The End of Everything

OpenBSD is constantly tweaking shit. 6 months release cycle? Does it really take mankind decades to create something that still only aspires to perfection? For me, X on OpenBSD 6.0 crashed on both of the Thinkpads I tried it on. I want a solid fucking system. I don't want to beta test some kids idea of an OS. Software Open and closed is becoming shittier by the day. I put freedesktop.org in the same camp as Microsoft. Haphazard, invasive, irresponsible, narrow-minded, fickle, capricious. Shit.
two thousand seventeen.

You should at least try 6.1. X crashes a lot less in it than 6.0 from my experience & syspatch has made tracking -stable not a pain in the ass

I just had a flashback to 1998 holy fuck user

Doesn't the Intel Management Engine have a 3G modem or something? I think it's only in Skylake CPUs, but if the people I heard this from are correct, we're fucked.

Fucking hardware botnet.

I use computers for my work needs and reading news, but my life isn't my computer. In fact, you could not learn anything at all personally about me by looking at my hard drive (literally empty besides work stuff and a video player, in which I watch stuff before deleting it).
You would learn a lot if you came into my apartment, of course, and took a look around bookshelves and such. Granted, my purchase histories here and there do tell a lot, but that is not dependent on me using the computer or not. I buy locally whenever I can, but my country is almost third world. I can only get to certain stuff through the Internet.
Get over the teenage worldview in which your life revolves around your computer because that is how you lived in your parent's, shut-in inside your room and your computer, having your little compartimentalized life there. AND THROW AWAY YOUR FUCKING """SMART""" PHONE.

Literally get a life.

I agree in principle, but the problem is most people are clueless to even know what's going on inside their computers. I would normally not give a fuck and have everyone be responsible for their ignorance, but these are our families and loved ones.

6.1 worked great for me, except that I needed a particular NodeJS (I know) module for work that happens to not work at all under OpenBSD.
If I get some free time soon I'll try to port it so that more cuckdevs can move over to OpenBSD.

Hell, that OS won me the moment the init system was not systemd AND it automatically downloaded missing firmware as it detected my hardware.

If you have botnet cpu like that (I never heard of such a thing), put your desktop if a Farraday cage. No more EM comms, cia niggers btfo.

I just had a small argument with an acquaintance of mine. I told him about the nvidia telemetry and he told me I shouldn't worry about nvidia spying on me because the creator of the cracked Windows distro I use (that he uses, I surely don't) is probably spying me as well anyway.
I told him to tell me his bank account details so I could log in and see how much he makes. After all, if so many people already spy him he shouldn't worry about me, who he knows and trusts more.

He just replied with a vague non-answer.

I realized people don't say things like "if you don't have anything to hide you don't have anything to worry about" or "they have been doing this since forever anyway" because they really believe that. They say those things because of cognitive dissonance (the term properly defined, not what you think it means).
Cognitive dissonance as defined in the dictionary is basically the mental discomfort one feels when their worldview is challenged.

These people are using these excuses as a cop-out because they can't really consider the fact that their lives are so much out of their control. Lest they have to give up Facebook, games or whatever it is the botnet has them grabbed by the balls with.

I think I'm fine, since as far as I know, Vishera doesn't have botnet.

Yeah of course it always is just a silly excuse which they don't really believe in, they just want to keep their heads in the sand because the reality is not something they want to deal with.
"Don't worry, be happy!" is the first commandment of our age.

What does Intel ME use to connect anyway? WiFi or mobile network?

maybe computers never made your life that good to begin with.
The only reason I liked them was because I could get skilled without being social, which fucked me over in life.
Will you suffer from Stockholm syndrome?

It uses mobile networks, so there's basically nothing you can do. I believe the coreboot team has made a tool to *temporarily* disable it, but that may not actually work.

smh tbh fam

Everybody suffers from Stockholm syndrome. The system is holding us hostage, yet we're siding with the system.

There's really no component (like a card) that I can remove? I don't need mobile networking at all. Actually I don't even know if my laptop has hardware for it. It's first gen (Arrandale) of these new Core i3/i5/i7 CPUs so I think it already does have Intel ME.

I think it's on the cpu die at this point

This. Basically realize no matter what CNN tells you, computers are only as much a part of your life as you allow them to be.
I have a physical switch that I use to turn on my router whenever I want to use the Internet. No 24/7 connection for me because I chose so. Same with my phone, which is on and connected only when I want to use it or when I want my clients/coworkers to be able to contact me.

Ditch all the things that hold you hostage and take control of your fucking life. Stop making excuses.

You're wrong. Intel says the CPU can be connected to a 3G modem so that you can choose control your computer from the 3G network.

It uses your NIC.

