Wrongthink

Many in the alt tech and open source club, and especially the variety who might visit wrongthink, probably go to some length to present their device metrics as some other platform.

Any longtime Wrongthink visitor is probably familiar with my criticisms of uBlock Origin.

Our marathon hasn’t kept pace with Debian.

Sometimes I find unwanted junk cards in my mailbox from organizations seeking to add vacation properties to their portfolio.

Buster marks the last Debian release made before stepping into this decade.

At last, software produced within the last decade is in our grasp.

It’s been a while since we last checked in on the normies to see how their relationship with tech has been going.

Jessie marks the halfway point of our journey, from Sarge to Bookworm, from 2005 to 2025.

With enough road now behind us, I finally took it upon myself to make a clone of the Upgrade-Journey drive so that I can save scum if the need arises.

As a self professed minimalist, I’ve long been a fan of the axiom “Perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”, penned by Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

The backward compatibility of interfaces has been nothing short of heroic.

Finding computer equipment that respects user freedom and owner control can feel a lot like squeezing water out from stone.

With two versions now behind us, it is a good time to start tracking a sort of “technical debt” as it accrues from upgrades.

There is something just so alluring about the picturesque, upper middle class suburbs as they are portrayed in film, with their neatly trimmed gardens flanking lawns and quiet network of roads meandering between them.

Last month marked the start of an experiment where I upgrade through historic Debian releases, starting with Sarge.

Had my priorities been better aligned, I would have first begun building Linux skills sometime during the Bush (W) administration.

There are times when it becomes necessary to unfurl the sails and set to sea in search of spoils.

One overlooked aspect of data security is availability.

Network firewalls for the Linuxes have historically been application-blind.

While the internet has been taking well to IPv6 deployment, the same cannot be said for the domain name system’s authenticity mechanism, DNSSEC.

Problem: You deployed a remote system that you access at a site which you may not physically visit for weeks, months or even years at a time.

For the longest time, I had unknowingly been reinventing the wheel.

Linux Mint’s greatest strength is its aesthetically coherent GUI whose layout makes it ideal for those who find themselves arriving from a Windows environment.

Each year I’ve made it a point to donate the value equivalent to what I would have once paid for Windows licensing to my most used Linux distribution.

I’ve decided I will no longer refer to Linux as GNU/Linux.

Most of the content on Wrongthink assumes that readers are already competent with Linux and computers.

A frustrated individual recently vented some valid complaints over the intrusion of digital technology into daily life on her blog.

There has been so much online outrage over the historically recent shoehorning of ideolgical agendas into video games.

You have a file you would like to share with a friend, or to a colleague.

Many contemporary devices still use the original network time protocol devised as it was in the 1980s.

An outfit in Bulgaria design and produce single board computers, microcontrollers and DIY laptop kits sold as TERES-I.

Much of what I compose never finds its way beyond the drafting folder.

In 2015 the aptly named “Discord” went about “solving” a problem that had already long since been solved: in-game voice chat.

Web video content is gradually being lobotomized.

Is it truly “sticking it to the man” to forge a way to continue to use a product which has had its original user-hostile features mitigated?

But does it live up to such a description?

Currently only one substantially complete antivirus kit casts itself among FOSS, ClamAV.

Whether you’re working with free or closed equipment, the underlying firmware can be a fragile beast.

We shouldn’t refrain from admitting where we’ve lost ground or find ourselves on the losing side.

Many web blocker addons take the approach of selectively blocking resources based on finite blacklists.

As OSes begin to entertain dropping “x86_64-v1” support in builds[1][2][3], the clampdown accelerates on generative computing.

Many of the same block lists used by ad blocker extensions can also be used globally by your hosts file to redirect all requests to that domain to a non-routable address.

There are a number of quality of life tricks for Debian that I wish I’d known when I was first learning the ropes.

While there remains no ideal browser, there are a few decent options.

The industry has been struggling with how to handle securing DNS, an original protocol designed without encryption in mind, which is responsible for informing your computer which IPs map to any domain name.

Update Q4 2024: The reliability of this method has raplidly deteriorated.

Some kind exchanges with readers have inspired a degree of introspective and I’ve since determined that we focus a bit too centrally on trashing the bad to be found in technology.

“If the oppossing faction’s candidate wins, then I’m moving to Canada/Mexico!”

This is an assertion you’ve likely seen normies argue before.

Concepts, features and creature comforts which existed within linuxes since long ago, that where only later adopted by Windows.