If you are doing stuff in Linux that requires the terminal, you were probably making edits to the registry in Windows or pasting in wild powershell lines from online guides.

No need for 98% of the user base to ever touch the terminal. Open whatever software store comes with your distro, click install next to whatever you want.

The only exception to that is that sometimes, when a trusted person is supporting you through something, giving them a line to paste into a terminal might be quicker than walking them through all the clicks of a gui. Sometimes.

Someone always chimes into these discussions with the experience of being DDOSed and Cloudflare being the only option to prevent it.

Sounds a lot like a protection racket to me.

Except, if you chose the wrong 1 of that 10 and your company is the only one down for a day, you get fire-bombed. If “TEH INTERNETS ARE DOWN” and your website is down for a day, no one even calls you.

I think the strategy used the world-over, is to surveil everyone and build network graphs. You may work extremely hard to secure your device and communications, but the algorithms will build up a dossier on you based on all of the people you associate with who are less capable or motivated. Machine learning is insanely good at filling in missing data in an information rich dataset.

On the other hand, we live in a golden age of private, end-to-end encrypted communications tools. There are literally too many to list here. The problem is our end-points are extremely vulnerable to surveillance now.

Also, the PGP web of trust was a pretty terrible idea for anyone concerned about authoritarian governments. Especially “key parties” that network based on government IDs. They also barely worked in practice anyway. Web-key discovery actually has decent UX, despite being tied to a purchased domain rather than a drivers license. It works fine for people you don’t know, but know by their domain. For people you know, exchanging keys via QR code or verifying keys via some hash out of band has become standard.

I would be terrified of using a bluetooth mesh network in a situation where private, encrypted communications are illegal. That would be literally walking around transmitting your intent. It’s a great idea in a free country though.

In a dystopia, you want to blend in. Something like deltachat has the right idea there - you have to look like boring email on the network. Maybe even layer on stenography -sending boring emails with cat pictures, but your messages are hidden inside them.

Honestly, I would probably go with sneakernet. A microsd card can be hidden very easily, are difficult to detect electronically, transport virtually unlimited text, and be encrypted in-case the mule gets caught to prevent networks being exposed. The latency is just a necessary evil.

Usually these models are trained on past data, and then applied going forward. So whatever bias was in the past data will be used as a predictive variable. There are plenty of facial feature characteristics that correlate with race, and when the model picks those because the past data is racially biased (because of over-policing, lack of opportunity, poverty, etc), they will be in the model. Guaranteed. These models absolutely do not care that correlation != causation. They are correlation machines.

I cant imagine a model being trained like this /not/ end up encoding a bunch of features that correlate with race. It will find the white people, then reward its self as the group does statistically better.

That’s not the biggest disadvantage “if used properly.” Any account you have should get a passkey on every device you own. Each device has it’s own passkey system. If you have an iPhone, yeah, you get an apple passkey, but then if you have a windows laptop, you have a microsoft passkey, a FLOSS system will have it’s own, and so on. You are already on whatever system would contain the passkey and can easily add different ones each time you get a new device.

The biggest issue is that most people use a small number of devices (including many who use 1). Passkeys work best if you have many devices, so if you lose one, you just use another to access your services. If you have 1, you need to use recovery codes (and people don’t save them).

How many good passwords can you memorize? I can maintain 2-3 in my head long term, especially if only used rarely, and you can be phished if you are typing it in. Not tenable for online accounts. The only real comparison with security parity is a password manager + 2fa generated on-device, compared with passkeys. In both cases, you have “strong” password, no re-use, resiliency to fishing, and requires both “something you know and something you have.” I think a password manager is slightly more usable, but I’m not convinced either is a “good” experience yet.

We have had more outages in our corporate tech services in the last month than the last year before that. Between AWS, Azure, and Teams issues, it’s been crazy.

Because you are not the customer of the ad networks. They are marketing bs to ad buyers, where you actually viewing the ad is merely incedental.

Yes. Because targeted advertising is just selling something in it’s self. It was always a scam, but the mark os businesses that buy into the idea.

Also the eugenics stuff. Yeah, it was just a low-effort way to set up the premis, but eww (and also very incorrect). They had to make sleepwaling into that kind of thing seem plausible with some explanation. Instead, we didn’t actually need that.

Thanks, I’ll take a look.

Do you have a recommendation for consumer-priced outdoor cameras/doorbells? Seems like a minefield.

I agree, but for the reasons above, it’s a terrible outcome for everyone on the internet. The number of people who will keep their router up to date with security patches are abysmal. Fix the ISPs and it would work, but you can’t fix the situation where the majority of residential humans suck at managing routers.

Yes, this really is a situation where ISP managed devices could really be the right option for most -if they weren’t such terrible companies.

The ICC is one of those orgs where not having their data sitting on silicon valley servers is a big friggin’ deal, and they should have probably thought of that years ago.

If that story is at all true, I feel so bad for that kid regarding so much more than the OS on his computer. I honestly hope you have thought about the potential future circumstance that you need to take on an abused teenager.