Privacy & lack of sensible firewall

[Mirdarthos]

@soundofthunder

You do assemble them, at some point, right?

Well, at the moment not me personally, but my best friend does it with me right next to him. I have a brain injury and can’t make small, fine move reliably, so he does those kind of things for me.

But yes, and then it becomes my PC made from my components.

[soundofthunder]

@Mirdarthos

Well, at the moment not me personally

One of the reasons I no longer build machines on request, is that I can’t read RAM serial numbers anymore; not even with a magnifying glass. Mostly, it’s instinctive, but I only risk it with my own hardware now, not with anyone elses.

[Mirdarthos]

Heh. Yeah.

Age is the worstest thing! You can watch it come up, but it always surprises you and you can never prepare yourself properly for tolerating it…

[soundofthunder]

@Mirdarthos

Heh. Yeah.

Age is the worstest thing! You can watch it come up, but it always surprises you and you can never prepare yourself properly for tolerating it…

As with everything;
we can only make the best of whatever cards we’ve been dealt, and hope for a good win from time to time.

[Ben]

I had a real headache, because I couldn’t really afford… well anything at all.

But I couldn’t get out of paying for the PSU, an RM650 Gold rated with 10Y guarantee - runs silent and the fan never even gets started.

For the one component that will kill your Mobo and CPU in less than 10mS, it’s pretty much a no-brainer.

As for age - not my favourite topic. I heard about how time goes faster, but I never expected it to go this fast.

The first reminder I got was jumping on James’ skateboard and going down a 5 metre slope, at the bottom went unstable - ended up with a torn Rotator Cuff in the shoulder.

The doctor said ‘you shouldn’t do things like this at your age’ - me looking at him and thinking ‘who you talking about like some kind of fossil?’

Not to forget 18 months of self inflicted treatment - 15 minutes hotpack, 20 minutes of agonizing excercise a few times every day.

But then - that’s where we are now. We’re the fossils we used to laugh at

[Mirdarthos]

And we don’t have to like it for it to be true…

[Zesko]

@BIZDIK

Let’s assume that you created a virus or a malware in AUR, can you stay anonymous to protect yourself?

I did not create the malware in AUR. I can but I don’t want to do the crazy thing.
Yes, any random professional hacker can be anonymous and do that without giving their identity who they are.

@BIZDIK

In Package Manager, under details, it lists the details for the AUR package. If your detail info doesn’t check, you won’t last long. From that point on, you won’t have much of a chance. Will you?

Each AUR package always has its own details in PKGBUILD to show URL - where source comes from.
With AUR, you can check PKGBUILD yourself and then decide whether you trust the source-URL or not.
For example: A source-URL shows *-bin which is a binary package as Black-box that you never know what is in it, then do not trust it. This is your judgment.

If many Arch users notice dangerous AUR packages and report them to the Arch security team, these packages can be deleted by some AUR administrators, I think.

[Yochanan]

@soundofthunder

Perhaps this thread would be best moved to the Members area

…then the OP would lose access to the thread. He’s not TL2.

[soundofthunder]

@Yochanan

…then the OP would lose access to the thread. He’s not TL2.

Oops. That would be annoying to some.

[BIZDIK]

@soundofthunder

@Ben

… MOST people who get Windows don’t exactly ‘pay for it’. They pay for hardware, and get special deals and mostly don’t buy a Windows licence.

That’s not entirely accurate.

The cost of the OS is actually factored into the selling price of the (OEM) hardware. The OEM pays Microsoft for a bulk amount of Windows licenses; those costs are then recouped within the selling price of the hardware.

Very god point! I absolutely agree!

@soundofthunder

Computer stores buy these computers and stack them nicely upon shelves, with mood lighting, and whatever other sales enhancements they can muster, Mister.

Now the retail store resells that computer, and Mom and Pop consumers pony-up, blissfully unaware that they also paid a license fee for that Windows that came pre-installed on the computer for free.

If you buy a new computer from the local Computer dude, you stand a better chance of seeing the cost of the OS included on an invoice; certainly more so than you ever will when buying off-the-shelf.

So, whether you need it, want it, or not, you pay for it. “That’s not fair”, I hear you cry – and, it’s not; but just you try to get your money back for that (very secretive) monetry value…

Here’s some interesting historical research: using your favourite browser, search for Windows Refund Day.

Here what bothers me to no end! Micro$oft is so desperate to push Windows 11 at all cost. And the upgrade is “free”. When Micro$oft says it is free, that’s when you should run the other way! The 3-letter agencies must have “special” updates and so-called upgrades in Windows 11. I would not even touch that garbage with a 10-foot pole.

