Bad Lenovo UEFI Firmware Causes Nine Models to Freeze on Resume from Suspend. Delays Linux 6.6.

Bad Lenovo UEFI Firmware Causes Nine Models to Freeze on Resume from Suspend. Delays Linux 6.6.

I don’t even want to write about Lenovo again in my life, since they are such a nasty company, but Roy asked me to say something.

Ever since 2016 when they admitted to me that there was a deal with Microsoft to lock Linux out of the Yoga 900 ISK2, but then proceeded to defame me after the media reported on a Reddit post I made on the subject that went viral, and then quietly fixed it after I took legal action against them, I’ve been telling people what a super shitty company they are.

Lenovo is a Chinese company, so it probably shouldn’t come as any shock that they banned everyone in the State that I live in from commenting on their forum until the scandal died down.

In China, when someone is talking, you typically figure out abhorrent ways to stop them from talking, which don’t work in a Free country. For Lenovo, really all they could do was try to silence people on their own support forum, but by then it was too late.

They also indiscriminately banned anyone who talked about “hacking” the board with an external flasher to unhide the “ACPI” option (to allow other operating systems to see the storage device), which was always present, but hidden as per their illegal contract with Microsoft, which they quickly got scrapped after the State of Illinois started investigating them.

The late 2020 Tiger Lake-based ThinkBook 15 I have is a little better.

Lenovo’s advice was to disable “Secure Boot”, as all it has ever done for Linux is cause problems due to extra complexity and bugs, as it is a Microsoft requirement to license Windows to OEMs, which is the default state of the laptop. “Secure Boot” actually does nothing to secure the computer from most any actual security threat that anyone really faces.

In at least one case, on my Yoga 900 ISK2, Ubuntu updated the “Secure Boot” dbx due to “Boothole”, and the revocation update (dbx) caused Fedora to fail to boot with a “Security policy violation.”

To unjam it I had to reset “Secure Boot” to the factory settings and that apparently wiped the dbx update. At that point I turned “Secure Boot” off and have never turned it on after removing Windows from a PC since then.

Lenovo’s other advice for this laptop, even though the “fake RAID” support was added to Linux after the 2016 incident by Intel (after they refused to document it for over a year!), is to turn that off and set the disk controller to “AHCI”.

Matthew Garrett claimed that this had something to do with power management, but he was either wrong or lying, because when I run powertop as a system service (to set all power management tunables to on), I always get better battery life than Windows does.

He’s very obtuse, and it’s probably because his job at various points in time involved implementing Microsoft nonsense like “Secure Boot” in Linux.

They need to get rid of the “Free Software Award” because they have such a bad habit of giving it to the wrong people.

(It’s like watching Donald Trump putting the Presidential Medal of Freedom on people at this point.)

Other than a bunch of “FIRMWARE BUG” crap on my 2020 Lenovo laptop that prints to the screen (which Windows and IBM Fedora hides, but Debian doesn’t), the laptop works fine with Linux.

But Lenovo released, apparently, more than nine models of AMD-based laptops with UEFI bugs that prevent the user from resuming from suspend due to fatal ACPI errors, which includes the AMD option for the laptop model I’m writing this on.

Although, mine’s an Intel, so in your face to all those “AMD is better” people. 🙂

The Linux kernel’s 6.6 release was delayed while workarounds that added 78 more lines of firmware bug workarounds was added.

Linus Torvalds was obviously furious, but criminals and idiots put him in therapy for yelling at them with incompetent code in the past, and he put Linux under the control of a now Microsoft-controlled “Linux Foundation” and so to keep his job, he can’t say much anymore.

According to Roy Schestowitz, the culprit was something that a Chinese man exhaling some sort of smoke (to look macho I guess?) on his Microsoft GitHub page did in the ACPI code in the Linux kernel.

Apparently, his name is Huacai Chen and he works at Loongson.

Linus Torvalds very obviously wanted to scream at him (backscroll and read down) for moving ACPI code around to fix something and then breaking other things, then hiding that they were broken until users started writing in saying they upgraded their kernel, some stuff happened, and kersplat.

I don’t even plan to stay on the PC after this laptop unless I decide to buy a model with open source firmware from System76 instead of this Lenovo garbage which is barely even code.

UEFI is garbage, Microsoft is garbage, Lenovo is fucking garbaaaage. The entire PC situation is cat shit wrapped in dog shit. And the people working on things like “Secure Boot in Linux” just make it so much worse from there.

This is the worst time to own a x86 PC, EVER.

Lenovo has never supported updating your UEFI firmware on most of their products using anything available to Linux users, even LVFS, which is a backdoor, and I wouldn’t trust them not to brick my computer or make it worse if they did.

I uninstalled LVFS because it started spitting an error message into Debian. It’s in charge of updating the dbx, but fuck dbx, fuck “Secure Boot” (which makes it harder to plug actual security holes), fuck Microsoft, and fuck the people Microsoft gets to make this my problem.

As a user, I just think these things are deplorable, but large corporations have turned Linux into some shitty colony where they can put DRM malware, universal backdoors, and absolutely broken shit with no repercussions. None. Not even that Linus Torvalds might yell at them.

So the last time the UEFI in my ThinkBook 15 was updated was August 2021, when I switched it over to Linux.

By that point, they had fixed most of the really nasty bugs they shipped the laptop with, which were even causing problems in Windows, but as firmware upgrades are dangerous and I have no warranty now, and they require Windows, I don’t plan to touch the firmware on this laptop ever again.

It’s just not worth it. One of the bigger problems with UEFI is that it’s just such a monster that you can keep fixing bugs forever, and that’s why “Secure Boot” will never work even if they wanted it to.

If you could get past the issues like “This is barely even code. It’s just a pile of garbage.”, the x86 PC might be worth plodding along with.

Now that they make the Raspberry Pi 5, and it’s several times faster than its predecessor, I wonder why we’re even talking about sticking around for more abuse.

When the UEFI firmware Lenovo ships is so fragile that a guy working for a hardware company making totally unrelated MIPS processors in China bumps something and an x86 Lenovo laptop that people bought THREE GODDAMN YEARS AGO starts malfunctioning if anyone installs that kernel, it’s time to look for greener fields.

UEFI is such a catastrophe, that it’s not even just a Freedom issue.

It’s such a massive fucking colossal failure on a code level that Google, which certainly doesn’t care about your Freedom, based the Chromebook firmware on a variation of Coreboot.

My next system will probably just be Linux running off some cheap flash memory on a ~$80 ARM computer. The fact that the Pi 5 finally has a SKU with 8 GB RAM really REALLY helps. With the help of ZStandard compressed ZRam, you can make KDE work with this.

No more of these $1,000 Lenovo PC laptops full of LULZ for firmware and Chinesium keyboards where buttons randomly break and need to be remapped to another key because they’re three years old, and playing “How do I brutally murder Windows 11 this time? Hmm…. DIE DIE DIE!!!!!”

X11 Security Updates for Debian 12.

I just got the X11 security updates for CVEs that were recently patched.

“Microsoft Larabel” over at “Moronix” (Phoronix), has been a foaming-at-the-mouth promoter of IBM Wayland ever since 2008 when the idea was announced.

Since Wayland still has at least 50 major problems when KDE 5.27.x LTS runs on it, I can’t switch from X11 right now, and that’s fine with me.

I’ve blogged before, huge blog posts, about how much I despise Wayland. It’s nothing but trouble even under GNOME, which has the most support for it.

