I had to replace the default Apple Podcasts app (went with overcast). An update made it completely unusable for me, particularly when I had one hand available to hold the phone and press buttons.
> should never be used to install telemetry or spyware or to re-enable it if it was previously switched off
I lost track of the number of times a friendly Windows 10 (and 7) update has re-enabled telemetry. Either that or there is yet another, completely different post-update Wizard for advertisement, telemetry, default applications, and other privacy stuff (There sure is a lot of effort put in moving settings around each update!)
As usual in Microsoft wizards, you have to check/uncheck the exact opposite of all the defaults for a good experience.
>I lost track of the number of times a friendly Windows 10 (and 7) update has re-enabled telemetry. Either that or there is yet another, completely different post-update Wizard for advertisement, telemetry, default applications, and other privacy stuff (There sure is a lot of effort put in moving settings around each update!)
...and that's why I'm using LTSC, because it's limited to security updates and supported for 10 years, rather than regular windows which gets "feature" updates every 6 months. For office, the equivalent would be perpetual (2016 or 2019) instead of 365.
I've read[1] that it's possible to legally obtain LTSC without volume licensing by purchasing a few other Microsoft thingies. Is such a method how you did this, or did you unfurl your sails?
Btw (rant incoming), this isn't a spiel against piracy. If Microsoft complains that people pirate LTSC without providing an easy legal way to obtain it, they can cry me a river. I just switched over to Linux from Win7 early this year; between spying on you, stability and data loss issues from firing their QA department, the auto-installation of Candy Crush, and the intentional difficulty in getting LTSC which doesn't have these problems, they lost me from ever switching to Windows 10. Which is an absolute shame, because if it weren't for those dealbreakers, it would actually be a good OS, and I would be using it on my desktop. Maybe someday I'll spin up a QEMU gaming VM, but if they ever make LTSC impossible to obtain, I'll just try to forget Windows 10 exists entirely.
If it's safe to say so - I don't wanna jeopardize your methods here - how did you obtain it? As far as I can tell, normal consumers can't buy them "legit", but they are "illegitimately" resold anyways, which makes rejection of their "validity" during activation a possibility (assuming Microsoft finds out, of course).
>which makes rejection of their "validity" during activation a possibility (assuming Microsoft finds out, of course).
AFAIK Microsoft doesn't revoke existing activations, so you should be fine unless you need to reinstall. If you dont want that risk, a locally hosted kms server (running in a VM for maximum security) achives the same thing.
"Europe's highest court ruled on Tuesday that the trading of 'used' software licenses is legal and that the author of such software cannot oppose any resale." [1]
But this is pertaining to msdn subscriptions, which provide keys for a variety of Microsoft products. According to the article, you can't break them up to sell individually
>In a small victory for Oracle, the ECJ ruling prevents resellers from breaking up a license and selling only part of it if they have purchased licenses for more users than they need.
I don't see anything about that being a used key. On the contrary, it warns you it can only be activated once for one hardware combination.
Edit: those are usually MSDN or volume license keys that shouldn't be resold but will activate nevertheless. Reselling those may be legal only in the EU, but still, they're not used.
Works great and rock solid, even with new hardware released after LTSC. Missing the Windows Store but if you search the web there's a github repo which has an installable version.
echo o > /proc/sysrq-trigger
will shutdown a AWS instance immediately. I've used it a couple of times to make real sure my costly spot instance was terminated.
Looks like SysRq-o does a clean poweroff, not a dirty/immediate one — it calls kernel_power_off(), not machine_power_off().
This means, importantly, that can actually take some time to happen, as drivers get a chance to run deinitialization code. This also means that a wedged driver that doesn't respond during deinit can prevent the kernel from halting.
Thus, while SysRq-o might be useful for killing a wedged userland, it's not a panacea — especially, it isn't guaranteed to complete a shutdown for unstable kernels, or kernels with badly-written DKMS drivers attached. It's not truly equivalent to a power-cut.
This page was loading so many trackers for a full minute (doubleclick, openx, google.ca???) that my laptop started heating up. I'll wait for another media source to read about it, thanks.
> In other situations, we'd normally call this doxing
No we wouldn't.
If you're going to complain about ads, but still want the content, then shutup and pay the website for it. You're not going to do that either, though. Want to have your cake and eat it too?
No, instead (generic) you just wants free content. (Generic) you isn't going to pay $12.99 monthly per website to support the content and operation costs. (Generic) you just wants free stuff.
How many people on HN complain about Paywalled websites and immediately seek ways to circumvent the paywall? Paywalls are the alternative.
There's real costs with running a website - even more-so with producing content people are interested in (clearly evidenced by front page of HN).
Or, just use an Ad Blocker and be on with your day. It's the complaining that's annoying - and petty. Solutions to your perceived problem are super easy and well within reach. It's literally 3 clicks to install uBlock Origin.
The problem is systematic: There is currently no realistic way to pay and be done with the medium; there is no spotify or netflix for websites. Those services kinda prove that people are willing to pay after a decade of torrenting and burning DVDs.
