Living in a city in Europe in a very decent apartment in a building that was erected in the 1880s (sic), this article made me chuckle - but also feel bad about how the throwaway society of the 21st century has extended even to things that are supposed to last.
I live in a house that is at least 110 years old, built around the time Australia became a federation. The house has been repainted and extended several times, but it still has 3.5-meter-high ceilings, ventilation holes with intricate metal bars, and a lot of original details.
Even though the house is really old, it has been taken care of. There is no mold, the doors are still the same original ones, the fireplaces with decorative tiles are still there, and the wooden fireplace parts are still in good condition. I don't know how they did it, but it was built rather well.
Interesting tidbit: on the ceiling there was something like a Star of David. After asking LLMs what it was, one of them said that when Australia became a country, the Federation Star had only six points, denoting the newly incorporated states, but later a seventh point was added. Gemini told me that the frieze details were typical for the 1901-1910 period, and this helped me date the house.
This took about 10 minutes. Before, it would probably have taken me at least several hours of Googling.
I did, and also it matches what I know from history on how the flag of AU has changed so it matched several facts I knew already. Also mentioned 2 of the producers of freezes and etc in the city back during that time and I've found a some images from their catalog online.
Apart from a brief spell when I was very young and my family lived in a 1950s council house I've never lived in a building as new as that... and I'm 60 and have lived in 11 different properties. But that's the UK and Edinburgh for you...
Edit: Never had any mould problems but then again most of the places I lived had draughty sash windows...
Same, the building my apartment is in was built in the 16th century. It holds up great, and I certainly am not a paragon of maintenance.
The only issues are zoning laws which apparently prevent us from fixing "mundane" things - such as the windows making you feel like the people in the square below are actually in your living room. I wish that wasn't the case.
I don’t think you go lucky — renting from small landlords who live in/near building is the way to avoid this. In my experience, say the word “leak” they’ll be there in 10 minutes. And good tenants have value to them.
At two years with a corporate landlord, they’ve done the math and see they can cheaply renovate your apartment, jack up the rent, and make more money than they can by renewing you.
Small landlords also haven’t built software to collude with each other to raise prices.
Yeah, similar. The place I was in in the Netherlands was a converted office building (originally made iirc in the 1960s or 70s) but refurbished to apartments post the turn of the century.
In the many years I lived there... the place was pretty much identical. Sure, it'd probably need a deep clean for the (faux?) wooden floor that gets dirt into the crevices... but that's it?
Even back home in India, we've lived in buildings made around the 1990s iirc. They're perfectly fine, and apart from outdated floor plans, there's nothing problematic about their age at all.
Though, I just remembered one thing. In India, everything is made of concrete, and even in NL, beyond the outer concrete walls, the inner walls - even though often drywall-like - are very "high quality". They're extremely soundproof and fireproof (the latter of which I unfortunately learnt post a fellow neighbour's fire. Their room was burnt down to the bedframe, the neighbours were just fine. Never leave your cooking unattended, folks!)
We use this technique in our team to distribute passphrases for our secondary secret stores (that contain instructions on how to access our primary secret stores) in a "democratically secure and safe" manner.
One of my most esteemed former co-workers used to say that whenever you succeed in making something idiot-proof, the universe will create a better idiot, undoing any progress you made.
I'm very curious where that saying comes from now. I haven't found anything conclusive, like [1]'s friend I thought it might have been Douglas Adams, but a few references refers to it as "Grave's Law". After a few searches, I can't find any references to that which I can date further back than '99. But variants of the saying is at least as old as '89 (Rick Cook's version in [1]), but it's the kind of thing that sounds like a sufficiently "obvious" extension of the far older view that human stupidity has no bounds that it feels surprising if it is that recent.
That's from Mostly Harmless, 1992, so newer than Rick Cook's version.
But also sufficiently different that I have no doubt a lot of people have independently coined some variant or other. There's also the decades older (sometimes attributed to Einstein, but there appears to be no evidence that he said it) "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." It seems sayings about the extent of human stupidity are quite widespread in many variations.
Does Windows on ARM use VBS/Virtualization Based Security, and does ARM support nested virtualization to do so in a VM, too? Does it employ costly CPU vulnerability mitigation techniques that might hit two times in a VM (unless the Hypervisor is adequately set up, which I'd hope is the default for Hyper-V)? Those two things account for most of the common performance problems observed when putting modern Windows in a VM. I'd love to know more about it, but the article does not seem to mention either.
As a wireguard user myself (even on the lone Windows machine that I still begrundingly have), I am happy that this problem could have been resolved. I am just wondering - if there had not been this kind of public outcry and outrage that Mr. Donenfeld discounts in his announcement message, would the issue have been fixed by now?
What are individual developers of "lesser" (less important, less visible, less used) software with a Windows presence to do? Wait and pray for Goliath to make the first benevolent move, like all the folks who got locked out forever from their Google accounts on a whim? Ha!
