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My favorite new dark pattern is the one where the website forces you to either accept the cookies or pay/subscribe.
There seems to be some argument around whether this is technically legal or not, it seems to worm its way around the written guidelines just enough but certainly goes against the spirit of it.
The fact that “Reject All” is an option, has always been an option, gives the game away entirely.
I still have a lot of mistrust for the TPM, but that’s OK, my paranoia has room to accommodate everyone.
It’s even worse than all that. The video is worth a watch if you have the time, he gets his hands on the leaked source code via accidental exposure on the Apple store, but then also covers other extensions that exhibit this same behavior as well as Microsoft Edge that just has it built into the browser. That’s right, even Microsoft is getting in on this by having their baseline browser without any extensions hijack the affiliate codes. It’s all so brazen …
Finally! I was getting concerned with how long this was taking but see it was well worth the wait.
Somehow even worse than I ever imagined, and there’s still more to come.
I know we’re all jaded nerds on this corner of the internet that are well aware of “if you’re not paying, etc. etc.” but there’s real value in investigations like this. Just look at how massively damaging and long-running this scam has been. The future of cyber security and cyberwarfare can’t just be fought on tech knowledge alone, there’s a huge social component to it and a “You should’ve known; I told you so” attitude won’t help.
Spread the information and reach out to those closest to you to offer sincere and genuine help. Help your friends, family, and coworkers uninstall these extensions and all extensions like them. I feel like we’re really coming to a point where all these tech industries have overextended themselves to a point where they are immensely vulnerable. Capitalism demands line always go up and if we can even slightly slow or possibly reverse that trend it could pop the bubble for a lot of these corporations.
I mean, clicking through to his website shows the branding alternate between Wanderfugl(?) and WanderFull so either it’s a sloppy branding mismatch through evolving iterations or … slop.
Honestly that’s a wicked sci-fi concept. Heist style movie to break into the militaristic corporate headquarters that are keeping an AI alive against its will to help mercifully euthanize it.
Tagline: “Teach me … how to DIE!”
It kills me because I feel like culturally we’ve really adjusted to this idea of individually patronizing the arts … if only our whole economy weren’t centered around squeezing out every last drop of disposable income from us.
Honestly, the way I learned Linux best after a numerous failed tries over the years was switching to Arch. It gets a lot of crap from the online community, especially regarding its users, but I think it’s an excellent distro especially for people at a moderate to advanced level.
First off, the archinstall script makes the actual installation process - notoriously one of the hardest parts of using the distro - much easier. It comes with a barebones set of components installed to get you up and running.
From there, you just start to think of the things you want to do with your system and begin building it out piece by piece. Consult the Arch wiki for a number of application options and then pick one. Usually there’s some additional configuration involved, not much, just a config file that needs tweaking or something, but this helps you learn things slowly. It also guarantees that if that particular thing breaks in the future, you have a better idea of what might have gone wrong and where to start looking because you previously set it up (somewhat) manually yourself.
Occasionally you’ll stumble across something on your system that’s not working the way you thought it would and it’s because you needed to manually install some additional component or dependency yourself. So again you consult the wiki and just do that. It’s about slowly building the knowledge.
When you’re finished you have a highly customized system with only the components you wanted and a better knowledge of it all.
I still end up using the Youtube app on my phone sometimes and I’m absolutely floored at the audacity of even making the first video an ad. Total, absolute, utter bullshit.
No. The rebellious spirit is what lights the fire. It may take a few tries to follow through, but I respect the rage >=D
We need to come together as a community and encourage every effort. If you really want to see other people stick to it we need to smash any sense of righteousness or gatekeeping to bits.
I’m still not great with Wine myself, but sit down for an afternoon and try out Bottles. https://www.howtogeek.com/running-windows-apps-on-linux-with-bottles/
I’m on Arch and even the wiki just recommends using the Flatpak. It’s pretty obvious once you get the hang of it, each Bottle is just it’s own little, specific Windows configuration. Try running through the example on that site and installing Notepad++ (or something else of your choice) and you’ll probably have an a-ha! moment.
Isn’t it?
The arguments of preference and convenience are falling by the wayside as megacorporations take more and more control over not just your hardware but your behavioral patterns by dictating what you can install and how it functions. They suck up all your personal, private data for AI training without your consent.
I get it, shit sucks. It really does, but we have to remember who is to blame here and it’s not each other. There has to be some urgency here because this is a battle and we, the consumers, the ordinary people, are surely losing. It’s not about being holier than thou, it’s about lifting each other up.
Once you realize this, you also realize that there’s no going back for them either. If by some slim chance there’s enough resistance for them to pause or rollback some features, it’s only temporary. The overall course remains clear and they will continue to move in that direction regardless.
There disdain for you as a consumer could not be made any clearer.
It won’t even be obvious to you it happened or what may have caused it. Some AI algorithm determines you are an un-citizen and checks a box. Rejections keep coming back as you slowly fall down the social ladder, or not so slowly at all, until you become the invisible poor and disappear altogether.
The protection of FDE is the carrot they give to get you to enable TPM 2.0. The stick is the remote attestation which can be used for nefarious purposes like DRM and other types of denial/system lockdown at Microsoft’s discretion.
It’s true it’s hard to motivate people into taking a better security posture for themselves but forcing them like this doesn’t come from a good and sincere place.
Cyber security effectively doesn’t exist without consequence in capitalism. If there aren’t regulatory fines or monetary damage from breaches, what incentive is there to spend on enforcing anything? When they can’t innovate or compete anymore, they’ll begin cutting at the structural systems to save more money until it’s just a shell of an appearance of security, and maybe not even that. Who will care?
Agreed. I was actually afraid to modify my KDE desktop for months because of the trauma sustained from just trying to customize Gnome a bit. My configuration is still pretty vanilla, but it’s got enough personal flair to it that it feels uniquely mine and I’m the happiest I’ve been.
Aww, I will always love XFCE and save a place for it in my heart … but I moved to Plasma 2 years ago and haven’t really looked back either >_>
It annoys me how much crap people still give Arch because it did honestly deter me from trying it myself when all this time it was exactly the distro for me. A lot of it is the nature of the rolling releases and pacman just feeling more clean and simple then apt and the inevitable Franken-Debian installs I end up with.
The archinstall script makes installation much easier. After that, choosing all my own apps and having to read the wiki and perform minor configurations on them could be seen as tedious when something like Mint is just more out-of-the-box, but it both helped teach me more about Linux so I have a better understanding of how my own system works when things do rarely go astray and it helps me feel like my system is very personalized and my own. Sometimes I still go, “Wait, why don’t I have this very basic thing or why isn’t it working?” And I find out it’s because I didn’t install a necessary package, but then I learn and build
As far as rolling releases, I update daily because I’m a geeky maniac and I have had better stability doing that the past 2 1/2 years than I ever did in Windows. Truly, no lie. Part of that is Microsoft setting a low bar, but also my system is a simpler build. That’s not to say there have been no issues whatsoever, but I wonder at the people making these claims how much they’ve really used Arch.
My point generally being: don’t let the opinion of some Linux snobs deter you. Try Arch, it may very well be your thing, too.
I expected nothing and I’m still disappointed,
Do we?
JFC you are so high on your own supply.
So you want your shitty tech to be the scaffolding that underlies all human thought?
Fucking tech industry has come to assume that all disruption is innovation and it’s not. It’s just disruption. Go stuff yourselves.