I… don’t know where you’re from, but actual gambling is legal here for adults. Are you suggesting that people should be able to place bets on actual sports but not buy a random loot box in a game? That seems incredibly extreme.
Which still leaves a bunch of other stuff people have used kids to attack on all sides of multiple political aisles, but hey, if that’s the one you want to caveat I’m happy to flag how weird the caveat is.
Yeah, I read about some of the tightening at the time and I’m not disputing that there are technical ways of… you know, making your country’s Internet a mostly separate bubble for non-techie users.
The point is it’s both hard and extremely invasive to get there. You can’t just wish upon a star for VPNs to not be used for a particular application without going to those extremes. Especially if the thing you’re trying to prevent is people watching Superman two weeks early or wanking to a mainstream porn page.
It’s kind of unfortunate how much this has been encouraged by petty online fights. People were very excited when “will somebody think of the children” was applied to, say, some social media content or gaming loot boxes because the Internet did not like those things, so they were very happy to ignore the pre-existing parental control devices and request blanket bans. Then people remembered that a bunch of old, prudish people on both sides of the political aisle don’t like porn and it was too late.
Man, people love the “they first came for” argument online and I should have guessed the first time it really pays off in the 21st century it’d include the absolute most depressing things possible instead.
Anyway, this is bad and I don’t like it, but UK politics are almost as bad as US politics, so I’m happy to let both stew in their own cautionary tale juices.
I guess that works for VPN services offering servers outside the country. That’s not what VPNs are, though, and you still can’t ban the concept of VPNs having a connection outside the country. VPN software is available open source and all it takes for it to connect abroad is my phone with a VPN connection to my home computer being abroad.
I mean, Russia (and even China) still have people using VPNs all over the place. This (and a lot of the push for age verification and comms backdoors) reeks of barely understanding the desired result and entirely misunderstanding how the tech works.
How do you “ban VPNs”? That’s not how software works, and VPNs are… you know, a key part of a bunch of online infrastructure. I get that they mean “ban them to bypass restrictions”, but the entire point of a VPN is you can’t tell from the outside what it’s being used for. You may as well ban thinking about butterflies. You can write it down, but you can’t enforce it.
He doesn’t say he doesn’t, so I assume he does.
The problem is the way he got banned also blocks him from his shared auth, which in turn blocks him from purchases and device functionality:
The Damage: I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously-active “bricked" hardware. My iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly. I have lost access to thousands of dollars in purchased software and media. Apple representatives claim that only the “Media and Services” side of my account is blocked, but now my devices have signed me out of iMessage (and I can’t sign back in), and I can’t even sign out of the blocked iCloud account because… it’s barred from the sign-out API, as far as I can tell.
Seriously, it’s like a one page blog. You could have read it in the time it took you to make me read it for you.
Agreed 100%. I think it’s understandable to feel schadenfreude on someone this deeply embedded being bit by the arbitrary business practices of big corpo in a worst case scenario type of situation.
But the problem is the business practices, not the person being affected. The guy’s job feeding Apples gargantuan content engine doesn’t make this alright.
Because it was a 500 dollar transaction and the card they purchased was an apple-branded product in a major retailer.
It was a 500 dollar transaction because this guy is a pro developer in Apple’s ecosystem and apparently uses a 6TB plan for both personal and professional storage.
The Trigger: The only recent activity on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan. The code failed. The vendor suggested that the card number was likely compromised and agreed to reissue it. Shortly after, my account was locked. An Apple Support representative suggested that this was the cause of the issue: indicating that something was likely untoward about this card. The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale), so if I cannot rely on the provenance of that, and have no recourse, what am I meant to do? We have even sent the receipt, indicating the card’s serial number and purchase location to Apple.
Much as I do think mixing pro and personal accounts is a mistake, as a person who has to pay several major corpos for subscription plans for professional software that include cloud storage, I admit I get it. Receiving spam about how full your free personal Google Drive is kinda sucks extra if you are already paying a bunch for an enterprise account with a bunch of storage on the side.
Not an “apple fan”, an apple-focuse software dev deeply embedded in their dev community.
Which I suppose goes a long way to explain them being multiple terabytes in the hole inside Apple’s ecosystem, and also why even having a separate backup would definitely not fix their problem in the first place.
That’s not true at all. Synology will sell you 24 bay rack mounted devices and 12 bay towers, as well as expansion modules for both with more bays you can daisy chain to them.
Granted, I believe those are technically marketed as enterprise solutions, but you can buy a 12 bay unit off of Amazon for like two grand diskless, so… I mean, it’s a thing.
Not saying you should, and it’s definitely less cost effective (and less powerful, depending on what you have laying around) than reusing old hardware, but it does exist.
I’m currently running some stuff out of an old laptop which I also have tucked away somewhere and just… remote desktop in for most of the same functionality. And even if you can’t be bothered to flip it open in the rare occassion you can’t get to the points where the OS will let you remote in, there are workarounds for that these days. And of course the solution to the “can’t hook it up to a keyboard and mouse” in that case is the thing comes with both (and its own built-in UPS) out of the box.
