It’s a little longwinded and meandering, but it’s a good piece and a good message. This is why things like Linux and opensource are so important. On the surface it looks like a bunch of nerds making our computers slightly more of a hassle to use and slightly less compatible with everything else, but maintaining full control of what our systems do, what other system’s they talk to, and maintaining a chain of accountability that goes all the way to the hardware is so important. Sadly it’s important in ways that the average person doesn’t care much about, or rather they won’t care about them until it’s too late. Until every computer for sale everywhere is just a surveillance device shaped like a laptop that plays youtube and opens facebook while logging and sending off every click and keystroke.

Now I’m all fired up. I’m going to go install Linux on an old thinkpad.

It’s especially rough when you remember seeing it on the internet before and even had it yourself at one point. There are/were a bunch of music artists I discovered at both the old eMusic and the music section of old download.com, but those collections weren’t archived anywhere in any meaningful way when the sites changed. It took me years to finally locate what I was after. It’s just so draining to know that something used to easily and freely available and to not be able to find it no matter how hard to dig.

So do I call her Mother or Goddess.

The game was rigged from the start.

Maybe I’m missing context, but the article doesn’t mention what this admission looked like. Was it just a use saying “yeah I downloaded the new ghostbusters movie, it sucked glad I didn’t pay for it”, or was it someone admitting to camming/distributing/facilitating piracy at a base level? Surely they are not going after someone for just casually mentioning they pirated a movie?