AnyOldName3

Arch is at least more likely to update to a fixed version sooner, and someone getting something with pacman is going to be used to the idea of it breaking because of using bleeding edge dependencies. The difference with the Flatpak is that most users believe that they’re getting something straight from the developers, so they’re not going to report problems to the right people if Fedora puts a different source of Flatpaks in the lists and overrides working packages with ones so broken as to be useless.

People fall off rooftops fitting solar panels, burn to death repairing wind turbines that they can’t climb down fast enough to escape, and dams burst and wash away towns. Renewable energy is much less killy than fossil fuels, but per megawatt hour, it’s comparable to nuclear, despite a few large incidents killing quite a lot of people each. At the moment, over their history, hydro is four times deadlier than nuclear, wind’s a little worse than nuclear, and solar’s a little better. Fission power is actually really safe.

The article’s talking about fusion power, though. Fission reactions are dangerous because if you’ve got enough fuel to get a reaction at all, you’ve got enough fuel to get a bigger reaction than you want, so you have to control it carefully to avoid making it too hot, which would cause the steam in the reactor to burst out and carry chunks of partially-used fuel with it, which are very deadly. That problem doesn’t exist with fusion. It’s so hard to make the reaction happen in the first place that any problem just makes the reaction stop immediately. If you somehow blew a hole in the side of the reactor, you’d just get some very hot hydrogen and very hot helium, which would be harmless in a few minutes once they’d cooled down. It’s impossible for fusion power, once it’s working, not to be the safest way to generate energy in history because it inherently avoids the big problems with what is already one of the safest ways.

That’s misleading in the other direction, though, as PhysX is really two things, a regular boring CPU-side physics library (just like Havok, Jolt and Bullet), and the GPU-accelerated physics library which only does a few things, but does them faster. Most things that use PhysX just use the CPU-side part and won’t notice or care if the GPU changes. A few things use the GPU-accelerated part, but the overwhelming majority of those use it for optional extra features that only work on Nvidia cards, and instead of running the same effects on the CPU if there’s no Nvidia card available, they just skip them, so it’s not the end of the world to leave them disabled on the 5000-series.

You can jam the Windows UI by spawning loads of processes with equivalent or higher priority to explorer.exe, which runs the desktop as they’ll compete for CPU time. The same will happen if you do the equivalent under Linux. However if you have one process that does lots of small allocations, under Windows, once the memory and page file are exhausted, eventually an allocation will fail, and if the application’s not set up to handle that, it’ll die and you’ll have free memory again. Doing the same under every desktop Linux distro I’ve tried (which have mostly been Ubuntu-based, so others may handle it better) will just freeze the whole machine. I don’t know the details, but I’d guess it’s that the process gets suspended until its request can be fulfilled, so as long as there’s memory, it gets it eventually, but it never gets told to stop or murdered, so there’s no memory for things like the desktop environment to use.

The new law allows you to have more than one charging connector provided that either the USB-C one is the best one, or the USB-C one is as good as the spec allows. If the new connector’s genuinely better, then it’ll beat a maxed-out USB-C connector, so devices will provide it in addition to a maxed-out USB-C connector.

Male to female A-to-A cables are pretty common (they’re just basic extensions) and totally legal under the spec provided they’re limited to a certain length or contain a powered repeater. It’s just the rare male-to-male (which my keyboard stupidly uses) and even rarer female-to-female that aren’t legal. There’s also the exception of USB-on-the-go cables with a micro-B end and a female A end for devices like smartphones that are capable of being host or connecting to a host, back before they switched to USB-C.

In other threads, people have suggested that he might be carrying the manifesto in case he was shot and killed if/when arrested.

They have to defend their trademark. They don’t have to defend copyright, and most of Nintendo’s reputation comes from copyright claims. Someone streaming a let’s play isn’t selling a counterfeit Mario game, they’re just showing you things in a real Mario game, so there’s no trademark claim.

They’re also big abusers of the fact that most of the people they make copyright claims against can’t afford to defend themselves against such a behemoth. Even if you’re sure you’ve not violated their copyright and your lawyer’s sure, too, it’ll be much cheaper to roll over than get the legal system to agree with you.

The intended use for this kind of product is that you hire a company to break into your company, and then tell you how they did it so that criminals (or, if you’re someone like a defence contractor, foreign spies) can’t do the same thing later. Sometimes they’re also used by journalists to prove that the government or a company isn’t taking necessary precautions or by hobbyists at events where everyone’s aware that everyone else will try to break into their stuff. There’s typically vetting of anyone buying non-hobbyist quantities of anything, and it’s all equipment within theoretical reach of organised crime or state actors, so pentesters need to have access, too, or they can’t reasonably assess the real-world threat that’s posed.

Upstream Firefox doesn’t comply with FDroid’s rules (thanks to the ‘proprietary bits and telemetry’ Handles mentioned), so is only available from the Play Store or as a loose APK that won’t auto-update.

