The internet is changing in lots of ways. With companies like Twitter (or I guess X now?) and Reddit making controvercial changes in the interest in making a boatload of money, AI models inching their ways into every inch of our world and governments all around the world trying more than ever to block websites that threaten their interests, the web is looking a lot different now than it did even 5 years ago. You may not find too much issue with it, but lots of people don't like where things are going.

Adding to this, Google is working on something that I and many others believe will negatively effect the internet. It's called Web Environment Integrity, and it will essentially apply the same digital restrictions we see with movies and music (Digital Rights Management or DRM) to the entirety of the internet, including restricting how we access it, and the tools we use to remove some of the worse elements of it.

DRM applied to the web

As a quick explaination of what DRM is for those who don't know what that is, it is a technology that is applied to digital media such as movies and music that is meant to prevent piracy, but also restricts things so much that it has the potential to punish people who bought the content legally. If you've ever owned a movie, but you could only watch it on certain devices or apps, you've been screwed over by DRM. Imagine this, but applied to the web

What is Google doing?

Web Environment Integrity basically looks to provide a sense of trust to the web. It would allow any website that implements it to restrict which clients can access the site. This means that if your web browser or whatever app you are using to access the site is considered a "trusted client" then it can access the site. Otherwise, it won't be able to. This all sounds good enough on it's own, but it introduces a number of issues that have the potential to restrict peoples' digital freedoms on the internet.

Lets look at the trusted client bit for a second. This means that a browser has to implement the technology to be trusted by websites that also implement it. Since Google also owns Chrome, this presents the risk of making Chrome and other browsers based on it (like Edge) the only browsers that are "trusted," basically making them the only browsers you can use. This is concerning because it gives Google the power to shut out the competition as far as browsers go, and it also shows just how much control Google has over something that is supposed to be open and not controlled by any single entity.

Of course, there is the potential that other browsers could implement this, but most aren't keen on stuff that restricts digital rights on the web. Firefox for example fights for an open web, which Web Environment Integrity goes against. This snuffs out any Firefox based browsers, including ones that are made to help people get around censorship from oppressive governments.

Finally, this will affect certain extensions that block ads and trackers for the sake of privacy. While this is a win for those who rely on ads for revenue, it will also remove protections from trackers that collect more data than they should, as well as ads that contain malware. Going back to the browsers that wouldn't implement this, there are many browsers like Brave and DuckDuckGo that would never allow this due to the privacy hit, thus eliminating them as an option for browsing the web.

How does this affect me?

To make this easy, I will split this into three bits for three groups:

• People who use something that isn't Chrome
• People who use ad and tracker blockers
• People who just use use Chrome.

Note: For the sake of simplicity, Chrome will also refer to Edge since they are based on the same code

People who don't use Chrome

For anyone who uses a browser that isn't Chrome, such as Firefox, Brave or DuckDuckGo, then your browser is at risk of being denied access to certain sites on the internet unless they implement Web Environment Integrity. And if they do implement it, they would do so at the cost of digital freedom privacy, as they would be implementing something that would render ad and tracker blockers that's made by a company who's entire business model is based around collecting user data.

People who use ad and tracker blockers

As touched on above, this will essentially render any ad blockers and tracker blockers useless. While anyone who earns revenue from ads will like this for legitimate reasons, it also poses an issue for those who use these tools for the sake of privacy, and to help protect themselves from malvertising.

People who just use Chrome

Lets say you are one of the many users who just use Chrome. In that case, chances are you won't be affected much if at all. However, that doesn't mean that everyone will be in the same boat. This will affect people who choose to use different browsers by rendering their choice basically useless, and will be a big blow to the people fighting for privacy on the internet. More importantly, this can affect people who rely on browsers like Tor to evade censorship, or to stay safe in cases like activists doing their work to improve the world, or sources speaking with the press about sensitive topics.

The final point

Google's initiative sounds like it would be a good thing on the surface, but just like most DRM systems, while it solves some problems, it introduces much bigger problems that outweigh the benefits by a lot. Therefore, I ask that everyone fight to keep the internet the open place it was meant to be, and speak out against this flawed initiative.

Let me know your thoughts

I want to hear what you think about this! Let me know what you think by contacting me at the email address on my main page https://saladhax.site, on Mastodon @[email protected] or on Threads @gortbrown.

If you know a lot about this topic, and see something that I got wrong, or have a point I forgot to mention or mentioned poorly, feel free to let me know! I'd rather be corrected if I'm wrong than just assume I am right.

