After META and Yandex had their long established and trivial-to-implement cookie tracking abilities (Localhost->HTTP(S)/WebRTC) exposed a few months ago, I have been waiting for some changes to come along to try and lock out potential snoopers who might figure out how they are now de-anonymizing phone users and tracking their web habits.

Preventing sideloading, combined with moving some of the dev internal, both seem like moves toward this end to me. But what do I know, I have never even owned a smartphone.

This probably outs me as an old fart, but my first computer experiences were with assembly and BASIC intepreters, then things like COBOL, Fortran, and Pascal.

I remember when Bill Gates got his panties in a wad over people sharing MS BASIC and always tried to steer clear of M$ products from then on, although I did have the common misfortune of having to use Windows in several work environments throughout my career. Luckily, the last I ever had to touch as an admin/user was Windows 7.

My personal desktop OS history is as follows:

Solaris -> OpenBSD -> Slackware -> Debian -> SuSE -> Mandrake -> Gentoo -> Redhat -> Fedora -> Sidux -> Arch -> OpenSUSE -> Mint.

I stick with Mint because I don't want to spend my time tinkering on the OS, and it makes helping all the noobs/non-techies I have convinced to switch to Linux over the years that much easier. This is well over a hundred at this point, and you know who most of them come to when they have a problem. With Mint, they seldom have any issues.

The years I spent tinkering taught me a lot, especially on the rolling OSes, but these days I appreciate having a system that just works reliably, so I can spend my time tinkering on my own projects instead. I have VMs for other OSes as needed anyways.

Now you damn kids get off my lawn!

This reminds me of a line in The Gulag Archipelago , by Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”

Living a principled life, based on humility, empathy and introspection, and seeing how that positively affects those around me.

Related philosophical pondering:

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
― Vaclav Havel

Adverse_Reaction

joined 3 days ago