I've said it elsewhere but...

At least one electricity company in the UK (Octopus) is already doing this.

Last year I had about a dozen "fill your boots" sessions from them, where they tell you a timeframe and in that timeframe not only is all electricity "free" (they only charge you for what you would have normally used in that period, any extra is free) but they enter you into prize draws, etc. for participating.

I used them to not only do all my chores, heating, cooling, cook dinner, etc. but also to fill my solar battery bank from the grid (which I then used to reduce my grid usage over the next few days). In fact, that's how I discovered what the maximum draw I can pull through my main consumer unit is before the main RCD trips.

I even did things like charged up all my cordless tool batteries and the like too.

This isn't new, but making it "official" and widening it to all electricity suppliers is just obvious.

I don't know what the electricity companies will think about it, because they seem to be largely profit-making worthless privatised entities, and asking them to help people reduce usage of their own product is nonsensical (I remember schemes were the water companies were supposed to encourage less water use, this involved sending you useless tat to drip-feed your plants and suchlike, and similarly for electricity companies, which involved sending you a free lightbulb).

But I suppose with the right incentive (e.g. penalising low usage or offsetting the extra usage against their later energy purchases, etc.) it might prompt them to take up the scheme too.

It's largely irrelevant, long-term, though, because as far as I'm concerned energy production is not democratised. I myself intend to be utility-independent by retirement, and electricity was the first and easiest to achieve, and I'm way ahead of schedule there.

Nope. No such thing when I paid to have that button first time around.

I don't use companies that try to monetise my use of them, especially if I'm paying for their service.

On that note...

Why the fuck am I seeing huge ads on Slashdot now for "bolt.new" and other shite when I paid many years ago to "Disable Advertising"?

Largely nonsense.

They are defaulting to PREEMPT_NONE but nothing to stop you changing that.

Newer versions of PostgreSQL already avoid certain spinlocks that hit this performance issue which is, as stated, doing something dumb in PostgreSQL which kernels can't have insight into, and which the new kernel defaults now penalise.

And nobody, with a brain, would just be running anything critical on the very latest kernel without testing it first.

By the time 7.0.1 comes out, PostgreSQL will have sorted it and nobody will ever remember it was ever a problem.

If he thinks he can, then he should.

Because then we can just ignore him, put an unpaid AI in his place.

Let's do this to ALL the billionaires.

Like there's a guy who's moderating the ads?

I've previously reported any amount of utterly illegal, misleading, out-right lies, etc. ads on Facebook in the past and nobody cares. They take your report and then a month later they tell you that they found no violation.

The only moderation they do for advertisers is "Enter your credit card details".

It's kind of the reason they're in this mess in the first place.

Okay, so...

Back in the day, on Windows... 98 through to about 7? I used to use ZoneAlarm on my Windows machines.

Was that because we didn't have a network firewall at home? No. We did. In fact, I used to do quite a bit with Freesco (a single-floppy Linux router distro, designed to replace Cisco routers with commodity PCs). Our networking was DAMN good for a home network.

But I liked to use it because it would POP UP and tell you something was using the Internet. What port. To what domain/IP. That it wanted to listen on a port rather than send data? Allow or Deny? What kind of software profile to apply to this? Is this a game (i.e. some random outgoing stuff only)? Is this a web browser (let it do what it likes on 80/443)? Etc. To what zone? Internet? Local Network? etc.

That, I find, is the ONE THING that's still actively missing from all modern operating systems. I want that on my phone. I want that on my Windows PCs (Windows Defender doesn't even come CLOSE). I want that on my Linux PCs (but less of an issue there, for sure, and it's more difficult because they don't necessarily have a GUI by default).

A decent application firewall is severely lacking in modern machines, and part of that is the "UAC fatigue" that Microsoft introduced, where you got a dialog asking you inane questions about deep-level technical stuff. But I *want that*. The closest I've found is Comodo Free, which does the same. And you would be AMAZED how many programmes automatically do a DNS lookup and check-home as their very first action on a modern Windows machine. Basically EVERY piece of software you use. Every game. Every application. Every part of Windows. Every service.

And it's mostly unnecessary.

I would give my right arm for a decent GUI version of this, especially now that I'm entirely Linux again after 20+ years. Not because I expect it to defend me against attacks like a software firewall is sold as doing. But because I want to know why, in the ever living fuck, every tiny application thinks it has to immediately connect out to the Internet on random ports to talk-home in order to operate. So I can eliminate that feature / software.

Honestly... if there ever is a world war, the Internet will be the first thing under attack. And you'll realise - as I did even many years ago, how much stuff just jams up if it can't immediately DNS-lookup and connect out of your network. And how some stuff just then immediately stops working when you deny it, as in the programme just stops loading completely until you allow it.

