Ahh, okay. I understand. Thank you for the clarification.

Considering he’s made $400B since acquiring Twitter…

Serious question: How?

AFAIK, Twitter wasn’t terribly profitable before they sold to Musk. Then after he purchased it, the enshittification accelerated.

How on earth does this result in $400 Billions in profit?!?

I totally agree.

I am so tired of this “slow boil”, bs.

lol - for the people who up voted this: Did you actually read the 50 pages of this article?

I gotta admit, that I dozed off after the first 5 minutes, skipped through bits of the middle, looked at the end for something meaningful, something to act on - but left disappointed.

Weight - imperial when weighing people, fruit and veg (from a market)

… wait… What about stones (as a unit of weight)? Or is this just a Scotland thing? (People were asking my weight. I had kilos, I had pounds, but they were wanting stones. … Like really?!?)

Darth Jar Jar was the original plan, Lucas changed it after the backlash against the character.

Was this ever confirmed? I just thought it was a fan theory.

That said, if Lucas had actually gone down this path, it would have totally redeemed Jar Jar.

Perhaps you’d like DeluxHost.

You can pay with crypto (I never tried it).

And they use to offer but only through this website.

• 2 cores
• 8 GB Ram
• 80 GB disk
• 10 gbps network (symmetrical)
• “fair-use” bandwidth (15 TB/month)
• a static IPv4 address
• a /64 static IPv6 block
• located in Europe

For 18 Euros per year.

Now, to set some expectations. For 18 EUR per YEAR:

1. You’re NOT getting 99.999% uptime
2. That said, they are pretty reliable (especially as a hobbist platform)
3. For this price point, you’re not getting blazing fast hardware.
4. The reliability does depend a lot on your neighbors
5. The biggest problem I’ve had is with IO (and high/unusable IO-waits). I’ve had IO operations blocked for 5 minutes.
6. However, their Support is really helpful, if you’re not a jerk nor expecting 99.999% uptime with SLA’s. And you can provide timestamps when issues occur, they will go out of their way to try to improve the situation.
7. I did have issues with their network 6 months ago, but they did some migrations and I haven’t noticed any issues.
8. You will want to look at their Fair-use document, to see what you’re allowed and not allowed to do with your bandwidth.

That said, I’m very satisfied with them… but, at this price point, I won’t be surprised if they “disappear in a year”.

When I look at what other VPS companies are offering for 18 Eur: I feel I’m getting a much better value from DeluxHost.

edit: formatting and words

I don’t think it’s that easy.

Interactivity only possible for most at small scale.

You’re overlooking the real OG of the internet: usenet, irc and bulletin board systems (bbs).

The internet has always needed an “easy access” place to communicate, ask questions, or joke around - with a broad audience from around the world.

Of course, gopher, ftp, and http - did exactly as you said: serve static content.

But the internet has always needed a place for “dynamic” conversation and it’s these places that are overran with bots.

Ding! Ding!

This is the real answer: mail providers get to track you, your service get constant confirmation that your email is live (so they can send more ads from themselves plus their 400 closest affiliates). It’s a win-win situation for everyone /s.

“The beatings enshitification will continue, until moral is improved.”

is it worth it?

I’ll try to be objective.

The Pros:

1. Graphene gives you more “control” over your data “out of the box” than any other custom firmware. Yes, you can patch and mod your favorite firmware to your liking, but graphene “just works”
2. It’s rock solid and reliable. It only supports one hardware family. I’ve never had graphene lock-up, crash, camera stop working, etc
3. The installation and upgrading is amazingly easy (compared to other cfw) and streamlined. After the initial setup, it behaves just like any ofw.
4. You’ll see just how much of an intrusive cancer Google has become (Google play has a “feature” where they’ll dynamically load code and try to run it - graphene blocks this kinda crap).
5. Going back to stock Google (with locked bootloader) is rather easy. So you don’t have much to lose (other than a few hours) in trying.

The Cons:

1. Some apps will crash. Graphene hardens how applications behave (in terms of accessing memory, for example) some apps are buggy and will not work. Not many apps (may 1 or 2 out of 30+) but it does happen and you can fittle with the app settings to try to fix it, but it’s tedious through trial-and-error
2. Some apps won’t work, like maybe your bank because it will never pass the “Google integrity” checks. The fear and concern is that more and more apps will start to block cfw. So expect that you might need a second device.
3. Any apps/processes that deal with money (tap-to-pay, Google wallet) probably will not work (again, it fails the “Google integrity” checks).
4. (personal preference) I don’t like the graphene launcher nor their store nor their (boring) default icons. However, graphene empowers you to change/replace all this.

They’re just people doing a job that I regret is necessary…

I think this is the difference, many people believe that the TSA are not necessary nor effective.

9/11 (which was the fuel to create the TSA) happened because at that time the expected response when you (as the passenger) plane was hijacked, was to stay calm and sit and wait for the plane to land, while random demands/negotiations were made with local governments. Yes, a few people might be killed as an “example” or threat, but if you wanted patiently your government would save you.