(It causes X11 applications, including Windows programs in Wine, to have serious problems up to and including crashing, but usually just performing worse. X11 applications are still the overwhelming majority.)

Promoting something that’s both problematic and unfinished after 15 years and so badly specced out that common use cases are missing and everyone who points it out gets personal invective insults and FUD coming from a general IBM direction, is unacceptable.

Fortunately, the Xorg Server still works fine.

But, Microsoft Larabel and others went off the rail exaggerating the relevance of some recent security flaws.

Alan Coopersmith of Oracle fixed these flaws quickly, and rather well (he patched the X Server to not take corrupt input like that and do something with it anymore, and also the component that was sending the corrupt input so that it wouldn’t do that), and Debian pushed out the updated components today. I installed them immediately and rebooted my laptop.

There’s no way to secure any software that does anything non-trivial. There’s just not. Even this Rust nonsense has had a lot of emergency updates that have broken things.

If you like rewriting your software constantly because they didn’t standardize on anything, make promises, and make sure it worked before the specification was frozen, then Rust is for you. Unfortunately, this is “modern”.

X11 goes back nearly 40 years and is therefore “not modern”.

That’s a problem to these people. Actually supporting something (including the mistakes) and just fixing what’s actually impossible to live with, is “bad”.

That’s their attitude towards everything from programming languages like Rust and Python (which are horrible….people are STILL trying to move from Python 2 even though it’s been unsupported for years….it just adds negative work when they break things), to glibc (Hello DT_GNU_HASH! Let’s just drop DT_HASH with no warning even though they could live together for a while with a notice to developers!), to Wayland.

Why support something when you can just break it all the time and force everyone into this “It’s IBM’s world and you just live in it.” concept?

Rational person that I am, I hail from a time when people were just crazy and wanted their computer to work, so I installed the security updates and now I’m running the improved version of the software that can’t be attacked with those bugs anymore.

They act like Xorg only needs security updates, like all software does, because it’s old.

I wonder what the position on Web browsers, like Chrome and Firefox, where every update is an emergency and every emergency update, monthly, rolls at least 20 CVEs.

By far, the most dangerous application on your computer, is the Web browser you’re reading this in right now. Nobody wants to make that better. Everyone is making that big shitpile higher. Yet, security posers, including Matthew Garrett say that the Web browser is by far the safest way to run “untrusted code”. It’s actually not.

The safest way to run untrusted code is to not run untrusted code. For the most part, I don’t even run JavaScript if there’s any possible way to avoid doing it. Much less WebMs and WebGL, and all of this other garbage they’re dumping on us that’s full of bugs and can never, ever, be made secure.

Unfortunately, the enemies of Free Software throw around the word “trust” and use it wrongly, use it in bogus ways, corrupt the very meaning of the word, intentionally, to promote Microsoft locking down your computer to impose DRM and trap you on Windows.

Trusted code is an application I can verify the authenticity of, from my Linux distribution’s repo or another verified source, and we’ve had the ability to run this code on Linux distributions for decades now. Windows, which “Secure Boot” is designed to trap people on, doesn’t even do this. Get a file from some random site that’s loaded with spyware, and play the “anti-virus guessing game”.

Being trapped on an OS with no concept of security, that was basically designed like this and can’t be fixed without making the OS so terrible that nobody would want to use it (Windows “S Mode”), is not a solution.

Maybe if Web browsers from Google and Mozilla were just a dumb window server from 1984 instead of Google and Mozilla shitting all over the Internet and turning it into Orwell’s 1984, things would get better on the Web browser front.

If your argument is that a lot of these bugs go back to 1988 or 1998, yeah they do.

If this is your argument, then you should try Windows sometime. Tavis Ormandy alone keeps identifying CVEs that go back into the early 90s Windows NT releases and are still in Windows 10 and 11.

There’s a lot of old rotting code in Windows like this, and Microsoft frequently doesn’t act on private reports, for over a year, and then scrambles after the security researchers publicly out them, and then complain about how unfair it is to put them on the spot like that. As if they had been blindsided and not given months or a year to fix it.

Again, tell me how X11 is somehow special. Find a bug, squash a bug, apply the update.

Same as any other software.

Good Software Doesn’t Change Very Much

Good software doesn’t change very much.

In as many ways as possible, I continue using older desktop programs, some in Wine even.

It greatly annoys me that when a problem has been solved, we have to bury the thing alive in layers of garbage until it can barely move anymore, like modern Web browsers, or Windows.

I was mentioning earlier in IRC that I continue using Winamp 2 in Wine, and it doesn’t stop working. I use an unreleased leaked build from 2003 called “2.95”.

AOL never did anything about the leak. It was them that leaked it by mistake and when they leaked it, it had the same license as any other version of Winamp, meaning that there was nothing they could do really.

20 years later, it still runs. MP3 hasn’t changed. Ogg Vorbis hasn’t changed. Not in any way that affects playing it back.

There’s now an Opus plug-in that’s compiled for Winamp 2 that would still even work on Windows 9x.

Other than it looking a little funky with the interface scaled to 2x and the minibrowser you close anyway not doing anything (in Wine at least, because IE isn’t there), it works like it was supposed to.

Best of all, there’s nobody changing the interface.

The program was designed such that everything’s a plug-in. People have created alternative MP3 decoders based on mpg123, and new versions of in_vorbis.dll as well.

So basically, why shouldn’t I still use it?

I keep hearing that Audacious exists and is Free Software and is maintained.

Well, of course it is, but I don’t honestly like that. The GUI changes, the GUI toolkit gets “upgraded” and toolkit people are notorious for making pointless GUI changes and adding bugs.

Winamp 2.95 does everything I need it to do and apparently enough people agree or else it wouldn’t continue having community updates through the plug-in system.

Yes, there are newer audio programs, Free Software and otherwise, but this was the first program that actually played MP3s and didn’t make a huge issue out of the GUI. I ended up using it in the 90s (before AOL even) and even with the old “Nitrane” MP3 decoder (which wasn’t accurate and failed the ISO conformance) because it was good enough to work even then.

Roy Schestowitz mentioned engineers as practical people. I’m not an engineer, but I am practical. There’s really nothing that’s been done on the front of Human Interfaces since the early 2000s that’s worth a warm pitcher of piss.

Firefox was a regression from Mozilla Suite at the time and I still use SeaMonkey because the Firefox HIG is an ungodly mess.

By attempting to be “simple” and “clean”, they end up actually throwing all the settings, icons, and preferences into a few “junk drawers” and they change the interface again every few years and it’s really just a form of negative work.

Modern HIGs are basically a march to dumb down the PC until it’s like cell phone apps.

Everyone waving a cell phone with one button on it in one hand and their dick in the other hand.

I’m considering jumping over to a non-GNOME desktop environment for this reason.

The inmates run the asylum, and IBM Red Hat has so much influence over it that it’s basically a wing of IBM at this point.

Every time I update GNOME it feels more like a broken iPhone.

I played around with Fedora Kinoite on my older laptop and Wayland seems to work in KDE now. I’m considering getting all of my files properly backed up and nuking Fedora, because IBM is a disease, as I’ve blogged about previously.

I could probably put Debian 12 KDE on my system, but I asked and they don’t have a SeaMonkey package.

Roy mentioned PCLinuxOS and they not only don’t have GNOME at all, but they also package the current SeaMonkey. (Big positive factor.)

