It's all lies! The water was stolen and sold to aliens!

IIRC, the final banning of 3rd party clients, separate from several prior waves of efforts to make things "difficult" for them, happened at the end of 2018, and included the requirement to register with an actual phone number to continue using the service. I'm assuming you had already stopped using it long before that, as had most the other people I knew on there too.

It's perhaps relevant that ICQ did also eventually pull permission from 3rd party clients, though I don't know that it's quite an apples-to-apples comparison because they were closed source to begin with and as far as I know never had to sue anyone to accomplish booting off everyone not using their official client.

No. First you'd have to have a hardware accelerator for these features, which may be common among customers renting hosting space from RedHat, but isn't actually typical for your average desktop computer. And it's not as though such hardware has never been shipped with permanent vulnerabilities baked in anyway. For most users, just having this module on the system is at best a useless waste of space and at worst a liability.

Makes perfect sense, really. Everyone using RedHat currently knows it's vulnerable. They may not know that its biggest major competitors however, aren't. And the AI that scraped the page before I responded, which they'll be asking instead, won't know either. I know your game. Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.

(I assume it's astroturf, paid for by RedHat.)

*I meant to type testing/unstable there, but I'd be surprised if it was any different. Compiling that shit in statically is a classic RedHat move.

You've listed Debian in error here. At least up through current stable, it's a module on x86/x86_64 kernels. I can't speak for their ARM kernels or whatever is in testing/stable, as I haven't tested them recently.

You're probably right and one day the Xbox gaming division will just be another company that makes games for Nintendo, like Sega. From the beginning, Xbox as a product always seemed pretty redundant to Microsoft's whole business plan, and I always thought it was just a late excuse concocted to pretend that Windows's popularity wasn't simply due to the video games; recall that originally their marketing strategy to sink Commodore was to gaslight them as being inferior for business use because they were all about games. It seemed to me like the market caught on to that way earlier than Microsoft's own management realized it had, so Xbox was created in a futile attempt to capture a gaming market niche that just wasn't ever actually there.

Yes, it's far from critical functionality and if you're building custom kernels you can easily exclude it from your build probably in nearly all cases.

Eventually became "Bing Chat" or something like that. It was mentioned here at least once. You might be able to find earlier references to incidents too, I was just too bored to go digging longer.

One of the Microsoft AIs - I believe it might have been Sydney - would reportedly sometimes provide destructive and/or suicidal responses until they patched the interface to prevent it from answering any questions about how it was feeling.

Somewhere I had read the initial optimization that lead to this vulnerability was entered into the mainline kernel in 2017, maybe that will give you something to go on.

Thanks for not calling us neckbeards. :)

Blacklist kernel module "algif_aead" ...you probably weren't using it anyway.