ReactOS is essentially a ground-up reimplementation of Windows XP.
Joe Enduser doesn’t really know anything about Windows either, so the help desk shouldn’t have any issues.
Plus, as we already established, Joe Enduser will do just fine with Chrome wherever it’s running; those specialized OSes are for specialized tools run by specialists.
Those proprietary tools mostly run on DOS, Windows XP, and in some cases Windows 7.
That’s a solved issue for the most part, between DOSBox, ReactOS, Bazzite and Linux with WINE. And for the most part, those tools can still run XP in offline mode; they’re never going to be upgraded to a modern OS anyway.
The Canadian government mostly moved to web-based systems a number of years ago anyway; it’s public servant computers that are mostly stuck with Windows — and they don’t need to be.
The bigger challenge is in how to get them off Google Chrome, since there’s a lot of stuff that requires Chrome (as opposed to Chromium) to run properly.
On top of OpenBSD, I really don’t see why Canada needs a Windows replacement when open source replacements already exist? And we can already run NextCloud-AIO with EuroOffice on top.
The only things missing are AI and surveillance— and there’s a perfectly functional open source agentic tool that can run open models. And nobody really wants the surveillance.
CanoOS — I haven’t figured out what the second O is for yet, but it has to be there.
…minus whatever cut Trump demands.
The big issue is when older communication standards stop being supported and you lose access to 3G, 802.11n, TLS1.2, etc. at that point, the device becomes an offline-only device.
That said, I have an iPad 2 I picked up in 2011 that still functions perfectly except for web browsing. Works great as a jailbroken emulator, an eBook reader, running all the same offline apps I used in 2011, and the original battery still lasts for 8 hours on a charge.
I’m wondering about the legally bit though. If the things are there illegally, removing them without damaging anything they’re connected to… someone’s going to have to say “Hey, that’s mine! I’m the one who illegally installed that thing! It belongs to me!”
Since they still have them there and haven’t claimed them, couldn’t they be claimed by anyone as abandoned salvage?
I wonder if this also means literally anyone can take them down and salvage the hardware?
What always confused me about that is that I could look at my own eyes over years and see that SOMETHING was acting as a lymphatic drain — so I always took that as a “we don’t care enough to figure it out.”
Trump: “It’s my house, I can invite who I want to invite.”
Also Trump: “If I invite you to my house, it’s illegal for you to not show up!”
If the model is just a model, a pre-trained probability seive, what difference does it make if someone is abusive? If it causes a token spike, the user has to pay for that. The abuse shouldn’t survive beyond the context window and the model isn’t wired up to “feel” or suffer.
So is this a publicity stunt (“Our model is as intelligent and human as a real person”), or is it about social influence/normalization—they worry that if people become accustomed to abusing the prompt, that will trickle over into other social interactions?
Wireguard is generally fast and secure. All the other transport options fail on at least one of those (OpenVPN is secure and slow, L2TP is slow and insecure, IPSec and IKEv2 are less secure and brittle).
Essentially, the one downside to Wireguard is prevalence. So if you can find somewhere trustworthy that it IS an option, why not?
That said, I do wonder why more people don’t turn to global Tailscale networks and bypass central control. Of course, you DO need some way to establish trust for your Tailscale network.
If you’re willing to pay though, why not just spin up a VPS somewhere and run Tailscale on it? You control the logging, Your exit node is on a trusted netblock, and you can connect whatever you want to it over Wireguard.
Seems like it should theoretically be possible to have AI subscribe to all the news feeds (AP, Reuters, NewsWire, public reporting databases, legal and police feeds, websites of all registered non-profits, etc.) and generate hyper-localized page content linked to an ad network.
As long as you pull in more in ad revenue than you pay in tokens and infrastructure costs, it’s a win — once someone sets up such a system, they just need to fix things when they break; most of the process would be automated and self-healing.
I’m surprised we haven’t seen more attempts at this. Would it be slop? Definitely. But it would be profitable slop.
If any other dev lab had approached security the way they did, they’d be massively sued for negligence. And the suits would succeed.
We aren’t in the dot com bubble anymore.
And the voter registration list culling?
What’s that in Olympic swimming pools?
So that’s over 1,000 unverified proofs published now?
At that volume, it becomes noise; someone still has to read, understand, validate and be able to apply those proofs before they become useful.
No, because Apple and Google aren’t providing third parties access to the Internet through your devices.
And this is why I block all ad scripts. Sure, I might want to support the website, but I’m not going to run an unvetted third party’s scripts. Display passive ads and I’ll give them my views. Curate them appropriately and I may even click through.