuse."

And I am still very much of this opinion. Most of the tacky consumer stuff out there right now is garbage.

How about reasonable copyright law that doesn't lock up content for a thousand years and can't just randomly be purchased by Disney or ViaCom because they want to protect their profits? While you're at it, why don't you buck up and afford better protections to the Public Domain?

It's not just power buttons, it's capitalism's development cycle in motion. More more more more more. It is the ethos of the cancer cell. Avira and AVG were pretty good anti-virus programs then the manufacturers had to add "more" to them, to the point where their memory footprint was a joke. Can those former assets. Signal USED to be a pretty good private messaging app, until they got lazy and retired a security feature that I really needed ("just use the android lock screen," they told me). I can't recommend that app anymore. MalwareBytes is starting to get too big for it's britches. More more more more more. Add more features. Make it smaller. Make it more mainstream. Make it prettier. (Microsoft knows all about this one. We call the new Windows versions "a fresh coat of paint" because they're just re-arranging userland with some flashy icons and visual effects.) Now add in more annoying widgets and visual effects. More. More. Whoops, now it's danged near unusable. As for the phones, at least if you could take the battery out.... Whoops, not anymore! Google, Apple, and Samsung are all engineering towards garbage, literal "garbage", as in E-Waste, right out of the factory. And they won't care about trashing the planet along the way either.

If Sam Bankman-Fried has $250 Million then you can rest assured that it belongs to someone else. Or several hundred or thousand someone elses. My fear is that he'll get out of prison on good behavior in 15-25 years and still have millions to retire comfortably on, rather than being forced to liquidate every single cent that he has stolen and claimed as his own. I guess crime does pay for some people.

Meta has already demonstrated that they can't be trusted with people's personal information or political leanings or, in fact, much of any sort of moral stance beyond code-talking white supremacy, racism, and/or bigotry in their content moderation and "Community Standards" with overt bouts of political preferences. I trust that whole organization less than a three-day-old egg salad sandwich from a vending machine in a men's room in a truck stop on the edge of Detroit. Regulate the industry before lots of people get fleeced or injured. See also; FTX and the rest of the crypto-currency sector as an example of what not to do.

Perhaps if Huawei weren't beholding to, or even appeared to be beholden to, the Communist Fascist Kleptocracy that is the ruling government of China who have repeatedly and blatantly espoused a mantra and dogma of hostility toward everyone and everything else on the planet in favor of their own ever-growing power base and self-enrichment. Show us the new Tiananmen line of core routing and switching products, then let us do a complete code review for that new line, then we might be able to talk.

Mental Note: Most large companies (BMW, Canon, Mercedes, Tesla, and more) don't mind the notion of digital extortion just so long as they're the ones doing it to the consumer. Should a private party or group do it back in their direction it's bad and law enforcement should be involved. Huh. We'll all keep that in mind.