As a counterpoint, I’ve had Ubuntu’s installer and grub’s updater overwrite and break Windows’ boot files several times, but never had the opposite happen (I’ve had both destroy themselves, though). Thankfully, I know how to rebuild the necessary parts of a Windows install, so it’s never been a catastrophe, but it’s irritating to see what’s always been the source of the problems I’ve had be held up as infallible. Possibly this is a problem unique to Ubuntu - I’m happy to blame Canonical - so maybe it could be entirely sidestepped with other distros.

I’m not arguing for anything in the post above, just pointing out that a broken (or badly repaired) insulin pump is genuinely more dangerous than having no insulin pump. That doesn’t have to count against the right to repair one, as if you’ve got the right to repair an insulin pump, and do so badly, it doesn’t mean you’re legally forced to use it afterwards, just like I’ve got the right to inject all the insulin in my fridge with an insulin pen back to back, but I’m not legally forced to do so.

I do think the right to repair should be universal, but as I think that medical stuff should be paid for by the state, NHS-style, that would end up meaning that the NHS could repair medical devices themselves if they deemed it more economical to do so and recertify things as safe than to get the manufacturer to repair or replace them. The NHS is buying the devices, and gets the right to repair them, and that saves the taxpayer money, as even if they don’t actually end up repairing anything, it stops manufacturers price gouging for repairs and replacements, and if the manufacturer goes bust or refuses to repair something, there’re still ways to keep things working. It doesn’t mean unqualified end users can’t use their new right to repair their medical devices and risk getting it wrong, but if you’ve got an option of a free repair/replacement, most people would choose the safe and certified repair over their own bodge.

If you’ve got a broken insulin pump, assuming you’re in a country with a functioning healthcare system, you should have been given a spare pump with the original, and probably some insulin pens, so when one breaks, you fall back to the spare, and get given a new one to be the new spare (or could get the broken one repaired). Using the spare is completely safe.

If you don’t have a spare, your sugars would go up over several hours, but you’d have a day or two to get to a hospital and potentially several days after that for someone to find you and get you to a hospital, so it’s not safe, but also not something you’d die from if you had any awareness that there was a problem.

If you’ve got an incorrectly-repaired pump, you could have it fail to give you enough insulin, and end up with higher sugars, notice the higher sugars, and then switch to the spare. That’d be inconvenient, but not a big deal. However, you could also have it dump its entire cartridge into you at once, and have your sugars plummet faster than you can eat. If you don’t have someone nearby, you could be dead in a couple of hours, or much less if you were, for example, driving. That’s much more dangerous than having no insulin at all.

Prosthetic legs don’t have a failure mode that kills you, so a bad repair can’t make them worse than not having them at all, but insulin pumps do, so a bad repair could.

Nuclear is even less killy than hydroelectric (dams sometimes burst and drown a bunch of people downriver) and wind (sometimes technicians fall off when fixing a turbine) per kilowatt hour, despite the potential for really scary failures, largely because it generates so much power when it’s working.

It’s easy to get pressured into thinking it’s your responsibility. There’s also the risk that an unhappy company will make a non-copyleft clone of your project, pump resources into it until it’s what everyone uses by default, and then add proprietary extensions so no one uses the open-source version anymore, which, if you believe in the ideals of Free Software, is a bad thing.

There was an EU-wide one that gota lot of its funding redirected to AI stuff recently that you might be thinking of.

No, that is an entirely unrelated bad decision. It being okay to not have a popup to opt out of secure boot when it does its one job and notices you’re about to run insecure code in kernel mode doesn’t make every other user-hostile thing Microsoft ever does magically okay.

It’s upstream GRUB that’s decided the older GRUB versions are insecure and not to be trusted. Microsoft just propagated that to machines running distros that weren’t shipping patched GRUB builds yet. Up-to-date Debian wouldn’t be affected provided that they downstreamed fixes quickly.

https://fedia.io/m/linux@lemmy.ml/t/1111595/-/comment/6916699 says that Debian’s GRUB wasn’t affected, but another part of the boot sequence was.

You can’t trust users to make informed decisions about cybersecurity as most users don’t have the necessary background knowledge, so won’t think beyond this popup is annoying me and has a button to make it go away and I am smart and therefore immune to malware. Microsoft don’t want Windows to have the reputation for being infested with malware like it used to have, and users don’t want their bank details stolen. If something’s potentially going to be a bad idea, it’s better to only give the decision to people capable of making it an informed decision. That’s why we don’t let children opt into surgery or decide whether to have ice cream for dinner, and have their parents decide instead.

The comment you’re quoting was replying to someone suggesting a warning popup, and saying it would be a bad idea, rather than suggesting the secure boot UEFI option should be taken away. You need at least a little bit more awareness of the problem to know to toggle that setting.

If you’re doing things properly, you’ll know your Microsoft account password or have it in a password manager (and maybe have other account recovery options available like getting a password reset email etc.), and have a separate password for the PC you’re locked out of, which would be the thing you’d forgotten. If someone isn’t computer-literate, it’s totally plausible that they’d forget both passwords, have no password manager, and not have set up a recovery email address, and they’d lose all their data if they couldn’t get into their machine.