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Cake day: May 17th, 2024

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  • This post really rings true. This is the small rumbling before the big quake.

    The reason everyone is offering condolences and claiming this is bad is because the government is supposed to have a monopoly on violence, and that offers protection to the elite in society. Even on radical left lemmy, you can be banned for implying this is a good thing.

    This person was at the top of a pyramid that lied to and deceived millions of people and made life absolute hell for people undergoing medical problems. He was responsible for that misery. He created hell on earth for those people. He was not that different than a mass-murderer, knowing full well what his policies would do, only his actions were legal.

    His company delayed, denied, and defended, and the assailant had an answer to deny and an answer to defend but there was no delay, just a quick deposing of this guy. It was obviously symbolic.

    It’s funny because the founding fathers of the US had enough of the bullshit from England and so they decided to rebel and used violence to create a New Republic… but their violence made them patriots and heroes. It’s just interesting… I haven’t seen 1 person call the assailant a hero yet. It’s not like the Founding Fathers of the US used rhetoric and voting to persuade England to stop its brutality.

    I bet a lot of people are secretly thinking that assailant is a hero. (In accordance with lemmy’s policies, I am not saying he is a hero and instead am saying the assailant is very bad and violence is always bad.)

    But we’re in such gilded-age end-times right now that the corporate media always parrot the idea that violence is always bad… (with the implied part being the government, backing the elite oligarchy, is the exception) and the populace has internalized that thinking out of fear.

    We have democracy in this country and should vote in leaders that actually make legislation that is sensible, but it’s impossible because the bottom 40 percent of society are brain-washed by religious delusions that the elite thrust upon them in order to make them easier to control. The problems in society are caused by religion and it’s just impossible to make the stupidest bottom 40 percent of people stop believing in bullshit.

    The elite have given people a choice: gun rights and policies for the rich… or no guns and policies for the poor. There is no middle class pro-gun party and it’s by design. We need to have liberals start embracing the NRA because any gun regulation seems toxic to middle America, and for good reason. To anyone who say the Democrats are not an anti-gun party, you’re lying and everyone can see through it. Any gun regulation is a slow decent to zero guns for regular people, and working class middle America knows it, which is part of why we keep ending up with these horrible leaders allowing health care in the US to descend into an abyss.


  • Me months ago: “the NRA matters and feminism matters and the solution is making sure women have more and larger guns and better tactical training.”

    Everyone back then was like “no guns are bad!” and now suddenly, look who is seeing the light.

    Trans people should not be armed. Trans people should be given vouchers to buy large amounts of weapons so they can be HEAVILY armed and also should be given subsidized weapons training by the government.

    When I meet a trans women, I want to admire her dress and know she has excellent tactical training.

    We need to stop seeing gun rights as a left or right issue and appreciate the fact that guns are anti-tyranny. The left’s constant anti-stance alienates a huge number of working class people as well. The problem with any sort of “reasonable restrictions” is the government always wants more, more regulation, more rules, and little by little it gets harder for the average guy or gal or intersex person. Liberals need to stop alienating middle America with this anti-gun stuff so we can protect trans people.


  • This isn’t about them being kicked out, this is about the fact we don’t know the process that resulted in this. Was this a decision Linus made after a night coding and thinking about the world? Was the foundation ordered to do it?

    It lacks transparency into the process even if the outcome is fine and the way it was done doesn’t feel transparent, even if it makes sense not to include Russian coders in the project.


  • These projects are so big and complex that even with open-code a malicious actor is sometimes able to insert damaging code. Who suddenly made this decision? Did the US government order them to do this? If the US government can order them to do this, can they order the elevated coding status of a “benevolent” contributor on the US government payroll who is then ordered to put in a very hard to detect exploit? Open code doesn’t mean exploit free, it means exploits are more likely to be patched.



  • It would be much better if the company were not in a place in which gag orders can be issued, leaving questions as to transparency.

    As it stands now, it isn’t clear if Linus is just “grouchy” about this with a unique personality or if the foundation got a NSL and can’t say anything. And that leads to questions about whether there were other NSLs other than this one and if it’s had an impact on the code.

    Exploits are so hard to detect sometimes if done well and often although they get patched… eventually… the damage is done prior to the patch. The US government, despite doing lots of good things, engages in torture. And even if the US government is the “good guy,” this leads to less trust in the open-source ecosystem, no matter what the justification.


  • But seriously, Linus’s comment regarding this was… just… I have no words… he basically put every Russian in the same basket, called them trolls

    There are a huge number of online Russian trolls. That part of his response was not hyperbolic. They do have troll factories there to influence public opinion.

    The problem is this still leads to questions about transparency about the project in general and how this decision was made and whether it was made by those involved in the project or was an order from the US government.


  • Yes, this is exactly my same thoughts.

    This is terrifying.

    I don’t like what the Russian government is doing and Putin is cruel and evil, albeit intelligent (which makes him even more terrible).

    That being said, in the US, government agencies can order a company to do certain things, put in certain code, or whatever and then issue a gag order as part of that preventing disclosure. And although there’s a limit to how much that can screw over open-source software users, we do not know what exploits nation-states have, we don’t know what backdoors are in different chipsets or closed-source firmware.

    If a developer writing open source code can be blacklisted so easily without transparency into the process, it suggests the company is being ordered to do certain things and not disclose them by the US government, which is a government that still engages in torture.

    Notice how they are not coming out and saying “We were not ordered to do this by any government agency.”

    Could the foundation be forced to elevate a developer with government ties who then is able to “accidentally” put in an extremely hard to detect exploit into linux that won’t be detected at first and only patched later?

    I really wish companies associated with linux were not in a country that lacked transparency with government regulations and in which gag orders were not possible.





  • Most male computer uses watch porn and would not want an AI to log that. Many women find porn sickening and don’t understand it and will never understand male urges that result in watching it. The fact that this got into a finished product tells you a lot about Microsoft’s corporate culture.

    No one working there really cares about the company enough to bring up uncomfortable issues, they are all there just to get their paycheck and actual outcomes be damned. The culture their must be toxic for this product to have been put into a product enabled by default.

    If this was a top-down decision and there was no input by others into it, it leads to questions over whether this feature was forced to be included by the government, which can easily require corporations to do anything and then issue gag orders and whether it was some sort of test to see how much intrusive spying bullshit that regular consumers will tolerate now. If this was a feature that was forced into the product, the plan may have been to turn it off by default after negative feedback, but then just keep it in the program for when governments want to turn it on. Governments may have realized it in any capacity such a terrible feature would result in outrage and may have thought this was the path of least resistance, like saying “Would you like to eat a bowl of shit? No, okay, we’ll just give you these brussel sprouts”