Interesting sidenote: when I was younger some guy who seemed to know it all said you have to call int main, and that void main might only be possible on Windows and C99. In recent years I've turned to ANSI C (2nd edition) as a happy place away from the internet and such and learned you can indeed have 'void main' all along.
I emailed a long rambling email to Void Main and while I got no response, the mail server was there as was his site. I didn't get a response.
I have tried reaching Calum, a guy I got to know my the name Declan, Refalm (the sexist MESser ever), and others to get the band back together and oppose soyware everywhere!
I recommend you do the same in your contacts, but I have recommended to Refalm that it stop being just about Microsoft. I've just landed myself the domain stopsoy.software today, but I have created a virtual host or anything for it.
I would actually like a database dump for this site, I think, password hashes not required as this site was always categorized pretty well. The main thing that has to change is instead of the enemy being Microsoft it be more general causes. Things like software and technology that is hard to maintain, uses vendor lock in (remember how once you could share that Facebook post by email or whatever you liked?), a bad security record, useless cryptography (end to end encrypted, won't let you password protect your private keys), and things like that would be the subjects instead.
I will also say that Apple has become an awful producer of soyware, I've only ever had two Macs. I have an old m68k mac classic, but I got an old Mac Mini (2011) on ebay and went to upgrade it to an SSD. I didn't have a tiny Torx driver to remove it's fiddly special treatment cooler, so I ripped those screws out with pliers. I wish I knew someone with a metals workshop, because if I just sawed the side of the case off the drive would kind of just be there. I put it back together with duct tape, but actually I think a little bit ended up in the fan which itself now needs disassembly.
The fact is Apple have become the lowest of bastards in many ways, I also had an iPad as a gift which was kind of nice. I could jailbreak it and fuck around to make it useful again. The App Store can't simply send me an obsolete Netflix for my obsolete iOS and things. I'm a pretty libertarian guy, but hippity hoppity this device is my fucking property! My Google Pixel on the other hand will let me click my way into an apk impulsively that ruins my entire life, and change the firmware and such.
I'll rant about one more thing, which was a shitty ISP I signed up for 'Dodo' (Australia), being a King of the intertubes I turned on their ISP-side content protections for kiddos. It worked by blocking 443 except for a handful of whitelisted sites that have policies themselves against porn and shit. It was basically a protocol downgrade attack and you would not get port 443 for zillions of sites, basically exposing kids and their private chats to mitm attacks.
Oh, and then you get the soymedia, a few years ago some fake articles popped up as well as a Linus tech tips video about Tor hidden services. It falsely claimed these involve exit nodes when they actually just use relays, and clearly everyone involved in spreading this shit was under duress. It was FUD to scare people away from Tor, by falsely referencing abusive exit nodes on the network. At the time, Tor had a nice illustrated page that made it clear how hidden services work.
Oh, but I'm not done! Soyware! Here is some fucking soyware: big government climate models failing to account properly for a massive reduction in sulfur dioxide emitted in the shipping industry. Yes, massive supercomputer next-gen edition soyware here! The chemical has a cooling effect, and the rest of the fuel industry don't want the sulpher and it would ruin many kinds of engines (it's fucking salt). It has issues with being toxic, and for busy ports a danger to human health. Al Gore forgot to put some things in a spreadsheet, and decided to rename global warming to climate change. It never occured to these soyelites at the UN IPCC and other government bodies that we were also unintendedly creating cooling by seeding clouds.
And nobody ever hears about solar flares, or that we are approaching a solar maximum but ham radio people. Anyway, it's going to be a fucking hot summer here for me, and much worse next year. There are solutions to a lot of the things I discuss here, and all of them involve more people grasping concepts for themselves. We live in vast democracies of fucking idiots taking things for granted, accepting it all to be too far beyond them. It seems to get worse and worse as time goes by, and more luxury is available to them at lower cost.
I think a battle regarding software would demonstrate this point the best, it's easy to find reference to anything inside any good software online. Open source exists as the way the market has come to establish trust and peer review in the heart of the Internet. I think it's a nice thing to do to help a couple of people know how to keep a Linux computer handy and up to date, and this gives them an altenative when their main PC has been ransomwared or destroyed. I have for similar reasons, and the global warming above a CB radio and a nice AM/FM radio for disaster.
I find I get some people taking an interest in proper open source cryptographic communications and secure key exchange, by pointing out how TLS and cert authorities ultimately come down to trade mark laws and protections from fraud more than anything else. I remember when I was much youger, 20 years ago, when this site had the word fuck in the domain name people thought any kind of mitm was too paranoid. These days you can just jump on a persons LAN in any way you like, and finally bring them IPv6 and have SLAAC make you their IPv6 router! A few other little details with the TLS, like a captive portal that claims to be Soyweb (fictional ISP) 'you must install this CA cert into your operating system to proceed, because of new security requirements' and their UI never tells them it can sign any god damn domain name it wants and open them up to SSL inspection.
And I'll contradict my own libertarian ideals and little and say, that trademark and consumer laws are not protecting end users here. Companies will honestly use a bit of open source to offer the latest and greatest technologies Linus Tech Tips can speed scroll through on Wikipedia, but they will often be completely redundant.
Want a fucking VPN, here:
https://github.com/angristan/openvpn-install and
https://cockbox.orgI'll end on a positive note, Elon Musk has realised that a company should not micromanage it's billions of users with a cheap AI all to prevent kneejerk offense. Yet, in twenty years hoardes of people might have to pay him $25 a month to turn off the advertising among their own thoughts.
At the same time when people actually do read and study, well, drug addicts clearly do pretty well in using open source and cryptography well! All of that driven my emotions of paranoia but towards a productive direction for the rest of their minds. And for myself, there have been many times I was careful with production work because of a deep seated anxiety allowing me to be fully aware that I was grasping at straws and had better be fucking careful.
Relax, do therapy, buy Avast, always use a VPN, pay some faggot to run 'sfc /scannow' and MSRT, scroll nice Facebook posts, and never argue or learn anything in life ever again. Dumb consumers, waging away at undignified work and everything outside of that especially the computer is an escape from reality for them. I have this old Raspberry Pi 3 which is a NAT router of a VPS in Bulgaria, just to give these kind of creatures some wifi without fearing for my safety and property.
/rant
