unwarlikeExtortion

If you just give binary blobs and no sources

The main point is that you give the source to the blobs, so it's not a black box anymore - new maintainers knowing what the blob does (and how) saves a HUGE amount of time prodding the black box (blob) to infer its behaviour.

And it doesn't pose a security risk - if anything, more eyes on the code is better. Security through obscurity has been proven a myth since open code has more eyes on it. Security researches have smarter things to do than prod some binary blob when there's so much code that's either open source in the first place or at least only they got access to closed code.

What obscurity does is limit the eyes on the code, but the share of bad actors hoping to strike gold to researches looking at it outdoes any benefit.

Will your technically-challenged great-Aunt switch to post-support build when her phone hits EoL

She won't. But you as her niece/nephew might. And the local repair tech might when she comes to ask. Abd she's not an idiot, just the technology isn't mature enough in the societal sense: people don't think of bringing their phone to a repair shop like they do their cars, which is a fixable issue - even without much advocacy groups time will fix this issue.

hackers [will] be able to remote control her banking app and take away your inheritance before the community can even patch it

You might be mixing apples and orabnes here: why and how is the community expected to "fix" a banking app?

A banking app is a closed blob just like phobes nowadays. It's a parasitic relationship: blobbed phones are used to justify blobbed apps and vice versa. It's like saying "well, the foubdation of the building is bad, but to fix it we'd need to also deal with the crumbling walls" - so instead of fixing, it often is better to do a fresh start. But you're suggesting we should continue making buildings with bad walls and foubdations because we have the wall materials lying around, so why not use them?

Then there could also be licensed code

This is a recipe for disaster. I hope you're trolling.

The Internet wouldn't work if DNS were centralized, and the only thing DNS is used for is translating key pairs (basically). Now a single point of failure would have to do code vetting?

It's the totalitarian dream! Oh, and absolutely out of touch with reality.

Actually, both "persona non grata" (latin has cases) and "gratis coffee/beer/bootloader" both make sense.

Just convert the "x is gratis" into "you're welcome to [relevant-action-verb] x".

As in, "The kernel is gratis" = "You're free to [use] the Kernel" (which is basically "it's free" in everyday english).

For "Persona non grata" it would be "(You're a) person not welcome (to [come] here)".

This is what it originally meant. It has nothing to do with price and everything to do with gratuity. I (a provider) am grateful to you and welcome you to use/come/see/do/whatever.

"Gratis" would be the ketchup packet at McDonalds - they're happy you paid for a burger so they'll give you a ketcup packet as they're grateful you did.

There isn't. In order to use, you must have access somehow. And that access allows collection.

You can't use Google Maps without letting it know whete you are.

There can be some waysto forbid collection, but they're all stopgaps.

Giving location access is like opening floodgates. Some data will end up somewhere you don't want.

Bigger is always better. For hardware.

On the other hand, less is always more for software.

Might as well bump it to 64 GB and an LLM chip since in 5 years' time people might like Copilot & Friends spying a bit less on them.

Ads? Privacy popups? Newsletter popups? Autoplay self-resizing videos?

Sure, coming across a site that does all is luckily not too easy.

At least I don't remember it being back when I raw-dogged the web.

Toolbars were a user choice and most weren't rootkits, so you could disable them from a standardized browser interface or like any other app on your system.

Can you do such a thing with the modern stuff on Chrome or vanilla Firefox?

Politics is the science and art of organizing, constituting and managing

If politics is the art and science of anything, that something is spreading corruption and attaining personal gain at thr cost of general society.

This is where a man page comes in but alas, but some (perhaps even most) of them are fucking horrible. The core incantation is either too dumbed-down or (more often) too long-winded.

Some good ones I can praise are netcat, ghostscript and 7z. Special praise goes to the Library Funtions Manual entries like signal and exit.

Bad ones ones in my book are vim (too short), ffmpeg (a simple reordering of sections would make it quite a bit better, like moving the less common flags lower down the page) and git starts of strong but ends up being way too detailed and unstructured.

I could go listing examples for days, so I might as well stop now.

Well, of course anything he does has to be strong as he can't seem weak in front of his somehow-still-existing sheep heard.

To be honest, even this seems like a step in the right direction, as they're direct and transparent about exactly what they use. Sure, it should be normal, and those toggle popups with a "Reject All" that does not cover everything (usually strategically leaving "legitimate interest" be) should rot in bankrupcy after a fine. Without large and sure fines, it's the cost of doing (profitable) business.

Hopefully, eYou will see the good aspects of not using invasive tracking tech, especially america-based black boxes.

I mean, if someone is responsible enough to brethalyze themselves, they should also be responsible enough to not drive. Hooking the brethalyzer up to the car to disable it seems like a terrible idea.

Deoending on the way it's implemented, a bad one could brick a car for hours if someone drunk tries it, but there are perfectly sober people who could drive. Or y'know, this shit with someone coming on and remotely disabling things all willy-nilly.

Even if you do put healthcare on the hands of for-profit, it could work, what with the high demand and hospitals being big players, meaning they have scale, a big prerequisite for lowering price.

At least for the "common" ailments.

That being said, there's no competition, the only true capitalist prerequisite for capitalism working.

So basically, capitalist healthcare could work, but US healthcare is basically as late-stage as capitalism could get, so alas - no.