bragh

> The system is audited both internally and externally fairly regularly, the latest report being released just December last year

Can you please clarify the 'fairly regularly' part? One of the members of that commission said that this is the first time that this kind of audit has been undertaken: https://digi.geenius.ee/rubriik/uudis/e-valimiste-tooruhma-l... To be fair, there are lots of other reviews having taken place, but none of them are regular with the exception of the OECD ones happening during elections: https://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrooniline_h%C3%A4%C3%A4le...

> There is also frequent news coverage, both supporting and criticizing the system

ERR is government-funded and seems to me quite neutral, not sure how it is relevant here. But it still seems to me that mainstream media is supportive and you have to go to "alternative" news sources to find any true criticism.

> One of the current government parties [3] is an active critic of the system.

Actually 2, if you count both KE and EKRE. And this is one of the major criticisms against those parties and has been so for years.

A good example of the prevailing attitude can be seen in this thread from 2017 about the security hole back then from Hinnavaatlus, probably biggest IT-related forum in Estonia: https://foorum.hinnavaatlus.ee/viewtopic.php?t=715076&postda... The general tonality in the beginning was that this is a tinfoil problem and somehow brought up by KE and EKRE before elections until the reality of the situation sunk in.

Brave guy to publish this, hopefully it won't end up similar to the Dreyfus affair — depends on which the media will roll due to it being "pickled cucumber season" (everybody is on vacation, nothing much happening during summer in Estonia). The flaws of the ID-card is a very politically charged topic to discuss in Estonia, having any doubts about the ID-card or e-voting will make you a persona non grata.

On average over time, I feel that Linux definitely loses out on desktop. But it's not about rudeness, but about the choice of when you want to use the administration time. If you have a strict deadline or presentation coming up, then that 1 hour for updates or a forced restart can be much more costly than when the update happens during the weekend or while watching a movie.

.

That is true. If I put it into monetary terms, I would gladly pay 50 EUR per month to have an operating system that did the following:

- UNIX command line integration and generally following UNIX philosophy

- Docker integration working out of the box

- no spying on me

- fractional scaling support

- Nvidia drivers support (for gaming)

Running Windows 10, Ubuntu 20.04, Mac OS Mojave and Mac OS Catalina on different computers because of reasons and all of them lack something.

> (WFH employees not getting on VPN for days at a time, for example).

This is a metric that should be taken with a huge grain of salt in the world of cloud services and bad VPN software.

> But when I wrote something incorrect, in your perception, you straightaway jumped to "lying".

Because the entire tone of your original post was written in a way to imply that the OP hadn't done the due diligence. The end of your post was quite telling in "It's quite straightforward."

I just don't understand how come there are so many pro-Microsoft comments lately justifying everything bad that they are doing. It feels like arguing with a pure-Microsoft IT department, everything good that happens in Windows is good and everything bad is user mistake and could have never happened.

> Edit: I did that Google search and found that Windows ignores Active Hours in the sense that it still downloads the updates. But it does not Restart the PC. I could be wrong, but I'd appreciate if you can state it politely.

And this same google search shows that this does happen:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...

> b) "Change active hours", which can be used to specify an 18-hour window within which, "We won't automatically restart your device during this time"

Why are you lying? That part has been there for a long time and doesn't work anyway, just google for 'windows 10 ignores active hours'.

You are laying it on a bit thick there. How can you justify the next stage of the embrace-extend-extinguish cycle and spying on users as enabling more choice?

And this is the saddest part of it all: the industry slowly started to drag itself out of the mire that is Microsoft monoculture, as servers were moving to Linux even in evil-corp style organizations; cloud services offering competition to Office hegemony (especially in education); IE6 dead and its descendants soon-to-be-forgotten; .NET being forced to improve itself and to become only 5 years behind the curve instead of 10 years (but some places still seek developers for the Lovecraftian horror that is Web Forms).

And now all this, all over again? Goddamn this industry.

> I searched the net for answers but my search foo sucked.

Do not feel bad about it at all: somehow it seems impossible to search for answers related to Ubuntu. Anything related is for something like 14.* or 12.* releases. I do not understand what is going on: are people really not asking the questions for newer versions, both Google and DDG not properly ranking or are the questions/answers getting somehow marked as dupe and deleted?

Are you really certain that you weren't one of the people who actually was part of the privileged clique?

My small town school had instances of missing teeth, broken jaws, one kid beaten far enough to require hospitalization for 2 weeks, etc. 10 years later, the popular kids say that there was no bullying and it was all intended in good fun. My therapist didn't even believe me at first when I discussed the things that were going on at my school, but luckily I do have some reminders of those times on visible places.

Sure, they are not a monopoly yet when you look at the whole of e-commerce. But Amazon effectively is a monopoly for at least books and probably electronics, depending on where you live.

Quoting from an article published in 2018: https://www.retaildive.com/news/amazon-beats-best-buy-as-top...

