There’s no oversight for any of these agencies and they have the means and incentive to backdoor cryptography, what would stop them from doing this morality? There’s no possible way that they both aren’t compromised and all we’re seeing now is them firing pot shots at each other trying to convince the reader to join their honeypot because its sweeter.

Microsoft certainly tries it’s best to keep you locked into their ecosystem by making it inconvenient but not impossible to leave though that’s not the real reason, it’s security. Businesses and especially governments are scared of nation state hackers contributing malicious code to open source products and falsely assume it’s safer to use closed source software because those incidents aren’t public. There’s so much great software out there I’d love to use and the first question I’m asked when I bring it up is can you prove China hasn’t contributed code?

Just set this up last night, it’s very handy for working with pdf’s.

The hyper text markup language programming language?

Companies love to install backdoors and proprietary software for drivers that act suspiciously like spyware, it’s their favorite past time. So while the OS may be trustworthy the additional software they install is not.

I wanted to do my own self-hosted storage but for the cost and features I went with Dropbox. It’s $10 a month if you prepay for the year otherwise it’s $12 and you get two terabytes of storage. For that you get all the same things most self-hosted solutions will offer including 30 days of versioning/backups. Additionally it’s pretty popular so most software has built in integration which is convenient but not something you need. Bottom line is doing your own storage can be cheap but adding off-site backups gets expensive and just going straight to off-site backups (cloud storage) is going to be close to the $10-$12 dollars you’ll pay anyway but you have to do all the work.

It was oil, not poppies.

AT&T

We had a bad lightning storm happen in the area where I was working every day and it damaged the cellular tower so you couldn’t get service anymore in that area. After a week of waiting for them to repair it I called to see what was going on and they told me they weren’t going to repair it as that area was going to be upgraded to the latest cellular technology at the time, but it wasn’t expected to be done for another four months. They offered me a single $25 credit if I’d keep paying them $80 a month to provide nothing. I don’t think my phone would have even supported their new network even if they did make their changes in a reasonable time. My favorite part was when I got transferred to cancellations department they asked if there was anything they could do, “Yes provide cellular service.” “Sorry, we can’t do that.” 😂

Not just mall cops, it’s just people in general in any position of power. When I was young I used to host game servers for a community I created and liked to have a decent amount of people to administrate them and keep the games fun for everyone. There were people playing for months and always seemed reasonable and level headed and I’d see if they would be interested and most jumped at the chance to be more involved in the community. Every once in awhile though those reasonable and level headed individuals once they got some measure of authority went absolutely crazy and there’s no indication of who it would be. People can be the exact opposite too, they clown around taking nothing seriously always trying to push boundaries, but then you give them some responsibility and suddenly they are the most responsible person you’ve ever met, they just needed a chance to show it.

Red Faction?

You could have just said “Point blank with 99% chance to hit and you miss.”

That or they’re running an instance and want people to leave here and join theirs. Would make sense for someone who wants to manipulate content and people, crush the popular instance and you’re more likely to inherit those users.