9/11 shattered that illusion/“rules of engagement”. Now, all of the sudden, if your plane is hijacked you’ll find yourself as an unwilling participant in someone’s suicide run and your only way to survive will be to fight as though your life depends on it (because it does).

I this respect, the complacency of 9/11 will never happen again regardless if the TSA exists or not.

You would need to create yet another version of HTTP to handle that…

We’re going down the rabbit hole, but I’ll play along:

I don’t think we’d need a “new http” version to support this. It could all be done with http headers.

Disclaimer: I’m spit balling here, there are probably more efficient ways to do this.

Anyway, when you go to your bank, included in your banks response header would be a “challenge” (a blob of data in as X-Age-ThinkOfTheChildren-Request).

Your browser would pick this up and generate a “response” and send this as part of all future requests to your bank, like an http-cookie (X-Age-ThinkOfTheChildren-Response).

The “response” was created using the banks challenge plus using the unique age certificate stored on your pc (in your TPM module), which was generated (and “officially digitally signed”) during your initial “age registration process”.

The bank looks at the response, verifies that it was probably signed by the “official age verification organization” (simply using the same technology used to verify ssl certs are valid).

Of course, this entire process depends on a “chain of trust”. The bank needs to trust that you didn’t hack your browser to forward these challenges to another pc. However, this is realistic. As part of the initial age verification process, you can only use “trusted vendors” (ie: Red Hat, Ubuntu) - this means they are required to prevent you from installing “hacked” apps. This could be in the form of preventing certain browser plug-ins and only allowing distro provided versions of your web-browser.

Banks are the slowest companies to handle that kind of modification.

True, but this also depends on the bank. Fintech banks like Revolut were the first ones to start to blocking access to phones that are rooted or running custom firmware (… because they care about security /s)

Most of the effort to implement this will be at the OS and browse level, but this would be a univeral solution. Meaning, it would be trivial for your bank, email service, porn site to support it as it’s simply generating a challenge and verifying the response.

With microslop forcing tpm 2.0 as a hardware requirement into windows 11, all the pieces are in place to pull this off - it just needs the software and the legal requirement.

Back in the day, you went dumpster diving for PC parts.

Now, you just sift through the rubble of data centers in war-torn countries.

“They” have also been trying to prevent consumers/us from taking ownership of our devices and data for the last 2-decades.

… and, ya know what? It’s working.

Because Linux distributions can be created free-willy. Just check out Linux From Scratch, Gentoo, etc. Same with live boot from USB, same with stripped down server distros like Alpine — you have the same issue.

I don’t want to be “that person”, but here’s how it could play out…

The “free-willy” distros would not fulfill the “trust” requirements needed to pass the “certification process”. You can still use them, but think of it like running custom firmware on your cellphone: you’re not going to be able to access your bank, but somethings will still work.

Larger distros (Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc) would pay to pass the “certification process”, but this would come by making certain concessions:

1. The kernel would not be allowed to be tainted. Which means you can only use official kernel modules provided by your vendor (no self-compiling)
2. Certain kernel modules would needed to be removed (or nerfed). For example the Fuse filesystem.
3. You could probably keep root access or at least a nerfed version of it.

Then with theses concessions, your PC world be deemed “reliable” to perform the necessary age verification and have this confirmation passed through your browser to your favor porn site.

I’m baffled. It’s almost as though they’re missing the point of attestation: which is to give “assurance” to application developers/companies that their applications run in “a certain way”.

“A certain way” can have many interpretations, but Googles interpretation means:

1. No root
2. No custom firmware
3. When a users “shares their contacts” with your app, your app gets all their contacts - free from being censored or modified.
4. When a user “shares their files” with your app, your apps gets access to **all their personal data ** - free from being censored, modified or sandboxed.

iodéOS will have their own definition of what “a certain way” is. Which will probably be identical to Google definition.

Heck, GrapheneOS’ attestation has it’s own definition of a “certain way” applications run:

1. No root

I know this, because I run Graphene and I run it rooted. I sign my rooted Graphene with keys, that only I carry and I have my phone setup to only allow OS updates with only my keys.

It does not and will not pass Graphene’s attestation, although from my perspective - it meets my security requirements while give me control over my data.

This discussion has nothing with security patches, but everything to do with the accuracy and how much information developers and companies can get off our devices.

Ah, true - but each application (ie: your banking app) would need to be updated to recognize graphene’s attestation keys.

This sounds promising, but I fear will need government enforcement.

For example, grapheneOS provides it’s own attestation, but few apps actually uses it, as it would require the developers to make some (minimal) changes to their code.

I 100% agree. Then there will be different (mandatory) verification services. Some will be paid, but the free ones (ran by Microslop and Google) that will sell all your personal data to their 500+ closest affiliates.

Ultimately, the end game will be certain websites (like your Bank) won’t trust your identity because your using some FOSS verification service and as “they take security seriously” will require you to use MS or Google.