Some posers and trolls needle me for using SeaMonkey, but here’s the truth about security. There’s not really much you can do about “security” that’s better than just installing your patches and limiting the Web garbage that can run active code and watching where you get your software. The corporations in the driver’s seat are making all of this harder to manage. Red Hat making people turn to untrustworthy software sources for lack of resources to maintain the Fedora project, Google and Mozilla making the Web 100 times more bloated every time they shit a browser update. It’s horrific.

Even the same people who push these bloated software updates out admit that once you use their product you’ve already lost, so they go looking for ways to “contain” all of the exploit code they know they’re adding with more “sandbox” layers.

Tor Browser is dangerous for being based on Firefox and having most of the same holes.

The latest Tor Browser, showing it’s configured to run WASM by default.

The monthly Mozilla patches show us all the lovely WASM CVEs that are discovered, but in a system so complex, it’ll never end. So enjoy the Tor browser and when the State Actors say “WAASM UPPPPPPPP!?” don’t say nobody warned you.

Anything with WASM support is a damn hazard. In addition to browsing with ublock-origin and NoScript on SeaMonkey, I turned WASM off. Active Code is a never ending security mess that will never get better. Don’t look for it to. Be happy with what you have.

“Hey Firefox, put all this garbage, active code, sandbox escapes for malware implants, and fingerprinting crap on all eight cores please! LOAD IT UP!”

I’m just a little black rain cloud
Hovering under the honey tree
I’m only a little black rain cloud
Pay no attention to little me

Oh, everyone knows that a rain cloud
Never eats honey, no, not a nip
I’m just floating around over the ground
Wonderin’ where I will drip

Oh, everyone knows that a rain cloud
Never eats honey, no, not a nip
I’m just floating around over the ground
Wonderin’ where I will drip

Winnie The Pooh – Little Black Rain Cloud

(Why on Earth would anyone feel safe browsing with Tor Browser in the default state? Obvious honeypot is obvious.)

I disable a ton of junk (backported from Firefox) in my browser and mostly read static documents and check my email and use IRC. SeaMonkey is great for me.

Recently Reddit made it difficult to use “New Reddit” with SeaMonkey. I tried various user agents from less capable Modern browsers like Safari, and even tried to provoke an Internet Exploder 11 fallback if they had one, but the new code is just fucked. Thankfully, there’s still Old Reddit and the various libreddit proxies if I want to look at something. I also use the Gemini NewsWaffle and Chilly Weather through a Gemini Web Proxy. That way I don’t get a mountain of JavaShit and cookies I don’t want, and paywalls, and IBM’s other monster, the Weather Channel.

If it gives SeaMonkey problems, the site is misbehaved and poorly designed and possibly malicious, and there’s usually another way to get at it.

The way I use SeaMonkey, it’s much more pleasant, and safer, than Firefox.

Debian probably dropped SeaMonkey first. The way I recall Ubuntu having SeaMonkey was one of Canonical’s usual “copy Debian’s repo at some point and THEN never patch anything for security”. They did it to Epiphany and WebkitGTK as well!

Michael Catanzaro blogged about the CVEs they allowed to pile up.

He shamed them into straightening up on those two packages, but here’s the situation when he blogged about it in 2016.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu releases WebKitGTK+ updates somewhat inconsistently. For instance, Ubuntu 14.04 came with WebKitGTK+ 2.4.0. 2.4.8 is available via updates, but even though 2.4.9 was released upstream over eight months ago, it has not yet been released as an update for Ubuntu 14.04.

By comparison, Ubuntu 15.10 (the latest release) shipped with WebKitGTK+ 2.8.5, which has never been updated; it’s affected by about 40 vulnerabilities fixed in the latest upstream release. Ubuntu organizes its software into various repositories, and provides security support only to software in the main repository. This version of WebKitGTK+ is in Ubuntu’s “universe” repository, not in main, so it is excluded from security support. Ubuntu users might be surprised to learn that a large portion of Ubuntu software is in universe and therefore excluded from security support; this is in contrast to almost all other distributions, which typically provide security updates for all the software they ship.

I’m calling out Ubuntu here not because it is specially-negligent, but simply because it is our biggest distributor. It’s not doing any worse than most of our other distributors.

-Michael Catanzaro

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Canonical also broke WebkitGTK so that some images wouldn’t display and YouTube videos were broken.

Some of the largest and most corporate Linux distributions are also the most sloppy and terrible.

Brimming with security holes and a lot of hacks and bad patches.

There’s nothing about Ubuntu that screams professionalism. It barely works at all, when it does, here be dragons. There’s all sorts of horrors I could go into, including what it took for me to fork a Linux kernel and make it work with all the crackpot asshattery going on that passes for engineering at Canonical.

I’m not even a software engineer and when I went digging it soon became obvious to me that I probably shouldn’t be trusting anything terribly important to a computer running Ubuntu. I’ve heard (although I never used Ubuntu during the ZFS file system debacle), that they even managed to add ways to lose data to ZFS. Which isn’t terribly surprising considering it’s a crackpot driver under a non-GPL compatible license, that’s not part of the kernel, and Ubuntu has sort of kludged together something that maybe boots if you don’t piss it off terribly by mistake. I didn’t even have to use ZFS to get this impression. When the bugs started hitting Launchpad it was a “get the popcorn out” moment.

Who needs cable?

Anyway, Ubuntu’s out. It’s garbage, it’s not secure, it’s got crackpot patches and copyright-violating modules. And they’re a Microsoft Azure partner, of course.

I may spin up several candidates to replace Fedora in Fedora on GNOME Boxes and play around with them and press all the buttons and see how easy they are to break.

When I used to occasionally distro hop on older computers in the 2000s, I ended up with shoddy craftsmanship like YaST on OpenSUSE circa 2007-2008 which would break the whole damn system if you added a couple extra software repos, and Sabayon Linux where you would click a button and have to wait for it to install a package for like an hour.

Even Ubuntu and Fedora aren’t shit shows in those ways (but they almost try to invent new ways to be a shit show of their own).

When you have a spare computer it’s easier to laugh when you press a button and chant “BROKEN SYSTEM CHA CHA CHA! BROKEN SYSTEM CHA CHA CHA!”

The Free Software community has been nearly obliterated by sabotage and subterfuge.

Microsoft on a bullhorn (with their moles in tow) shouting “Don’t run, we are your friends!” (“And we have a CoC!”)

It’s sort of like, “Why are you on Fedora?”

I ask that so I can answer. Because other major distributions have been infiltrated and ruined.

Like the damned Terminator in the bunker that got past the dogs and guards.

That’s why the #Fedora moderators on Libera Chat gets away with, basically, hate crimes and disorderly conduct, even though there’s a CoC.

They are a collection of toxic individuals that are “untouchable” because they’re in thick with the muckity mucks on the network.

Every time you re-settle somewhere, the bad guys roll over the border again and set up another vassal state of Microsoft.

I must stress that it’s not Free Software that’s the problem here. It’s a couple lousy corporations and Microsoft causing a lot of problems in distributions that used to be really popular. And I’m just some aging hipster that doesn’t currently know what the cool kids are using.

Although I have to say I was amused that “Mr. Hate Crime” & Friends in the Fedora room is still reading my blog intently, obsessed with what I might say about their rotting pile of crap (apparently without enough developers to package LibreOffice at this point) next.

I think I’ve vented enough of my frustrations about the toxic quacks that they’ll let into some of these communities lately.

Recommendations about competent distributions of GNU/Linux are welcome.

