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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • It’s mostly about using every last one of the cpu cycles efficiently, which is old school think from the days when 640k was supposed to be enough for anyone. When I was a wee tyke in the 8bit era we had machines that did graphics, but they were for launching games from a terminal/console.

    There are many servers with GUIs, primarily Windows servers, and there’s probably web or GUI interfaces available for every useful service you can run which will be handy in some contexts, but there’s a kind of speed and simplicity you can get with a good console that no gui can touch. Hard to explain unless you’ve done some work.






  • There are those of us who were on the Internet before the capital showed up, and all of us said that it was a bad idea to use these corporate silos, that there were implications that were not great to handing what we knew would one day be the public square over to private interests. We were not listened to, of course, and for the thirty years that the government kept the house of cards propped up with zero interest they created a real illusion that it might actually work.

    But maybe I have to reassess Elon. I have heretofore considered him something of a bad man, a Senator Palpatine with his “saving the world through capitalism” schtick, but with an Emperor lurking in his twisted mind. And here we have that very Emperor, taking off the mask. But perhaps… perhaps… perhaps Musk is actually Vader. Perhaps in revealing, to all with eyes to see, the very problems we Libre’d zealots have been crying out in the wilderness about, perhaps he is the one who will restore balance to the Internet.

    Nah he’s just an apartheid rich boy who talked a good line while he could keep pulling free money out of the bag, but now that he has to put money back in the bag he’s taking whatever work he can get.










  • Folks, don’t worry, just sharpen up your pitchforks.

    Here’s the bit that doesn’t get talked about much: For thirty years, money has been effectively free for these people, and they’ve been spending it all to build up this big Orwellian house of cards on the idea that people would never be able to do this without big corporate money. This was a deliberate action on the part of government and capital to “make the internet happen”.

    Now the thing is, the internet was already happening. It just didn’t have video. In 1995, you still mostly got video on physical media or via cable/sat. MP3s weren’t there yet, so there also wasn’t really audio, to speak of, just little .wav clips that we swapped on irc for amusement.

    But there were vibrant communities on usenet talking about every type of interest (EVERY type), there was trolling and DOS attacks on irc and even a bit of friendly chatting, and the good thing that we get from all this - more easily connecting to people we can relate to - was 100% already present for anyone who bothered to get a PC and modem. Believe me because I was there, we already had The Internet in full swing, while we played our CDs and VHS (DVDs if you were affluent).

    Got that whetstone wet?

    So what did they bring to the internet? Well, not music - MP3s showed up around 1998, and the music industry was taken entirely by surprise. It took them three years to figure out what was going on, by which time Napster had introduced the world to peer-to-peer file trading.

    Back in the 8-bit days, we had to have swap meets, people would gather in large rooms, bring their 64s and 1541 drives and a box or two of fresh (or culled from your existing collection and freshly-formatted) 5.25" floppy disks which we had cut a notch out of so we could use both sides, and get a fresh supply of games, demos, sid files, useful software, etc, to mess around with for the next month or so. Napster and Bittorrent, however, represented a far more easy and accessible version of piracy: no need to carry 10-40lbs (cause CRT monitors, remember) of gear to a different place, just load up the program, choose your own adventure.

    There was a lost opportunity to humanity around this time, because at some point around 1998, each entertainment industry conglomerate’s board of directors, either in groups or individually, had someone (probably from IT, but possibly a child in their family) sit them down and demonstrate downloading and listening to music on Napster.

    If only, each time that happened, they had thought to point a video camera at the face of the executive or shareholder or CEO.

    These would have been, these SHOULD have been, the world’s introduction to reaction videos.

    Instead we have a bunch of video of people watching women eat poo.

    Anyways the thing is they saw this happen and they found their most badass but cooperative front men to sit on their horses while they sicced the hounds on the uppity peasantry who think they are entitled to have joy in their lives without paying.

    They ended up making Metallica look like landed gentry, basically, and nothing stopped, and that’s been the dynamic ever since: They have been focusing all this money, which the Federal Reserve was good enough to make available at zero interest (ie. free) on creating the infrastructure for a paid version of the internet where they control it entirely, just like they used to control access to music and movies by doling it out one disc/tape/record/cylinder/music sheet at a time, and just trusting (i’m loling as i type) that people really do want to pay what they used to charge for a single record, and we are all just waiting patiently for them to decide how much our lives they need to cut away from us, and we’ll be happy with whatever dregs they leave us, just like that vauntedly docile peasantry of old.

    I hope the tines of your pitchforks are shiny like chrome now.

    Cause again, we already had the internet working before they got here, 100% functional in all the ways it needed to be, before they got here. We don’t actually need them at all. I mean sure, some people can’t even pump their own gas, let alone change their own oil, so yes, some people will just need crayon-level functionality delivered with big bright icons, but most of us can figure out how to launch a desktop application and browse a discussion board, we’re all doing it right now on Lemmy.

    The bottom line is that we don’t need them to manage distribution anymore - we actually never did, all we need is bandwidth for all. They are desperately trying to make us not see that.

    And meanwhile, since covid, the Federal Reserve has been calling in the bill, and everyone who has a mortgage knows it’s gonna cost you more for the next few years at least, if you weren’t lucky enough to renew right before covid. But we were already paying interest and used to the idea; we are honest people trying to have a nice place to live. Those without mortgages, please, laugh at us right now because our problems don’t even approach the magnitude of the problems faced by rent-payers right now. You have a scumbag trying to skim their life off the top of yours.

    I KNOW your pitchforks are ready, and you might even have a few torches in the shed out back.

    But, imagine how it must feel for someone who has been pulling free money out of a bag for thirty years, and has now been told that not only is there no more money in the bag, that in fact, they must start putting money back IN the bag now?

    That’s Netflix, That’s Google, That’s Elon Musk, That is Zuckerberg and the Metaverse [edit: and let’s not forget our very favorite here on Lemmy, u/Spez…].

    I’m a little old for pitchfork crew, but I’ll be sitting here with my popcorn watching these bastards burn, very soon.





  • I’m sure there is a much more sophisticated explanation from the lawyers’ end, but more fundamentally, I’m pretty sure that encryption is not part of the basic protocol. Privacy is not actually a basic feature of the internet, so something as basic as email does not include it. Anything that uses email to do private coms would have to be referred to as ________ over email.

    PGP/GPG has been around as an option since the 90s, but it’s rather clunky to implement and you need to know how to keep your private key safe. So, the problem has long been functionally “solved” for the competent, and there we stay; you and anyone you want to talk to privately will always be free (possibly not legal, but free) to generate a key pair each, share your public keys, and then talk privately using those keys for as long as you can keep your private keys safe.

    And really, I personally find the idea fairly silly, that some company is going to keep my key for me and respect my privacy. No, if someone wants to keep your private key for you, they want to know your business, all of it. You don’t ask to hold anyone’s keys anymore than you ask to hold their johnson for them when they piss. I do use some corporate encryptions, signal for things I don’t want the DEA to know about mainly. Oh also FUCK THE DEA