Computers are still useful tools in absence of privacy. Even on a library computer in plain view where people constantly monitor what you do you can still install a C compiler, perform numerical computations, access digital resources to learn. Obviously you can't spend all day on skidforumz.ru but there are plenty of books and so on that are non-controversial and teach you a lot.

The thing that is compromised by lack of privacy is your ability to use the internet as a force multiplier for unlawful or socially unacceptable activity. You can still be a racist shitlord or commit fraud IRL, but you need some social skills to get away with it. One side effect of early internet has been allowing even autists to do it, which is now fading and you feel it as a diminishing of your own comparative power in society.

I don't disagree with the principle of what you're saying, but the spyware you worry about would simply archive data and send it in bulk when you do connect.

With the phone I think you actually are getting added security, since it won't be pinging its location data continuously.

Explain something to me, Holla Forums: If intel surveyed consumers asking whether they would like to have a 3G modem in their CPU I bet a large fraction would say no. But isn't capitalism supposed to be about companies delivering the product the market wants as efficiently as possible? What gives?

Forgot to add, another loss is not being able to maintain largely online social relationships. To wit, I don't know any of you fags IRL and people that I do know are boring faggots. Clearly the solution is for us to network offline and find some solution to the geographic dispersion, which is probably the main problem.

What about corporate surveillance or cybernetic management of society? "Unlawful or socially unacceptable activity" doesn't even remotely cover everything I want to hide, or why I want to hide it.

You mean like, advertisers trying to track you to sell you shit?

Post-WW2 capitalism is also about sustaining the existence of the market by any means necessary. Which means everybody needs to be surveilled so that we can prevent any threats to the market as such.

x never crashed for me on bsd, what de/wm were you using

That's the least of it, corporations sell and use that data for other shit as well. What I have in mind is its use for political purposes, for law enforcement to preemptively target "future criminals", and generally any management of people through data and algorithms like in health care, banking or insurance.
Also it's not necessary that any one element of what I do is suspicious or noteworthy, algorithms might decide that a combination of them makes me suspicious. That's the essence of big data after all.

That is the dumbest thing I've read.

That's because you know shit about history. Before and during the WW2 period economists came to the conclusion that completely liberal economy of the 19th century doesn't really work that well and that you need a government which establishes existential conditions for the market to exist. The market is completely free of interventions internally while the government ensures its existence by building the necessary infrastructure and transforming social relations.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism
Post-WW2 reconstruction of Germany is the first example of that, closely followed by EU project started shortly after in 1952. This same ideology is the main influence behind the Chicago school of economics in the US, although they are more extreme in conceptually turning the whole society into a market (everybody is an entrepreneur, everything you do is an investment).

So your explanation is that the manipulation is so strong that it overwhelms the competitive impulse of the whole consumer CPU market?

It's not that incredible, but I feel like there should at least be some competing manufacturers that produce non-tracking CPUs. The market should overwhelmingly prefer those, so it's a humongous competitive edge. Even a giant like intel would be crippled, and since it's public it would be defrauding the shareholders.

Of course whoever is orchestrating this could just be playing aggressive whack a mole with every competing product.

I agree that it's a sad violation of privacy, but just taking things at surface value, it doesn't quite prevent you from doing anything*. So I would say it's not an infringement of your freedom, but of your other rights, namely privacy. But OP is specifically claiming that lack of privacy makes computers pointless - that's not true, there are still some uses that computers are good for even if you have zero privacy.

*: Caveat of course is that, as you say, if the combination of data is used to later prevent you from doing things, then your freedom is also infringed. But you can still circumvent it by keeping any remotely non-normie activity strictly offline. OP's complaint can then be rephrased as:
And of course the answer is that there are still normie activities that even a bad goy can enjoy, and insofar as these go computing is useful regardless of surveillance. Moreover, offline computing becomes a whole new private sanctuary where you can do whatever the fuck you want. Ditto private, personal networks.

I hate to sound like a faggot but the solution is clear: If the death of online culture like this one bothers you, the most useful thing to do is to network offline. A parallel network, whether piggybacking on the existing Internet or alternative hardware (Meshnets etc) will inevitably develop but that takes time and the discontinuity could erase all culture accumulated so far. The easy way of insuring against this is to network offline.

No, I wrote that half-jokingly. But there is general obsession with both security and connectivity, as well as with actually offering surveillance as a service (Your device got stolen? We can track it!).
Competitive manufacturers won't produce non-pozzed hardware because it's a feature not a bug(tm), if Intel offers it so must everybody else if they want to compete. It's really only a few competent circles that perceive these "features" as retarded, while the management loves it.

