At some point on the Web (in my childhood, in the Russian-speaking parts - around 2002-2004) anything requiring registration was treated as some sort of closed club, and that was about just registration. Though people exposed their ICQ UINs and email addresses, so that you could chat with them (that’s the old way you’d DM a person whose post you liked).

I’m not sure about all these rules of what websites should and shouldn’t do. Perhaps websites should be always treated as some untrusted alien space that can possibly do anything. If you want to do something where such a leak is really bad, or anything worse than a pocket theft of 20$ - then perhaps such a system shouldn’t rely upon untrusted centralized service having everything.

I like the social model that existed then, though. It was somewhat global, now we have modern Web services (even if in Fediverse) that expose everything over the Web, posts, DMs and so on. Back then forums were websites, DMs were in ICQ\XMPP\Skype, email as its own thing, feeds as RSS.

Eh. Good I never had premium then.

(Though I suspect my porn habits were exposed in much detail otherwise via something like personalized state surveillance.)

YOU have to pay the energy company for the extra electricity you put into the grid! Like… What‽‽‽

That might be logical in some situations. Where there’s surplus in the grid and it plays the role of amortizer of what you give it. They can’t just shut you off when they are getting too much load. Or they can but prefer to have a soft curve where you get less and less until you start paying for what you give.

Like water is a resource, but you do pay for water disposal (that is, I live in Russia, and there’s a separate line on the bill for what goes into sewers), or, if someone provides passive cooling service somewhere, you might pay for the heat you give away. Even if that’s energy.

The ability to have smart cars that improve fuel efficiency by adjusting to traffic conditions may very well compensate for the increased electricity demand created by data centers.

That just reads mindblowingly stupid for me after only one semester of the “automatic guidance of trains” subject with a few simple methods of numeric optimization. And I wasn’t studying very well, to say the least.

The rest of what you write feels as if you’d missed the whole “digital computer” thing and what it already allows us to do since 1970s and that is being done since 1970s.

Wouldn’t doing anything harder than usual be a flag about you then?

By bypassing all that they won’t immediately know who owned it through whatever machine IDs computers have on them.

There’s probably enough redundancy in such possibilities to track you not to care about this particular thing technically .

It’s just an insult to the user and they are assholes, dealing with assholes is a bad sign similar to black cats crossing your path. Don’t deal with assholes.

No need to explain this technically, you might think it’s better, but you are implicitly supporting the idea that without hard proof it’s fine that they are doing all those weird things. It’s not, you don’t have to prove anything. They are assholes, don’t deal with them, don’t keep taking insults. Simple.

If something is beneficial to the side with more negotiating power and is practical to do, it happens.

It wasn’t plausible when Internet connectivity for accounts on local machines wasn’t a given always everywhere.

And it wasn’t that important for them.

Now both have changed enough.

Also I think all stable continuous changes of mass where single person doesn’t change much are predictable, similarly to Asimov’s Foundation (except there it was presented as something a virtuous genius does to help humanity, not quite how life works).

So expecting Microsoft and others to break their dicks is infantile. I think they’ll succeed fully inside their strategic definition, their model, one can say.

Where anything divergent and interesting can happen is the fringes. Like Reticulum, Briar, hobbyist weak hardware, technologies that will emerge occasionally without mass economic pressure. Toys and jokes.

Would you pay 500 dollars a month to have the possibility to do your movie searches? Or alternatively, would you like your LLM of choice to counter that, having read all your emails and browser history, you are probably interested in a totally different movie that just happens to be playing now at a nearby cinema?

There might be a more direct parallel than originally intended in this with the explanation how one person works hard all day and makes less than another person who pushes a few buttons. The latter knows which buttons to push.

This technology is useless for my movie searches, but it might be useful in the same way as radar was for air defense.

BTW, I’m not sure what I’d choose if offered to pay 500 dollars for knowing what that movie is. There’s one girl, if she’d be interested too to find that movie, perhaps I would.

So if such an expensive technology would allow this kind of nuanced search, and more seemingly efficient wouldn’t, then we have a use case.

Or a model allowing to predict actions of other people sufficiently well, based on seemingly not precise enough data. However much it would cost, that would be justified, similarly to high-frequency trading, because it would operate on all existing value, not just what it generates.

I’m not saying that it IS all a bubble, by the way, as I can’t read the future and these gigantic profits might well materialize in the future. I’m just saying that “bubble” and “useless” are different.

I know, I was making two points, one is that everything is relative (what you’ve just agreed to), another is that it might not at all be a bubble.