One night while I was scrolling through Mastodon instead of going to bed (something I wish I could say didn't happen often) I came accross a new challenge that piqued my interest. It's called The Old Computer Challenge. The idea behind it is to see how well you can do using an old computer as your main computer for a week. Apparently in the past, this meant actually using old systems or limiting other things that were harder to limit in the 2020s. But the challenge for this year is interesting. For one week, you have to use a computer (old or new) that is limited to a single CPU core, 512mb of RAM, and the lowest CPU clock speed possible. I decided to give this a shot since it's summer for me, and the only thing I really use my main laptop for is basic entertainment and checking emails, and the stuff where I really need a fairly capable machine is for work, and is therefore done on my work laptop. The only question is, how am I going to do this?

The Hardware

So as you can probably guess from what I said above, I will be using my main laptop, the Framework Laptop 13 with a Core i5, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, which is split between Debian 12 and Windows 11. So yeah, definitely a far cry from the humble specs layed out in the challenge. Luckilly, it is possible to limit these specs in the BIOS to acomplish this on whatever hardware I want. The hard part, however, will be the software.

The Software

It's safe to say that Windows 11 probably won't be the OS of choice here, (a blessing in disguise? XD) so Linux it is. I thought about some BSD derivative, but from what I remember it doesn't support my wireless card, so that unfortunately makes it a no-go for me, as I don't have an ethernet connection anywhere but right by my router in the living room, and I don't want to tether myself to the livingroom floor for a week if I want to access the web. Anyway, I still might have to choose a bit wisely as 512MB of RAM is a bit restrictive even for some Linux systems. My plan to find a distro that will work is to try them in a VM with the restrictions in question. I think Debian 12 with a lighter desktop environment should suffice, but if not, it shouldn't be too hard to find something. As for programs, I don't think the hardware restrictions will cause much of a problem since most of what I do can be done in a web browser or a text editor, with the exception of Rocket League, which I can either do without for a week or download on my Switch.

I will try working things out, and as I plan and participate in the challenge, I will post here about it, as I think this will be a fun challenge to participate in. If you are interested in participating yourself, you can read about it in this blog post by Solene Rapenne.

It's summer vacation for me, and that means I spend a lot of time while doing remote IT stuff watching YouTube videos in the background, and reading tech articles online. As I am a big Linux nerd, I have seen a lot of articles and videos about Linux, and about the end of life for Windows 10 since that's been a bit of breaking news in the past month. But along with some of these articles and videos, I have seen a lot of responses criticising their choices. A lot of them have summed up to "Well why didn't you just do this. It's a pretty easy workaround to solve this problem." And I get it, some of those people were probably well-wishers just trying to help out. I don't really have any issue with them. I do take issue, however, with the people who posted those comments in a very "what an idiot" kind of tone. This is a friendly reminder to those people, as well as just anyone else listening: not everyone want's to do some janky workaround to get things working for them.

There are two pieces in question that have fueled this thought in my head: an article written by Jenny List on Hackaday, and a video made by CHM Tech on YouTube about the Windows 10 end-of-life.

In the article, titled Bye Bye Ubuntu, Hello Manjaro. How Did We Get Here? List talkes about the fact that she switched to Manjaro from Ubuntu, and her reasons for doing so. Specifically, she didn't like the fact that Ubuntu had gotten slower, specifically when it came to the use of Snaps for a lot of the packages. A lot of the comments were friendly conversation about the topic, but some criticized her decisions. Specifically, some asked why she was even using snap in the first place, suggesting she just uninstall it, or just use the deb packages. Of course, some people replied mentioning that some programs like Firefox were moved to Snaps, which got countered with mention of a workaround using PPAs. Now of course these workarounds aren't all that hard to do if you know what you are doing, and List seems like she is fairly savy when it comes to tech, but that doesn't automatically mean that she, or really anyone else, is just fine with a "workaround." In the article, List mentions that she wants her computer to just work, and be fairly reliable since it's what she does a lot of her work on. As good as a workaround might be, it still usually isn't perfect. I haven't explored this PPA workaround myself, but I'd imagine it comes with a few potential problems, making it less than ideal for a reliable "just works" system.

Another example is in the video, titled WINDOWS 10 EoL Reactions: 2025 The Year of Linux? It's a follow up to another video he did on the topic, where he responds to the comments on the previous video. In the previous video, he talks about how the Windows 10 end of life could negatively affect a lot of people with hardware that doesn't meet the minimum Windows 11 requirements. He didn't end up mentioning the workarounds that exist to get Windows 11 working on that older hardware, and for good reason. But a lot of people in the comments called him out for that, talking about how easy it was, and how it meant that the problems in this video didn't exist. One even commented "I can't believe people don't know how to put win 11 on older systems." That one I think would immediately put things into perspective for most people. The reason most people don't know how is because they aren't a part of the tech community, and more importantly, wouldn't want to deal with a workaround just to get the latest software (which in a lot of peoples' opinions isn't that good, or isn't really different enough to care.) Plus, this workaround can still cause issues if the hardware isn't officially supported, breaking peoples' systems.

