Just two days ago there was a warning on the radio that in a few cities, criminals have placed stickers with their own QR codes over the original ones on the parking ticket vending machines. So if you want to purchase a parking ticket online, it sent you to their own website, faked to look like the original one, and requested to enter CC data for the payment.

I don’t f-ing care about US soldiers and spies being tracked. What concerns me is that many many more normal people have most likely been tracked, too.

Have they ever considered fixing those security holes?

Regarding AI, there are only options on what would be great with AI. There simply is no option “No, I don’t f-ing want AI” in a Mozilla product.

I want a Browser and an EMail program. Not something that tries to do thinking for me.

First I thought “WTF is period data a thing that should concern the government”, but then I noticed we are talking about the future Handmaids Tale country here.

Which system/distribution/device does show this message?

Indeed. And yes, they know how to do that.

Walk, stop, look down, look shocked and/or disgusted and walk “around” it. That’s easier to simulate than trying to “climb over”.

Last year, about this time or even earlier, a supermarket in a major city here suddenly had a wealth of Chrismas products (mostly sweets) on offer. Of course, people wondered, and it turned out that the supermarket chain had been shooting pictures for their Christmas campaign near that location, and instead of throwing the stuff away, they simply sold them off.

Me: Software developer. Other person: Sales guy.

Sales guy: Have you finally fixed the XYZ bug?

Me: What XYZ bug? Never heard of this before.

Sales guy: The bug that impacted our project A, B, and C! It is there for years!

Me: No, I have not fixed it. Because I just heard about this issue now. Nobody told me about an XYZ bug, or problems with projects A, B, and C.

Sales guy: What? Why didn’t you know about such a bug? This cannot be possible! I’ll talk to the boss about your incompetence!

Me: Because none of your team found it necessary to inform me? Maybe we should talk to the boss about this.

Try a little less Chaplin, and you are on a good way.

They probably speak English with you because your German is not sufficiently efficient.

Deutsch ist gar nicht so schwierig. Versuch es doch einfach mal!

Windows is definitely not the only bad software, but for the amount of resources they could spend on quality, it is a rather shitty product. They could do better, but they don’t want to.

Canon printers. Back in the time, I bought a large canon printer - for 60cm wide paper, with large ink tanks on the side. It cost a rather substantial amount, but printing under Linux was meh, as there was no special driver for this model. I asked for a manual so I could write such a driver myself, but their position (back then, I never bothered to recheck) that Linux and open source in general was theft of intellectual property.

Apple for their poisonous followership.

Canon for being assholes.

Microsoft for their shitty products that only survive due to the mass they have acquired during the years running largely unchecked.

Facebook/Meta/Twitterx/Tesla: see Apple.

No, not an Osborne. A real IBM Portable.

Do they really require it, or is this just the usual security theatre?

No to both. Windows is so broken, it needs kernel-level external software to protect it from attacks that should not be possible in the first place. It is a joke of history that this software was even worse than windows itself.

Oh, grasshopper, have you not learned yet not to trust marketing terms?