Your well come.

I miss Allie’s blog alot.

Noone should of aloud this code to go out the door. Atleast alot of other people people probably complained aswell, so your apart of a bigger group, incase you were worried.

COBOL

If you’re going to forbid any 2-letter initialism because it might have naughty connotations, you’re not going to be left with many options.

Yeah, Display Port is old, but I’ve never seen that P and D symbol before, or at least never noticed it. And, even if it existed before Display Port over USB, you’d think that that potential confusion was a good opportunity to come up with a new logo for something that would be put next to a USB port.

It’s almost as if having all these different features would be easier to differentiate if they had different physical shapes.

I think the goal was always that you’d only ever need one type of port and one type of cable and that that port and cable could do anything. Unfortunately, because there are so many revisions and so many features are optional, you’ve now got a situation where the port is the right shape, the cable fits into the port, but you can’t get the thing to work without reading the fine print, or without decoding obscure logos.

I just love that in a world with Power Delivery (PD) they decided that the best way to indicate Display Port (DP) was to have an ambiguous symbol involving a P and a D.

Ah, I would say that is worse than piracy, since you deprive them of the ground for a time.

Maybe, in my mind I was picturing a situation where someone had lots of property and didn’t realize that anything had happened. I see your point though, that in theory you’re depriving them of the use of it whereas with copyright infringement there isn’t even a second where they can’t enjoy their own property. They only potentially lose out on a sale.

Sneaking into a concert that isn’t full is probably a better analogy. You get the experience of the concert without paying for it, and the venue owner maybe loses out on a sale without knowing it.

Also, “piracy” or “copyright infringement” isn’t theft in any sense.

A key element of theft is that you deprive the rightful owner of something. You now have it and they no longer do. What makes it wrong is that the person who should have it no longer does. It’s not that you have it. That’s why the punishment for “mischief” where someone completely destroys something belonging to someone else is similar to the punishment for the theft of that same object.

Copyright infringement is breaking the rule that the state imposed giving someone the exclusive right to control the copying of something. You’re not depriving anyone of anything tangible when you infringe a copyright. They still have the original, they still have any copies they made, any copies they gave out or sold are still where they were. The only thing you’re doing is violating the rule that gave them exclusive control. If you’re depriving someone of anything, it’s depriving them of the opportunity they might have had to make money from selling a copy.

If anything, copyright infringement is more similar to trespassing than to theft. Just like copyright infringement, trespassing involves not allowing someone to control who accesses their property. If you sneak onto someone’s campground property and have a bonfire party, the person loses the opportunity to rent out the campground for the bonfire, and any money they might have received for doing that. But, if you sneak in and sneak out and leave no trace, you could argue that nobody is harmed.

But you really have to be masocistic to even want to drive in Zürich during the commuting times.

Yeah, and if you do, you’re going to be passed by buses, bikers, even pedestrians. I just love that Zurich buses pick up some passengers, go into their bus lanes, pass all the cars, then get their own light. Meanwhile the Mercedes is sitting at the red light just waiting.

The North American approach (because Canada is guilty too) to transit is to just throw a bunch of busses at the problem and act like they’ve “solved traffic”.

Nobody thinks they’re “solving traffic”. In most of North America, buses are seen as transportation for poor people. Cities feel like they need to supply them because poor people need to get to their jobs, but it doesn’t have to be a good solution.

In Switzerland where they actually do try to solve traffic with buses, those buses have their own dedicated lanes, their own stop lights, etc. Plenty of rich people still drive because it’s a status symbol or something, but buses, trams and trains are the fastest way to get from A to B. Cars are forced to yield to bus traffic. The result is that buses are fast and predictable, so everybody’s happy to use them, which means they get increased investment, which leads to even better bus service, so even more people use them, etc.

Which instance?

Most of the time the fact there’s a beginner-friendly option doesn’t mean that there aren’t also options for more advanced users. This is especially true with Linux.

On phones both Apple and Google lock things down so much that your options are limited. That’s mostly an issue with monopolies not with phones. Macs have a bit more freedom than phones by default, Windows has a bit more than that, then you can go back to Mac if you’re willing to hack around and run QT apps and so on. But, I can’t imagine a Linux distro that didn’t let you ditch a beginner-friendly UI for something more powerful.

I’m still hoping that the success of the Steam Deck will get the ball rolling. Steam Deck success might lead to more games that work really well under Linux. That means less of a reason to keep using Windows. More people using Linux might lead to more software being fully available for Linux, which might get more people to use it. I still think eventually you’re going to need non-hobbyists to come in and smooth a lot of the rough edges. But, stage 1 in that whole process is getting more people using Linux, and maybe that’s actually happening now.

