I was working on server side stuff back then and IIS was never dominant - it was more a hodge-podge of various solutions including stuff like Sun’s proprietary stuff on top of SunOS, and indeed IIS was also in the mix though at least in my experience it never really overtook the Unix-based solutions.

But yeah, Apache with Linux came out and took pretty much the whole webservers and web-services market pretty fast, and Linux itself took over most of the broader server-side market (so, stuff beyond serving web-pages or REST interfaces).

Windows NT had a bit of a moment before that, but it didn’t grew all that big on the server side because of competing Unix solutions back then (SunOS, IBM AIX and so on) and then Linux came and pretty much crushed NT server-side for anything but serving Microsoft-ecosystem-specific stuff (such as services supporting single sign-on for Windows).

Oh yeah, I remember that.

Shame that he’s one of the ones who plowed, sowed and fertilized the field were anti-EU populism grew strong.

His was the usual “magical” thinking of technocratic neoliberals in Finance who grew up in stable Democracies - the idea that you can Financially and Economically tilt the field as much as you want to favor a handful of people whilst disfavoring the majority and there will be no consequences outside of Finance & Economics (which they control).

This was quite a widespread way of thinking back then amongst Finance and Political circles in Britain - the idea that in Democracy control over Economics was the same as total control.

The reality was of course quite different: the pain suffered by the many as a result of the decision that Asset Owners should be saved using Austerity for the rest to pay for it, generated a social and political pushback which the Far-Right and the section of the very rich who funded such parties (many of whom also owned tabloids pushing such ideas) skillfully redirected towards anti-immigration and anti-EU feelings, which in turn ended up causing Brexit.

Similar things happened all over Europe, but because Britain was already thoroughly subverted by far-right tabloids and had a stronger and deeper Austerity than the rest (thanks in part to Mr Carney) there it happened sooner and harder, plus the results from Brexit were a warning to the rest of Europe and as the public opinion in the rest of Europe quickly turned against the idea of referendums on leaving the EU after seeing the shit show in Britain, the Far-Right parties there quickly shut up with their previous anti-EU rhetoric, so things haven’t become quite the shit shot as in Britain, though we did see the Far Right growing following the political and Economic choices made after the Crash, which were along similar lines as those in Britain in the Eurozone too, just not quite as nasty in most of it (with the notable exception of Greece, which was made to suffer to save German and French banks).

Just because Democracies don’t tend to end in Revolution, doesn’t mean that pain inflicted through Economic means doesn’t end up generating some kind of social and political pushback.

Just avoid like the plague brands that sponsor World Cups.

I’ve been doing it since the last one in Qatar (because of the slave-like conditions for workers there) and am doing it for the current one also (because, well, mass-murdering Fascists supporting the XXI century version of the Nazis whilst they activelly mass-murder children because of the “crime” of not being White Jews).

As it so happens, a happy side effect is often that not consuming products of those brands (which are invariably large brands) means you produce less disposable stuff and/or consume more local products. You even end up saving money because you either stop consuming something that you don’t actually need or you replace it with a store brand, and those are cheaper.

Win-win-win.

I’m neither Canadian nor live in Canada.

I did, however, live in Britain when Mark was the head of the Bank Of England.

His policy during his tenure there, which started a bit after the 2008 Crash, was to sacrifice workers and income from work in order to protect and even grow at a faster pace the wealth of Asset Owners and Bankers.

During at least several years of his period there (can’t talk about the entirety of it, since I left the country before he left his job), real incomes of the lower 90% of the population were falling at around 1% a year, whilst for the top 10% they were rising at over 20% per year.

Mark Carney was the Bank Of England Governor of Austerity, a widespread pain which almost certainly was decisive in causing Leave to win the Leave Referendum and thus Brexit.

Unless, he has massivelly changed as a persom since the days when he was getting paid a massive salary to in a time when everybody was suffering, make sure the ultra-rich and sleazy bankers not just kept their riches but actually saw them grow faster than before (doing so by sacrificing the working class and the income from work), he doesn’t give a shit about people losing their jobs unless they’re his mates.

Could it be whatever blackmail material Israel seems to have on him?!

Being able to track people is a desired feature, not a happy coincidence of leaving it to the private sector.

Go see who voted for Chat Control in the EU Parliament and who you see voting for it is the mainstream parties which have been well entreched in power as a power duopoly and which have been Neoliberal for decades.

They want the mechanics of Autocracy in place because it makes it easier to spot dissent and interfere in attempts to change the system that keeps them in power and makes them personally very wealthy from doing favors with the power they hold to very rich, very thankful, friends.

I reckon a nice cold beer would’ve been a better charitable donation.

Also if launching from Lutris you can setup something like Firejail as command prefix (per-game or as default for all wine games) so that Wine (and everything run via it) runs sandboxed.

If running it via Lutris or from the command line you can use as command prefix a proper sandboxing application like Firejail so that wine itself is launched inside a sandbox.

For example I have it set up in Lutris so that by default all my games run with networking disabled.

