Thanks for correcting me. Considering a long is also 32 bits, a “Long Pointer” being 32 bits makes sense.

Identifying the windows string types is fun. The letters are supposed to have a meaning. Without looking them up, my guess is:

LP_ - Length Prepended
C_STR - C string / null-terminated
WSTR - “Wide” string / utf-16
TSTR - I have no idea

The H in HGDIOBJ could mean “handle to” and if I’m remembering right, GDI is a Windows graphics drawing interface.

He got off the couch? That’s worrying; couches are inanimate.

Popsicle = should take a seat over there
One-eyed monster = a fan of Austin Powers

It won’t at first. If more essential websites start to unnecessarily adopt it, it will start to lock Linux users out of being able to access the services necessary to exist in modern society.

Imagine if you need age/identity verification to:

• Do banking
• Make online purchases
• File your taxes
• Book a doctor’s appointment
• Apply for a job

The working class isn’t their target audience. They are selling AI to other companies with the promise that AI will be able to increase their profits by replacing expensive and needy meatbag workers.

The AI companies’ goal is to siphon wealth away from other businesses, and the other businesses’ goal is to accumulate wealth by siphoning it away from workers. It will grind the economy to a halt once the lower class can’t afford to spend money anymore while they hoard their wealth. With the way things are going right now, the next step after that will be living in a technofedualist dystopia ruled by the few ultra-wealthy who invested in private compounds and armed militias.

We should be praying for the AI bubble to burst before AI can start succeeding in eliminating workers.

Meta is funding a lot of the lobbyists pushing for age verification laws. Uncoincidentally, Meta both owns a stake in a company providing identity verification as a service, and serves to benefit from not having to moderate its own platforms.

It’s like Secure Boot, but without any of those pesky self-signing workarounds.

“But that’s unenforceable”, some will claim.

And to that, let me remind us all of a little-known concept called cryptographic attestation. If that doesn’t ring any bells, then the term “secure boot” should.

Once this shit passes into law, that’s the next step. Operating system vendors have their private keys to sign attestation tokens saying “John Johnson is an adult” and you’re only getting one if you verify your government ID. When you go to a website, your browser sends your signed token to the website and then the website checks if it’s a valid token signed by Microsoft, Apple, or Google.

But Linux?, you may be wondering. No. No Linux. Kiss it good-bye. Your bank will “require” identity attestation for “extra security”, and your bank doesn’t give a fuck about Linux. Your bank will check against whatever list of public keys they want to trust, and it ain’t going to include anything not backed by a global megacorporation.

The man’s getting a two-for-one special of losing both a flame war and a real war.

That is incredibly ironic.

It relies on the .NET runtime already existing on the system, so it can’t even be excused as a false positive mistaking an embedded language runtime as malware.

Either way, somebody pays Apple $10} a year. After paying them the equivalent of a kidney for the hardware. No thanks.

–no-preserve-root

What language was it written in? I read that Microsoft Defender likes to flag the baked-in runtime of some languages as malware because they commonly shows up in actual nalware.

Deeper areas are darker? Oh yeah, then explain why a flat swimming pool has dark patterns on the bottom! Checkmate, translucency believers. /s

They’re aware of their influence over the news cycle and public discourse. It says a lot that they prefer to focus the spotlight on a war even their supporters don’t want than those files.

If the files were a nothing burger, you know they would be bringing up them as a distraction instead.

Whataboutism

Good luck convincing tankies with that definition. They will just claim the definition doesn’t count because “the UN is a Western imperialist facade pushing US propaganda.” The same goes for any source that doesn’t agree with their ideals, for that matter.

Anyone following the thread can see that the “accusation” being referred to is China being imperialist.