palordrolap

My question is this: Do Microsoft ship crap-infested versions to people who could make their lives uncomfortable, like, say, intelligence agencies, or do those agencies take a crap-infested version and have their IT security strip all the crap out?

Because if I was in charge of an intelligence agency I’d be asking - with dangerous smile - for the crap-free version, turn IT loose on it anyway and then be, shall we say, horribly invasive to Microsoft if there’s anything still left in it.

… and if I wanted Windows, I’d want whatever the end result of that is.

On the other hand, maybe this has already happened and that “horrible invasion” is the cause of all the spyware crap in the consumer release.

Sigh.

It’s not just about primes, it’s about proving the technologies and techniques needed to verify such a number is prime, which might then be extrapolated to things unrelated to proving things prime.

For example, GIMPS (the organisation behind this find) was a great example of distributed computing long before people had multiprocessor supercomputers in their homes.

But let’s not forget the hobby factor. You don’t get to decide what other people do for fun. If they want to lend a portion of their computer’s runtime to a distributed computing project, that’s up to them.

Some people climb tall mountains, and that’s not of much use to anyone either.

All their media is hosted under the redditstatic domain, and as far as I can tell, that’s hosted on AWS. (There’s actually also a redditmedia domain, which they may also use, but that’s also on AWS).

That probably means that Reddit can get away with saying they don’t host any of it. They merely point their web addresses at the third party host.

“… you don’t. You recover it from /dev/random. Eventually.”

Hiroshima was a man-made disaster that happened in 1945.

Chernobyl was a man-made disaster that happened in 1986.

And now generalise for the punchline.

LMDE6 still uses ntfs-3g as far as I can tell, so I’m going to assume that regular Mint does too. lsmod reports nothing like ntfs, and the tried and tested, if no longer developed, ntfs-3g suite is installed.

Things might change as and when the kernel driver is more stable for writing. I’m sure more bleeding-edge distros are already running the kernel driver, but then, those who run those distros are deep into Linux and NTFS is not really something they deal with regularly.

As far as I know, Linux ignores NTFS permissions when given raw access to a disk, or rather, acts as thought it’s SYSTEM or some other high-level user, working around anything Windows might have set.

Worst case, you could still move your important files to an exFAT partition (or into an archive) where permissions don’t apply.

Interesting. A quick search around finds someone confusing a bot into selling them a Chevy Tahoe for $1 at the end of last year.

Can’t tell whether that one went to court. I can see an argument that a reasonable person ought to think that something was wrong with the bot or the deal, especially since they deliberately confused the bot, making a strong case in favour of the dealership.

Now, if they’d haggled it down to half price without being quite so obvious, that might have made an interesting court case.

NTFS file reading and writing is reasonably well supported under Linux, though exFAT or native filesystems are preferable. Actually finding software that will understand your files is one level removed, and getting equivalent or even the same software running is another level still. e.g. reading MS Office documents - LibreOffice is pretty good at that. For games, Steam and Proton have a lot of that covered.

If all you do is on websites, most if not all of the usual web browsers are available and work indistinguishably.

That said, I will leave you with these three words: Backups. Backups. Backups.

This has already been tried in at least one court.

There was that story a while back about the guy who was told by an airline’s AI help-desk bot that he would get a ticket refund if turned out he was unable to fly, only for the airline to say they had no such policy when he came to claim.

He had screenshots and said he wouldn’t have bought the tickets in the first place if he had been told the correct policy. The AI basically hallucinated a policy, and the airline was ultimately found liable. Guy got his refund.

And the airline took down the bot.

I think they thought they could be the “true Tesla” to rival the “Edison” thief or mangler of ideas that the company named Tesla is or, at least appears to be*.

Ironically, that seems to have been the only truly good idea they’ve had.

* For legal reasons this is a hypothetical opinion I believe, in some form, might have belonged to the founder(s) of Nikola Motor, and says nothing of my own disappointment opinion.

Two types of people on Earth. Those in the bottom percentile and everyone else.

Not sure I’d want to see that, tbh. It would only introduce more avenues for DDG to make questionable choices when they’re already on thin ice.

The secret to Mastodon is to follow hashtags, not people. (It took a while for that feature to mature, which made that difficult earlier on.)

You can follow people too, but with the population there being lower, it generally makes more sense to follow a topic and hide accounts you don’t want to see.

Caveat: I don’t spend a lot of time on microblogging platforms, Mastodon or otherwise. The above knowledge might be stale, but used present tense to not give the impression the platform is dead.

Peeked at Bluesky the other day and was thinking “wow a lot of these posts are in Portuguese”. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to connect the dots.

Anyway, my point is, damage has been done to Xitter’s user base in Brazil. How much damage remains to be seen.

2K was my jam.

The death of the DOS line of Windows (3.x, 9x, ME) lead to the decision to inject clown DNA into NT in order to appeal to the masses and that’s how we ended up with XP.

Vista was an attempt to eradicate the clown, but it was still there, people hated it and because Microsoft thought they had eradicated the clown, they thought people wanted more clown, and that’s how we ended up with Windows 8.

What about 7? The clown gene skipped a generation.

TIL.

Edit: I’ve just noticed that there’s an active QMMP project. That would be an even better option.

With that licensing, I think it might be better for anyone wanting to contribute time and effort to be looking to resurrect XMMS or XMMS2* instead. Heck, they even supported Winamp skins.

* There were apparently two unrelated projects called XMMS2. Take your pick.

If the block feature goes away, I guarantee it will come back for - at the very least - the highest tier of paid accounts almost immediately afterwards.

I can’t imagine any of the large corps that still use Xitter for customer communication will be happy not being able to block serial trolls. Or people with legitimate grievances who won’t go away.

Google’s money is a bit scummy these days, and definitely not something that should be relied upon long term, but I hope Google are making some kind of monetary donation.