I concur and want to add a realization I had some time ago: Considering the state of dysthymia and feeling depressed as one end of a spectrum and a fulfilling, content "happy life" as the other, the sole determining metric is the degree of experiencing self-efficacy.
The experience of self-efficacy is witnessing your willing satisfy your desires and needs through your own working. And self-efficacy is a basic, most important human need, completely independent of grand ideological or intellectual nesting. You may experience it when putting on your pants, going for a run, or building a house; a successful hunt and finding shelter; you may or may not experience it through work. Doing something you deeply don't care about, lacking intrinsic motivation, luck and wealth alone do not grant you the experience of self-efficacy. It's not abstract power, but concrete evidence of you qualitatively changing your world for the better.
Seeking to increase this metric is not a basis for ethics, but guidance for finding lasting satisfaction in life, even under adversarial circumstances. Nihilism, or defeatism is learned helplessness, or depression made religion.
> This feels like the start of treasure hunt like game. Between username of rabinovich (as others have pointed out) and the prior submission by rabinovich of an archive.today like tool 3 months ago - https://ghostarchive.org/. When you click into the search query examples for ghostarchive such as this one https://ghostarchive.org/search?term=https://docs.google.com. Many of the documents are very weird indeed.
This is what someone trying to start a treasure hunt like game would say....
Not excusing this malicious behavior, but I have to say, the mentioned blog post is a major dick move, too. Got quite the impression of a passive aggressive undertone, and there is clearly bittersweet irony in collecting and "archiving" an archiver's personal information from long ago traces. Maybe it's all some feud between two dicks, some backstory untold. Maybe the blog author wanted some information gone from archive.today, but was denied.
Blog post author here. Nope, I was just curious, since it's quite remarkable how huge archive.today is, how widely it's used, and how little we know about it. I do acknowledge the irony of an archiver being upset by an archive of their own work though :)
All that said, the post does not actually dox anyone (as far as I can tell, every name mentioned is an alias or red herring), and the "investigation" was basically punching things into my favorite search engine and seeing what came up. If a nation state level threat actor or even one of the copyright cabals wanted to find the maintainer, they have much better ways of going about it.
Assuming you are who you say you are, thanks for the feedback.
> All that said, the post does not actually dox anyone (as far as I can tell, every name mentioned is an alias or red herring)
Well, you clearly do have struck a nerve. And the article at least comes off as the attempt to dox someone. Curiosity is one thing, publishing these findings (where the original sources may fade in time) is another. It's quite evident the person behind archive.today does not want the attention. Just saying, your post doesn't exactly say respect privacy. Would you not have published, if you were actually confident to have found the guy? I got the impression, you would have published regardless.
> the "investigation" was basically punching things into my favorite search engine and seeing what came up.
I think that's what doxxing is, for the most part. You did the work, so everyone else doesn't have to. Nation state threat actors and "the copyright cabal" also got other stuff to do, technical feasibility isn't really a valid argument. Nation state actors could also hack, extort, or kill someone. Ethically, that's of no consequence regarding your own actions against someone.
Not saying you are the worst person ever, but I can totally see why you attracted someone's anger.
Perhaps, and yet I've referenced this article numerous times over the years. The most important property of an archive is that it saves an authentic copy of the source material—that is to say, the archive must be trusted. If archive.today is indeed a legitimate archival source first and foremost as it purports to be, the user has a reasonable interest in investigating the people behind it so that they can come to an informed conclusion about if they can trust the archive or not.
There are different scenarios and different needs. Trust-wise, the enemy of your enemy may be your friend. Dodging legal liability can be an asset too, if you are dealing with evidence against the government, or powerful people within your jurisdiction. Wikileaks fills a similar role. And archive.org certainly isn't trustworthy with respect to US political influence. They are trying to rewrite history, they will purge the archives, too.
For the average case, you shouldn't fully trust any one service IMO.
Targeting containerized environments, VoidLink seems most sensible when accompanying universal exploits like the xz backdoor. May be indicative of continuing efforts and confidence to infiltrate the base Linux ecosystem. I imagine, this framework isn't primarily used for targeted attacks and espionage, but rather as rapid staging ground for "cyber warfare" operations.
I feel like, pioneers of the past would be rather disappointed with us.
I mean, primarily we're not using this ridiculous power to solve actual problems, but to enslave one another in addiction, mindless consumption and manufactured consent to a lesser life.
Almost 100 years later, now with computer enabled misinformation and agitation campaigns by tech oligarchs, a new fascism is on the rise and Alan Turing would be called an abomination, again.
