Several years ago I had a brief stop at some airport-- maybe Atlanta? But they had an indoor smoking area. I smoked at the time so I followed the map, and you could see the smoking area from the balcony on the floor above.
It was a glass cube maybe 10 feet across, and it was crammed full of people. Completely full, like those Japanese trains. And there was a crowd of people outside waiting to get in.
I went outside. It was pretty nice, there was no one around.
As always, "the internet" here means "the six biggest websites".
The small web still exists, largely exactly the same as it always has. It's just not linked on reddit/Facebook/google/etc.
The old internet is still there, it's just buried by miles of corporate excrement. If you go looking you'll find neat weird blogs, message boards and forums, honest-to-god webrings, and more.
The internet as a whole isn't shit, the six biggest websites owned by rich megalomaniacal assholes are shit. Those same assholes would also really like you to believe that the entire internet consists of their six websites and literally nothing else.
I'm a lifelong Arch user (btw) but I would also call out Manjaro as a less full-contact way of using Arch. It's got a slow and stable release cycle, it's fairly reliable because it stays behind the bleeding edge like Debian does.
But you still get the raw unadulterated power of the archwiki, and the same full control of the internals. It's a great middle ground between Ubuntu and rawdogging pacstrap.
Then again you still have the slightly heretical option of running Manjaro but using the unstable repos so you're getting the full Arch experience
Genuine question, how is everyone else dealing with giving agents elevated permissions? Obviously the answer is "don't", but some things are pretty harmless, like journalctl and dmesg, and are pretty useful for debugging the system.
I guess you could make a new user to run the harness under and give it no-password sudo rights for select commands? That doesn't feel like a great solution but it's the only thing I can come up with
You know what? I think this is dead on. Like a lot of us, I grew up in the 90s tinkering with Windows regestries and internals. That knowledge only ever really helped me with Windows systems, and it really only carried me up to Windows 7/10. After that, it felt like debugging an opaque blob, just pulling levers until something different happened and trying a blind binary search across random behaviors.
But since Linux is open, you can observe it as a holistic system. You don't need to-- and likely shouldn't try to understand it as a whole, but you can follow a thread all the way down if you want to. If the audio system really pisses you off, you do have the power to follow it and fully understand it.
Thinking about systems and how many different pieces fit together to make a cohesive whole is honestly the vast majority of my life and work as an engineer. It's a fundamental skill that doesn't seem very common outside the realm of nerds who like picking apart complex problems. But it's certainly my most heavily used skill, and in large part it's because I got into Linux as a teenager in an era where Linux was absolutely not meant for teenagers to be daily driving on a new laptop with no drivers.
My new refrigerator has WiFi, but no screen. They clearly could not come up with any real feature other than "get an alert when the temperature goes too high". Everything else could be done with the built-in seven segment display, if they hadn't intentionally removed or hidden them. In total: sabbath mode and "turbo cool" modes.
I wish I could have paid $100 less to not have an entire computer running a full WiFi stack.
Though shockingly, the owner's manual includes MQTT API documentation. If I really cared to, I could put it on a VLAN and have HomeAssistant talk to it.
I think there's something important in the fact that we've spent the last ten years or so making software as locked-down, unfriendly, unusable, and outright user hostile as possible. And now suddenly everyone has the ability to make software.
Why should I use your software with oceans of padding and unlabeled hieroglyphic icons from which you've removed 99% of features? I can just do it myself now. Ostensibly, yes, the software is "worse" in some technical sense, but better in the ways that actually matter: it can be used it can do a job. It no longer exists as a stage for the author's minimalism fetish or as a vehicle for some pointless middle-manager's promotion package.
Software is a tool, it's supposed to be useful and do tasks to help the user. We've spent so much time, money, and brainpower this past decade making software as unusable and unhelpful as possible. Is it any wonder that when computer literacy has hit a huge low that people immediately and with gusto jump onto the "make your own software the way you always wanted it to be" machine?
Whether good or bad, this is a pretty natural reaction to the previously-modern state of software. The industry decided to only publish software that can only be used One Correct Way, and physically prevented any use other than the single happy path by stripping out any feature that wasn't absolutely critical. If a user wanted something other than the author's personalized emacs file, fuck them, that's their problem. We decided to only publish UIs that cannot be understood by humans and HOW DARE anyone suggest ultra-minimalist UIs that are 85% whitespace are bad, what are you a Luddite?! And the huge crew of self-entitled "well just fork it if you hate it so much" crew.
We did this to ourselves. We made software exclusive, elitist, and are shocked when the masses go "okay, I'll make my own"
You've described states one and two as outlined above.
Whether a bug is exploitable is an entirely separate category of unknowable, because seemingly-innocuous bugs quite often have very deep and very subtle implications that when combined with another innocuous bug, result in an RCE or PE.
Therefore, it's sensible to treat all bugs as potential threat vectors unless and until proven otherwise. Which brings us full circle: state 3, all bugs being public, is probably the safest thing because nobody can know if a bug is in state 1 or 2.
As an outside observer, there is no way for you to determine if a bug is in state one or two, you only know once it's in the third state.
Which is the entire problem here. Having the bug be known to everyone is a vastly improved state over being known to a few. Yes, the bug being completely unknown is better than being known to a few, but there is no way to ever know if that's the case.
From the outside, known to none and known to a few are indistinguishable, and thus both states are the worst possible case. The only remedy is to make the bug known to everyone such that it cannot be covertly exploited.
Trades can pay very well and frequently require nothing more than on the job training.
You think you need college for the same reason you equate "job" with survival. These are not universal truths, not even in capitalist hellscape America. It might be harder but it is in no way a requirement. Anyone who tells you different is lying to you.
It was a glass cube maybe 10 feet across, and it was crammed full of people. Completely full, like those Japanese trains. And there was a crowd of people outside waiting to get in.
I went outside. It was pretty nice, there was no one around.