The fact of the matter is, the code signing requirements on Windows are a serious threat to Free and Open Source Software on the platform. Code signing requirements are a threat to FOSS on all platforms that support this technique, and infinitely more so where it's effectively mandatory. I firmly believe that these days, THIS is the preferred angle/vector for Microsoft to kill the software variety their C-levels once publicly bad-mouthed as "cancer", and zx2c4 is one of the poor frogs being slowly boiled alive. Just not this time - yet.
They would be ignored. Having an audience is key to getting problems solved, whether it’s a lone hacker or a large corporation. Without an audience, you have no leverage. At that point you might as well create a new Windows account and re-apply, since that would have more luck than getting around a “we’ve closed your account and there’s no appeal process” barrier.
If that sounds Kafkaesque, it is. It’s a small miracle that getting a post to the top of HN can surmount such bureaucracy at all.
The best way to get an audience is to tell a compelling story. Make it interesting. There are ways of doing that for even the least known developers.
My point is to push back against the idea that it should be fair to everyone and that what’s morally right should prevail in every case. The hardware developer program doesn’t exist to treat every developer fairly. They exist to make money for Microsoft. pg puts it more eloquently here: https://paulgraham.com/judgement.html
It makes me think tech communities need to lobby for more laws to ensure fair access to platforms, app stores, etc. Be that at least side loading apps, etc.
Otherwise we’ll eventually all get lost in the kafkaesque technocracies.
Less for moral reading, but to keep from being squashed by the weight of tech.
But eff isn’t going to come to my aid if it’s isn’t a big story, like wireguard. We’re all just arguing circularly around the fact that companies with massive footprints can and do operate in a manner where it’s assumed that zero access is the industry standard for “normal users”
I got a modestly-similar situation resolved by buying a support package and spending 4+ hours across ... not sure, but probably 4-5 support calls? It's been 5 years. If memory serves it was the $200/mo support package for Azure.
In retrospect, I should have not spent 3 weeks trying to get their incompetent software to work and just gone straight to phone calls. And at least in my case, the support agents seemed broadly unfamiliar, but seemed to have access to higher-priority internal case submission which did finally get to someone who could fix my issue.
While this is a small problem for software (and hardware) that needs custom kernel drivers, or software that needs to run as administrator, you seem to have jumped a long way past that to rant about FOSS on Windows with no justification- general unsigned software works just fine on Windows as it always has.
"works just fine on Windows as it always has" is just not true. These days, I cannot even run my own cross-compiled Go executables of a cross-platform tool that I am developing in private on Windows 10 or 11, because some blue popup from Windows Defender/"SmartScreen" prevents me from doing so, and tells me to contact the software publisher if I'd like to be able to do something about it. Outright disabling Defender/SmartScreen works around the problem (but the popup doesn't tell me that), and, presumably, signing these executables with a "trusted" developer certificate would make this outcome less probable - that is at least what people online have been telling me.
In my book (I started using computers during ther Windows 3.0 era), this clearly does not qualify as "working just fine on Windows as it always has", no matter how you spin it.
Do you download the cross-compiled executable via http or smb to the Windows machine? If so than it most likely got earmarked with a NTFS alternate data stream.
File Settings > This file come from another computer: Unblock
PowerShell > Unblock-File
Add your smb file share as trusted: Internet Properties > Security > Local Intranet > Sites
I hate it too that you need to sign software that you want to publish. Totally destroys the economics of little shareware type software.
Thanks for this (and I actually learned about PS1's handy Unblock-File this very moment! :)), but I am aware of the "mark of the web"-stuff MSFT had introduced after realizing that an "attacker-controlled" filename extension alone is a poor safeguard against making a file executable ;)
For my specific problem/situation, the executable in question gets transferred to the target machine on a read-only UDF file system burnt onto a USB thumb drive. Other Golang executables from FOSS projects on the same filesystem execute just fine (I guess they have better "reputation", due to their hashes being registered with MSFT somewhere).
I am already donating the rough equivalent of the cheapest Microsoft 365 subscription to The Document Foundation each year, and won't stop now just because they're increasing the visibility of their donation-based funding model. I hope they succeed, and many more people start contributing financially as a result.
Thanks, but no thanks. The only winning move, long-term, is to excise everything this wretched company makes from your life as vigorously as possible. It's been true 20 years ago, and it's even more true today.
The reason, i opine, that so few people switch from Windows to any Unix flavor is that Windows users are waiting for the two productivity suites which make Windows at least marginally usable (cygwin and msys) to be ported to any of the Unix flavors.
Play on Lennox is just non-free wine. And no offense to the wine people, but it seems like perhaps they have hit a wall on what would be Windows 10 translation.
None of the missing ones have proper, official, upstream LineageOS support. If you install LineageOS on these, you install somebody's own, personal fork of LineageOS. Which might be totally fine, of course. But because of the necessarily different signing keys alone, it's a (potentially) very different thing.
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