As per your point, Wine is just an adaptor layer not an emulator or sandbox, so a Windows binary running in Wine can try and load Linux libraries and start doing Linux stuff rather than Windows stuff if it succeeds (in other words, it’s perfectly possible to make Windows malware that acts as Linux malware when it detects its running with Wine)

I’m more worried about other “enemies” of the American Regime, such as journalists, syndicalists, foreign politicians (including in “allied” nations) and even just people who have access to things as simple as internal strategical information in companies that compete with American companies.

I mean, once you have access to it thanks to things like the Cloud Act and the Patriot Act, it’s not exactly hard to use internal access to Microsoft and LinkedIn systems to automate mass industrial espionage by linking people to certain positions in companies competing with American companies and specific computers to those people and then push a special Windows Update to track what they’re doing and documents that pass through them (though with Windows 11 I bet the eavesdropping part is already done by default on all computers with the data sent to MS).

It makes it easier for Microsoft to know where to push that very special Windows Update that installs whatever the NSA wants installed in the computer of some journalist, foreign politician, syndicalist, high level manager on a foreign company that competes with an American company and other such “extremists”.

Look, with things like the Goldberg Emulator almost all games that use the Steam API can work without Steam as it provides you with a drop-in replacement to the steam api dll.

The main practical differences between Steam and GOG is are:

• You need to have certain technical skills to work around Steam’s (often very weak) locking. Not crazy high (basically how to navigate a filesystem), but some.
• In Steam you do NOT know at the time of the purchase if that will actually work or not (games heavily integrated with the Steam API still won’t work with the Emulator) or if the game has or not further DRM, so you CANNOT make an informed purchasing decision in terms of “will I still have access to these games in the future no matter what”.
• You know for certain that games in GOG have no DRM, theirs or from the publisher’s, because CONTRACTUALLY GOG forces the publishers to not have DRM in their games to sell via GOG.

Personally I buy tons of games from GOG and only a handful from Steam because I do value the certainty that if I have the hardware and OS for it (or an emulator), I can still have fun with those games 10 or 20 years in the future. Then again I’ve been gaming for almost 4 decades hence have enough experience with getting to a point were I miss a game that was fun but can’t run it anymore.

PS: Funny enough, my latest return to sailing the seven seas was because of an oldish game I have in Steam that wouldn’t run in Linux with Proton, probably because of the original DRM from the game itself. The pirated version runs just fine. I strongly suspect that if that game ever got sold in GOG it would also run just fine in Linux.

And you can get a crack for most DRM out there (nowadays, even Denuvo).

Being weak and possible to work around for those with sufficient technical skill doesn’t make it any less a DRM.

Steam’s DRM is clearly only trying to stop the people with average and below technical skills from installing and running the games outside steam, not trying to stop the people with higher technical expertise from going around it (and in fact if you use something like the Goldberg Emulator there are even more games which can be made to run outside Steam than just the “many” you talk about).

By comparison the no-DRM posture you see in with GOG is not only “here are the offline installers to download” directly from the page for the game in your library but even “CONTRACTUALLY game publishers cannot sell games here with ANY DRM”.

“The rules are there but we don’t enforce them” is a very different posture from “we make sure there are no such rules”.

You can do this right now with the Goldberg Emulator, but it doesn’t work well for games which are deeply integrated with Steam’s API (for example, to do things like Cloud Saves).

And Gabe can have a accident or a heart attack tomorrow and die and then it’s not a benevolent autocrat that controls your game collection anymore …

I do know how the SMTP protocol works.

Just because the envelope is not sealed doesn’t mean that the state should be allowed to get a photocopy of what’s inside to be perused by some apparatchik if they feel like it WITH NOT EVEN A SUSPICION OF A CRIME MUCH LESS JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT

Is this shit Democracy or is Autocracy with a bit of Theater of Democracy on top?

They still get to eavesdrop on your e-mails.

You know, the digital version of mail.

Guess who used to open and read people’s mail … oh, yeah, the political police of every fucking dictatorship in Europe (both Fascist and Communist) during the XX century.

This is the shit these people in supposedly Democratic nations have enacted.

If you’re a citizen in an EU member state, I suggest you have a look at who are the MEPs in you country who voted for this shit. In mine - Portugal - which had a Fascist dictatorship complete with mail opening secret police, this was passed entirely with the votes of the mainstream parties and even the far-right voted against it.

It dissipates righteous indignation by making sure that people feel the satisfaction and the release of “doing something” (and thus not act any more forcefully) whilst said “something” is the least impactful thing imaginable.

It ultimately makes those who would do more do less instead.

Not only would that solve this little problem, it would reduce Google’s power and remove one’s data from the claws of US authorities (were the Patriot and Cloud acts let them mass track everybody using a Google product).

Just make sure you chose a non-US Linux phone.

Most online petitions are nothing more than a way to safely (for those targeted and for those amongst the authorities who support them even against the public interest) dissipate the common people’s righteous indignation, by making them feel like they “did something” whilst said something is just about the least impactful thing imaginable.

(Some official ones, for example those mandating parliamentary sessions on the subject if they reach a certain threshold, might not be so, though its unclear as it really depends on the legislation around it allowing politicians to just ignore it at will)

This bullshit will require a lot more than adding your name into a list on some corner of the web in some legal jurisdiction where they’re free to sell your private information.