Nobody is saying that server grade solutions aren’t functional or convenient. They exist for a reason. The argument is that a home/family server you don’t need to use at scale can run perfectly fine without them only losing minor quality of life features and is a perfectly valid solution to upcycle old or discarded consumer hardware.
I think the self-hosting community needs to be more honest with itself about separating self hosting from building server hardware at home as separate hobbies.
You absolutely don’t need sever-grade hardware for a home/family server, but I do see building a proper server as a separate activity, kinda like building a ship in a bottle.
That calculation changes a bit if you’re trying to host some publicly available service at home, but even that is a bit of a separate thing unless you’re running a hosting business, at which point it’s not a really a home server anyways, even if it happens to sit inside your house.
I mean… my old PC burns through 50-100W, even at idle and even without a bunch of spinning hard drives. My actual NAS barely breaks that under load with all bays full.
I could scrounge up enough SATA inputs on it to make for a decent NAS if I didn’t care about that, and I could still run a few other services with the spare cycles, but… maybe not the best use of power.
I am genuinely considering turning it into a backup box I turn on under automation to run a backup and then turn off after completion. That’s feasible and would do quite well, as opposed to paying for a dedicated backup unit.
No.
I had that laptop before I tried to move it to Linux and I’m not buying a new one. It does work under Windows.
This is not my laptop not supporting Linux, this is Linux not supporting my laptop. Because I already own the laptop. If people weren’t trying to cheerlead for their preferred OS for other reasons than… you know, whether it’s good or not, this wouldn’t even be a discussion. In fact, half the “Windows sucks” angles these days are down to “Windows 11 doesn’t support specific pieces of pre-existing hardware”. Which, you know, is the exact problem I’m having here.
Now, would ASUS finally paying attention to the ecosystem make it easier for a whole bunch of people to move over? Sure. Of course. But that doesn’t contradict my previous statements.
I have an ASUS laptop that maps its multiple speakers incorrectly under Linux, it’s been killing me for months and I’m now considering it. I was not prepared for the realization that the Linux path forward would be to just pay by the bug fix.
Look, like I said, it’s not you and it’s not about whether you’re agreeing or disagreeing with me.
I think at this point I’m just disappointed at the concept of social/user generated media as a whole. Straws and and camels and all that.
In that it’s mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.
So I guess it’s a good test for that sort of “just read the headline” response.
It’s been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can’t parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?
I may be done with this place at this point. It’s just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.
I am so furious with this at this point.
And the problem is, I also get what’s going on. You all feel cool and proud and self-actualized with the whole thing where you moved to Linux and whatnot. And you really, really, really want to tell somebody about it. I get it. It’s social media.
It’s fine the first few times, but it piles up after a while, you know? You can only have somebody veer sharply to the left towards “I use Linux, by the way” so many times.
Nobody asked if it was a dealbreaker for you. That didn’t happen. And even if someone did it’s not relevant to the conversation we’re having. We know.
Look, again, it’s not you. It’s just that hanging out around this place and trying to engage with the issues can get to be really weird after a while.
I’m confused. What is “not accepting” a MS account to set up Windows? I mean, if you don’t have to use Windows and that is a dealbreaker for you, then great.
But if you need to use Windows and you want to… you know… work… around… having to be logged in, he’s suggesting a way to do that. That’s what we call in the business “a workaround”.
As I said elsewhere, I get that people want this to be a dealbreaker, or the suggestion to be a pointless defense because this is a Linux community and there is a cultural pressure to pretend that the account problem is a massive dealbreaker (as opposed to most normies just going with it, just like they do on their phones, which is what actually happens), but OSs aren’t football teams. You can both criticise MS for having an online activation requirement, rightfully so, and acknowledge a potentially useful mitigation for anybody who needs or wants to use the OS without being constantly logged in.
I genuinely don’t know that I follow that explanation. For one thing, what reasons would there be to ban paid blind boxes, online or offline, while allowing outright games of chance with a monetary payout? In what world is a Magic the Gathering blister more of a problem (for a consenting adult, anyway) than an online casino?
But also, by the larger point you’re making it seems like you’d be fine with a government saying “porn is banned for everybody because reasons” but not with “porn is banned for kids”, at least in a scenario where that comes with age verification.
To be clear, I agree that both of those are… not good. I just don’t know that I can wrap my head around the logic of thinking the more extensive issue is more acceptable than the alternative. You could argue that the porn ban is an excuse to add mass surveillance, but at that point we’re not talking about the porn ban, we’re talking about the mass surveillance.
Oh, and for the record, there is plenty of will someone think of the children regarding loot boxes. Both on its own and bundled together with a blanket assessment that gambling is immoral and/or illegal. It’s actually a fairly close match to the porn issue, where concerns about children are being wrapped around a more targeted hostility around the concept from both sides of the political spectrum.