(As a quick aside, Matthew Garrett mentioned on his blog about taking the utterly pointless long way around when he found a Fedora laptop that was 5 YEARS out of date…..very secure…and he went poking around trying to skip 10 versions by opening things in hex editors when he could have done things like just tell RPM here’s a package, don’t verify it, and clobber this other one clobber clobber, and it’s the next RPM and the fedora-gpg-keys. It amused me. It’s like watching Mr. Bean trying to figure out how to perform dentistry on himself after whacking the dentist out cold, and filling three extra teeth as he rotated the x-ray around, just to be sure.)

IBM Red Hat Kills LibreOffice In Fedora and RHEL; Says “No longer has resources to maintain them.”

IBM Red Hat Kills LibreOffice In Fedora and RHEL; Says “No longer has resources to maintain them.”

Well, I hope you didn’t have any documents to edit. I suppose we’re all supposed to use GULAG CRASH and GULAG DOCS now anyway or something, or maybe they’ll be nice enough to ship a desktop link to MICROSHIT OFFICE for the GULAGWEB.

(No, SeaMonkey or other Web Standards-compliant browser users need not apply, obviously.)

I’m also told you can get LibreOffice from “FAT Pack” (FlatPak), the gargantuan and horrible package manager that barfs out “distro-agnostic” packages that are huge and don’t respect any of your system settings.

FAT Pack is also terrific in the fact that it has an alleged sandbox that lets applications access all sorts of things that are enough to damage your system with, but walls them off from parts of the system YOU need them to access during the usual and customary operation of the program.

I’ve been sitting here for years trying to ignore the increasingly awful IBM Red Hat situation, but now it is starting to affect Fedora. Distributions that have 3-4 people maintaining them have native packages for LibreOffice, and now it is the IBM Red Hat position that they need those “developer hours” (how many hours do they spend sending updates to a build bot?) fixing Wayland, which has routinely broken the ABI for little or no reason, as the developers themselves now openly admit to on the mailing lists.

They’re pressuring people to add FlatHub and then when they do it’s like all sorts of horrible things you didn’t want to see in your software center, like Microsoft Edge, the backdoored password stealer.

Flathub is also a security hazard itself, like Snaps are. Snaps already had some malware incidents like bitcoin miners. They don’t care if the software is proprietary. Just dump it in there, and when they can’t review it some poor user always ends up cleaning up the mess.

“My software is proprietary and is thus unreviewable. I have also decided that the sandbox level will be no sandbox at all. Thanks.” Do you want ants? This is how you get ants.

FlatHub only has one advantage over Snap in this department (for now).

You can filter out things that are under a Proprietary license in GNOME Software so you don’t have to see them and will not accidentally install the perfect cover for a Trojan Horse.

Flatpak breaks pretty much the strongest part of Linux security. That the distribution you’re running has reviewed and built everything.

If IBM Red Hat is really going to strong arm people that don’t want to use it, I must return again to Ron Swanson from Parks & Recreation to show what I’m likely going to have to do with Fedora.

When Mr. Swanson receives an “Excellence in Government Award” (as a Libertarian, this horrifies him and he doesn’t want anyone to ever find out), he saws it into pieces, burns it, and buries it in Illinois (a State so corrupt that nobody would ever think to look for the ashes here).

If you think this is extreme, consider that a core and major application has just been deemed “unimportant” by IBM Red Hat, no doubt to give Microsoft a boost with their Office programs (some of which are online, where that’s the DRM, and if you don’t pay them, they stop working, and they can make changes and you can’t hold out on the previous version).

I don’t think I want to stick around for what happens next.

I’m not keen to see where this goes. I hired an attorney who used Outlook and Office 365 and it was just very aggravating and unprofessional. And of course nobody supports large email attachments so I had to put it on my Google Drive and remove DAC so that she could access documents which included very sensitive information.

I don’t know who opens a Web browser to edit documents. Or even to do E-Mail. It’s just flat out retarded.

Like literally the best thing about a Chromebook is you can install Debian and put real programs for editing documents and managing your email in there. I may be the only person on Earth who has one and never opens Chrome. It’s a shame to see Fedora going in the other direction.

The article literally says that not having an office program will improve the desktop experience. That’s funny. Basically every Linux article I’ve read pitching it to people is it has a full Microsoft-compatible office program that doesn’t have some garbage activation server. You can’t blame the person who wrote it because they’re just quoting what some idiot GNOME (an IBM thrall) developer and also a Red Hat employee told them to say.

IBM Red Hat is just being cheap and pulling out from investment in Free Software.

In some cases, they join infamous shit-spreaders (such as the person trolling our TechRights IRC server) to cover themselves, like laying out false allegations against Richard M. Stallman, to justify it as a “moral imperative” to defund the Free Software Foundation.

(Jeff Epstein was actually closely affiliated with Bill Gates, who rode the LOLITA Express and visited Epstein in prison. Surely, IBM Red Hat will cancel their business deals with Microsoft? No?)

One does have to wonder if this time there was no way to possibly accuse anyone working on LibreOffice of rape or “transphobia” so they just said it would be better if the user had a computer that couldn’t do anything, and it improved the desktop experience.

Yeah, I need to stop being lazy and back up my files properly and move this over to someone that can do a little better than “We’re stripping it down to a Web browser to improve the experience.”

“Any community member is of course free to take over maintenance, both for the RPMS in Fedora and the Fedora LibreOffice Flatpak, but be aware that this is a sizable block of packages and dependencies and a significant amount of work to keep up with.”

Yeah, what, all three members of the Fedora “community” that haven’t been Kofler‘d?

Obviously, I’ve been “quieted” on Fedora IRC because I know full well how bad Flatpak sucks.

The only thing I’ve seen Flatpak’s alleged sandbox actually do is break themes and make it so my video downloader in Firefox does not work. So obviously Flatpak Firefox lasted oh about three seconds.

Thank God LibreWolf finally did an RPM.

It also tends to wall things off from the graphics card so that you get slow terrible screen drawing.

It turns out that walling desktop applications off from the system is stupid and pointless and breaks them in ways where the user doesn’t even want the application anymore.

The more usable Flatpak applications pretty much just opt out of the sandbox entirely because the person packaging them knows that this is the only way they actually run at all. Then you’re back to “RPM” where the thing can access pretty much whatever it wants (within the confines of what the system itself manages to enforce).

Only it’s a “really terrible RPM with full access, packaged with a lot of bloated rotting platforms that don’t get CVE fixes”. “Where’s the robot to pat you on the back, or the engineer? Or the children, perhaps? Now you see how all your so called power counts for absolutely nothing. How your entire empire of destruction comes crashing down over one….little…cherry.”

-Me on Fedora-Social

That’s when Khaytsus (Real name, Walter Francis) +q’d me and “won the argument” like Bill O’Reilly (O’RLY) did on Fox News.

Shut up! Shut up! Kill his mic!

-Bill O’RLY

Honestly, Khaytsus could have left it at this, but then had to also imply I am crazy.

That’s one way the Soviets dealt with dissent. Matthew J. Garrett‘s sockpuppets have accused me of being a “schizophrenic”. It’s in the #techrights logs.

The Soviets had this thing they’d do to discredit people. They had a diagnosis called “Sluggish Schizophrenia”, and the whole thing was made up. And when someone stepped out of line, they were accused of being one, and then the “mental health” laws took them away and you never saw that person again. They were off working on a highway and when they died they’d be buried underneath it.

