>"Gotta have that phone in case there's a school shooting."
Um yeah, sure. But that doesn't require unrestricted internet/app access.
>"following pressure from parents who claim too much in-school screen time has zapped children's attention spans and left them worse off academically."
And how many of these parents gave their children phones/tablets/computers with full internet/app access?
>"seriously? of course firefox users fucking complained. That's why the mozilla had to add their AI kill-switch after they got caught auto-adding AI."
No. Mozilla never "added AI". They added the ability to optionally hook Firefox into third-party AI systems (with the default on). And there was ALWAYS AN OFF SWITCH. It just wasn't in the main settings, it was under about:config. Then they later added in the main settings as well.
It never downloaded or installed any AI system. Very different.
>"I've gone and deleted chrome. I'm using Brave, but its crypto-bros in charge of that so I dont exactly trust them either. They just have a really effective adblocker that doesnt seem to trigger youtube into issueing shrill threats about breaking TOSs with adblockers"
I would suggest Firefox + UBO. I have no problems on YouTube or other sites with them (at least that is my experience on my machines which all run Linux). And as a huge bonus, you get to NOT support Google's efforts to control the web (Brave is still based on Google Chromium). Plus you also signal to sites that you want to support actual browser diversity, not mostly just a different UI on yet another Google-controlled engine.
>"Quick - copy and paste all your comments from the "Copy Fail" discussion over here!"
Pretty much
Copy Fail used the algif_aead module and for enterprise Linuxes, that is built-into the kernel. So either update the kernel, or mitigate with:
# grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="initcall_blacklist=algif_aead_init"
and reboot. Dirty Frag uses three additional modules: esp4, esp6, and rxrpc. Enterprise Linuxes don't build those in, so all distros should be able to use something like:
# rmmod esp4 esp6 rxrpc
# sh -c "printf 'install esp4
for immediate mitigation, without rebooting. Of course, disabling those modules has a price, it will disable IPsec ESP, IPsec VPNs (like Swan), and AFS clients. So if you use/need those, you can't mitigate without losing that functionality.
Honestly outside of people who do heavy 3d rendering, even a computer you use for your job just doesn't need to be that powerful.
As a programmer who sits at a screen for 8 hours a day, it took a lot of convincing for me to even give up my 10 year old workstation because it was pretty decent when it was purchased and as long as it had decent ram (it had 32GB) I was perfectly fine working on it. Having to reinstall was more of a headache that the benefit of getting a new system.
Hell my home/play machine is SIGNIFICANTLY more powerful than my work one.
I view my home computer like a Corvette and my work machine like a Corolla. At home I want fast - at work I just want dependable.
You're at Witt's End.