HN readers typically know how to deal with ad blockers, our less technical fellows don't, and we ultimately owe them to work against this bullshit, like we expect them to steer their respective fields and professions to the common benefit, that they make their products and services healthy and safe.
A computer literally heating up due to who knows what arbitrary javascript is executed on that person's computer is notable, and the advertising-tech-complex is very much on topic for HN.
Finally, there can be NO DEAL between a website visitor and a bunch of third party javascript that cannot be understood or audited, and if the operation is not profitable, tough. There were cool websites on the internet before ads and we will have websites in the future.
> there is no spotify or netflix for websites. Those services kinda prove that people are willing to pay
The overwhelming majority of Spotify accounts are Free Accounts, supported by... you guessed it... Ads.
People don't torrent music because Spotify is easier. Spotify earns money through advertisers paying them to advertise on their platform. Spotify pays part of that to artists who put music on their platform. Everyone is getting paid, and it costs the user nothing. That's why Spotify is so popular.
> There were cool websites on the internet before ads and we will have websites in the future
What is it your are arguing for? Charging $0.35 per every single page view? Or people running websites should just foot the bill out of the goodness of their hearts? Someone has to pay the hosting bill...
Some of the tech-elites on HN will pay this out of principle, but the overwhelming majority of people will not. Be realistic.
A world where you must pay for every page view is effectively antithetical to everything the web stood for. The _free_ distributions of knowledge to everyone simply would cease to exist.
It's actually amazingly clever. We've tricked 3rd party advertisers into footing the bill for literally _everything_ on the internet. You are free to consume content without paying a single penny - someone else is paying it for you. The trade? You gotta look at some ads once in a while. Oh the humanity!
If someone is this principled - they should run an Ad Blocker. Most people simply don't care. You can make a case that they should care, but then you'll need to come with with a robust system to pay content creators to ensure they aren't buried in expenses of running a website for a bunch of freeloaders.
Advertising is not free lunch. We pay by being manipulated into spending more. Would have been nice if there was a free source of money, but clearly this cannot possibly be true. Even if advertisements wouldn't work, the cost of advertisement is still baked into prices.
There is also no contract, no trade. People go on a website, ignore any and all terms of services and privacy notes and try to read what's up. Presenting such terms of services etc. is acting in bad faith (as no layperson is able to understand it and no lawyer has time to read all of it). Third party code is executed on their computer. Could be bitcoin miners or even ransomware.
Your example with spotify may be true, but you can't ignore that Netflix and others are raking in a lot of money and provide a really expensive product (compared to website articles which yes, were produced for free by many people for years, on some level). I used to subscribe to The Athletic and will probably do so again if there's football in autumn.
I really wouldn't mind seeing some ads. On a shoe website, see a banner ad for shoes, with a hyper link to another shoe website. No tracking, no code, just a link.
I think the problem there is those types of ads aren't effective. And therefore, advertisers won't pay for them, which then goes back to the original problem of "who's paying the hosting bill"? Let alone paying the salaries of a dozen journalists or content creators.
If tastefully done, ads can be discrete and effective. There are bad apples out there, who plaster every pixel of page space with ads and more ads and more ads.
I don't think anyone enjoys that experience - but that's not the ads fault, it's the webmaster who did it! Eventually, that strategy won't pay for itself anymore as people stop using the website.
Netflix is a strange thing to relate to here, I think. People have always paid for movies - so I think it was a natural progression to pay for a movie streaming service.
Websites have mostly always been free - and the ones that successfully run a subscription model absolutely limit their market appeal and userbase. Making people pay for every page view (the effective equivalence of running impression-based ads) is simply not going to work; you'll have an immense challenge to convince people what was previously "free" is now going to cost them actual money directly from their bank account.
At the end of the day, there's two arguments going on here.
1) Tracking is a violation of expected privacy, and should not be done.
2) Ads are bad and should go away.
Number 1 is true! However, the result of stopping would be unrelated ads being shown to people with practically zero percent chance of converting into a transaction for the advertiser (showing diaper ads to a single man that lives by their self, for example). That could be fine, but again, reduces advertising effectiveness which means advertisers will pay less for the ad space. This could work... but will have ramifications that are potentially not great (more paywalls, for example).
Number 2, in my opinion, isn't true, and isn't realistic for the reasons laid out above.
It’s one thing to show an ad, and it’s a completely other thing to go around the internet and unmaks my behaviour and identity in order to profile me in order to show me ads AND store data about me. The thing is, I don’t know whether site will do that or “just show an ad” before I go there, so it’s not active subversion, it’s an active defense against downright shady business. Show me an ad - fine. Go out and profile me - fuck you.
Estimates set the lower bound at 250x the size of the observable universe, according to the limits of measurement of the "flatness" of our local space.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5476
Bad comparison. This is akin to someone random walking into a restaurant and looking under the fryer and finding a dead rat and removing it with the fryer.
Me too! Especially with the short expiration times of LetsEncrypt. But I really don't want to put `nginx -s reload` in the Cron, in case I'm tinkering with the configs and they're suddenly live (which only really happens at staging or at home of course, but still).
That's what I usually do. My problem is that I might be adding a location and nginx reloads between that and adding access restrictions (i.e. because I took a break to google).