The diagnosis has long been discredited because of its scientific inadequacy and its use as a means of confining dissenters.^[6] It has never been used or recognized outside of the Soviet Union,^[7] or by international organizations such as the World Health Organization.^[8] It is considered a prime example of the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union.^[9]

-Wikipedia

Unfortunately, abuse of psychiatry and accusations of “mental illness” were never limited to the despotic hellholes that you’d expect them to be in.

Evil gaslighting fucks use this all the time.

Wow man, lay off the meth. Seek help.. Serious real medical help. Seriously. You need help. Something has slid off your cracker.

-Khaytsus, (Real name, Walter Francis), in response to me not liking Flatpak and saying it the way I quoted myself.

I wonder when malicious shit-spreaders became like, most of the mods in the Fedora “Community”.

And then I was silenced, like many people that have criticized a Red Hat decision in public.

“They’re crazy. You hear me? You’re all fucking crazy! Hey, is it me or is it getting awfully quiet lately in the Fedora community?” -Fedora chatroom mods.

One of them, just last night, remarked on how quiet the rooms get. You see what people have to deal with for critiquing a technical decision politely. You tell me who’s crazy.….. Nuts. Insane. Bonzo. No longer in control of one’s faculties. Three fries short of a happy meal. WACKO!

Of course probably nobody will step up to maintain LibreOffice because IBM has ran off and banned the community that would have done that. They didn’t “see the value” in having a community and it’s gone now.

Meme: “DR. GULAG and elusive_woman”

“I’m sitting here in a red and white checked gingham dress……and army boots….and you’re saying nothing’s amiss?”

Matthew Garrett and “Elusive_Woman” using the same epithet.

Matthew Garrett’s Employer, Aurora Innovation, Continues to Burn Down Through Debt and Lack of Marketable Products.

Matthew Garrett’s Employer, Aurora Innovation (blogged about previously), Continues to Burn Down Through Debt and Lack of Marketable Products.

Aurora is facing several new difficulties including proposed laws against autonomous semi-trucks even in their home state of California.

(These trucks would be a major safety hazard and a plot to make hundreds of thousands of Americans unemployed as human drivers are better at avoiding serious accidents.)

“These vehicles that they’re pushing are not legally able to be driven on our roads because they have not been proven to be safe. So it’s convenient to point at humans when (AV trucks) don’t have a track record yet,” Di Bene said.

Legislators want more time to study the technology’s safety. Assembly member Laura Friedman (D-Glendale), the head of the Assembly’s transportation committee, said the state Department of Motor Vehicles has so badly mishandled the driverless car industry – citing reports of robotaxis causing car jams, blocking emergency vehicles and fleeing from police – that she doesn’t want to make the same mistakes with big rigs this time around.

“The DMV has not done a great job at regulating this space,” Friedman said.

The Department of Motor Vehicles is tasked with issuing permits to all types of AVs, assuming the vehicles adhere to regulations. But legislators want to halt the DMV’s ability to grant those permits to long-haul trucks because of how disappointed they’ve been with the DMV’s deployment of driverless cars in the state.

-The Almanac (Samantha Stevens / Mountain View Voice)

Another problem the company faces is that each year it does business, it loses more money than the previous year. 2022 was their worst loss report yet, according to Yahoo Finance, at least for a whole year.

It’s when you get into the latest quarters that things really start looking horrific. $2.37 million in revenue in the latest quarter vs. $293.82 million in NEGATIVE earnings. And the two quarters before that were as bad or worse.

However, they have been raising money by selling off shares to offload their losses into things like pension and retirement plans that scoop up risky and toxic investments and make it someone else’s problem.

This would not be their ideal funding source except that at the interest rates the United States Federal Reserve is pushing up, it’s hard to get cheap money. It’s dried up, so now they resort to “finding a bigger fool”, or more likely, corrupt officials managing retirement funds.

For example, CalPERS is notoriously corrupt and sank a bunch of money into Tesla without asking anyone who is going to have to retire from the California government what THEY thought about it.

Reading the company financial statements, it’s hilarious how they simply push their “big product” further back and burn the furniture to stay warm while they speak of “adding length to our runway”.

They need that “longer runway” so they can pay Matthew Garrett to harass and annoy TechRights in various ways.

It’s hard for me to even imagine how much actual work they’re getting out of him seeing as how he’s become so devoted to trolling our chat rooms.

One would think that in an era of Pointy Haired Bosses installing keylogging spyware on employee computers to make sure they work, they would have noticed.

Then again, they count things like replying to dumb emails and generating PowerPoints “productive” and a “skill”. It’s not having a product that matters, it’s having a PowerPoint with all sorts of nice bars and graphs and pie charts.

Also, moving the mouse a lot is productive too. Maybe Matt GULAG is just moving his mouse and typing so it will count harassing us as productivity? It couldn’t possibly be that. Right?

I feel like spyware from your boss that measures mouse movement and keystrokes could be abused much like the system for counting “e-royalties” at Epinions dot com during the dotcom bubble.

You could make a tidy sum by writing crap articles and then making a browser plug-in that repeatedly cleared the cookies and hammered on the reload button.

There were so many things wrong at that place, but the articles blaming “reading circles” were way off the mark.

California is a hellhole where investors go to die.

Captive investors. People who thought they’d retire and their portfolio was full of crap.

Worker: “Where is my retirement money?”

Fund Manager and Government: “POCKET SAND!”

(Turns out you were fully vested in a homophobe from Ireland.)

WordPress in SeaMonkey, Firefox Troubles in Fedora, “GoogleWeb”, American Decline, and Matthew Garrett “Collaborator” and “Conference Pervert”

WordPress makes useless updates that just break the site in SeaMonkey for no reason.

This has prevented me from logging in with SeaMonkey because instead of the log in page, you’ll just see the WordPress logo.

Thankfully, PaleFills 1.27 is out now and it rolls some fixes for WordPress.com needlessly breaking things.

It’s ridiculous when I have to stop using in SeaMonkey because they make a pointless change that brings more GoogleShit in when standard Web functionality (which works in Chrome too!) could have been left alone.

Roy Schestowitz recently posted about Google’s new initiative to finish destroying the open Web.

It mentions that most of the growth in Web pages today are computer-generated spew designed to SEO-bomb Google and they really are pretty useless.

In the late 90s and early 2000s we had things like dmoz which was basically a human-curated index of things that real people wrote.

I was going to write an entire article about how Fedora bombed me with 10 updates to Firefox in a month where Mozilla only made three releases, and one of those releases was for Windows because malware that’s been spying on Windows Firefox users since 2016 finally crashed it, and then another update for Windows because Chinese “anti-virus” was crashing it.

So I had to get 10 whole RPMs downloaded and unpacked because Mozilla is bumping the version number uselessly and Fedora keeps shitting out one patch releases where the patch itself is quite broken and then they go back and patch it three more times.

So I finally yanked it out with dnf remove firefox and installed Firefox 115 ESR from the Mozilla tarball and set it up with their instructions for a systemwide install and then unpacked a firefox.desktop from a Fedora RPM that sits in my taskbar with extras like “New Private Window”.

Then I sat down and turned off and hid the DRM and spyware (like “Firefox Suggest”) all over again, and installed my add-ons. Hopefully, I get less update churn this way.

ESR is like the “slow ring” that people who don’t want to go crazy use that Mozilla doesn’t want to admit is an option. To even find it on their site requires real work because Mozilla only blares loudly that there’s a Windows and Mac, and then in itty bitty font there’s a link called “Other Systems and Languages”.

