Amazing, thank you for the in-depth (but simple enough) explanation!

OH. So like, it’s a situation where the “lock” has 2 keys, one that locks it and one that unlocks it. You keep the “unlock” key on your person and never let it out of your sight, but let the “lock” key just gets distributed and copied anywhere because all it can do is LOCK the door, and it really doesn’t matter who locks the door so long as only you can unlock it.

That is very interesting. I still don’t quite understand how it technically works, because I thought if you encrypt something with a key, you could basically “do it backwards” to get the original information… This is probably due to getting simplified explanations of encryption though that makes them analogous to a basic cipher (take every letter, assign it to a number, add 10, convert back to new letter - can’t be read unless someone knows or figures out the “key” is 10) and now it is obvious that it is significantly more complex than that…

But I am much more confident that I understand the ‘mechanics’ of it, so thank you for the explanation!

Considering they don’t want your address or name, how the hell would that work anyway? This had to be a joke…

I find the best way to torment Linux ISOs is using the live environment exclusively to:

1. Bing search “how to burn iso to usb” 1a) immediately change search to “how to burn iso to usb linux”
2. Bing search “windows 11 install free iso” 2a) download the first link that is an iso
3. Follow instructions from step 1a 90% to the letter using the iso from step 2a, changing the 10% ignored until it “works”.
   3a) bonus points if you try to write the image to the same USB the live environment is on - if the “chosen” method allows this, congratulations secret ending unlocked, skip to step 6.
4. Bing search “is windows 11 free install safe” 4a) change search to “is windows 11 free install safe reddit”
5. Either unmount the live USB while it is still running, or just hard power down the computer, without even closing the browser.
6. Plug USB drive directly into USB power wall adapter and never plug it into a computer again.

Now, before you ask, yes, you absolutely could do all of this in a VM, but I’ve found it is more tormenting if there is real actual hardware wasted and/or at risk of damage. Linux is the natural enemy of consumerism, so buying a 12 pack of flash drives just to do this on a thinkpad over and over until the thinkpad dies really hurts the linux ISO to their core.

Okay, but like, if the carrier sees all your texts, don’t they also receive the public keys and can then also decrypt the messages?? I’m genuinely curious how this works. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced I don’t understand how any encryption works because the intended recipient needs the key to decrypt it, and if I’m giving them that key, but my traffic is also being watched… doesn’t whoever wants to snoop get the key too??

I feel like I have to be missing something because this just sounds like having an encrypted flash drive that you leave out in the open for someone else to grab, but it has the password written on the side of it in sharpie.

Gotcha, that makes sense. Thank you for explaining it!

I feel like every time Halium comes up it comes with qualifying statements (like “I don’t love Halium”). I don’t really know enough about it to know why that is. What are the problems with Halium that people don’t like? Is it what it does (or how it does it) that is the problem, or something else about the project?

I’ve mostly just heard they are a little under-spec’d in general, so performance is not great.

That is very interesting indeed, thank you for bringing it up!

What I really want to at this point is a pager, a cellular Wi-Fi access point, and an 8" tablet that can run Linux and sip power so I can just pretend I don’t have a device.

This is basically what I was thinking. Where can I find a fully functioning 8" Linux Tablet? I feel like the rest of it is easy peasy.

Edit: In my head, I am imagining a steam deck but with the side controller bits snapped off. Someone pls make this. lol

Parents don’t have access to every device children have access to either

Either parents or the school… and if the school doesn’t have a pretty significantly locked down network, that’s a separate problem.

Also, you’re right, I misspoke. While some of the bigger websites have decent-ish parental controls, I was more thinking of device specific parental controls. The amount you can lock-down (and monitor) a phone you give your 12 year old is pretty impressive. I’d rather parents did that than hand the monitoring, censoring, and access over to various government agencies all over the world.

“I need internet at home for work!” - Okay, so plug in the one computer you work on? Do you really need to blast 100% of your home with internet via Wi-Fi, probably not. Even if you do (for some reason), why do you then also have to give little Timmy a Wi-Fi capable tablet at all? Download some episodes of Paw Patrol and let your kid watch them offline…

I know none of this is actually about protecting kids… But even if it was, their reasoning and methodology sucks.

some of the 16 to 21-year-olds surveyed saying they had viewed it “aged six or younger”.