My prediction: AI is the deathblow to IPv6 adoption for the wider web, since blocklists only really work with IPv4. Increasing VPN usage making user tracking and heuristics difficult, AI scrapers stealing appropriated human content and AI spam poisoning its exploitation, not to mention tech monopolization and centralization, the limitations of IPv4 are suddenly becoming an asset and incentives for IPv6 support are zero.
On the plus side, we probably got all of IPv6 to build an alternative, non-commercial, better web or whatever network, if we act quickly before routing support is vanishing. IPv6-only housing is cheap, things don’t need to work out. There could be the IPv4-enforced corpo world within walls, and IPv6-enabled wild wide wonderlands.
The point isn't the technical inability to block particular IPv6 addresses efficiently, but anticipating abuse potential by IP. You can change IPv6 addresses freely compared to IPv4. With IPv4 it's easy to determine, if you are dealing with a residential IP or VPN. No heuristics or analysis needed. IPv4 addresses are blocked preemptively, that's not really a thing for IPv6. Eg. VPN providers wouldn't have static endpoint addresses with IPv6. So you may be able to limit spontaneous abuse such as DDoS attacks, but it's a lot harder to filter technically legitimate traffic, which is merely unwanted for your data aggregation.
No, but subnets can't be as easily associated with unwanted traffic. If IPv6 gets blocked you just get another IP. A VPN or hosting provider can't simply rent, or god forbid buy IPv4 addresses and subnets, arbitrarily. The IPs they use are rather static and easy to discover. Rather trivial to block all them, preemptively. Residential IPv4 VPNs are not legal offerings and their use is limited.
VPNs can fight traffic analysis, they can't fight preemptive IPv4 blocking.
See, it doesn't matter if it's somehow possible to control IPv6 traffic, factually, it is sooo much easier to control and observe IPv4. IPv6 adoption isn't going great at all and now there are new strong business incentives against it.
The direction we're moving right now isn't free intergalactic mesh networking, but holistic control and centralization by the tech oligarchy. IPv6 is good things... we can't have those.
> How do you think VPNs are getting past VOD providers’ VPN block lists?
In my experience, they most often don't. If you got more insights, please enlighten me. I presume VPNs which get past VPN block lists, are just not yet on the radar, or don't provide the privacy claimed, not actually fully in control of their infrastructure.
> What’s illegal about them?
Where do you think residential IPs are coming from? It's often botnets or otherwise compromised devices, or people tricked into sharing their connection. In any case, it's most certainly breaking the ISP's TOS. Because of the effort behind providing residential IPs, these VPN services are rather expensive. And certainly not trustworthy in regard to privacy. If offering residential IPs would be legal, every VPN service would provide them.
> And does it matter to uncooperative/aggressive bots?
No. They are used for mostly shady/criminal activity, where the limitations and legality don't matter. I doubt commercial LLM crawlers and data intense campaigns aren't bothered by legality, stability, connectivity or (upload) bandwidth limitations. Like, you wouldn't crawl the web on a mobile connection.
> There's glimmers of hope, like fedora which has its media writer, which is gonna hold your hand through the whole thing. Even that links out to github for a download, despite clicking on a seemingly specific 'windows/mac or linux' button. It's a little buried too, below iso downloads, when it really should be brought up more forward, and explain a little bit better on how it's gonna guide you thru the whole thing.
> It really should be an app that's gonna guide you thru it, or a dead simple 1-2-3 step tutorial that's gonna guide you thru writing an image (download writer, download iso, write an image - laying it out more than that is just overcomplicating it really, at least in the initial quick install guide), with a clear, visible link to it - and yet somehow even this is too high of a bar for many distros to clear.
Sorry, but this is just ridiculously nit-picky. How much more hand-holding do you need? Everything you want is literally there. Are you complaining that Fedora also addresses Linux users, at all?
Fact is, installing an operating system is a bit of an involved process. Realistically, people wouldn't even start with the docs, but some YouTube tutorial... But man... Fedora tries so hard! The site is ultra clean and on-point. Docs are friendly and very much 1-2-3 structured, they maintain a fucking media writer to do all the complicated shit like choosing a mirror and checking signatures, a simple installer where all complexity is hidden and you can just hit 'next'. What the hell do you want more?
MacOS and Windows don't even consider OS installation and only show you where you can find their OS preinstalled. Lol.
(I do have to agree with you on ubuntu.com tho. Haven't opened their site in a while and... jesus christ, what a mess!)
Fedora is the better example there. (i literally say that it's the glimmer of hope there lol.) It's an actual utility slash app that will do everything, and not just a file that's just thrown at you with no pointers.
