Most sane countries leave electoral boundaries to an independent commission

My experience with Linux with Nvidia drivers was basically - hey execute this “.run” file and you get drivers. Okay that worked but then if the kernel updated, the drivers broke and had to be reinstalled. And if the dist upgraded to a new version then the drivers broke completely. And NVidia gave up providing drivers at all for their older GPUs and I was stuck with Noveau which is better than nothing but useless for gaming.

Conversely, some dists are supported by graphics manufacturers with proper packages but there is always that gap where the driver dependencies and the kernel dependencies are out of sync. Or the graphics driver only works on the last couple of dists and support disappears after that. Or you upgrade the dist and then discover there are no drivers for it yet.

I know it rankles some purists, but really there should be an long term, versioned ABI for graphics drivers on Linux. The kernel devs hate binary APIs but it should be in the interests of the likes of NVidia / AMD / Intel to develop and support one for their needs. i.e. a driver works across multiple versions of a kernel and multiple dists and makes it far less onerous for users to install drivers and for manufacturers to support them.

The success of Steam Deck has helped a lot. Prior to that Linux ports tended to be very perfunctory and they weren’t tested or supported very well. I guess that now there are actual Linux gamers (via Steam Deck), that support has improved. That said, I think outside of Steam Deck and SteamOS, your experience of gaming is going to be extremely dependent on your GPU, driver support and a number of other factors. Things are far more likely to work well on Windows than they would for Linux.

I live in Ireland and the laptop I bought for €1000 over a year ago currently costs €1600. Prices & gouging going up everywhere.

As an addendum I think the “seasoning” was some kind of matt black enamel layer on the inside of the pan. I wouldn’t have touched it but even in regular use flakes detached and I had about 6 divots in the pan because of it. Oven cleaner did nothing to remove this layer so I used by angle grinder and a sanding attachment. It was painfully slow (my grinder is cordless and needs recharging) but I cleaned it eventually. Once I was down to bare metal I cleaned it and seasoned it with a few layers of oil. I think it will be far easier to clean from now on. The outside of the pan and bottom are still coated in whatever the inside was when I bought it.

I cleaned a cast iron pan over the weekend. “Oven cleaner” the voices on YouTube said. In reality I needed an angle grinder and it took me the better part of 3 hours to do. My pan had some kind of matt black factory “seasoning” that was definitely not just oil and it took that long to chip it all off. Anyway pan is back in action now.

No, YOU don’t understand end to end encryption, and you don’t understand browsers. You say you could “write down a base64 encoded binary blob on a website”. Yes you could and how do you decrypt it? The asnwer is with a key (asymmetric or symmetric) that the recipient must have in memory of the receiving software - the browser that the filter has already intercepted and compromised. So “moar layers” is not protection since the filter could inject any JS it likes to reveal the inner key and/or conversation. It could do this ad nauseum and the only protection is how determined the filter is.

But this is also a nonsense argument just on a practical level. The problem is kids connecting to adult websites, or websites with some adult content. The filter doesn’t need to do much - either block a domain outright, or do some DPI to determine from the path what part of the website the browser is calling. The government thinks it reasonable that every single website that potentially hosts adult content should capture proof of identity of adults. I contend that really the issue is kids having access to those websites at all, and that proxies can and would be a far more effective way to control the issue without imposing on adults. No solution is perfect, but a filter is a far more effective way than entrusting some random website with personal information. Only this week somebody found an app that was storing ids in a public S3 bucket compromising all those users. Multiply that by hundreds, thousands of websites all needing verification and this will not be the last compromise by any means.

Or the terrifyingly-random bullshit that happens when someone chooses to depend on a free service such as Hotmail as their primary mission-critical address. (This article is about the developer getting locked out of their Hotmail, and the generally-broken state of Hotmail’s account recovery process.)

That could be it. What is certain is that these big corps really don’t want to pay human beings to sort out issues so if you get caught in the middle of some BS you may have no recourse out of it.

I honestly do not know what you are saying. Deep packet inspection through a firewall that does mitm interception demonstrably happens. It is not up for debate.

What isn’t made clear is if this had anything to do with him being a LibreOffice developer. Or just the usual Kafkaesque bullshit that happens when someone’s account gets flagged for “suspicious activity” or whatever and they cannot get a real human being to help or reverse the problem.

I really do not know what you are saying. I have just told you that Fortigate Firewall can and does do deep packet inspection on https connections. It does so by man in the middle proxying. If one filter / proxy can do it then any other could too. There would be ways for kids to circumvent this, e.g via VPN but that is no different than with age verification.

I’m intimately aware about what it can and cannot do. And it can intercept and man in the middles any https traffic

Did you read the text? This guy was providing a package because the default one was broken and he’s fed up of dealing with complaints. And the solution to that is just flatpak the thing and tell users to use that regardless of dist.

I’m sure when atheists and satanists start proselytising there will be outrage - “we really meant Christians should allowed to bother their co-workers not you guys”

The answer for this guy and other people stretched by supporting Linux is to say it’s flatpak or nothing. Stop trying to build for each dist because it’s not sustainable. If someone on a dist wants to maintain a package then let them take the heat if it is broken.

You obviously didn’t know how it works if I had to explain it was already possible. And I am not aware of any mobile device that prevents you installing a new root CA.

And it isn’t “madness”, it’s a completely workable way to offer filtering for people who want it for kids and have no filtering or censorship for anybody else. It is a vastly better option than onerously demanding adults provide their identity to random and potentially adult themed websites where they could be victims of identity theft or extortion

Deep packet inspection already happens on encrypted traffic (Fortigate Firewall) so it’s eminently possible for filtering software to do the same.

Actually it can be done and is being done. Software like Fortigate Firewall can do deep packet inspection on encrypted connections by replacing certs with their own and doing man in the middle inspection. It requires the browser has a root CA cert that trusts the certs issued by the proxy but that’s about it. Filtering software could onboard a new device where the root cert could be installed.

And if Fortigate can do it then any filtering software can too. e.g. a kid uses their filtered device to go to reddit.com, the filter software substitutes reddit’s cert for their own and proxies the connection. Then it looks at the paths to see if the kid is visiting an innocuous group or an 18+ group. So basic filtering rules could be:

1. If domain is entirely blocked, just block it.
2. If domain hosts mixed content, deep packet inspection & block if necessary
3. If domain is innocuous allow it through

This is eminently possible for an ISP to implement and do so in a way that it ONLY happens when a user opts into it on a registered device while leaving everything open if they did not opt into it.

And like I said this is an ISP problem to figure out. The government could have set the rules and walked away. And as a solution it would be far more simple that requiring every website to implement age verification.

That’s a problem is for ISPs and content providers to figure out. I don’t see why the government has to care other than laying out the ground rules - you must offer and implement a parental filter for people who want it for free as part of your service. If ISPs have to do deep packet inspection and proxy certs for protected devices / accounts then that’s what they’ll have to do.

As far as the government is concerned it’s not their problem. They’ve said what should happen and providing the choice without being assholes to people over 18 who are exercising their rights to use the internet as they see fit.

Of course it was piracy but it was friction free piracy. Not just the price which was low but having a really cool webstore and client application. There was nothing that the music industry offered that was remotely comparable in terms of the convenience that allofmp3 offered at the time.