So there may have been a problem at least 10 years ago. Does that problem still exist? (never mind the obvious “is the problem parents ignoring their kids on a tablet”…)

Josh Lane was addicted to porn by 14-years-old after first finding it via a Google search when he was aged 12.

Okay, now let’s address the parents being the problem. By default, Google’s “Safe Search” is on, and the kid actively searched for porn. So no parental supervision of the 12 year old kid on the internet. Someone setup a google account, and changed the default settings to show those results. (oh, but that person is 25 now, so that was also 13 years ago…)

Almost all of the big websites have parental control settings that would alleviate the vast majority of these “problems” if parents actually used them. Parents being willfully ignorant isn’t going to be resolved by legislation. They know that. This is all a smoke screen to put the entire population behind a firewall and control the narrative. It isn’t even a very thick smoke screen.

What’s the point of this when you can already use proton ge with lutris or bottles?

Am I missing something? Is the idea just to make the process easier?

Also, it sounds more like you’re advocating for kernal level anti-cheat being created for Linux by game devs as opposed to being against the horrible and invasive practice regardless of OS.

I just don’t agree. First, I don’t think a monopoly is an inherent part of nature, and further I disagree that monopolies exist because some company just makes the absolute best product and people end up always choosing it. A monopoly’s key feature is not giving the consumer a real choice through shady and unfair business practices.

Also, windows is not the better product. They don’t make the best OS. Arguments could be made that they have a better OS for gaming, but for almost everything else they are worse than basically every alternative (not just Linux) but still dominate market share due to lack of consumer choice. At the retailer, hardware is tied to an OS - if you want macos you have to buy Mac hardware. If you want chromeos you have to by an underwhelming netbook.

IMO, keeping windows around just in case a company does some underhanded shit like kernal anti-cheat or invasive DRM so you can give your support to the company doing the underhanded shit is a detriment to progress.

I’d rather struggle to learn freecad than keep windows around even though fusion360 is easier (for me) to understand, because I don’t want to reward bad behavior. If those of us that can switch don’t, then things don’t get better. I couldn’t have made the switch if thousands of people more knowledgeable and talented before me hadn’t taken the first steps. It’s soapboxy, I know, but I also feel it’s important.

It’s all about where to draw the line, and what you are able to tolerate, I guess. The biggest problem with that though is continuing to support a game / Dev / publisher that is consistently doing these awful things.

If you aren’t able to tell your friends “no, I’m not playing that game, and here’s why” then the industry will just slide deeper into these terrible practices and the entire games industry gets worse. Some people don’t even understand what anti-cheat is doing (and think it works), and if those of us that do, that they trust, don’t explain it to them, they won’t have the opportunity to make an informed decision of whether to support it or not.

Yea, but honestly that’s not a Linux problem imo. Invasive anti-cheat has been a deal breaker for me since its inception. It started as “I don’t want to deal with your shitty software always running in the background eating up my CPU cycles, need maximum performance baby” and then quickly became “I’m not giving your shitty software kernal access to my entire machine, I don’t trust you”.

It’s made so much worse when you realize it doesnt even actually stop cheaters…

For those unaware, what is the significance of it being written in Haskell?

All of them i’ve actually wanted to try out I was able to stream via the xbox game pass website in a browser. It is not a perfect experience, but it is “good enough” on a decent internet connection. I understand that if you physically have an xbox you can also run the game on that and stream it to your linux desktop for much better performance and latency, but I have not tried this myself.

That said, it is pretty rare. The only ones I’ve tried that with were fortnite (a friend wanted to play the lego game mode, but it was short lived - starved for content, lol) and starfield (it was free on game pass and I wasn’t sure I wanted to buy it).

Can someone explain like I’m 5 searXNG?

Like, I vaguely understand the terms everyone uses to explain it but I don’t really understand what it does or how it does it. I’ve used a public instance of it that the maintainers of my Linux distro provide and is set as default search on a fresh install. The results weren’t terrible but did take some time to load, which is the main reason I tend to use other engines.

If I self host it do I get better performance? What about results? Are they different on different instances?

My best guess for the hopeful outcome is the ai starts tacking on the license magic words at the end of things it says… But ultimately it feels like a digital version of sovereign citizens to me.