(Though even fedora's download page could use a more clearer "How to install" link next to the iso links there. cause even clicking on Documentation there isn't gonna lead you to an installation tutorial or even let you easily find one there without digging. and even what's written where is either not that great or just doesn't exist lol. like, i would just straight up disagree on docs being friendly in regards to install process. though maybe that's not even necessary cause you're just gonna boot into the installer that'll take you through it. and again, it links out to github instead of actually downloading it right there, which only adds unnecessary confusion. how hard could it be to actually split links per platform? this is again the sort of thing where some people there might presume that 'users will just figure it out', that they will hunt out the correct file there on a page that looks nothing like previous one and is more geared towards devs, even though it could've been streamlined further. putting media writer higher up on the page is a nitpick, lack of a prominent installation guide is not, cause it's not linked to, and it also seemingly doesn't even exist. there's https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f36/install-guid... but not for a more recent version, i guess it just got lost in the shuffle.)
Some Linux distros aren't really doing as good as they could be at making things more accessible to a wider audience and less proficient users. And so the install base stays where it is. I don't think it's extremely nit picky to point out that just linking to an iso and expecting people to just figure it out without even clearly linking to a tutorial is not very accessible. And it really could be as simple as just actually having a link that says "How to install" or "Installation guide", and it's baffling when that stuff is buried. People could use trying to look at these things from a perspective of a new user who's not familiar with these things, and not just from someone who's in the know. Cause it's not actually intuitive or accessible having to dig around a website, trying to guess which of the links would take you there. (other downloads? documentation? support? none of these are an actual guide, and sometimes you won't even find a link to a guide there either.) There seems to be an assumption that just giving an iso file is enough, and that assumption is incorrect.
For example, Debian does kind of a bad job there cause it just throws an iso there and leaves you to poke at other links and guess, the installation guide there is buried under a bunch of clicks for some reason. Ubuntu is pretty good (though im still baffled why won't they feature their desktop version even more prominently on their front page. now that's an actual nitpick), and it actually outlines 'how to install' right there next to the download, and has an actual link to a more comprehensive tutorial too, that's laid out pretty nicely as well. (that's pretty much perfect really. though some other flavors of ubuntu might not be as great there.) Compare https://www.debian.org/releases/forky/amd64/ and https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-desktop (both also first results from google on 'distro name how to install'). Debian's idea of a guide is kind of diabolical in comparison. It looks intimidating, it's plainly a pain in the ass to navigate, it's not laid out well whether you a new user or even if you know what's up, it's easier to just give up on that page and look elsewhere for something better formatted. But hey, maybe Debian isn't even really meant to be all that accessible or to be for the kinds of users that ubuntu might cater to. Or rather, it just won't be, if it's gonna be like that.
Windows is quite easy to install. They have a media writer too and their installer is pretty straightforward. It'll even do an in place upgrade that will just work. They clearly have considered OS installation, and have a couple of different tools available for it. They also still sell usb sticks with an installer on it.
To be honest, I don't think Debian and Fedora are even targeting total beginners and that's fine with me. I love Fedora, but I wouldn't recommend it as a first ever Linux distro.
But yeah, I have to take back my rage somewhat, since I realized the Fedora docs are not once mentioning what actually to do with a "boot medium". Granted the installer is pretty self-explanatory, it's a bit odd the rebooting hint is omitted.
I disagree on the GitHub thing. It's an easy way to maintain and safely distribute the binaries. It's likely a thing of maintenance capacity and I won't fault anyone for that. All this shit is free... And lots of it is work in progress.
Also quite frankly, if someone can't be bothered to pick the right binary for their OS, the whole process of installing a new OS is maybe a bit too advanced to do unsupervised. Let's be real, this level of curiosity and engagement is required to install and run Linux. I don't think it should be pushed onto anyone not up for the challenge. In my experience, that doesn't end well.
Again, all this shit is free. Fedora, although backed by Redhat, does not profit at all by anyone installing Fedora. They don't nudge you towards commercial products, don't collect or sell your data, no subscriptions, no ads... nothing (in contrast with Ubuntu, which actually does these things). Any voice of entitlement just hurts me a little, seeing how much they try.
> I kept reading endorsements of Fedora's level of polish/stability on HN but was kinda nervous having used Debian distros my entire life and I’m really happy I finally took the plunge. Wish I tried it years ago!
This. I don't know why, but people forget about Fedora when considering distros. They rather fight Arch than try Fedora. So, did I. Maybe its Redhat. Wish I switched earlier, too. (Although I heard this level of polish wasn't always the case.)
