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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • That’s true.
    But the idea is that there are no precompiled binaries that are implicitly trusted.
    So you CAN vet all of the code and artefacts, and if something doesn’t seem right you can trace it back to the code and understand exactly why, instead of seeing a black-box binary and coming to the conclusion “it’s doing something it shouldn’t, but I don’t know what or why”.
    The idea is that you are in control of the entire build process.

    But yes, it would be extremely time consuming to vet GCC, build it from source and (I guess) compare checksum/hashes against published binaries. Then vet all of the source code of everything you need to compile for Gentoo, then compile that and compare checksum/hashes etc.
    Which is why it’s in a 4chan meme.

    But I imagine governments agency will have some deblobbed Linux installs with the technical capacity to vet all the code and artefacts


  • It’s referring to binary blobs. A windows exe might be a binary blob.
    These are distributed compiled. Even if the project is open sources, the binary blob might have been generated by a compromised compiler.

    This is one of the reasons the XZ Utils compromisation went unnoticed for so long. One of the compressed files used for testing contained malicious code that would be included in the build artefacts (IE, the final compiled binary) under very narrow and specific circumstances.

    So “deblobbed” means absolutely everything in the OS was built & compiled on their computer from original source code


  • The planned obsolescence is most likely a deliberate trade off rather than actual planned obsolescence.

    If fast charging did do significant damage to battery life and this was known at the time of implementation, the decision would have been “users want fast charging phones” Vs “users want devices that last a long time”.
    In this instance, the convenience of fast charging absolutely would have won.

    “Users want a clear and easy to use device” Vs “users want a robust device”. Which is why we all have glass screens, and the glass technology had to catch up to further expectations.

    “Users want easy wireless connectivity” Vs “users want fast and reliable network speeds”. WiFi wins, and has to catch up to further expectations.