I both agree and disagree. Cinnamon is by FAR the best DE out there in my opinion, but I upgrade machines frequently and game with typically bleeding edge hardware. WIth Mint switching to LTS only, it pretty much screwed Mint from being able to support the newest hardware out there without jumping through serious hoops. Now that UbuntuCinnamon is a fully supported variant you get the beauty and usefulness of Cinnamon without being tied to an LTS edition, so you can get that bleeding edge hardware support from the normal 6 month release cycle. The only downside of UbuntuCinnamon being a fully supported variant now is that they had to support snaps which can go straight to hell. Bloated from including all dependencies for every app over and over, slow, incomplete desktop theming support, inability to control when and where upgrades happen, and the buy in for the whole android or iphone app store mindset. Fuck that. Deb files in repos or GTFO. Thank God it is relatively painless to rip the entire snap ecosystem out of the machine right after you install it.

Pity that distros made these two gigantic bad choices recently and didn't ease up on the gas when the cliff got near.

And my point is that the government should have the ability to make that decision if they own the device. If they don't then it should not be their decision.

Giving people control over their own devices does not break Apple devices. It only breaks their business model. It shouldn't even be a question for owners to be the sole decision maker over their devices whether it is phones, cars, tv's, media players, gaming consoles or anything. It really should be regulated by law that companies cannot over ride the owners wishes and that all devices must be shipped with a way to lock the manufacturer out entirely if the owner wishes to do so. Choice is never bad. Many people will choose to continue giving Apple or Google that control, but it should NEVER be forced on the owner of any device.

And this is utterly irrelevant. The owner of a device should not have to fight with the manufacturer to do whatever the fuck they want to do with that device even if the decision is bad for them or their device in the long run. If a manufacturer has more control of it than the owner, then the device is pre-loaded with malware from the factory even if that malware is the legitimate software products of that manufacturer. That is a huge issue with software and devices today.... treating the owner as if they are the thing that needs to be protected against.

You misunderstood my point. No matter whether the owner is a business, the government or a normal everyday user buying it with their own money. Whoever the OWNER is, is all that matters and no security decision should over ride the owner of the device even if it is a bad decision. Owners should have every right to, and the ability to lock out even the manufacturer of a device once they have purchased it. And every decision that owner makes should be law of the land for that device. If someone, even the manufacturer, has more control of a device than the owner does, then they aren't truly the owner.

I am a huge naysayer of walled gardens and think they should never exist. I think the owner of any device should the sole God of that device and should be the only decision maker that matters. BUT that means if the owner is a business or a government entity then they should set the devices up to their chosen level of security. If a regular person is owner of the device, then they should have say over whether sideloading or rooting is OK. Personally I believe if you don't have root on your own device then it is pre-loaded with malware even if that malware came from Google or Apple. But again, the owner of it is the only one that should have say over what and how anything gets loaded, what security it uses, and what the device can and can't do in general. But ALWAYS the first step should be making sure the manufacturer does not have more control over any device than the owner of it does.

The following items are true.... 1) Self driving is 100% autonomous and handled 100% in vehicle and does not give government or insurance any information about my current or historical locations. and 2) It can 100% over-ridden and driven as a regular vehicle with the human being the sole entity in control.

This is not correct. Yuzu can play unencrypted games, and that means it can play games not created by Nintendo.

There *ARE* homebrew games for the switch, that can be played on Yuzu and Ryujinx.

Here's a non-comprehensive list.
https://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/...

The mere existence of these games makes your statement false.

Not entirely correct.

(note, I own a 1st generation Fusee-gelee vulnerable switch, which has never touched nintendo's servers, and have extracted my own keys from it. The emulator I use likewise, is configured to disable the networking stack, so the emulated switch never talks to nintendo's servers)

What the keys REALLY do, is uniquely identify that switch, and that cartridge. The actual decryption keys still use a master signing key, and all switches are able to decode all cartridges/downloads, without pulling another cryptographic key from Nintendo.

Nintendo even made it so people without internet access, can get switch console updates, via the cartridges themselves-- If the cartridge has a minimum system version requirement, it comes with that system version's installer data packed inside it-- and updates the console to that minimum required version, before allowing the cartridge to play.

This said-- THERE ARE pirate copies of the title and prod keys out there, that are clones of a banned switch's keystore. These keys cannot talk on nintendo's servers; Nintendo has blacklisted the keys (which identify a unique console, for the purposes of software license validation, and very little else), so you cant, for instance, play Mario Kart with your friends (unless you use the LAN exploit, and a VPN tunnel).

For wholly single player games, like BotW and TotK, this is a great big nothingburger.

Nintendo's consoles *DO* phone home to the mothership about what games you have been playing (including the unique metadata collected from the console's unique key, and the game cartridge's unique key) and if Nintendo finds this phoned home data suspicious in any way, they will just ban your console, ban your Nintendo account, and tell you to pound sand. So-- ProTip-- Dont trade cartridges with lots of friends, Nintendo will consider it piracy, and ban the shit out of you and your friends.