(It also doesn’t hurt that Microsoft keeps shooting themselves in the foot with things like the Cloudstrike bug, and the Windows Recall snoopware failure. Long may that continue.)

I don’t think Linux Bros will ever find a way to appeal to women newcomers. I think it will take a company that can afford to hire UI/UX designers, marketing people, etc.

But, that’s hard because there’s a chicken / egg situation. Selling a Linux-based computer to the general public is going to be very difficult because of the network effects around Mac and Windows machines. Everyone else uses them and so there are people you can ask for help, there are software vendors who make stuff for the platform (also with nice UIs meant for normal people). I can only see someone spending money to make a mass-market friendly Linux in some limited circumstances.

One situation where a company might make a truly user-friendly Linux distribution is if a company like Valve decided to make a game console. They already have the Steam Deck which is doing really well, but nobody’s going to be doing their taxes on a Steam Deck (although they could). But, if they made a desktop-replacement game console that could both play games and also act as a normal home PC, they could afford to spend the money needed to sand the rough edges off the experience.

Another situation might be if a big country mandated Linux for something, either for government computers or for kids in schools. They’d probably have to have a support contract for that, and whoever was supporting those systems would want them to be as user-friendly as possible so they didn’t have to deal with as many support issues. So, if say Brazil mandated that all government employees switch to Linux, that could result in some company making a Linux desktop experience that was comparable to Windows.

Yeah. If you work for the Men in Black, and you’re a regular employee the policy is going to be something like “never under any circumstances plug anything into your PC that hasn’t been given to you by MiB IT staff”.

If you work for the Men in Black in cybersecurity and your job might involve investigating strange USB drives handed to you by aliens, agents, spies or employees who found one in the parking lot, you probably already have a rigidly documented procedure involving a special air-gapped, locked down computer in a bomb-proof, EM-shielded, dimension-shifted room, and you don’t need to ask for advice on Lemmy.

If you work for the Men in Black in cybersecurity and there isn’t yet a procedure for investigating strange USB drives handed to you by aliens, agents, spies or employees who found one in the parking lot, and you’re somehow in charge of creating such a procedure, you’re again probably not going to be posting on Lemmy asking for tips. You’re probably going to be doing deep research on various USB and USB-look-alike threat vectors. Then, write a report, have it reviewed and in a decade you’ll have an ultra-safe procedure that nobody follows.

For everybody who doesn’t work for the Men in Black, just plug it in and take a look, and don’t do anything dumb like double clicking on “Really Just A Word.doc.exe”.

There are exceptions, like if you have a psycho jealous ex who also happens to be a ruthless hacker. But, that isn’t most people, thankfully.

But, this is a cybersecurity forum, and so you’re going to get praised for coming up with the most outlandish possible threat vector, and the most complex and inconvenient way to counter it. Suggesting normal levels of precaution is going to get shouted down because it implies that that person isn’t knowledgeable about the vaguely possible incredible threat vectors that you can prove your worth by showing you know all about.

its

Or, maybe it’s a tiny thermonuclear device cleverly disguised as a flash drive. Or, it might be a living, breathing creature that has evolved to mimic the look and feel of a flash drive but will detach itself from the computer and attack you at night while you’re asleep.

If you’re working with the Men In Black, you might have to consider these things. For the average person, it’s almost certainly just a flash drive and you can take reasonable precautions and be more than reasonably safe.

AFAIK computers with normal setups won’t auto-run anything on a flash drive you insert. At most they’ll prompt you to ask if you want to run something. (Say no.)

So, it’s pretty safe to look at what files exist on the flash drive. Then you just have all the various exploits that exist with unknown files. Obviously, don’t run any executables on the drive. Don’t double-click on anything that looks like it’s a document (say PDF or word doc) because it might not be. To be extra safe, even if it is actually a PDF or word document, don’t open in the standard program (word or acrobat) because there’s a slight chance it might be an actual PDF that exploits an unpatched vulnerability in that program.

If I work in Iran’s nuclear program, and found this flash drive on the ground outside, I’d be a lot more cautious and maybe do some of these extremely paranoid things people here are suggesting. But, if Aunt Jenny was just over for a visit and I found a flash drive in the hallway near her room and want to check to see if it might be hers, it’s probably safe just to insert the drive take a quick look and not click on anything.

Imagine thinking political theory involves selection pressures.

Sure, sure.