- pmdr parentPerhaps people who unknowingly bought a rooted phone. I don't know how frequent this is, but it would be the only case it would matter.
- > Love the idea but it still isn’t easy enough for normies to host a blog or a website.
I have a hunch that normies are increasingly unaware of what a website is. Newer generations are growing up with apps, on their phone/tablet, some being basically "illiterate" when it comes to using a laptop/desktop beyond the top 10 webites corresponding to the apps on their phone.
- > The second you expose anything to the public internet it is going to be flooded by malicious bots looking for things to exploit.
I've been running VPS's since at least 2010 and this has always been the case for me, getting "scanned" all the time. Yet what I also noticed is that default installations of most modern software are not as insecure as most "cloud devs" nowadays have fearmongered us into believing. You can run your own MySQL or the likes. Or use SQLite. Use stable, secure software and use publickey auth. Look into scripts that block repeated and invalid requests. Hell, use Docker or jails to run most things.
Perhaps it's true that no one is unhackable, but that definitely doesn't mean you'll 100% get hacked within a day of running your own server.
- For me, earlier versions of macOS/OS X and Windows Vista/7 were the right mix of eye candy and usability. Apple's just showing off with this liquid glass thing. Yeah, it's cool that they attempted it, but it should've remained entirely opt-in. Apple being Apple, there's no opt-in -- once they like it, it's the default.
- > Turns out a lot has changed in the last decade and I think it’s likely that the article should be updated on what it’s like right now.
Yes, every one-pager running on Vercel/Netlify sits behind Cloudflare now because no one wants to risk an insane cloud bill in case of an attack. People have become hopelessly dependent on managed cloud services.
However, to be fair, there's less captcha solving nowadays, since they introduced their one-click challenge (but that's not always the case).
- > It is not CloudFlare that is ruining the Internet, but the spammers and attackers.
Spammers have been around since forever and it used to be the webmaster/sysadmin's responsibility to deal with spam in a way that would not hinder user experience. With Cloudflare all that responsibility is aggressively passed on to the user, cumulatively wasting _years_.
As for attackers, I wonder if Cloudflare publishes data showing how many of the billions of websites it "protects" have experienced a significant attack. They don't offer free protection to save the internet, but rather for control -- and no single company should have this much control.
- > I'm not running my own ISP and I'm not in a country known for originating DDoS attacks (Sweden), yet just using Firefox on Linux seems to be enough to be forced to click on traffic lights many times an hour.
I'm in the same situation. Linux, Firefox, Sweden, with a residential IP that has been mine for weeks/months. Who's massively DDoS'ing with residential Telia IPs?!
- IRC, email and XAMPP solved messaging a long time ago. Derivative products built on these protocols should have solved the chat problem for most orgs, but we got complacent and thus vulnerable to nickle and diming by the likes of Saleforce and Microsoft. Now rug pulls by faux-opensource projects that basically want free labor for their commercial project so they can sell it to bigger fish.
It's not people wanting to make more money that I despise. Fine, make your commercial version ten times better, I don't care. But the practice of crippling your opensource offering by removing features or adding limits is evil and shameful.
- This summer I bought and returned a FW 13, the newer AMD variety. Specs and performance were top notch, albeit a bit pricey I'd say (I brought my own 96GB of RAM and 2TB NVMe and the laptop was still 2200 EUR). Tinkered with it for a few days, tried Windows 11. The Mediatek Wifi card was horrible and it took a few hours of driver hunting to finally get it working in a stable fashion.
Reading the FW subreddit, a lot of said 'just drop in an Intel wifi card instead.' Well, yeah, that would surely have worked, but, again, I had already paid a lot for the machine itself. Battery life was subpar for it to be of much use as a laptop, but I didn't really mind. The screen was quite okay.
But what really put me off was how HOT and, consequently, LOUD it would get by merely watching YouTube at 1080p. Hot means really uncomfortable to touch and definitely not something you'd want sitting on your lap. People heard the fan from another room more than 10 meters away. That's when I decided that the little fan inside it would never be enough. With proper cooling, it would've been great as a workstation, though not as laptop meant to be carried.
tl;dr FW has a lot to work on noise, cooling and battery life. I don't suppose there will ever be a huge market willing to overlook these aspects just for the sake of repairability.