Just wait until it puts a certain percentage of adults into teen rooms automatically and someone gets harmed:

"if ChatGPT thinks a person has lied about their age when they first signed up, it will automatically put them into the Teens mode"

[this is referring to some kind of chat room on social media or something]

Describing Linux Mint as "old technology" is absurd. There are some things that are in need of update, but those updates come and have been coming out slowly all along. Linux Mint got a revamped fingerprint reader interface for instance.

The user interface is actually decent. Something you can't even begin to claim about many distributions.There are exceptions, Zorin OS is pretty good, and Deepin though the distro is inferior in other ways.

Yea, so he's pushing immutable Fedora more or less.

Humorous.

I think I'll stick to Linux mint/Trisquel/pretty much anything else. I don't doubt there are some benefits from immutability, but there are also other ways to get there.

Search for overlayroot and install that in Ubuntu-and Ubuntu derived distributions for instance and you'll get the main benefits of immutability.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=h_zQP73rFO8

Humorously inaccurate:

"A spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the agency had the authority to search the electronic devices of anyone entering or leaving the United States, regardless of citizenship"

You have the right to TRY and search people at the boarder. It's abundantly clear that no one can be forced to surrender a password period. There is not a crime for "not assisting" law enforcement in their investigation. The crime is interfering or something of that nature and would constitute actively engaging an officer in some form of physical intervention. Not providing information that later turns out to be incorrect.

I have an entertaining take on the federal government's position regarding a f'd up story:

"American Who Wiped His Phone With 'Duress' Password During Border Search Gets Felony Charges"

So the federal government stated:

"Individuals who destroy or attempt to destroy property, including data, to prevent lawful search and seizure should expect to face prosecution and punishment for their actions."

So ... your going to go after the officer who entered the code into the phone and whose action destroyed the 'evidence' then????

Which is entertaining in and of itself... because we don't even know that there was evidence in the first place. The excuses for the search have already been stated as 'child porn' which were lies as the government also stated the reason for picking him out at the boarder was on behalf of and for the reason of targeting his activism, that is opposing 'cop city'.

Basically there was never any reason to believe that evidence of a crime existed on the phone in the first place so the guard effectively at least in theory destroyed data. That in and of itself could be in doubt though as we don't know what if anything was on the phone prior. It could have been a phone without anything on it for all we know. It could be the phone was wiped or it could have been coincidence the phone restarted when it did. More evidence is needed and testimony by someone knowledgeable about the phone's design/OS design is needed to determine some aspects of this.

If the phone was simply 'blank' for instance would it have shown a screen when you turned it on? This doesn't mean it wasn't blank as it could be there was a duress password set, but nothing was actually wiped beyond the code itself. There can't be testimony as to 'pre-wipe' data status.

My mom once asked me "who told you life was fair?" in response to a statement @ 3-4 years old that something wasn't fair and it seems particularly applicable here...

"Independent music publisher Round Hill is suing Suno and Anthropic for allegedly using hundreds of copyrighted songs without permission to train their AI systems. The company says potential damages could exceed $1 billion, arguing there is 'nothing fair' about building multibillion-dollar AI businesses on copyrighted material while rights holders receive nothing."

There is nothing fair about copyright. It's dependent on theft, violence, and coercion of the masses.

Copyright only exists under the false auspices of the common good. In reality it's mostly a tool to funnel wealth to an elite.

If you don't believe me just watch Shark Tank or take a 101 business class some time.

While I was never a fan of Shark Tank the key things that the billionaire investor who hosts the show is looking for and says it allowed are things like copyrights, patents, and similar IP that can give him exclusivity.

This is the same sort of thing that is taught in business at every university on the planet.

I'm fully convinced we need a new distribution built from the ground up to be more secure. I just ran into a stupid fucking ?mistake? for a distribution geared at security and being hardened against attack and catering to the most vulnerable and now creating insurmountable hurdles for authenticating.

As a technical user I SHOULD NOT have difficulties confirming your distribution has been properly signed by you.

In another 10 minutes I'll probably be able to confirm this was in error and everything is sort of alright.... but... again... if I can't do it easily jumping through dozens of steps to verify then how the fuck is anyone else suppose to?

Yea, we need a new distribution assembled by competent developers and security minded folks.

The spin is just astounding, so India got rid of bills over the equivalent of US ~$1 in order to force people onto a digital system they had a lot of control over and they're crediting ease of use for the cause of its success. Merchants were forced into accepting else die of starvation from a steep decline in business. It blows my mind how the powers that be twist and manipulate reality. It's not 'ease of use', but rather you made paying with cash impossible for most transactions:

"India's UPI became ubiquitous partly because it made digital payments almost frictionless for merchants, including small vendors who can accept payments with little more than a QR code. New research suggests that merchant acceptance was 'not just a result of UPI growth, but one of its key drivers'."

The humorous part of this is that the communication cartels are probably right in-so-far as there not being a law restricting them from selling your location data. It's entertaining to see people get upset about it in-so-far as on the one hand (democrats mostly here) will go on and on about the "rule of law" (which is humorously weak, though undoubtedly even more so during certain regimes), but then fail to realize that saying "good" (that they lost here) is the courts basically letting the "rule of law" slide. Talk about a double standard.

What people should do is stop subscribing to these carriers and demand freer markets (I don't carrier around a cell phone with active SIM). There is nothing that says radio waves can't work more like TCP/IP. The FCC auctions off spectrum, but that's a bad way to do it if you want real competition.

"The Supreme Court today rejected Verizon's attempt to get a $47 million refund from the Federal Communications Commission. In a list of orders issued by the court, Verizon's petition was denied without explanation. The denial ends any possibility of Verizon asking a lower court to review the fine and order the FCC to issue a refund. AT&T and T-Mobile are continuing to challenge similar fines on grounds that selling device-location data did not violate US telecom law.

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon were fined a total of $196 million in 2024 for selling mobile users' real-time location data without their customers' consent. The carriers sold device-location information to data aggregators, who resold it to other firms. The carriers paid the fines and sought to have them overturned in courts, claiming their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial was violated."

Telegram isn't the bastion of freedom that many make it out to be:

"'Over a 61-day period, the framework facilitated the takedown of 524 previously unknown piracy channels and 71 bots,' the paper reads. Additionally, Telegram removed many flagged posts."

Some of you may find this funny. I was reading a story description on slashdot, this:

"X is significantly expanding its open source codebase, which includes the app's 'For You' algorithm and its core ranking engine"

and on first glance, and I may not have gotten to the ranking engine part, I thought it was talking about X11. I was thinking "isn't x already 'open source', what am I missing here?

"Slashdot Reader Builds 'Spaced Linux', a New Devuan-Based, User-Friendly Desktop Distro"

So close- then I read and avoids dependency hell by promoting mostly Flatpak usage.

Dependency hell is mostly a consequence of people doing stupid shit like mixing repositories never designed to work together and rolling release crap.

You clearly don't understand the model and are doing it wrong.

I sometimes wonder if we've made 'distros' too easy to assemble by folks that haven't a clue about what they're doing.

I'm not saying every distro needs to have its own packaging system or anything of that nature. No. I'm not even saying you have to package everything yourself to have a 'distro'. But having a proper understanding of the problems, the reasons, and some basic principles as to why things are done the way they are before you start developing a distro would be nice.