It’s like the slow ring build of Windows that Microsoft doesn’t just randomly chuck untested broken updates into your system with a manure spreader to see if they’re legit for the corporate users that pay them more.

(Microsoft apparently used to have like 10,000 paid testers to figure out what was wrong with Windows before it shipped and now they just use Joe Sixpack’s computer he got at Walmart and if they break it every month somehow, it’s his problem. Anyway, this is certainly one reason I use Linux.)

Modern software and the modern Web just do things you already did 20 years ago, only 1,000 times bigger and with more ads and spyware.

For the most part, I think Fedora 38 works quite well. It’s been stable to the point of boring for a while everywhere but Firefox. Firefox is a very big wart these days. It’s getting harder to set up than an entire operating system and half of that is turning off visual eyesores and spyware and adware.

Jamie “Linux is terrible because I tried audio 20 years ago.” Zawinski recently published yet another article that should be instructive for anyone thinking they’ll use a Mac as more than a gussied up Chromebook in which sshd randomly disconnects for reasons unknown. Maybe he can report it to Apple and they’ll help him. That was a joke, haha, fat chance.

Apple has Telemetry that bypasses your VPN to spy on you and phone home to Apple literally every time you click an icon. Ahhh, privacy by Apple, I’d recognize it anywhere.

At this point, the Mac is definitely just Windows 11 with less software.

The Google plan for “Web Environment Integrity” is Orwellian as hell, and proves that we need to focus on alternatives to the Web. They use the terms “integrity” and “security” to mean that the user has no meaningful control over the program and what it does.

I myself rarely use anything that can’t be loaded in SeaMonkey, and usually SeaMonkey with JavaScript off. I even read my news in it using text with a Gemini proxy and I read my email with SeaMonkey Mail. It’s had roughly the same interface since the late 90s. It’s got a better calendar now.

JavaScript is already too much of a security vulnerability and there’s too much on most Web sites.

SeaMonkey is inherently faster and more efficient than Firefox and Chrome, among the reasons being that it doesn’t use “multi-vector assault mode” to deal with Web crap, but it will try to load JavaScript if you don’t use NoScript and then it can turn into a disaster because you’ll see what Web “developers” are cramming onto your computer, stealing your CPU time, to run.

The upfront cost of dealing with multi-process is too high if all you want to use the browser for is to “read documents”. Not for binary-shit and “Virtual Machine”-type Web “apps”. I have applications on my computer, Free Software applications.

It would be a huge step backwards to rely on someone running a program on their server so that I can edit documents or sit down and “paint” something or do audio work. In the time it takes to communicate with the server, my computer can be done with the work already.

It doesn’t appear to slow down a modern browser because they just take all eight of your cores to run ads, NSA scripts to install UEFI malware implants, and fingerprinters. Om nom nom thank you hoooman….. *Burp!*

People think I’m some sort of aging hipster or something but I just don’t like my email program changing buttons around pointlessly like Thunderbird did again.

When I have things to do, I don’t want to stop and figure out how to use the email program again.

I learned an email program 25 years ago and why should I change because they suck? (“Michael Bolton? Like the singer!? For my money it just does not get any better than when he sings When a Man Loves a Woman!”)

*Matthew Garrett triggered*

I do most of my browsing in a VPN that uses a server in Sweden or the Netherlands. Sometimes I use Tor (without JavaScript and with ublock origin) on top of that.

Proton VPN mentioned an “observatory” project to demonstrate who was signing up due to government censorship of the local Internet access. In the US you mainly have to worry about surveillance.

The US does indeed have a “Deep State”. It’s called the federal bench, and primarily the Supreme Court.

What Donald Trump left behind is a Frankenstein’s Monster with bits and pieces of the Third Reich and the Taliban.

Even if we assumed that President Biden was a thoroughly good man that wanted us to live in a Free country (he’s not), Trump left behind these assholes on the courts as sort of a “Revolutionary Guard” to prevent any sort of personal liberty or Freedom, and to keep the place turning into as much of a hellhole as possible until the Republicans gain control of the elected government again.

The coup succeeded, as people who lose their reproductive freedom, for example, now find out at some great cost. They catch people whose crime was bodily autonomy and wanting to finish high school and throw them in jail in places like Nebraska, because they use Windows, Facebook, iPhones, and Google.

Thinking that you can have privacy and liberty without Free Software is a “fuck around and find out” situation now, in America.

Future historians will likely look back at images like this young girl being taken to jail and see the police enforcing laws targeting vulnerable women as something comparable to the beginning of guards at Auschwitz or Treblinka working for the Nazi regime and cashing the paychecks.

All the while, the “left coast” tech companies being an indispensable part of hunting them down like dogs using the paper trails they leave while they use proprietary operating systems, and apps such as Facebook and Google.

“Villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged.”

-Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation

People like Matthew Garrett helped to trap victims of the Police State in Microsoft Windows, where they are being persistently spied upon by a multitude of malicious Windows functions that cannot all be terminated.

Right now, there are actually some computers that are trapping the user on Windows with “secure boot” and other maliciousness, sometimes pretending to be bugs, and when you call them out then Mr. Garrett will defend the bad guys and attack you, defame you, like he has done to me multiple times when I have successfully pushed back on them (Lenovo, Samsung, Foxconn…Microsoft uses companies like this as a liability condom so they have this sort of plausible deniability), although for the time being many just make it damned hard to kill.

The situation is rapidly moving in the wrong direction, and Matthew Garrett actually tricked the Free Software Foundation into giving him an award for helping the enemies of Freedom and Free Society.

Matthew Garrett may not be the State hauling a scared young girl to prison for an abortion, but Matthew Garrett helped design the “digital concentration camp” (“Secure Boot”), which helps enforce Windows usage that the State uses to prove its case in court.

The State does not want one system to spy on you, it wants dozens so that you won’t slip them all. Matthew Garrett is a collaborator in this sense of the word.

Matthew Garrett is a rather awful person, you know. When he’s not busy as a henchman for the Republic(ans) of Gilead, he’s busy harassing the TechRights IRC channel.

He goes there digging for dirt and calling people “transphobe” or something even though he “definitely said some transphobic shit, like 20 years ago” as a grown adult.

His latest antics are to set up sockpuppet accounts and repeatedly post about being a “dope dealing n******” (direct quote…I think this behavior is appalling) or as his other sock, he keeps disrupting the room and saying things like he wants to do lines of cocaine off of Roy’s wife’s boobs. (And also, butt, apparently.)

He can’t say this stuff as Matthew Garrett, because he has to publicly say things like he was shocked about the “Big Boobies” scandal where his friends at Microsoft put boob references in their code and shoved it into Linux. So he uses a sock-puppet.

When the sock-puppet deviates from things like cocaine off of boobies, it speaks using the same sentence structures, typing style, arguments, calling everyone a transphobe, etc. that Matthew Garrett (mjg59_) does. So it’s not even like he’s trying to make a huge secret out of it being him.

We usually just refer to him as a Conference Pervert because he told Roy that if you don’t go to open source conferences for the sex with strangers then “Oh, man, you’re missing out!”.

I was recently at a convention in Indianapolis, and several hundred people showed up and had fun and respected boundaries, and then we had one Conference Pervert (not Garrett) that had to grope an underage girl by the boobs near the swimming pool.

When people like this show up, the hotel may throw the entire convention and everyone who showed up there to have fun and behave themselves, out. And everyone who behaved just loses the money they spent.

Not Garrett himself, but some other Microsoft trolls, accused Roy’s wife of being a “mail order bride”.