If your computer came with Windows 10, it doesn’t matter how many times you stop the “automatic upgrade to Windows 11”, the system keeps insisting and keeps trying to upgrade your system to Windows 11. It is like they don’t take “no” for an answer!

[Aragorn]

If Microsoft had not had any bundle sale deals with hardware vendors for having them sell computers preinstalled with Microsoft Windows — and earlier, MS-DOS, and then MS-DOS + Windows 3.x — then it would have already long gone bankrupt.

Most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from those preinstalled OEM licenses — with a penalty for the vendor if they also offer computers without an operating system installed — and from patent trolling. If a vendor sold computers without an operating system preinstalled, then the OEM deal was void, and then the vendor would need to pay a full-fat Windows license for every computer they sold with Windows on it.

To the vendor, this made a difference of several millions of USD in their expenses, which is why most vendors were afraid to offer anything other than machines with an OEM Windows preinstalled. Dell Computer was one of the first companies to defy Microsoft and start offering computers with FreeDOS installed, and later on, a choice of either RedHat or Ubuntu.

You see, the OEM license forbade them from selling computers without an operating system preinstalled, but the license did not say which operating system it had to be. In addition to that, Dell was already a sufficiently large company with an equal amount of clout. Their approach would from there on inspire other major manufacturers into doing the same thing.

IBM’s story was different in that regard. IBM and Microsoft were initially working together on OS/2, which was the once-touted successor to MS-DOS/PC-DOS, but when Bill Gates broke the agreement with IBM for further developing OS/2, IBM instead started selling their own professional workstations with GNU/Linux preinstalled — a choice of RedHat or SuSE — just to spite Bill Gates.

[BIZDIK]

@Aragorn

Later on, Windows started integrating a DOS memory extender and a primitive cooperative multitasking system, but it still ran all of its code with full privileges and full access to the hardware, and it spent more than 70% of its time in the processor’s real mode, which is the only thing DOS itself understood.

Given that DOS was a single-user operating system for non-networked computers and that it used an improved version of the FAT filesystem originally designed for Digital Research’s CP/M, DOS had no way to determine which files would be executable or not. As the matter of fact, it followed CP/M — of which DOS was essentially an illegal 16-rewrite by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer, because CP/M was only 8-bit — in that it would regard any file with a certain filename suffix — .COM, .EXE and .BAT — as executable.

The above, and the fact that DOS allowed anything running on it full access to all memory registers and all of the hardware, made it very easy to write viruses for DOS.

Later on, when Windows was ported to the NT kernel, Windows retained the convention of regarding a file as executable if it had one of the three listed filename suffixes — plus .CMD, which was the designated filename suffix for a batch file that ran in protected mode on OS/2 — while relying on the optional ACL (“Access Control List”) support in the NT kernel, which itself was more or less copied over from the kernel of the VMS operating system.

What this essentially means on account of Microsoft Windows, is that Windows is not an integrated platform designed from the ground up as a coherent operating system, but more of an application binary interface ported to a kernel from another, completely different and incompatible operating system, i.e; VMS. As such, underneath its graphical interface, Microsoft Windows is full of holes, and is being held together with duct tape and strangely twisted nuts and bolts.

As a result, Microsoft Windows is still a security nightmare,

I absolutely agree!

@Aragorn

This means that the source code is freely available, and that there are more eyes to spot the bugs and the weaknesses — many more than that there would be bad guys trying to exploit those bugs and weaknesses — and that due to the vast numbers of developers involved, bugs and security weaknesses are virtually immediately patched as soon as someone comes across them.

True! And that’s what I love about Linux, the most!

Have you ever heard of an encryption software called “TrueCrypt”? The anonymous developers of the encryption software, “TrueCrypt” warned users that the software was no longer secure. The statement left many unanswered questions, wondering many what truly happened! Were the developers approached and threatened by the 3-letter agencies to create a backdoor in their encryption software that they didn’t have much choice, other than warning people not to use the encryption software? I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but what happened to “TrueCrypt” was abrupt and bizarre to say the least. It just makes you wonder!?

[Dark_iaji]

If you are afraid of the failure caused by the update, you can choose some file systems with snapshots, as long as you do not encounter file system corruption, snapshots will allow you to easily roll back.

[soundofthunder]

@BIZDIK

Windows 11. I would not even touch that garbage with a 10-foot pole.

The one thing I like about Windows 11 is that it’s one more step toward a fully 64-bit OS, without the overhead of a virtual machine for the sake of running 32-bit legacy applications.