For the individual that is certainly better than Chrome, but from a perspective of does it give Alphabet, any less influence not really much better.

I come back to if we allow Chromium to become essentially the only online HTML Document rendering engine in use, Google makes all the rules. It is really to large a project for any entity not a large corporate to fork.

Just look at the whole plugin architecture(Manifest V2) stuff, Google got their way because the plugin architecture touches so much and nobody maintaining Chromium based alternative browser could realistically keep up with the mainline if they forked or tried to keep a patch set running.

Google basically unilaterally decided what web-plugins are allowed to do; and nobody was able to stop them.

Don't forget the children that don't eat, or miss out on a lot of opportunities because dad spend the money on whatever his version of a horse race happens to be.

I gambling should be restricted to private in person bets, between parties and it should be illegal to profit directly from any sort of book making or facilitation of gambling activities.

So if you and buddy you invited over to watch the game want to bet on the outcome with each other - legal

If you and some friends go the saloon/moose lodge and have a poker game at the table, while you order drinks - legal.

If the saloon charges you specifically for gambling use of the table, vs just requiring you buy a drink - not legal.

If the saloon wants a cut of the gambling - not legal.

  Market making is fine too, options etc on a commodity, and insurance - just fine, but there should have to be an underlying commodity that is actually being traded, or real property that is either impaired or not impaired in the life of the contract. An "event" alone is not a commodity. I can't sell you the results of presidential election (or if I can other things are very wrong). The idea these prediction markets are not 'gambling' is a farce. This judge is bonkers, and I hope this is over turned.

The trick with Iran if you want to be really America first about is not in the taking of the oil it is in the denying it to everyone else.

America is a net oil producer, we have a distribution problem that has us importing oil, while also exporting but we could 'fix' that, and probably would fix that given some time and a reasonable expectation that shipping anything via Hormuz was not going to be safe for the foreseeable future.

That would give America a tremendous economic advantage over the SE Asia, and event the EU.

I think it makes sense entirely to
1) Destroy all prospects of an economic future for Iran so the regime even though it will survive can't fund Hezbollah and others that interfere with our interests, because they'll all be too busy whoring for international food aide to do anything else.
1a) Declare victory and go home
2) Use DPA and any other legal means to keep domestic oil and gas, domestic.
3) Use (2) it advantage America industry down stream of oil and gas
4) Let the rest of the world figure out how to 'open the f***ing strait'

I am going call - homemade IoT stuff someone built themselves with a SBC or something out of scope.

What consumer or SoHo products can you point at that don't use the phone home model? I can't think of single one. Even stuff that really really should be able to talk to something local like my ecobee thermostats don't..

Let us also take DOS conditions out of scope, again if someone can send whatever packet that triggers a DOS on the device they are already on your internal network.

So the threat here if you smart lightbulb gets pwnt is that it could leave an attacker with place to maintain persistence after their foothold is fixed. IE the pwn your browser, gain persistence on your lightbulb, you patch browser, they maintain access to your internal network via the bulb.

Ok fine - but kernel exploits are *almost* *never* the issue there. It is nearly universally some defect in a listening service, not the IP stack itself. So that thing is getting popped via its bad telnet/web service regardless of the kernel is is running.

But what about local privilege exploits, those are frequently kernel issues. Once again does not matter for IoT devices, I don't care if you are root or bob on my light bulb. You bob can make outbound connections and give you are reverse tunnel to attack me thru just as well as root can. There are no authorization domains on my light bulb, you are me or your are not authorized the UID the kernel thinks you have is irrelevant.

Exactly Chrome and realistically Chromium is essentially malware. Geeks especially should consider it a civic duty to use basically anything else. Which pretty much leaves Firefox and Safari.

Browser diversity is critical to keeping the web actually open. Even if Chromium is open source, the reality is Google drives the project entirely. It puts them in a powerful position to gatekeep, and that is bad for all the same reasons it was bad when IE-5/6 ruled the web, nearly uncontested.

