It would be trivial for the Chinese to determine if covid 19 matches with what they were investigating in the lab, and if the people in the lab were among the first infected.
Since perchlorate's comment is now dead, and yours is similar, going to reply here.
I do agree to some extent. Having tools to challenge a dictatorship that cannot be silenced can indeed become invaluable. However, there is a significant difference between responsible moderation, which aims to protect individuals' safety, and full-blown censorship. While it can be a slippery slope, the absence of moderation shouldn't leave users defenseless against doxxing and threats, which can have real, harmful, and even deadly consequences. There must be some form of balance. From my experience, it feels like Telegram lacks any moderation whatsoever, which represents another extreme. I assume, though, that they must be enforcing some level of moderation for things like CP, since governments typically, really do not tolerate a no moderation policy in such areas.
I would say that being on this extreme end, Telegram has actually opened itself up to government scrutiny. If there had been some form of responsible moderation, governments might not have found enough grounds to justify their actions. The absence of any moderation means that governments can use full force and indeed justify it, potentially damaging the very area of free speech that Telegram aims to protect.
> help I'm being harassed online [detailed description of how]
> tsk tsk, and you think that justifies *censoring* people?!
Free speech and freedom from censorship are important, but I'm well tired of seeing them used as an excuse to deflect from real problems like online abuse, CSAM etc. Many people on HN seem to think some kinds of problems aren't even worthy of discussion because they any sort of regulation as an attack upon their privacy.
> What you call moderation is also a tool dictatorships use to censor people. It goes both ways.
The veracity of this claim aside, posting this as a reply to someone who just shared their own experience getting doxxed in a country where victims have legitimate grounds to fear for their lives... feels a little out of place.
Also, usually the dictatorships abuse the censors once their grasp is firm. Until then, they're typically abusing the lack of censorship for their own ends. We see that here in the US with troll farms abusing limited content moderation around misinformation to sway public opinion with falsehoods. Countries are trying to pull the US election in both directions right now this way.
> Posting this as a reply to someone who just shared their own experience getting doxxed in a country where victims have legitimate grounds to fear for their lives... feels a little out of place.
They should pick a bone with their country’s government that allows such thing to happen, not Telegram.
Maybe not hated but yeah I think the memes about the first memes I've seen about artifacts/stuttering in VLC are basically as old as VLC itself. And new ones keep getting made
believe it or not, most users dont run around downloading random screensavers or whatever. Instead they are receiving phish emails, often from trusted contacts who have recently been compromised using the same style of message that they are used to receiving, that give the attacker a foothold on the computer. From there, you can use a commonly available insecure legacy protocol or other privilege escalation technique to gain administrative rights on the device.
"Windows" is the combination of the OS per se and all the things needed for it to run properly. That thing is a mess of proprietary drivers and pieces of software cobbled together. It can't be called "high reliability" with a straight face.
Crowdstrike is a multiplatform malware that chronically damages computers on all major desktop OSes. This is a Crowd strike problem and an admin problem.
That's a hell of a take that should not be taken seriously. Perhaps if you hold everything else to the same standard. Anything used on macOS or Linux or whatever else fully and completely represents that core platform, then I'd agree.
Anecdotally, I have zero stability problems on my non-ECC consumer-grade 11th gen Intel Windows 11 system. It'll stay up for months, until I decide to shut it down. I had a loose GPU power cable that was causing me problems at a point, but since I reseated everything I haven't had a single issue. That was my fault, things happen. The system is great.
More significantly, I see no difference in stability between our Windows Server platform and Red Hat Enterprise (Oracle) server platform at work either. Work being one of the top 3 largest city governments in the USA.
I don't even think Linux is the definite answer. The majority of these critical apps are just full-screen UIs written in C, C++ or Java with minimal computing and networking, so they could just as easily run on Qubes or BSD without all the constant patching for dumb vulnerabilities that still persist even though Windows is 40 years old.
The problem is the middle management class at hospitals, governments, etc., only know how to use Word and maybe Excel, so they are comfortable with Microsoft, even though it's objectively the worst option if you aren't gaming. So then they make contracts with Microsoft and all the computers run Windows, so all the app developers have to write the apps for Windows.
Not really disagreeing with you, but "staying up for months" isn't a serious bar to clear, it really provides no information in 2024 everything you can install should clear that bar.
Can you say with a straight face that if you were designing a system that had extremely high requirements of reliability that you would choose Windows over Linux? Like, all other things being equal? I'm sorry, but that would be an insane choice.
Well, yes? Of course, not the consumer deployment of Windows. Part of ensuring reliability is establishing contracts with suppliers that shift liability to them, so they're incentivized to keep their stuff reliable. Can't exactly do that with Linux (RHEL notiwthstanding) and open source in general, which is why large enterprises have been so reluctant to adopt them in the past - they had to figure out how to fit OSS into the flow of liability and responsibility.
It's not as straightforward of a choice as it may seem. In theory Linux would be a better choice but there simply isn't the infrastructure or IT staffing in place to manage millions and millions of Linux desktops. I'm not saying it can't be done but for various reasons it hasn't been done and that's a major practical roadblock. Just from a staffing perspective alone if you hand millions of Linux desktops to life long Microsoftsies you're begging for disaster.
For sure, no question! There's a reason people choose Microsoft. My question was narrower, just the question on reliability (hence "all else being equal"). I don't think you can say that, leaving aside issues like this, that Windows is as or more reliable than Linux.
For instance, if you had to make deploy a mission critical server, assuming cost and other software was the same, would you choose Linux or Windows for reliability? Of course you would choose Linux.
Well, with the proliferation of systemd and all the nightmares it's caused me over the past decade, I actually might. But thankfully BSD is an option.
But Linux isn't immune from this exact sort of issue, though - these overgrown antivirus solutions run as kernel drivers in linux as well, and I have seen them cause kernel panics.
Depends i think. When i was working as a super market cashier the tils had embedded XP. in 2 or 3 years it rarely had issues. The rare issues it did have were with the java POS running on top.
Windows 10 for my home desktop crashed a lot more and just seems to have gotten more "janky" with time.