Well, one can say then also that US military is a bubble, it also hogs resources far bigger for the same results that poorer nations achieve. There are some things it does that can’t be compared to others because nobody has the need or that much money, but what can be compared is not even factor 10+.

It keeps getting that funding because of the position in the world it occupies.

Or one can say that the Danish kingdom sitting on the Sound relying on custom fees for its budget and then going on adventures with mercenary troops was a bubble. That bubble was inflated and burst a few times before that happened finally (something-something Kiel canal), and for long enough periods of history that just was the reality.

It’s a relative thing if something is sustainable or not. When people are talking about Earth being expected to exist for enough time to be more afraid of global warming and microplastics and such, it means that Earth’s existence itself is usually assumed to be indefinitely sustainable in our frame of evaluation.

So what you said is true, but dotcoms also were a bubble.

What if it’s not a bubble?

So I tried using some AI chatbots to find a movie recently, it made up a few, none being the answer.

(The question was about a historical movie, made in perhaps 1970s by the feeling, set someplace in southern France somewhere around 1650s, has a few beautiful views of nature and castles ; one scene where a guard captain enters a room, asks a question, as a power gesture drinks a glass of wine on the table and a minute later falls ; another scene where for whatever reason a rapier fight happens in something like a tavern, two women in pastel dresses are descending by an open ladder from the second floor, seeing the brawl take our pocket pistols, one of them is stabbed with a rapier ; another scene where a guy is getting questioned with his feet over the fire ; another when another guy is climbing a tower clinging at brick mortars outside and hears guards’ boots on the ladder very loudly ; when I was a kid and saw that, someone said it’s an adaptation of something by Lope de Vega, but I’m not sure that’s correct ; that’s just in case someone reading this knows such a movie.)

But some googling sessions they do optimize, without you the user ever having to browse a webpage, and just getting a textual answer. That’s a valid use.

And some other processes. They don’t have to be useful for all things they are applied to, just some profitable.

MS has nothing to do with it, except that BitLocker is much better than anything any Linux distro has to offer today.

It’s a piece of software with closed source code. I am aware that people can hide (and have done so many times) a backdoor or a mistake in source code so that it’ll be harder to find than many problems in binaries without source provided.

Still harder to audit.

You need to have the disk decrypt without user input, and you can’t have the secret with the user. (As the user is untrusted - could be someone stealing the laptop.) The normal Linux user mantra of ”I own the machine” does not apply here. In this threat model, the corporation owns the machine, and in particular any information on it.

Smart cards?

Hate RHEL all you want, but first take a look at what distros have any kind of commercial support at all from software vendors. This is the complete list: RHEL, sometimes Rocky, sometimes Ubuntu.

I know.

Basically, corporate requirements go completely against the requirements of enthusiasts and power users. You don’t need Secure Boot to protect your machine from thieves, but a corporation needs Secure Boot to protect the machine from you.

Sigh. Okay.

1. OK. I agree, but personally hate RHEL.
2. Yes.
3. Suppose so.
4. Brightness and sound controls too?..
5. Yep, meant that.
6. I thought of something like company-issued laptops, which might be good to have functional without Internet connectivity sometimes, if it’s remote work.
7. Dependent on the role some users might need to regularly install software you haven’t thought about.
8. Yes.
9. Well, disagree about SecureBoot, there’s nothing secure about MS signing your binaries. It’s just proof they are signed by MS. Setting TPM under Linux is, eh, something I’ve never done.

I think you can:

1. set up something like Fedora Silverblue,
2. disallow root,
3. disallow sysrq and such,
4. allow sudo only for select few things,
5. refresh configuration centrally.

I’m not sure it’s much more work than what I’ve seen in corporate environments with Windows.

That’s a question similar to legalization of sex work.

I mean, selling data on someone is not cool. But what’s completely illegal, but in demand by everyone, becomes something completely unregulated in practice and still a huge market. While otherwise it could be at least partially constrained by some norms. Similarly sex work is very much not cool. But at least in some countries it gives smaller chance of being murdered to workers.

So - I live in Russia, I’m not sure I like the way it happens here more. Especially when combined with slow encroachment of mandatory centralized services for everything connected to government, municipal services, utilities, documents. They want control like in China, but can’t be bothered with security at least like in China.

Nothing more Russian than police giving someone their database for a bribe.

And it’s even more Russian that police then pays for convenient service to someone who’s bribed enough policemen to assemble enough data.

It’s a common banality to say that Russian culture is somehow deeply authoritarian, but actually it’s suppressed anarcho-capitalism all around. LOL.

(And it makes perfect sense that Ukrainian special services are working the same way. Shouldn’t have invaded such a similar country.)