We don't want a web where the only standard is whatever chromium does.

In what other industry can you say,
"We think our product is great/safe/reliable/... but no we absolutely won't stand behind it if anything goes wrong." and have that no impact the marketability.
I am not talking legal or anything like that, just purely from a sales and customer relationship perspective.

Just imagine a GM ad;

"The 2026 Silverado our most capable pickup ever!" - Read in deep dramatic voice
"Remember Chevrolote Silverado models are for entertainment purposely" -Read as the image fades to black in higher pitch at 2x speed.

  It would be scandal..but when Microsoft does it, hardly anyone even blinks.

Not really...

Almost all IoT devices work by phoning home. They call some remote server, and do some API stuff, send some message poll for new messages / instructions. They tend to have very little if anything listening.

If they do get onwd its because the infrastructure that supports them gets compromised, at which point its really the infrastructure that was hacked and not the device. The other thing that happens - all the gosh darn time - is what ever little web based interface they have for setting up wifi/IP settings/etc is some terrible CGI thing with some form of injection vulnerability. Again though if that gets pwnt, it is only after some ofther failure of your internal network security. That is a concern, I understand defense in depth, I get foothold and dwell time issues, However a newer kernel won't prevent that kind of compromise. Lack of shell escaping on calls to system() or bad choices around using eval() will get you popped on Linux 7.0 as easily as 2.0.

spending effort to maintain support for stuff nobody is using is not reasonable. Would you write a book, if you were certain nobody would ever read it or even want to?

Don't say "but what about a diary," even a private diary generally has one intended audience if it is the author themselves, for their own recollection.

writing software that no computer will ever run makes very little sense, even from an educational standpoint.

- as to the hidden breakage. Probably not much, because if you don't know about those 486s lurking out there, you are not updating the firmware/OS/other software on them either, and they will continue humming a long as they have until something else breaks.

This is a part everyone seems to miss when the get freaked out about Linux itself or some distribution dropping support for something 30 years old...

In 2026 if you are still using a computer older than mid-90s (and very more than likely even one from after the mid 90s) it is because it is part of some very specific process that almost certainly has you not making changes, which are almost certain to include software changes too.

Just because Linux 7.x can't be built for i486 any more does not stop you from grabbing any prior version and using that. Thinking about 486s specifically, I know there are actually a lot of odd things like hardened industrialized PCs and some routers and the like running licensed 486 cores and late manufacturing Intel parts; that are still in use. You can even still buy some new. It would not surprise me to learn people are running Linux on a good number of them, it would surprise me to learn people are running Linux newer than 5.10 or 5.15 on them. Even in the most exotic memory configurations a 486 is going to top out at 3.5GBs of memory, I guess you could do nearer to 4GB on a ISA only system (No PCI or VLB). You really going burn 16MB or more of that just on the kernel?

Let's be real if you are running a 468 you are probably using using Linux 2.0 - 2.6 already. Not being able to use 7 hardly affects you.

 

As you can imagine I am 100% against communism and any form of socialism. Bezos and everyone else must have property rights not hindered by government, it is his business to run (or his board) and government must not be in position to dictate how any company hires and fires people, who they hire and fire, why, etc.

I fully expect Amazon to close this warehouse, maybe it will be contaminated with something radioactive for example, to make things easier and then it will shut down. Personally I root for the anarcho capitalist solution and wish Amazon to win this battle for its private property rights.

social engineering used in practice by the parent comment, now sitting at +4 Funny. Still waiting for that 1 autistic moderator.

Hmm....over the years, I've had several girlfriends report loss of appetite after trying to watch a lot of Monty Python with me......

It is something to do with 2 X chromosomes...?

I have to wonder if this is a first step to abandoning POWER. I can see IBM wanting to get out of the game of trying to build performance competitive CPUs they don't have many outside customers for any longer.

Especially when they could put commodity designs in their shiny black boxes and still charge super premium prices for them.