That’s why we should follow the example of the French and do a Revolution every now and then!

Have a UN agency run it?

Indeed! Nothing’s forcing you to be federated with lemm.ee, or keeping you from interacting with lemm.ee. You could block me, or defederate from the instance I’m on, just I could do the same. That’s the beauty of the Fediverse, it is what you make of it. Curate it however you like, and let others curate their own experiences how they like. Liberals, neocons, paleo-cons, communists, anarcho-capitalists, ancoms, apolitical folks, there’s a place somewhere on the Fediverse for every flavor.

You know this is the Fediverse, right? You have the power to make your corner of it into whatever you want. There’s nothing forcing you to be federated with lemmy.world or kbin.earth, just as there’s nothing stopping you from exclusively interacting with lemmygrad. The Fediverse is whatever you make it, and everyone has the right to make their corner into whatever they want.

gestures around Products as a service in general isn’t needed, but it’s done anyways. Single player games don’t need to be always-online and subscription-based. Same with movies. Same with cars. But in the world we live in, everything is becoming X-as-a-service. In this case, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if they purposely built in a chip that would disable or otherwise limit the battery unless the purchaser client continued paying the subscription fee.

Awesome! Linux Mint’s welcome page should have given you directions to setting up the built in firewall. If you really want an antivirus, ClamAV is a good one for Linux. However, whether you need one on Linux is actually a complicated question: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=358408

Really depends on your use case, at the end of the day. Good luck, and let us know if you have any questions!

It turns out Google Chrome (via Chromium) includes a default extension which makes extra services available to code running on the *.google.com domains - tweeted about today by Luca Casonato, but the code has been there in the public repo since October 2013 as far as I can tell.

It looks like it’s a way to let Google Hangouts (or presumably its modern predecessors) get additional information from the browser, including the current load on the user’s CPU. Update: On Hacker News a Googler confirms that the Google Meet “troubleshooting” feature uses this to review CPU utilization

The code doesn’t do anything on non-Google domains.

Maybe it’s because you tried it on a non Google site? Idk.

Were you ever able to figure this out?

It’s apparently built into chromium

Did you make sure that you opened the terminal inside the folder where your iso and txt files are, or at least navigated to that folder after opening the terminal? Basically, it’ll say “file not found” if you run the CertUtil command while not “inside” the folder containing both the iso and the txt files. Same with running the gpg command.

Usually, if you just open cmd.exe by itself from the searchbar, you’ll see something like this:

PS C:\Users\your_username>

If you instead opened the terminal inside the folder, you’ll instead see this:

PS C:\Users\your_username\Downloads\ISO>

Or whichever folder your iso and txt files are located in.

CertUtil and gpg are pretty tunnel-visioned - they can only see stuff that’s in the same folder as they’re being run in, unless you give them specific directions to get to a different location. That’s why it’s easiest and best to have everything in a single folder and open the terminal “inside” that folder.

Again - all this verification stuff with the terminal is, in my opinion, optional as long as you downloaded from one of the mirrors on the website. But since you still want to do it, this is the easiest way to go about it.

All the directions are here: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=291093

No problem, and again - if you experience any confusion during the process, just let me know! I also had to get help with installing Linux Mint myself when I first got started.

It should be fine. If you’re truly worried, go here:

https://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/linuxmint.com/stable/

And click the version of Linux Mint you downloaded - it’s probably 21.3 - and then download both sha256sum.txt and sha256sum.txt.gpg by right-clicking -> “save link as…” to download the files themselves.

After that, verify the iso you had in your downloads folder by following the instructions here:

https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/verify.html

Again, as long as you downloaded from one of the mirrors linked on the Linux Mint download page, you should be absolutely fine. This step is a just-in-case, for your personal ease of mind. It will, however, need you to open cmd.exe and copy the code inside the green boxes into the terminal and press Enter. There’s a pictoral guide if you’re doing the verification on Windows still, right here:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=291093

Let me know if you get stuck!

Guess it’s a moot point because as far as I know they didn’t end up using that name for their videos.

The sha txt file should’ve been available alongside the iso file from the mirror you downloaded it from. Honestly, as long as you used one of the mirrors that the Linux Mint website provided, you should be perfectly fine.

Good to hear! Let us know if you need any help with the install - some computers will try to fight the install, others are much more amenable to it. As long as you follow the instructions from the Linux Mint page, you should be fine.

Have you tried Linux Mint? That’s pretty user-friendly. As long as it’s a .deb, you can double-click install through a GUI, no terminal needed. There’s an “app store” with most of your standard apps, like Discord, Slack, Teams, Skype or VLC, and it has an office suite pre-installed along with an email client. The first time you start, there’s a welcome screen that helps you through setting up the firewall, appearance (you can make it look like XP if you want), backups, NVIDIA drivers, and update manager you can ignore or manually update or automatically update. I don’t know your system, but it’s pretty intuitive for Windows users (I use a Windows 10 theme). I’d encourage you to give it one more try, if you’re still open to it.

Hope all the other comments and suggestions are helping! Installation is honestly the only “hard” step for Mint. Once you’re done with this, it should be smooth sailing - and if you ever need any help, just ask!

The concept of the “Torment Nexus” is a placeholder for any technology specifically described as dystopian or otherwise contributing to suffering in fiction, such as mass surveillance, mind control technology, and so on. The meme refers to modern-day corporations missing the point of the fiction, and creating said “Torment Nexus” as something they view as “cool” and “futuristic”. In some cases, the companies are self-aware enough to not pretend that their creation is anything other than dystopian, but in many cases they try to sell the new technology to the public as a good thing despite that very tech being described as dystopian already.

So tell me, what part of their creation was “solving real-world problems” beyond playing to the desires of autocrats and control freaks? What part of their creation was a net positive to society? Or are you happy to live in a world of autonomous drone strikes on weddings and kindergartens, mass surveillance, a thermonuclear sword of damocles hanging over all of humanity, and so on?

How about the following examples:

• Autonomous weaponized drones with automatic targeting (Terminator)
• Mass surveillance and voice recording (1984)
• Nuclear weapons (HG Wells, The World Set Free)
• Corporate controlled hypercommercialized microtransaction-filled metaverse (Snow Crash)
• Netflix to create real-life Squid Game (Squid Game (speedrun!))
• “MoviePass to track people’s eyes through their phone’s cameras to make sure they don’t look away from ads” (Black Mirror)
• Soulless AI facsimile of dead relatives (Black Mirror)