Usually no, not in a way that I would be immediately aware of. But the point is that there is a general social management in place whereby we each get individually manipulated by algorithms and based on data that is collected about us. I don't mean this as a conspiracy, almost everybody thinks of this as progress.
Freedom isn't even relevant anymore today, it's become merely an empty marketing slogan. Today it's all about optimization and convenience. Who cares if you're manipulated by your apps and devices when it makes your life so much better. And being manipulated is the whole point, isn't it? Just look at Google Now or or Fitbit or those sleep regulators, and shit like that. We want this.
But there's also the fact that all this very banal data is used for credit scoring and such as well. The algorithms may decide you're not worthy of a loan, or that you need to pay higher insurance. This can spiral pretty quickly because algorithms' perception of you becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: you now can't afford some things which makes you statistically less reliable (not as well integrated, more prone to crime, etc.) So the algorithms lower your credit score even further. Probably works similarly in law enforcement: the more you're targeted the more suspicious you become.

You're right, but are we there yet? I know China uses this shit for credit scoring, but I haven't heard analytics impact lawful behavior significantly in the west. For a decade now there's been rumors of some job postings looking at Facebook but it seems rare, and easy to circumvent (they don't do a detailed check, just look to see if you have a profile at all and if you posted anything controversial lately).
Not trying to argue that it's not bad, just that it's not that bad. Normies buying fitbits and alexas sucks, but you can't stop it. But at least for now you can avoid buying one yourself. Though in a few years it may become increasingly impractical, which is why we should use our comparative freedom now to prepare for that.

Maybe you should install TempleOS, on air-gapped machine that has wireless card removed. Or you can run something else on ARM SBC. Or even make your own computer from discrete components and old CPUs or microcontrollers, and write custom OS. Or just use old hardware from 80's or early 90's. I started with those and no network except sneakernet (floppy disks). Do you think there's a point to having a mchine you can explore, program, make art, play games, do word-processing and spreadsheets, etc? Even just a few years ago I had no permanent Internet because I had to make trips to the library to use their wifi. I only did that to check my mail and do banking-type stuff. A separate machine dedicated to that can work...

Oh fuck, I noticed a couple days ago that there was some fuckery in my registry involving Nvidia Shadowplay.

I don't even use that shit fam, thoroughly spooked

I send all my Amazon Smile donations to EFF so my conscience is clean. :^)

I think in general you are right, and make some good points. The point though that several people itt are missing is this: Shouldn't a free people be able to communicate privately and/or anonymously even over the "public" corporate-owned networks, airwaves, or phone systems? We have the tech. We fucking created the tech.
Car analogy: Shouldn't we be able to drive to a whorehouse in Nevada, spend a few nights and then drive home w/o the .gov knowing about it? I think the answers to my questions are self-evident.
A more elusive answer fits this question:
Where is my fucking Mature, Solid, No-fucking-around Operating System? Because holy fuck it's not Linux anymore.

Since "Big 4" (Intel/AMD/Apple/Nvidia) personal computers soaked up too many normals and porkies, it is inevitably becoming dumbed down into the new teevee.

There's an uneasy tension that is being held for now, but soon enough, the Big 4 boxes will become so locked down that they will not appease hobbyists and engineers.

When the Big 4 finally "cross the rubicon" and make it undeniably clear they want to manufacture idiot boxes, not computers, then they hobbyists and engineers will jump ship to a new open platform like RISC V or J2 (FOSS SH4).

With the hackers freed from normal taint and split off again into their new Galapagos, rapid evolution will occur. Then there will be a new renaissance and all will be well.

Feels bad, man. I know tech is always changing, but I see the bug-riddled shitfest put out today and it's scary that we haven't gone anywhere with them.

fuck you OP why don't make your own 'secure OS' instead of complaining about it.

How is that relevant if the kernel isn't modular?

I agree there is a big problem with privacy, but I think there's nothing a person can really do about it except not using privacy-infringing services, hard- and software, and trying to make others avoid those things as well.

Also, I think you don't really have your priorities straight:
How is this a privacy issue? And if it is, why not just avoid GNOME, or use a fork of Firefox that doesn't do this?

Remember the microsoft anti-trust case?

Wrong, cognitive dissonance occurs when one holds contradictory beliefs.
Unlike you Holla Forums and SJWs would believe, the world does not revolve around your feelings.

c youtube.com/watch?v=qXTmAkJKikI

when one's worldview is challenged, it is challenged by contradictary beliefs, thats the challange.

Just wait for endless bloat to make vishera worthless.

If you're selling a "secure OS", that OS better be free software. If this is the case, it isn't difficult for that OS to continue without the original company that wrote the code.

I read the wiki pages on those microsoft trials. wtf I thought Apple was bad with their army of lawyers as their main business model but it seems they learned from the best.

It's a sad world we live in today.

Who says a secure os does not exist?
OP?

Because one has not found a secure platform does not mean a secure platform does not exist.