Yeah. Linux doesn't have a backward compatability problem. Society has a user-doesn't-have-the-source-code problem.

It's been over a decade since Google introduced Waves but I remember that a lot of aspects of that protocol would fill your requirements.

you have to truly believe that the government knows better than its citizens about what they should be allowed to access through the internet.

The government doesn't know any better than the citizens do: both have mandatory easy-to-use computing forced into their lives, often against their strongest protestations. Awareness of just how it is that that the market and institutional cooperation have corralled everyone into a technocratic guilded cage of proprietary and server-side software, and what a free citizen they can do about it, escapes nearly everyone.

I remember when everyone in tech knew about Free Software and boosted the GPL. It's been a long, slow decline of that rhetoric, thanks to new generations of "open source" boosters with jobs in the industry which is doing the information-capturing here. The fact that China is getting in on the American game is just one more development in already-disastrous story.

And if you are going to redesign it, make sure users are able to change it back again! Also, stop disabling important features. In Firefox, you can no longer change the default page for a new tab. What the hell? You can have a home page for when you open the browser, but ever subsequent tab can't be changed? That's infuriating, and totally breaks my workflow. I read Slashdot, I don't give a shit about my browser being easier to use for Grandma.

Support features like the Unity/Global Menu for desktop Linux out of the box—that should be a no brainer! I'm not on a cellphone, I'm on a desktop computer—I don't want a stupid hamburger menu, I want my menus laid out logically, using my screen real-estate without taking up more horizontal space than necessary. I don't care that only a small fraction of people want it—to focus on what most people want is to regress toward the mean.

Maybe, if you want to maintain market share, you should treat the power-users, the ones who make all the recommendations to their friends and families, properly. That's why people use KDE: it can be easy to use, but it doesn't spite the power users to do it. Power users are the only people who are weird enough to have actual loyalty and emotional sentiments regarding a piece of technology, we're the only people that it matters to please. Everyone else treats you like toothpaste—they'll love it and then buy a different brand tomorrow.

Power users care about things most people don't. Cater to us. Maybe one button, at the very start, that turns off every single suggestion and pop-up and offer to sign up for junk—make the button scary to everyone else, like "manual set up mode" or something. I used to get paid removing bloatware from new PCs, I really hate needing to do that to my own box when I install a web browser.

What good is it, then?

In Office 4, the integrated help system had interactive tutorials to teach you how to use Word, Excel, etc. Once they leapt to the ribbon interface, though, the need to re-learn everything was a feature. First of all, the rights to interactive training software could be licensed for profit to 3rd party companies, who could then sell access as services to businesses and education (just imagine, they had foolishly been giving that away for free in the '90s!). Second, the investment in learning the new, byzantine UI was emotionally rewarding for people who completed it, giving them a feeling of mastery or expertise within the Microsoft sandbox. Nobody feels smugly accomplished or proud for learning how to use the more-sensible LibreOffice UI.

I'm doing my first-ever talk at 4:20 EST in the Neptune room tomorrow on Media Ecology and Source Code Access. Lots of interesting talks the first day, in spite of some buffering issues with the live streams. Paul Eggert, the maintainer of the ubiquitous time zone data was an especial treat!

Why the hell is every single comment here speculating about how this is done when the article plainly says that only the first two bytes of the password are uploaded, and then if there is a match the full hash is compared locally on the phone without sending the answer to Google. Mind you, I'm sure collisions are more rare than positives—Google can probably infer that if the first two bytes match then a user has been pwned—but if it's positive than everyone else has your password anyway.

Did anyone actually read this thing?

A conference I was at last year had one speaker give a presentation on teledildonic rape through insecure smart-phone connected sex toys. The gist of it was basically, "What if the person cranking the vibrations up and down were, in fact, A STRANGER?"

If there's any evidence beyond all the posturing done on the news, in social media, and by random self-described statisticians then they must be saving it for the courts. At any rate, I'm not even sure that confirming it will do any good for everyone who's emotions and sense of personal security has been invested in knowing that these elections have been "the most secure in American history." My own long-held skepticism about the trustworthiness of voting machines already has me on the outside of going along with the official line. I fear that if the courts do find evidence, and change the official in their official capacity then it's their own credibility of the office which be spent and everyone will call it a coup against the President-Elect.

Seriously. It's like suddenly electronic voting machines are just fine-and-dandy. I'd figure that in so contentious an election-year, it'd be crazy not to suspect they've been tampered with (or, perhaps better said, working as designed). It's really an ends-justifying-the-means sort of situation, which is worrisome.

Now that is very, very interesting. Sort of like how you'd have your own telephone number printed in the middle of the dial of your rotary phone, right?

I've got one, albeit the last revision which requires some minor (!) re-soldering to get the USB port to work as a device host as required for the hub. You can run any flavour of Linux you like, and there are already ports of Debian, Manjaro, PostmarketOS, and Ubuntu Touch which work reasonably well, although daily-driver usage is probably a few months off. Ubuntu Touch implements it's own smart-phone style security permissions, but the rest are just like regular PC distros. The phone will try to boot off the microSD before defaulting to what's been flashed to it, so you can dual-boot as you like by swapping cards around.

It's got physical kill switches for the modem, the wifi, the camera, and the mics, and the modem is neatly walled up inside it's own system with no access to the larger phone and user OS, so it's as secure as you want.

I'd really recommend it because we early-adopters are basically hammering out all the major bugs right now. Once the next revision is finally shipped it should be in pretty good shape.

Maybe the simple left-wing right-wing dichotomy is so laughably reductionist that it's usage is absurd and nobody should even try to use it anymore. Arguments about how left or right one continent seems from another continent literally make no sense because it's impossible to fit the world into them with any meaning whatsoever.

Every argument like this makes no sense whatsoever, which I have to conclude is a feature, not a bug. That the entire planet's total political discourse has optimized into being framed within the absurdist paradox of a single spectrum makes total sense. Living in paradox helps maintain the necessary total loss of communication which enables everyone's identity to avoid exposure to actual threats of logical arguments that could be made against them. It's the human ego shoring itself up by ignoring the fallacy on the premise of it's enormity and ubiquity.

The validity of the issue is precisely owing to the quality of faith underlying the change. Discriminating against Hitler moustaches is a good-faith move. Massive, heavily-moneyed campaigns of organized "influencers" who team up to propagate new "social constructs" in a deliberate attempts to artifice social change is done in bad faith. It's literally top-down astroturf social-engineering done on the pretenses of fighting Nazis.

Ever notice how nobody throws around Godwin's Law anymore? It's because we've all, collectively, arrived at it's natural conclusion and passed into some kind of post-Universal-Godwin social reality. All of society is basically puppeted around by the threads of a) fearing the accusation of being a Nazi, or b) insufficiently fighting against the rise of their opponents who are Nazis. These mechanisms work really well, so they are used in bad faith for short-term expedience. But they'll burn out with fatigue, and then who knows what comes next?

The issues with people using the red pill or pepe the frog are totally invalid, and people should resist this sort of runaway, shame-and-fear based social-media policing.