StarDreamer

is definitely on every normal user’s mind at all times.

That was the context. The problem wa connecting to Wireshark, which more and more people are doing thanks to general awareness of VPNs.

and last but not least people like you going ‘hmm yes but akshually’ in sort-of-defense-but-not-really of the deliberately malicious and billion-dollar company.

Huh? Where in my post did I defend MS? I was there when Balmer and crew decided to sue anyone with a pulse for using Linux. I was there when the Cathedral acquired the Bazaar (and I deleted my account for it), and I am still here using Linux and BSD for every single machine I own with the exception of one. I still hold a grudge against Mr. Bill “Jump on a roller to show how fit you are” Gates, and I refuse to purchase anything from their game catalog since 2011. Hopefully with this context, you would no longer misconstrue my point as “defending Microsoft”.

Alas, normal users care about neither. The computer is just a tool that allows them to do work which allows them to put food on the table. If your assistance is just “boo hoo use Linux”. That’s not productive to them nor us. Joe Shmoe isn’t gonna care that you should save your documents as ODT instead of DOCX. They need that document working with no hassle NOW.

Look at it this way: A normal dude with bad hair and questionable social intelligence isn’t getting up in the morning and deciding to fuck with a million or more users by making their computers unbootable. There is only good intentions.

Case in video game modding: 1. GShade, where the developer deliberately made people’s game segfault if compiled on their own after an update 2. MultiMC, where the developer personally threatened to sue for trademark violation after packaging the application for a Linux distro 3. Bukkit, where one dev decided to DMCA and take down all instances of the project.

Outside of video games: the entire university of Maryland, which attempt to inject backdoors into the Linux kernel that was not caught until they published a paper.

Also, for the “good dudes part”: regardless of intentions, if the damage is done, the harm is done. If a suitcase falls from an airplane and kills me tomorrow, I wouldn’t care whether it was intentional or not. I would be dead.

Going back to the original blog post: there is both a user problem and a technical problem here. The technical problem “could” be fixed by switching to Linux (assuming systemd or gnome doesn’t get to it first), but the user problem can’t. Calling out anyone who points out the user problem as “corpo drone” isn’t going to make it go away.

Grab your shovel, time to lucky 10000 some bash.org content!

Devil’s advocate here: switching to Linux wouldn’t help.

I recently had to set up a public web server for a org that I belonged to. The idea was that I would set everything up in the most secure and unbreakable way I can think of, write documentation on how to do everything, transfer ownership of all the “break glass” credentials and lock my own account once I’m done.

This turned out to be a huge mistake. What was supposed to be some free work for a hobby group turned into a massive pain every day at 3-4am (due to time zone differences)

The person in charge of managing access control couldn’t figure out how wg-easy works. She managed to give her own credentials to EVERYONE who needed access, which obviously didn’t work due to IP conflicts. When pointed out, she modified the IP in every config file, which of course, still didn’t work. It took forever to tell her NOT to share credentials and create new peers for each user.

The biggest problem is some how NOT windows or mac users. There is a single Linux user that is causing the most headaches. When I set up wireguard, I tested on both Linux and Windows, with Linux being what I used. I ran into some minor hiccups with getting split dns to work correctly, but it was relatively easy to fix in Network Manager. I assumed if there are other Linux users they would be able to fix it themselves. Obviously I was wrong.

Said person had DoH enabled in their browser that they didn’t know how to disable, running varieties of “I don’t know” for their network stack, DNS resolver, etc. almost every question for dig, cat /etc/resolv.conf descended into “what’s that?” or completely incorrect commands (e.g. resolving a http url in dig). I could not figure out what the person was running, the person themselves had no idea what was running (I think it was systemd-resolvd, but I still don’t know as of now). Eventually, after 3 workdays of trying to help fix this at 3-4am, I gave up. I can’t help with a personal device belonging to somebody that has no idea what they’re doing.

As for why I’m mentioning this story: switching to Linux wouldn’t help this lady with her problem. There are similar issues on linux that would prevent a login or a graphical session (there was an old work machine that ran VLC, where VLC threw GBs worth of QT errors, eventually causing systemd to crash on reboot when the drive was full). The problem here isn’t just the system, it’s the user. A lot of people seem to be allergic to providing more details than “it’s not working”, “I don’t know” and “I didn’t try anything”. If the general mindset is “I don’t know what’s wrong with no details”, there’s no savings the user from technical problems.

On a side note for “why the hell did I knowingly volunteer to set up a web server for someone else”: the whole project was already 5 months overdue. It was beneficial for everyone for the server to be up asap. Said person in charge didn’t think of anything (dns, hosting, software stack) other than ask a bunch of CS college students to design a Web app for her. Needless to say the students bailed on her (which is probably the best scenario? In terms of maintainability and security concerns). It also only took me 2 weeks to set everything up (lamp stack, K3S, crowdsec, openappsec, wireguard, etc)

What’s your emergency “break glass” policy?

Is it a bottle of whiskey?

I agree that matrix is a slow and buggy hot mess, but its issues mainly lie with scaling. As long as your instance is small it works well enough. Imo this is architectural and will never be fixed with synapse.

As for no alternatives for discord. I think the problem is that people have come to expect a certain level of QoS with hosted services that are expensive to maintain for hobbyists (cdn, load balancing, nat traversal, ddos protection, etc). I think this is fundamental to how we’re abusing IP when it’s way past its prime and on life support using middle boxes. If we want to reclaim this space, the best way forward would be something like NDN, but the transition would be astronomical that nobody wants to do it.

Our minds like to process entities/companies like Google as human beings, which allows us to assign emotions to these things. But the truth is, they are nothing but a glorified Chinese room experiment.

People made the largest browser engine and operating system, not Google. Without people, the company is nothing. A company like Google is nothing but a set of self operating rules.

I love/loathe Google just as much as I love/loathe my weekly /tmp cleaning cron job. Even if it accidentally nukes my files, it’s just doing as it’s designed to do.

You design a system to maximize shareholder value, it will do exactly that without caring a single thing about human ethics.

1. They were ALREADY scanning your data using AI… And banning people for simply discussing certain topics.
2. How do people even notice these things? I honestly couldn’t tell. (Edit: okay, I forgot about the domain)

Anyways, I’m trying to get people in specific vulnerable communities to switch to matrix. But the amount of people refusing to do so out of convenience (and even refusing to setup MFA or using different passwords for their online accounts, including discord) is staggering.