What is the benefit of extracting and using my own keys, if I never play online anyway?

I am actually using the emulator legally. That's what. My hacked switch lets me dump my own copy of the game as well, with my own uniquely keyed dump.

No laws are really violated, other than perhaps, anticircumvention DMCA bullshit with the dump itself. Chuds like Nintendo and pals have been trying to claim that format shifting and software backups are illegal for decades now, and have been pressing the international trade unions of the world to try and engineer legislation to that effect.

Nintendo can go choke on a toxic amanita.

The only thing the unique keys do for Nintendo here, is uniquely identify consoles and game cartridges. It is not involved in the decryption in that capacity--

All switches can decrypt all Switch cartridges.

Full stop.

If you have a valid keyset-- even one that has been banned-- you can decrypt the data.

Fun fact-- Yuzu and pals can play games that have been UNENCRYPTED (as there *ARE* tools to do this!!), since this is how you play modded versions of switch games.

From an anticircumvention standpoint, the only obstacle they had in the way was the AES256 signing key stored in the bootloader checksum secure enclave of the Tegra SoC, to protect the boot process.

the Fusee-Gelee exploit rendered that moot, but skipping that process entirely, giving unfettered access to the switch before the nintendo OS can even load.

This is how you get your title keys. You use this exploit to load custom software that extracts the keys from the console's processor, which then gets saved to your microSD card.

As others have pointed out, Yuzu does *NOT* give you a set of these keys. They DO tell you how to get your unique keys out of your hacked switch-- but again, even the pirated keys (From a banned switch) will work just fine, as long as you dont try to play online, or use the e-store.

As others have rightly pointed out-- giving a means to legitimately use ones own keys to just play games in a blessed emulator anywhere, would have made Yuzu unnecessary, and been more useful generally. E-shop downloads would be transferrable, and people could play on SteamDecks legitimately. Nintendo would actually SAVE money (By not losing money on sales) this way.

However, Nintendo has a hard-on for being the warden of a panopticon, and wont allow that.

Again, *ALL* the uniqueness of the keys currently does, is allow Nintendo to notice when you lend your console to a friend, or your friend lends you a cartridge -- It's the vanguard soft-option vanguard on killing the second hand market, and the right of first sale.

I see this as a good thing and needs to expand. I realize free speech laws are in relation to government and not corporations, but when social media platforms become a defacto standard, then there are really no choices for anyone to go have free speech somewhere else. When that happens, I think corporations should be held to the same free speech standards as the government. I realize that people will say some heinous things once enabled, but bad people are easily countered with facts. And here is the really important part.... even if someone is really off base, is really a horrible person and says horrible things, it is easy to counter that with facts. But by letting someone speak, even when completely off base, you decrease the liklihood of them radicalizing. Shutting people down completely as has been the norm in the last 10 years causes radicalization. People get more and more desperate to be heard and go to extreme lengths for that to happen. Let people say their piece, then shut them down with facts or choose to ignore them. But EVERYONE should get to speak no matter how bad the message.

These are by design. Companies have learned that they can say security and idiots will accept it. I argue that privacy is not separate from security and that true security and privacy means even the company you are dealing with should have no way to tie an account to a real human if the human chooses for it to not be so. Almost all 2 factor that is put in place in the last 5 years is put in place in the name of security, but it is simply these companies putting in place mechanisms that allow them to tie an account to a real human identity.

Absolutely this. No one should get to decide what is good and what is bad in free speech. That is the entire point in free speech. Everyone is always for it until it is THEIR speech getting curtailed. MOST of the time government (and even corporations that manage social networks) intervenes for good causes that benefit the people. But sometimes... sometimes they work against the people. I realize that 1st amendment rights only affects government entities regarding free speech, but I would argue that when a platform becomes as ubiquitous as facebook or X, then they also should be beholden to 1st amendment protections. Again, no one argues that people will not say very heinous things and there will be misinformation, but no one should get to decide what those are on the behalf of someone else. That is the entire point of free speech. Freedom to say what you feel needs to be said AND the freedom to hear what you want to hear. Crazies are pretty easy to defeat with facts. Shutting them up entirely just radicalizes them.

There are other reasons for banning utility scale clean power projects than just old white "not in my back yard" people. I think one of the biggest reasons is that there are a non-zero contingent of people who believe like I do that the days of utility scale electricity should be ended... and for a variety of reasons. The technology exists now to concentrate on distributed grid electricity that can now rely on local, even individual house generation and backup. This provides redundancy, security, constant price security that don't exist with utility scale electricity. Storms, state level hacking, even wars are threats to utility scale electricity generation but distributed grid will provide some protection resiliency. I firmly that believe that the majority of utility scale electricity generation should now be over, but power companies are doing everything in their power to make distributed grid as aggravating and high cost as possible.

Freedom of speech is *** INFINITELY *** more important than protecting hurt feelings or preventing idiots from believing misinformation.