20 years ago it was the people who worshipped Jack Welch, not realizing (or not caring) that he was running GE into the ground.

Enshittification isn’t always driven by a conscious person or organization with an agenda, much less one with an agenda of short term financial gain. Sometimes the aggregation of a bunch of individual decisions causes something to get shittier. Or better. Or just different. 4chan is not at all like it was 20 years ago, but it wasn’t because of corporate influence. The culture just changes.

So if the question is whether the fediverse might someday suck, I think the answer is probably yes. It remains to be seen how it will suck, who will have caused it to be that way, and whether there will be other nice things about it.

What are the oceans if not one giant salt lake?

Deseret can have a little coastline, as a treat.

Are you under the impression that the water is recycled back in, like in a closed loop?

One time pads are perfect encryption, but the problem is that the key length needs to be longer than the message length. So if you have the ability to get the symmetric key to the recipient securely, then you had the ability to get the whole message to the recipient securely.

And that introduces a specific type of supply chain threat: someone who possesses a computer can infect their own computer, sell it or transfer it to the target, and then use the embedded microcode against the target, even if the target completely reformats and reinstalls a new OS from scratch.

That’s not going to affect most people, but for certain types of high value targets they now need to make sure that the hardware they buy hasn’t already been infected in the supply chain.

They did, eventually. The first PlayStation was relatively easy to pirate for (with a mod chip), but it took a while for that stuff to become available. Someone had to go and manufacture the chips, or reverse engineer the check.

By the time that scene matured, Sega released the Dreamcast right into a more sophisticated piracy scene that could apply lessons learned to the Dreamcast right away.

On paper, Sega had more sophisticated copy protection than the first PlayStation did. But it also released 4 years later.

you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.

I don’t remember it this way. Nothing else came close to the portable storage capacity of CD (and thus CD-R and CD-RW). The iomega zip drive was still a popular medium, allowing rewritable 100mb or 250mb cartridge. That was the preferred way to get big files to and from a computer lab when I was an engineering student in 2000.

USB flash drives had just been released in 2000, and their capacity was measured in like 8/16/32mb, nowhere near enough to meaningfully move CD images.

Then again, as a college student with on-campus broadband on the completely unregulated internet (back when HTTP and the WWW weren’t necessarily considered the most important protocols on the internet), it was all about shared FTP logins PMed over IRC to download illegal shit. The good stuff never touched an actual website.

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I don’t think you understand the type of multiple choice questions involved. Here’s a real question:

A father lived with his son, who was an alcoholic. When drunk, the son often became violent and physically abused his father. As a result, the father always lived in fear. One night, the father heard his son on the front stoop making loud obscene remarks. The father was certain that his son was drunk and was terrified that he would be physically beaten again. In his fear, he bolted the front door and took out a revolver. When the son discovered that the door was bolted, he kicked it down. As the son burst through the front door, his father shot him four times in the chest, killing him. In fact, the son was not under the influence of alcohol or any drug and did not intend to harm his father.

At trial, the father presented the above facts and asked the judge to instruct the jury on self-defense.

How should the judge instruct the jury with respect to self-defense?

(A) Give the self-defense instruction, because it expresses the defense’s theory of the case.

(B) Give the self-defense instruction, because the evidence is sufficient to raise the defense.

© Deny the self-defense instruction, because the father was not in imminent danger from his son.

(D) Deny the self-defense instruction, because the father used excessive force.

Memorizing the book itself doesn’t teach how to answer this type of question. It requires actual application of concepts to the new facts being given.