Anyone with a brain, having just invented a deliberately anonymous cryptocurrency that starts to take off, would NOT EVER touch the seed coins, especially once it became obvious that everyone was watching their movement.

The second that stuff moves, Bitcoin value tanks AND the ultimate destination of all those coins becomes international news. Hardly anonymous.

No, whoever they were, and for literally whatever reason they started the project, they would have created other additional accounts later on, capitalised on those, had no connection to the original accounts, and still be a billionaire now. But just one of hundreds / thousands of others that are all untraceable and not really being watched.

And when Bitcoin mixing services came out, they'd have been all over it - just to preserve anonymity if nothing else.

We know precisely one thing about Satoshi - and that's that they don't want to identify themselves. Maybe there is $138bn sitting in an account they could in theory get access to. But it would immediately reveal information about themselves that may well work against them - taxation authorities would be all over it, press, public, every penny would be traced to its final destinations, etc.

So even if they only had, say, a couple of million in another account... they'd use that. Not everyone wants to be a stupendous billionaire in the public eye. You have to be a bit of a sociopath to be a billionaire at all. And then think of things like security, press, public scrutiny, etc.

Maybe they've got enough to live a life of luxury, that they've properly declared, never have to work again and, ultimately... still stay absolutely anonymous.

The one thing we know is that they understand anonymity. Why on earth would we ever expect them to do the most stupid thing ever and reveal themselves, rather than just hide amongst a large crowd and enjoy the rest of their life?

Make illegal phone calls (e.g. fraud, harassment, unsolicited commercial spam, etc.) and they'll cut your telephone off.

Far closer in terms of analogy and technology. And extremely viable.

The electricity company are not directly facilitating or have knowledge or would have reasonable knowledge of your Internet activites.

But your phone number is actively facilitating your phone service, the same way your ISP Is actively facilitating your Internet service. And you would get cut off by your ISP if you were sending spam, or hacking people, etc.

Either the ISP has NO business doing that (and thus they couldn't cut you off for sending spam) or they are monitoring and able to cut you off (in which case they could cut you off for piracy).

If you kept sending spam email, your email account would be terminated. If you used your ISP connection to do it, they would start terminating your connection. Whether that was personal, business, paid or free.

How is that different to keeping using your ISP connection to download illegal stuff, once the ISP has been notified of that?

Are we saying that unsolicited commercial email is somehow significantly more damaging to people and incurring a greater commercial cost than pirating movies?

Ah, yes, the same cautionary notice they have to put on psychics, palm readers and tarot readers in my country.

Because even the government realise that they're just talking bollocks.

Everything needs to be branded or monetised.

It's why I want large commercial organisations as far away from my data, computers and workflow as possible.

I do not care about you, I don't want to be reminded you even exist, and I certainly don't want to give you money. Go away.

I want to turn on my computer, load up the browser of my choice, and that's it. I don't need to see a single brand, no "notifications", no messages of your choosing, nothing. My boot screen is a spinner. My desktop is a flat, blank, plain colour. I have my browser pinned as a single recognisable icon (doesn't even have the name).

That is what an OS should be. That is what most services should be. We shouldn't be spending our life subject to the whims of a corporation trying to wheedle money out of us or "foster brand engagement" or whatever nonsense they class it as.

The one good thing about hitting limits on CPU clock speed, memory shortages, etc. is that they might finally have to start actually making programmes vaguely efficient again.

There's also yet-another reason that I don't use Windows, and that's that everything seems to want an app running on startup to cache what it needs to to present these shitty web UIs with any semblance of performance, to do the most worthless things.

There are far too many programmes that just don't function correctly if you have a software firewall other than Windows Defender and you deny them web access, for instance. Windows Defender just lets it all through, but if you have a "ZoneAlarm-type" firewall, you see that EVERYTHING wants to talk-home or connect to a local web service and, when denied, it hangs up and falls over itself rather than deals with it gracefully.

Not what you want to see in critical services, for example.

Tell me how you're ever going to implement this on any open-source operating system ever?

Because people will just patch it out.

It's not like it's even a boot-time requirement (thus necessitating it being in the kernel/initrd, etc.). It's an account requirement. Which means that it can be patched out in no time at all.

As far as I know, not one single open-source OS has actually implemented this requirement (they put a field that would be useful for it into systemd, but nobody's actually using it).

Apple push an silent automatic update just for your computer that the next time you type in that key, it sends it to the FBI.

Next?

We're not dealing with a bit of software piracy or finding out who stole someone's Bitcoin, you're talking about agencies dealing with anti-terrorism and wars.