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Comment Re:Protect the children form stupid laws! (Score 1) 92

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).

Comment Re:Of course Apple knows the real email ... (Score 1) 87

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.

Comment Re:Has Anyone Here Seen It? (Score 3, Insightful) 37

Not yet but I’ll go see it soon What makes me really sad though is that being a “non franchise movie” is now enough of a thing for it to be pointed out specifically. All the big productions these days are in some “universe”, part of a franchise, a sequel or prequel or reboot. God forbid a studio dares to allot a blockbuster budget to an original work.

Comment Re:Looks like a robotic arm on a rail (Score 1) 40

The Chinese have these kinds of robots deploying much larger installations. They also have drones that fly panels into mountainous areas for installation.

Not that I'm knocking it, it's good that they are copying good ideas. The cheaper solar gets the better, and for political reasons stuff like this has to be home grown.

Comment Not the worst thing systemd does with user info... (Score 1) 169

So, during this story, someone pointed out a command to contextualize the info:
# userdbctl user --output=json $(whoami)

Ok, so run that and I see "hashedPassword". A field that my entire career has been about "not even the user themselves should have access, even partial access to it needs to be protected by utilities that refuse to divulge that to the user even as they may need that field to validate user input. And now, there it is, systemd as a matter of course saying "let arbitrary unprivileged process running as the user be able to access the hashed password at any point".

Now this "age verification" thing? I think systemd facet is blown out of proportion. All it is is a field that the user or administrator injects, no "verification". Ultimately if wired up, the only people that are impacted are people who do not have admin permissions to their system and have an admin that's forcing your real date of birth somehow.

The biggest problem comes with "verification" for real, when an ecosystem demands government ID or credit card. However, most of the laws consider it sufficient for an OS to take the owner at their word as to the age of the user, without external validation. So a parent might have a chance at restricting a young kid (until kid knows how to download a browser fork that always sends the "I'm over 18" flag when it exists), but broadly the data is just whatever the people feel like.

Comment Use an Age-verified flag (Score 2) 169

Why use a date field, which introduces all manner of privacy and anonymity issues? Instead, you could use flags: unverified, verified-minor, verified-adult. (and for further protection you could opt to leave minors at the unverified state). It might need some refinement since age restrictions vary with jurisdiction. But recording whether someone is at least over a certain age beats recording their exact date of birth.

Comment Re:The fusion delusion strikes again (Score 2) 46

Another reason is that if you send someone up there for roughly a year just to get there

With a working fusion rocket you won't have to coast most of the way, and the journey can be significantly shorter. It's right there in the summary: "from months to just a few weeks". Though I doubt that this company will build an actual fusion rocket motor anytime soon, if ever.

Comment Re:smug Linux user enters the chat (Score 2) 183

Had one just this week. Of course we were zapping a Raspberry Pi with 8,000V.

That's the reason why Windows has more crashes. Very varied hardware. I had an issue where sometimes the machine would fail to come back from sleep or hibernation, which turned out to be because sometimes the PCIe link training either failed or came up with a different result for the GPU. Setting the BIOS to force it to PCIe 4 fixed it. Similarly a friend had random crashing which was fixed by running his RAM slightly below rated speed.

Some people just have crap hardware too. Weak power supplies, failing drives, inadequate cooling.

Macs only do better because Apple tightly controls the hardware. Prebuilt Windows machines are probably similarly reliable, at least from people like Lenovo and maybe Dell.

Comment A fair number of considerations... (Score 3, Insightful) 183

One, how much is owed to dubious hardware vendors that don't even play in the Mac ecosystem.

The "lasts longer" is not necessarily a statement of durability, it's mostly about being a prolific business product and business accounting declaring three year depreciation.

I'm no fan of Windows and don't like using it, but these criteria are kind of off.

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