Not disagreeing with your argument, but even if all of that could be fixed, fundamentally any anti-cheat that isn't going to be defeated relatively easily needs some sort of privileged access to stop you modifying the game or running other software that interferes with it in some way. That necessarily requires a degree of access to your system that is dangerous, so anti-cheat software will rightly be told where to shove itself by any operating system with a security model worthy of that title.

I don't see the Linux community ever accepting that it's OK to deliberately undermine that security model just for anti-cheat, as a matter of principle. With so many games even at the highest levels already running very well on Linux, I doubt it will ever be a big deal for most Linux users, even keen gamers, to play the 90+% of titles that work and skip the few that insist on more intrusive anti-cheat/DRM measures either.

It sure would be nice to reach a critical mass where the games companies actively catered for that market, though, instead of mostly relying on tech like Proton to make what is essentially a Windows game run OK.

Unfortunately, there is another possible explanation for the emphasis on TPM that is much more sinister. It's possible that Microsoft and its allies are making a concerted effort to lock down desktop clients in the same way that the two major mobile ecosystems are locked down, to kill off general purpose computing and reduce the desktop PC to a machine that can only run approved apps and consume approved content. It already happens with things like banking apps that you can't run if you choose to root your phone to arrange the privacy and security according to your wishes instead of the vendor's or OS developer's. It already happens on open source desktops, where streaming services will deliberately downgrade the quality of the content they serve you when on the same plan you're already paying for they'd serve higher quality streams to approved (read: more DRM-friendly) devices, and where a few games won't run because their anti-cheat software behaves like malware and the free platforms treat it accordingly.

I am worried that we may be entering a make-or-break period for the survival of general purpose computing with the artificial demise of Windows 10. If the slow transition to Windows 11 as people replace their hardware in the coming years means almost everyone ends up running Windows or macOS on desktops and Android or iOS on mobile devices, there won't be enough incentive for developers of apps and creative content to support any other platform, and all the older versions that didn't have as much built-in junk and all the free alternatives will be reduced to irrelevant background noise because they won't support things that users want to do any more. Your own devices will force updates, ads, reboots, AI-driven "help", covert monitoring and telemetry, any other user-hostile junk their true masters wish upon you, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Governments should be intervening on behalf of their people at this point because the whole system is blatantly anti-competitive and user-hostile, but most of the Western nations are either relying on the absurd valuations in the tech sector to prop up their otherwise precarious economies or watching with envy while their more economically successful allies do that. So our best hope is probably for the legacy platforms to hold out long enough for some free platform(s) to reach critical mass. And frankly, there aren't many realistic paths to get there. Our best hope might be for Valve/Steam to show that many of those Windows 10 boxes in people's homes can now play most of the same games if they shift to Linux and possibly run some of them better than on Windows as well.

This is retarded.

1. It isn't for profit healthcare that is the problem, it's THIRD PARTY PAY.
2. I don't use third party pay, ever, for healthcare. I've been insured nonstop for over 30 years, and NEVER ONCE has my insurer paid my doctor.
3. Even when I've had emergencies, I still called around, negotiated a fair cash up front rate, paid cash up front, and billed it to my insurer. My cash up front rate was sometimes below any co-pay negotiated with my insurer, lol.

I just recently had some elective surgery that would have cost me about $2000 on my annual deductible, but I was able to cash pay a negotiated rate of $400 including a follow-up "free". I submitted the $400 to my insurer and they reimbursed me.

Third party insurance exists because YOU VOTERS demanded the HMO Act of the 1970s, which tied health care to employment, and then employers outsourced it to third parties.

Health care is remarkably cheap in the US (cash pay, negotiated) and I don't have to wait months to see a doctor when I call and say I am cash pay. They bump me up fast.

We don't have a problem with teens viewing porn in the UK. It just doesn't happen any more. In fact, we've been remarkably effective at stopping it compared to half the other countries in Europe, which have seen a recent surge in porn viewing for reasons no-one can identify.

Me too, though of course in our day, the world was much less connected and much less reliant on the technology. The worst we could have done after getting root access to the entire IT infrastructure at my school would have been look at what our classmates had been drawing in Paint or something. Today these systems host much more important and sensitive information and security breaches would be a much bigger deal.

And on that note, am I the only one less concerned by the behaviour of an impressively curious seven-year-old and more concerned by an official, professionally-managed system holding potentially sensitive data that is so insecure that even a seven-year-old could hack it?!

I wouldn't be fine with that. Someone would probably "buy" something because they wanted to have it available indefinitely. If they later found that their "permanent" purchase was revoked, they might no longer have the option to buy it elsewhere because it was no longer available, even if they did have that option available when they first "bought" the product from the other vendor. It's still a scam in the lying vendor's favour.

Of course you want off-site backups. And everyone has been doing that for decades so I don't see the problem with that.

Streaming replication of databases and the like is pretty much ubiquitous as well.

What exactly did you think all those big cloud services were doing for their managed database offerings?

Have you... heard of backups at all?

If the kind of site that would host this kind of system internally at an organisation like a police service has been catastrophically damaged then you probably have bigger problems than the time it takes to restore a backup.

The British government has some excellent IT people. It's a meme really that Civil Service staff are only there for the jobs for life because they couldn't make it in the private sector. The GDS team in particular have successfully automated a huge variety of government interactions with tens of millions of people and for example are widely regarded as having some of the best UX design and accessibility experts anywhere. Building on that to support other government activity, including internal functions not normally seen by the public, would have made a lot of sense. In the longer term we're going to want people like that dealing with the astronomical challenge of modernising NHS IT.

This looks like it might be a useful feature for some users. If it is clearly advertised and using it is optional, I'm not sure I see a problem here.

Is there any (non-tinfoil) expectation that any related behaviour in Firefox is not being added transparently and optionally? The description seems ambiguous about what triggers these previews. If merely hovering over a link would be enough to cause a visit to another page then personally that's probably something I'd want to turn off. Others might have a different attitude to risk there. In any case, if there's some kind of active choice where you need to click or press in a specific way to trigger it, that seems reasonable.

Don't worry, Microsoft has you covered. In a couple of months, Windows 10 will also be EOL. And there are millions of computers that could run Windows 7 or Windows 10 but can't run Windows 11.

Nah.

Iâ(TM)m 51. Iâ(TM)ve had health insurance continuously for 35 years and have used it exactly ZERO TIMES.

I am self pay. For everything but true life threatening emergencies, which Iâ(TM)ve had zero.

Even the ER is cheaper when negotiated self pay.

My urologist is stunned that I pay $85 for his visits. Self pay. Including labs. My colleague goes to the same urologist and his insurance pays $550 for the same visit and naturally it comes out of his deductible lol.

Insurance is a scam. All insurance is legal gambling and gamblers never win.

Supply and demand dictate this is exactly the case.

If something is valuable to everyone, it should only be accessible to those who have enough saved value to acquire it.

The poor fucked themselves. My parents are poor but worked hard so I wouldn't be.

Being compensated for it means it wonâ(TM)t get wasted and will always have a fair valuation.

Compensation is as cooperative as it comes because nobody can hoard it.

It would be amazing if there was a document that stated in very clear terms just how limited our federal government is and what it can't do at all no matter what.