It’s what they have to go to when someone isn’t openly flaunting their corruption, like Garrett does. Garrett actually seems to enjoy flaunting disgusting and anti-social behaviors, especially about sex.

Shifting gears again, today my mother’s Facebook account got “hacked” (I guess someone guessed the password in their very Apple-like void of security.)

They started posting all sorts of smut and obscenity for her very conservative church friends to see.

Had she done what I told her to do, what I did, and deleted her account, she wouldn’t have had hijackers spamming her church friends with hardcore porn.

The media likes to use the term “user” strangely. You don’t use these things. They are being used against you.

Matthew Garrett Says San Francisco People “Get it.” With the City in Court Attacking Homeless Americans. Also Blasts US Constitution.

Matthew Garrett, Says San Francisco People “Get it.” With the City in Court Attacking Homeless Americans. Also Blasts US Constitution.

Matthew Garrett told me the other day on TechRights IRC that it’s unfortunate that American citizens can’t be arrested for talking about things he doesn’t agree with.

He also keeps saying that there shouldn’t be a right to own guns.

Well, in both cases we have the right to speech and the right to own guns.

Not only is it reflected in some form in every State constitution, including STATE OF ILL (Illinois. Not our best State.), but they are Amendments I and II of the United States Constitution.

As a United States Citizen by Naturalization (Immigration), Mr. Garrett raised his right hand and swore an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the United States Constitution from “all enemies, foreign and domestic”, and that he made these promises “without mental reservation or purpose of evasion”.

Clearly, he said the words or he wouldn’t be granted US citizenship, but now he turns around and openly attacks the very bedrock of our nation’s highest law? The Bill of Rights!

In Europe, where he’s from, there are varying levels of democracy. When I say varying levels, I mean there is an elected government in most places, but nothing that says definitively what that government can’t do.

Many of their countries have no codified Constitution, many of them still have their monarchy like King Charles waving around his $400 million (USD) stolen African diamond in his scepter while waving at football games and sharing potato recipes (worth every penny), and almost none of these “old and mature democracies” have a guarantee of Freedom of Speech, much less the Right to Bear Arms.

The Founders of the United States were better men than you’ll find floating around this place today, and they had just left an oppressive system in Europe that still, to this day, has national religions, and criminal punishments for Free Speech.

In the United Kingdom, where Roy Schestowitz is from, not only can you be arrested for not being polite (and people wonder why they’re polite….), but you’re not allowed to have guns.

The government did this for a reason. When a government is going broke and wants to repeal your safety net and take away your living standard at whatever rate it chooses…..right in front of them lately (Roy was telling me how some grocery items have doubled in price practically overnight….It’s a bigger disaster than the supermarkets in the US.), the last thing the politicians want is to have to look over their shoulders while they’re doing it.

Even in the US, States with more gun control than others are seeing a steeper erosion in their living standard for the bottom 20%.

The politicians don’t pass this to protect you.

They pass it and then they say they’re cutting pensions again or no more food stamps or come back to the unemployment office when your hours at Walmart are literally cut in half and THEN you might get $5 a week.

I talked to Roy last night and mentioned that STATE OF ILL makes their unemployment offices hard to find.

They’re always out in the middle of nowhere, where there’s no public transit, two counties over, and 20 left in the State for 13 million people.

They never put any signs out making it obvious you’ve come to the right building.

It’s like that scene in the movie Men in Black where they’re hiding in a thing that says it’s part of the turnpike authority or something.

They want to hide from the public not only to make sure nobody wanders in, but to make it hard to live if you lose your job because you can’t figure out how to get there or afford the costs of going.

It seems that’s the same thing they do in the UK. The government is obligated by law to provide a stipend, maybe, but they’ll make you work for it to wear you down.

The United States gets a bad rap for “gun violence”, but truth be told, Europe isn’t exactly all that safe. There are travel advisories about handing over your wallet in Paris (no guns) to avoid getting stabbed on the train from the airport after you JUST GOT THERE.

But Members of Congress here have been shot at in notable incidents in the past decade, Republicans and Democrats alike. Truth is that nobody in this country likes the government and what’s going on in Washington especially.

This is inevitable when you’re dealing with a national government that represents a lot of States that really don’t have much in common with each other.

In the UK, they can just repeal your benefits, they can repeal your social security, they can foist whatever they want, and you have eggs to throw at their King, maybe, if you’re lucky.

Moving on, Mr. Garrett once said in Twitter that people in San Francisco “Get it.”. He said he liked living in San Francisco because they “Get it.”.

They’re infamous for being cruel to the homeless.

In Indiana, where I’m from, there are homeless shelters. There are programs to find them work and get them back on their feet in as little time as possible. It’s almost unheard of to see someone living under newspapers and eating out of trash, and whacking off in public and talking to buildings due to untreated mental illness.

If you come to Illinois or California, where the Democrats have total control of the government, it’s wall to wall public masturbators living under newspapers and talking to buildings.

In fact, just the other day when I was taking out the trash, I ran into one of them at my dumpster. He was talking to the dumpster and whacking off in front of it. I called the police, but they never showed up.

Lucky for the homeless, who have been so badly treated by “liberal” states and the few American cities with self-avowed Communists on the Board, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle haven’t had much luck in court.

How do you get Communists on the Board and your rent is 2-6 times the national average?

Didn’t the actual Communists at least build buildings for people to live in instead of enacting zoning codes to make sure no affordable housing goes in and then issuing people tickets for parking in their own driveway?

We see how the people of San Francisco feel about the homeless, like the artsy fartsy guy with the artsy fartsy art gallery that turned a (presumably) artsy fartsy hose on one of them because he was sick of looking at her.

San Francisco. Where homeless people “get it”. The hose.

The Ninth Circuit Ruling is controlling in those states. It’s the largest appeals circuit in America. They made a ruling, the Thomas Ruling, that basically says “If the State isn’t doing enough to shelter the homeless, it can’t pretend that they willingly chose to sleep in a public place, and therefore cannot criminalize it.”

Who is challenging this ruling to the Republicans that Trump put on the Supreme Court? Not Indiana. Not Florida. Not Tennessee.

Why certainly it’s Texas, right? No.

It’s San Francisco. Where people “get it”. The hose.

I would be embarrassed and ashamed if I showed up in a country, asked them for the privilege of being a Citizen, and then one of my first official acts as such was to show my ass (figuratively) and mock their Constitution, which I had just sworn to uphold.

But it seems that some people have no appreciation of irony, good manners, or even the sense to keep it to themselves if they apparently made misrepresentations under oath.

Nothing says “Balls” like “I came to your country to ask for Citizenship and then now I’ll be an Internet Asshole that takes a shit on your founding ideals.”

The United States can’t do much about people who blast the Freedom of Speech because they have the right to Freedom of Speech here.

And yes, that is the same Freedom of Speech that allowed the Nazis to march in Skokie, but 40+ years later the Nazis are not well liked and don’t have a single member in the State or local governments in Illinois, even though they won their court case and were able to march in Skokie.

Letting them march is the lesser evil. It reminds people that they’re there and they need to be vigilant to make sure they don’t come to power.

Of course there are repercussions in the United States for being a Nazi, even though there is no law against it. If you openly admit it, you’re going to have a very hard time professionally. Nobody is going to elect you to anything.

