Please note that the article disagrees with the headline. It states explicitly that there was no request.

In other words, the author feels free to lie to you.

To be clear, network costs represent a tiny fraction of WMF’s expenses. Much of WMF’s budget goes to social programs, not technical upkeep.

This goes back to the days of AOL chat rooms, where they shut down forums for breast cancer survivors because they said “breast”.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/1995/12/02/america-online-admits-error-in-banning-word-breast/

First step: Find a country with a navy competent to defend your undersea cables.

Case in point, Microsoft’s water use shot up from 6.4 million cubic meters in 2022 to 7.8 in 2023, in large part due to the “construction of more data centers.”

By way of comparison, the California almond industry uses 3.5 billion cubic meters of water per year. Describing datacenters as using “astronomical amounts of water” is a plain and simple lie.

Moreover, datacenters can be cooled with water that’s not suitable for most other uses. Google’s Finland datacenter is cooled with seawater, for example.

Zuckerberg has a moral defect. Evil is not a medical problem.

I watched this happen in a research institution in the early 2000s. Scientists who had been heavy SGI, Sun, or HP customers realized that they could get a lot more bang for their buck with beige-box PCs running Linux (or occasionally FreeBSD). Aside from up-front costs, hardware upgrades and replacements were much cheaper and easier to get for PCs.

The big Unix vendors did not help their reputation when they started selling Windows machines — which all of them except Sun did in that era. It became increasingly clear that commercial Unix for scientific computing no longer had a future.

The built-in Proton WINE does pretty darn well for me already. Baldur’s Gate 3 plays fine on my Pop!_OS system.

Try text.

In the future, all Windows apps will be part of Windows App.

Suing your former customers, now there’s a way to make people want to do business with you!

If you’re looking for commercial games on Linux, Steam has pretty much solved this with the “Steam Play” compatibility feature, which uses a customized version of WINE to run Windows games. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 runs perfectly. It should work anywhere Steam does.

People pay for this?

Other way around. Unsupervised OTA updates are dangerous.

First: A car is a piece of safety-critical equipment. It has a skilled operator who has familiarized themselves with its operation. Any change to its operation, without the operator being aware that a change was made, puts the operator and other people at risk. If the operator takes the car into the shop for a documented recall, they know that something is being changed. An unsupervised OTA update can (and will) alter the behavior of safety-critical equipment without the operator’s knowledge.

Second: Any facility for OTA updates is an attack vector. If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer. Because the car is safety-critical equipment — unlike your phone, it can kill people — it is unreasonable to expose it to these attacks.

Driving is literally the most deadly thing that most people do every day. It is unreasonable to make driving even more dangerous by allowing car manufacturers — or attackers — to change the behavior of cars without the operator being fully aware that a change is being made.

This is not a matter of “it’s my property, you need my consent” that can be whitewashed with a contract provision. This is a matter of life safety.

Remember SOAP? Remember XML-RPC? Remember CORBA?

Those were not very good.

This has been going on for over 25 years now.

The kind of people who go into business building censorship software turn out to quite often be the kind of people who think feminism is a hate group, atheism is a cult, birth control is a dangerous drug, evolutionary biology is political extremism, and therapists are child-molesters. As such, it is unsurprising that this software’s behavior has quite often reflected those views.

If you threaten violence to people for calling you a fascist … you might be a fascist.

Also, TCP/IP requires that the server receive your IP address (or that of a proxy, VPN endpoint, etc.) so that it can send the response back. Opening a new browser window doesn’t change that.

Even though going incognito prevents Chrome from saving cookies, site data and your browsing history, it doesn’t actually prevent websites or your internet service provider (ISP) from tracking you and knowing what you’re up to online. This news comes as a shock to many Chrome users but privacy experts have long warned that the browser’s incognito mode isn’t as private as you might think.

Know where else you’ll find that same warning?

On every new incognito window in Chrome.

It’s been there for years —

Your activity might still be visible to:

• Websites you visit
• Your employer or school
• Your internet service provider

1993 or so, before kernel 1.0. Slackware on floppies, then Debian, then Ubuntu, then Mint, now Pop!_OS.

I got a rather profitable career out of it: went into IT during/after college, then got hired into a big Silicon Valley company, stayed in that area for several years, then quit during COVID.