DEADMINCE

Oh, I absolutely think it can be changed, but no one would be in favor of the methods needed to change it.

The way I see it, if you have an uneducated, irrational population, or being a significant portion of a population, they need to be managed. They shouldn't be having a say in everything, they are not qualified to have a say in most things. They are basically children. They're basically children.

So to get there, you need to basically eradicate that population by mandating education, and certain types of education. Those same people are going to resist, but really that's the only way, and you need to do that even if there is a cost.

> Passwords are obsolete in 2024, and using them is very nearly universally bad.

The first claim is obviously nowhere near being true, and the second seems very subjective.

As the other user is saying, strong passwords with proper security have minimal risk. More than certs or keys yes, but they offer sufficient security and the balance with convenience is currently unbeatable.

Besides, even if someone gets access to your server they should be limited and unable to do any real damage anyway. Defense in depth and all that.

Passwords are not the issue you think they are. Someone compromising a strong password with something like fail2ban isn't more likely than someone finding a 0day that can exploit an sshd setup to only accept keys.

You can't have a good functional democracy without an educated and rational population, and there are better solutions in the meantime than waiting for that to manifest.

A democracy is not the answer. Democracy is tyranny of the masses and nothing more. Democracy gave us Jim Crow laws.

The answer is tighter regulation and laws, and less kowtowing to corporations and 'evil' countries.

This seems like a vague comment that doesn't map to mine in any real way. Could you elaborate a little more on your point?

Password authentication is still entirely necessary. I don't want to have to setup keys just to ssh into a VM I just setup, as one very minor example.

Ripping out the DRM absolutely is piracy, and it's the only way to do it since the companies themselves are not doing it.

Anti-cheat absolutely is DRM, a lot of the time. It explicitly uses DRM tech from companies that make DRM technologies. At the very least I guess if we want to be precise we could say DRM is often a component of anti-cheat technologies even if anti-cheat isn't explicitly DRM.

I've been paying attention to the gaming space, and I know it still sucks unless you use Steam and Proton (which can't be used without Steam). Valve even pretty much gave up on their console because the developer support just isn't there.

And like I said, DirectX is still a big deal.

Your in depth breakdown doesn't address the substance of the argument at all, it's mostly a distraction.

Servers can not bear the entire weight of guarding against cheat, it's impossible. If you don't understand that then you are not in a position to be writing any sort of breakdown.

Several games and game protocols require security on the client side to be able to stop cheats. You can't have security on the client side if the client has full access to the hardware and OS.

It's not more complicated than that, and your 'breakdown' doesn't adequately address that. You can dismiss this point if you like as you did when I made it in my previous reply, but it doesn't make it any less a fact.

We just need to stop wealth and money hording, by both individuals and companies.

We also have to do more to break the myth that many of these wealthy people earned their wealth, when if any truly did it was a very exception and very small minority.

Community servers can't offer strong cheat protection. If you can modify the client then you can cheat most of the time, and the server can't necessarily do anything.

A lot of that is nonsense. Only the ads and telemetry are issues, recent issues at that.

- The UI is emphatically not slow and is faster than the most popular DEs,

- Viruses and malware have not really been an issue in a decade and Windows has significantly better security than Linux at the moment,

- The Microsoft store is a first party packaging solution frequently used

- Real Windows > WINE

There are problems and issues to be sure, but technically it's actually very sound.

> Basically, don't believe any of this "We have to own your computer for your own good" nonsense. That's a scam. Every time.

Not really. It's all they can do to stop PC gamers cheating without having control of the hardware.

> rip out the anti-cheat stuff and the games generally work

Yeah, that's called piracy. The ant-cheat stuff isn't going anywhere, and even without it plenty of games require DirectX which has no Linux equivalent.

I think it's weird/lucky that you had such luck recommending macs - most of my non-technical friends just find them confusing and unintuitive, and it's not because they were only used to windows or something.

As for Linux just working untouched...doesn't mean it doesn't have problems or is secure. I've seen plenty of older people use their browser fine after not running updates for years.

You likely had much more ram than the average person did, right? My understanding was XP was based around the needs of the average consumer and wrote the OS in such a way as to almost mandate swapping rather than writing something smarter that could avoid swapping if the machine had more than enough ram.

Because that swapping would occur regardless, there would be a performance penalty when you didn't actually need it. Pointing the swap back to ram circumvented that.

I wouldn't say it's a crutch as there are still plenty of users machines and situations where ram might run out, so swapping is better than the apps crashing. But yes it's becoming increasingly obsolete.

> Swap is still mostly mysterious to me ... I remember back in the windows xp days

I mean no disrespect, but why in 20 years haven't you just read up on or watched a video explaining swap and disk cache?

Which is incredibly annoying and thankfully can be disabled.

Apps would crash before the device got the traffic back telling it what to swap out.

On consumer machines with a lot of ram, there shouldn't be a need for swap.

If the OS is written so inefficiently that it performs worse without swap, put the swap on a ram drive to satisfy it without losing any performance.

The way to do it would be to outlaw any protocol that can encapsulate to a point that off the shelf DPI can't read it.

> You know the thing about medical headlines where it turns out you can broadly tack “in mice” on the end to get a truer version?

No?

That's fair, I guess. I thought XP was shockingly horrible in many ways and Vista was kind of a disaster also, but at the same time that was also partly the result of forcing in security features and there was no way that wasn't going to be a painful process while developers and users adapted. And Windows 7 came out on his watch as well, so very fair point.

> I feel what we're all saying is that the security risks of amassing all this data are very unlikely to offset the small benefit of being able to remember something you did last week.

Oh, I agree. It's the rational observation and conclusion. But this feature isn't for us.

It's for the average non-technical computer user, and ostensibly they do want this feature, the downsides be damned.

> It'll be a scary "new normal" when your computer OS records everything you do, as standard, and everyone else expects that to be the case.

That is scary and not even something I had considered, since trying to criminalize E@EE gets all the press these days.

It's possible one day that all these computers from the last few decades may end up being very valuable given they are all unlocked and future ones may not be.

Thanks!

Thanks, I appreciate the answer example!

Most people doing the interviews are not qualified to do interviews. At least most of the time in my experience.

It doesn't help that so many companies think they have slick ways to root out better qualified people when most are just a waste of time.

If it's a feature announced and legitimately offered that consumers want, then it's not malware by definition.

> Microsoft's complete lack of any security consciousness is genuinely scary. They control so much of the world's personal and enterprise computing it's not even funny.

So this is funny in a way, because MS had such a terrible and mostly deserved security reputation with Windows...and then they really cleaned and tightened it up. Windows had and continues to have one of the best OS security architectures, and is certainly the best out of all consumer operating systems.

But with the cloud stuff and embarrassing gaffs like this, what the hell happened? New managers and a lot of employee turnover, I guess?

Since Balmer honestly.