> 60% of every incremental dollar being spent online in North America is gong to one company — Amazon. No matter what you sell, Amazon is coming for you

I'm from Estonia, the usual problem when it came to industrial goods was that consumers don't have a VAT ID and are protected by Consumer Protection and Technical Regulatory Authority. In B2B, companies need to handle problems between themselves, so that means the need to offer 2 years of warranty per EU laws to consumers, labeling and instruction manual in Estonian and probably much more that I can't remember.

But given these times, it's not a problem: I already know of at least 2 wholesale food suppliers who opened up their ordering systems to be used for B2C.

It's not madness, it's the price of flexibility and one that I am personally gladly to pay. I am forced to use Windows and pre-approved tooling daily at work, you can't imagine what a relief it is to use Linux at home, where you can chain together the exact programs that you want and make them work the way you want.

I hope the HiDPI support is improved now. Right now, when I use fractional scaling on 19.10, none of the display settings get saved and so after a restart, I have to readjust all of the layout, orientation and scaling for displays. Pretty annoying for a dual-boot triple display system.

edit: Nevermind, seems that it got even worse for my case:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mutter/+bug/187340...

Wasn't even told that about those things in HS chemistry in my time in my country, not sure why - considered too dangerous knowledge by educators? Only found out about it on 4chan and gasped on how easily we could have accidentally injured ourselves while cleaning our dorm bathroom.

Please stop spreading FUD: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/201103091459.p29E...

I think that when you look at both the properties of the virus (fairly long-tailed inhibition period, large proportion of carriers not displaying any symptoms, being infectious even after becoming healthy yourself, life-long consequences even for people who survive, aerosol spread and so on) and the results so far (the human lives + medicine systems of so far only a few countries + The Next Big Depression), it is not 'a fairly dull viral weapon'.

Sure, if you think of it in terms of being a weapon, it's not an armageddon weapon, but very few madmen want those anyway.

One of the food delivery apps available where I live initially started offering no-contact delivery as optional, after a few days no-contact was default and I think now it's the only option for delivery.

You can't fully reduce the risk from aerosol, as who says that in an apartment building someone didn't pass by 5 minutes before and went all disciple of Nurgle by coughing their lungs out, but that is that.

So much potential wasted by subpar tooling. Although I earn money as a C# developer and F# should be the logical choice, I am still studying OCaml right now.

Retractions are kind of a bandaid. They should not even be needed if journalists did their due diligence. Worst case I personally saw was a claim by a journalism lecturer that a small news site was alt-right from its inception and wrote a long screed lambasting the site - no, it wasn't, it got sold to a different owner a couple of years after creation because the original owners could not monetize it.

They even got the year of the creation of the site wrong. So, a person teaching journalism didn't even bother running a WHOIS query and spending 2 EUR to run a query against business registry. If that is the level of the teachers, then what can you expect from the people they taught?

I think the amount of trust depends on the team and what they are supposed to deliver. For example, I think that VS Code and Power BI teams can be trusted to have monthly updates that improve the product. But on the other hand, I am never able to trust MS on shipping any language features, as I got burnt so hard by .NET Core 1.0 and F# tooling in VS2017.

Yes, that case was a final wake-up call for me to start migrating as much as I can away from Google. Phone is the hardest part - I do like Android much more than iOS, but the risk of getting randomly banned by some deep neural net without any recourse is something that I can't accept anymore.

I think it is caused by Atlassian changing their branding: since most people did not bother to capitalize 'JIRA', they branded it as 'Jira'. By the way, I am on an older version of Confluence and it autocorrects the other way: 'Jira' to 'JIRA'.

Are there any soil biologists around on who can comment on the viability of this? Because as far as I understand, the land under permafrost in Russia is pretty much tundra and in Greenland, it's gravel. So it would take centuries to make it tillable compared to the timescale of decades we have before current breadbaskets lose the production capacity.

Did it always used to do that, wasn't it VirtualBox only in the beginning? Also, https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/Virtualization-Documentatio...

You can put a reverse proxy in front of it to provide at least basic authentication measures and force HTTPS. Better than nothing at least.

But the main problem is that unsecured clusters by default have caused a lot of reputation loss to the brand. When every few months news hit about yet another unsecured Elasticsearch cluster that leaked huge amounts of data, it is getting harder and harder to explain to the less informed how that is the fault of those people who did not even bother running a reverse proxy, not the fault of Elasticsearch itself.

The problem with Elastic is that their security features are not in the open core and so people tend to skip on that by not even rolling their own IP whitelisting/authentication with a reverse proxy. This results in a huge information leak ending up in the news every few months and you having to explain to your sysadmins and IT that no, Elasticsearch is not insecure as a product, it's just how those people at SoLoMo PwnMeNow Inc. used it.

There is a good reason why people are escaping small towns. If you are even a little bit outside of the mold, such as being into reading instead of cars as a guy, you will be ostracized by a huge part of the community. And may God have mercy on you if you are into the really weird stuff, such as liking programming, tinkering with electronics or anime.