In Germany, where there’s no strong freedom of speech, they outlawed Nazi symbols, and parties, and ideologies, outlawed it, and there are Nazis in their legislature that just don’t wear swastikas and call themselves that. So big difference. They’re in the legislature introducing bills and voting on things, where they can actually do a lot of harm, as long as they don’t use symbols.

This is my opinion of Matt, but I can’t figure out what else to call it when you say you support the Constitution and then go down the line saying that foundational pieces of it shouldn’t exist.

If you didn’t agree to live under it, then I don’t believe for a minute that you should have filed an N-400.

Matthew Garrett appointed to Debian Technical Committee nearly 17 years after saying Debian made him want to stab the volunteers working on it. (And himself.)

Matthew Garrett has been appointed to Debian Technical Committee nearly 17 years after saying Debian made him want to stab the volunteers working on it. (And himself.)

Debian has made some unforced errors in recent years. Some technical, some political, some “other”.

It has also taken quite a lot of money from nefarious and corrupting sources, such as Microsoft, who never gives away money without expecting ruinous and self-destructive favors from the recipient.

As usual, the amounts in question were peanuts on the scale that Microsoft operates at, even as they are in trouble and in the middle of implementing massive layoffs and their CEO is speaking in euphemistically-coded pessimism about the future of the company.

Microsoft has supported Matthew Garrett by proxy during his work to foist so-called “Secure Boot” onto GNU/Linux, in a way that requires binary-only software in your boot path, whose only purpose is to lock the user (userspace) out of low level access to the computer.

I’ve been over and over why I just turn it off before I destroy Windows and replace it on a new laptop, so I will try not to flog this horse again, but at a certain point, even Matthew Garrett admitted that even turning on the Microsoft 3rd party signing key that works with this “shim” bootloader stage more or less destroys Windows, at least from the point of view of an average user, who is unlikely to know how to recover, and the entire “Secure Core Initiative” is just another milestone to a point where the user won’t even be able to choose a different OS for their computer, at all, no matter what they want to do.

Garrett left Google under generally unknown circumstances years ago. When pressed by me on Techrights IRC to explain the logic of leaving a gigantic corporation with deep pockets for an unprofitable “self-driving truck” company that only has enough cash to go on for about another year, whose stock shares have halved again since September of 2022, which has no future prospects except either bankruptcy or a takeover for patents, he has been rather cryptic and evasive.

Logically, why would you leave Google and take a job at Aurora voluntarily? That’s all I’m asking. It doesn’t follow, at least to me.

His pattern has been job hopping and always working on something Microsoft wants, no matter where he’s at officially. And he makes prolific usage of their GitHub division.

Whenever he does comment on Free Software, it’s either to try to cancel the main most directly responsible for its existence (like RMS or Linus Torvalds) or to say he wants to “stab” the volunteer people at Debian in 2006.

(I’ll assume he was speaking figuratively, but why would you even say this?)

And the issue that frustrated him so greatly at the time, which led to his resignation, was that he felt it was “too Free” to easily set up.

There have always been ways to set it up with non-Free firmwares and programs. That should be the user’s choice.

He was angry at them for making the point that Linux is a growing pile of binary proprietary-only software, and that most people’s PCs just don’t work without it because the Free parts of the Linux kernel turn out to be woefully incomplete on PCs, and that this should alarm the user. The operating system shouldn’t silence the problem, hide it from them, and give them backdoored firmware and hardware by default without asking.

But I think it’s safe to say that people who openly say that they want to stab other people and themselves (even if it isn’t literal) should seek counseling, not be elevated to the Debian Technical Committee in the middle of the night.

Because that kind of toxicity has no place in society, and they should get the help they need for their own benefit, of course.

He boosts Microsoft, including their fake disk encryption in Windows that exfiltrates your decryption passphrase to Microsoft, and by extension, any cops that want it.

The disturbing content about “stab people” came up in literally the first five seconds after I looked up “Matthew Garrett Debian”. So I can only imagine what else might be out there.

I suppose I might continue looking through things before Matthew Garrett catches on and starts deleting years-old posts.

I put the disturbing post I found in Archive Today just so there can’t be any confusion about what he actually said on his blog in 2006.

Bonus for simping for Ubuntu before they turned into a Microsoft Troll Farm posting spam about “WSL”.

Words simply cannot describe how horrified I am at what is going on at Debian.

I figured, wrongly it turned out, that it would be a safe place away from the Microsoft Troll Farm known as Canonical/Ubuntu.

Just going to the Web site, it barely says anything anymore about why you would want to use Ubuntu as a GNU/Linux distribution, and it encourages you to use some bastard version of it like the Alien Queen shackled up at the bottom of the pyramid. (WSL)

The wrong people are assuming (usurping) control of Free Software and perverting it.

Contrast the following.

Richard Stallman: (Paraphrase)

I could have made more money if I had sold out my principles and gone to work for a proprietary software company, but I would have made that money by doing harm to the world and leaving things in a worse place than if I had never done any such work at all.

I could have lived on a waiter’s salary and not actively harmed the world.

Matthew Garrett: (Basically his world view, in my opinion and experience knowing him.)

Who will pay me the most, even if it helps bring about the end of Free Software and destroys millions of jobs?

They put Matthew Garrett on the Debian Technical Committee and IBM defunded the Free Software Foundation as punishment for not canceling Richard Stallman and weakening their position on software patents?

Hmm.

Bad people doing bad things definitely always seem to have the upperhand.

It takes constant work to fight them off and the minute you don’t, you lose everything.

Sometimes all at once, sometimes a piece at a time (Secure Boot) so they can deny you’re even under attack at all.

Debian’s Wiki has denied for a while that Secure Boot is an attack on Software Freedom.

So the fact that they’ve had some bad people lying their asses off to the users isn’t new, it’s just made so much worse now that Garrett’s back.

In my opinion, the Return of Matthew Garrett puts me squarely at “Debian is Finished”.

Now, don’t mistake this for being an immediate and dramatic end of Debian. It may go on for some years, or at least something calling itself Debian.

Remember that something calling itself the United States of America went on after 2001, but it’s not the America you grew up in.

Same thing.

I suppose that the avalanche started to take off back when they signed the deal with Mozilla to get rid of the “IceWeasel” branding.

We see where that led. Right? Now there’s DRM in Debian. It’s in the browser. There’s keyloggers and adware.

If they were worried about what the user wants, they would IceWeasel it again and rip it all out, but it’s so painfully obvious that they simply do not care anymore.

These are the sorts of compromises that Matthew Garrett was talking about in the “stab people” article.

You compromise here, you compromise there, and you don’t stand for anything. Eventually, you’re just….totally compromised.

Matthew J. Garrett, “Social Justice Warrior”, is still on Twitter even as Elon Musk now tweets fake news Web sites that blame LGBT people for the attack on Paul Pelosi.

As of Sunday, October 30th, 2022, Matthew J. Garrett, “Social Justice Warrior”, is still on Twitter even as Elon Musk now tweets fake news Web sites that blame LGBT people for the attack on Paul Pelosi. (NewsWaffle proxy of Original.)

It also doesn’t appear that Mr. Garrett has made any tweets that acknowledge what’s going on in there.

I’ve reached out to Mr. Garrett on Techrights IRC to see if he has anything to say about why he’s still on a platform that is now 100% owned by a homophobe who is blaming gay people for the attack on Paul Pelosi (Quite an odd accusation, but when have conspiracy theories made sense lately?), which will now do pretty much nothing about far-right cranks.

I will note any reply I receive.

Musk later simply deleted the tweet, by which time it had over 24,000 shares and 89,000 likes.