From the outside it really seems that a large amount of the USA administration is actively working against the USA’s interests. Which sounds weird.

At this point, if we use the age-old question of “who would benefit from the crime?”, we’ll get very weird results.

Sometimes I just get tired of having to fight against software to have it behave in a semi-decent way. The same way you technically “can” run a decent windows installation after removing/disabling/blocking a ton of stuff, I don’t really want a browser that can be trusted after you had to tinker with dozens of settings to just get back to basic non-intrusive behavior.

I said this in another thread on the same topic somewhere else, but considering user tracking as an inevitability that we have to accept means we’ve already lost on that front.

Well I heard about a guy that told the collective advertisres of the platform to “go fuck themselves”, maybe this guy should be investigated.

I’m just finding no confirmation that they send them unencrypted over the Internet

Even if they were sending them with proper E2EE to their server, that would still be a huge fucking problem.

I’d argue it’s a bit worse than PXE booting, since they talk about having the actual bootloader on a USB stick, whereas the same thing could have been done by having the boot process remote too.

as Electron has no integration with the rest of the system,

You pretty much can use Electron to build an application and use native OS-specific features. It only requires thinking about it and a bit of work, but technically isn’t much harder to do than with anything else. And there are some things useful in windows for that, based on user login credentials.

But ultimately, if the developers didn’t care about doing that, it won’t happen, regardless of them using Electron or writing fully native apps.

Firefox has a tendency to embed optional extensions as impossible to uninstall core features these days, so it would not change much.

Sure you can. You can also spend time disabling intrusive telemetry, you can also spend time reverting half the UI changes (not the other half though), you can also spend time removing integrated services you don’t use but are still running, you can (regularly) change back some settings that gets reverted every once in a while, you can also block some IP to prevent intrusive ads, you can toggle off part of the “user experience” that bloat the lockscreen…

Or you could, I don’t know, not have to do any of that and still have a working system that’s not trying to bend you over.

I had the occasion to discuss with people involved with Microsoft a few times, mostly on the research front. Great people, with great ideas, and very knowledgeable about their field. Of course they had nothing to do with the lobbying and the windows OS. Microsoft is very large; the corporate drones are only a small part of it. Unfortunately, it’s the part that decides what gets done and pushed out :(

Great, another victory of people keeping IP in closed box away from the public at the small cost of culture disappearing.