I love Fedora so much. Everything just works, but that's not that special compared to Ubuntu. What is special is the fucking sanity throughout the whole system. Debian based distros always have some legacy shit going on. No bloat, no snap, nothing breaking convention and their upgrade model sits in the sweet spot between Ubuntu's 4 year LTS cycle and Arch's rolling release. Pacman can rot in hell, apt is okay, but oh boy, do I love dnf.
Tho, Fedora has some minor quirks, which still make it hard to recommend for total beginners without personal instructions/guidance IMO. Like the need for RPMFusion repos and the bad handling/documentation of that. Not a problem if you know at all what a package manager, PKI and terminal is, but too much otherwise.
I dual booted Fedora back when it was still called Fedora Core from version 6 until 11-ish. I had it installed on a laptop and had a lot of driver issues with it and eventually didn't bother with dual booting when I moved to a new laptop.
I'm now looking to get off Windows permanently before security updates stop for Win 10 as I have no intention of upgrading to Win 11 since Linux gaming is now a lot more viable and was the only remaining thing holding me back from switching earlier. I've been considering either Bazzite (a Fedora derivative with a focus on gaming) or Mint but after reading your comment I may give vanilla Fedora a try too.
So far I've tried out the Bazzite Live ISO but it wouldn't detect my wireless Xbox controller though that may be a quirk of the Live ISO. I'm going to try a full install on a flash drive next and see if that fixes things.
Give it a try! Although, I do all my gaming on a Playstation. In Fedora, the Steam and NVIDIA Fusion repos come preinstalled and can be enabled during installation or in Gnome's 'Software' or the package manager later, but I can't speak to that. The opensource AMD drivers are in the main repo no action needed. ROCm too, but that can be messy and is work-in-progress on AMD's side. Can't vouch for the controller, but people claim they work. Guess, that's the live image. I heard, games with anti-cheat engines in the kernel categorically don't work with Linux, but this may change at some point. In that case, or if you want "console mode", a specific gaming distro may be worth considering, otherwise I would stick to vanilla. Good luck! Hope I didn't promise too much ;)
So I cleared out one of my SSDs and installed Fedora yesterday.
I still had the issue of no gamepad detection. I had to install xone which took some trial and error. Firstly, I didn't have dkms installed and secondly, soon after installing Fedora the kernel was updated in the background and on reboot my display resolution was fixed to 1024x768 or something for some reason (that's gonna be another issue I'll have to look into). I rebooted and went back to the previous version and then dkms complained the kernel-headers were missing. However, the kernel-headers were installed for the latest kernel but not the older version I had rebooted to. I'm not used to Fedora or dnf (I run Proxmox+Debian in my homelab) so after a quick search to figure out how to install a specific version of a package (it's not as simple as <package>@<version> but rather <package>-<version>.fc$FEDORA_VERSION.$ARCHITECTURE) I got kernel-devel installed and was able to finally run the xone install script successfully and have my gamepad detected.
The most frustrating thing is that the xone install script doesn't fail despite errors from dkms so after the first install (where I almost gave up because I thought something was wrong with my setup) I had to run the uninstall script each time there was a problem and then run it again. The xone docs also mention running a secondary script which doesn't actually exist until the first script runs successfully so that added a lot of confusion.
My understanding is you only need xone for the special adapter right? Have you tried cable and plain bluetooth before? Also Steam seems to come bundled with their own drivers for it, so the controller may just work within games in Steam, regardless.
I feel a bit bad, but honestly gaming on Linux is not my thing. From a quick glance, messing with the kernel like that may cause problems with secure boot and maybe that's causing your issues. Maybe you need to sign your modules or disable secure boot.
And of course Bazzite seems to have addressed this out-of-the-box... :D
Quite frankly, if you want to do anything but gaming on that machine, at least for me, manually installing kernel modules from GitHub would be a deal breaker, since that seems rather unstable and prone to cause nasty problems down the line.
You are right, I got that mixed up. To be fair, I somehow also thought of yearly releases for Fedora, which isn't the case. It's every six months, so the relation remains identical, just off by a factor of 2 :D
The experience of self-efficacy is witnessing your willing satisfy your desires and needs through your own working. And self-efficacy is a basic, most important human need, completely independent of grand ideological or intellectual nesting. You may experience it when putting on your pants, going for a run, or building a house; a successful hunt and finding shelter; you may or may not experience it through work. Doing something you deeply don't care about, lacking intrinsic motivation, luck and wealth alone do not grant you the experience of self-efficacy. It's not abstract power, but concrete evidence of you qualitatively changing your world for the better.
Seeking to increase this metric is not a basis for ethics, but guidance for finding lasting satisfaction in life, even under adversarial circumstances. Nihilism, or defeatism is learned helplessness, or depression made religion.
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