I think the takeaway from this should be to remember that workarounds aren't the same as an actual solution. They're literally just ways someone found to get something to work by getting around the stuff that makes it not work. It's a hack. An ineligant solution made to get something to work in a way it normally wasn't supposed to. And while some people are ok with that, a lot aren't. I think it's easy to forget when you are in the tech/hacker community that most people just want their systems to work withoug having to tinker around with it to get it to perfection. We sometimes need to remember that we think of computers in a completely different way than the average person, and so some of the things we might see as an acceptible solution to a problem might not be acceptible for the average user, because they just want their system to work without having to think about implementing some workaround. And thats fine! That's how I treat my main laptop, and I'm a technically savy user. I just need something that works rather than finding some workaround. It's the whole reason I keep around a Windows 11 partition rather than running it and Visual Studio 2022 (for my classes and a few projects) in a virtual machine. And if you are fine with a hacky workaround solution, there's no issue with that! Just remember that that doesn't work for everyone, tech savy or not.

One of the biggest new trends to hit the desktop Linux world is immutable distros. If you listen to any podcasts or watch any videos related to Linux, you've probably heard about them at least once, if not a few times. I've heard and experienced mostly great things about immutable distros, but I have also heard some criticisms about them. I have officially switched to Fedora Sodalite (Kinoite with the Sodalite image applied to it) on my Framework Laptop, and wanted to share my thoughts about what makes immutable distros so great.

If you haven't heard of these, or you just need a bit of a refresher, the concept of an immutable OS is based around the idea that a lot of the more critical files and directories are read only. This means you can't simply get into a file somewhere in a system directory and change it without a special tool. When applied to Linux, this means all but a few directories on root (like /home and /etc) can't be written to normally. This makes the system a bit more stable, as it is much harder to break your system by accidentally editing a file incorrectly or having a program break something somewhere.

This means for the most part, programs are run in containers. A lot of the apps you run, especially graphical ones will usually be installed via Flatpak. Otherwise, immutable distros will usually have the ability to create a container for a given system like Fedora or Arch, and supply a normal environment running just about any program. This is similar to how it works in MacOS (minus the container thing unless I am missing something.) And of course, you can still install programs and make changes directly to your system, but usually this requires a tool like OSTree or ABRoot, which will create a new image containing the modified system, and will load it after rebooting. This also usually allows you to revert back to older images, meaning that if you do end up breaking something, you can easily just revert back to a working system.

A lot of people find this idea interesting, while some others feel like it's locking things down too much and taking away their ability to customize their systems. I can kind of understand this if you are really into customizing your system down to the letter. For the record, there are a lot of ways that you can customize immutable distros, such as building you own custom images, or using OSTree or ABRoot to customize more general distros, but I can still see why this might not be appealing to some people. But I also don't think immutable distros are really meant for that kind of Linux user.

I believe that immutable distros are made for people who want a rock-solid system that has less of a chance of breaking on them. For example, I switched to immutable Fedora on my main laptop because that is where I do most of my work as a student. And as someone who likes to tinker around with stuff a lot, I found that sometimes my system would sometimes get kind of wonky, and on occasion I have even broken stuff, causing me to have to back things up and re-install my distro. That's not something I really want for my laptop that I use for just about everything, including my coursework. For my customizing itch, I just have an old but working desktop (or rather an old laptop motherboard I threw in an old case) to tinker around and distro-hop on, and my laptop will just be the solid system I can do my work on.

I also think that immutable distros can be a good option for normal users. I believe that an immutable distro could make Linux more approachable to less technical users, because you can just install Flatpaks from the Software app, and never touch the terminal sicne a lot of the system stuff is just set in stone. It also makes it a little harder to potentially break things because the system is read only. The way I see it, something like Fedora Silverblue could easilly be a good FOSS alternative to MacOS for most users.

So while some people don't like the idea of immutable distros, I think that they definitely have their place. And that's the magic of Linux being an open source project. There can be immutable distros for those who want something more stable that just works, customizable distros for those who want to tinker to their hearts content, and other distros for whatever people need in an operating system. Regardless of what your thoughts on immutable distros are, I think they are definitely here to stay.

I've always been fascinated by repairing old tech. My first repair was when I was in 7th grade, and I fixed the screen on my brother's Galaxy Tab. After that, I became obsessed with repairing tech. Eventually, that obsession led me to learn about fixing laptops and computers, and I still try to salvage old parts to throw together into something I can mess around with. I've messed with all sorts of old laptops, and even a couple of old desktop towers I found in the dumpsters outside my dorms near the end of the school year. But there's one device that I find interesting because it's been used by various people in my family for a good chunk of the past 10 years, and I'm officially using it today, In fact, I'm writing this post on it right now!

The Laptop in Question

This laptop is an old Acer Aspire v5 laptop from the Windows 8 era that belonged to my mom. It broke years before I took a crack at trying to get it working again, and my mom got herself a new one. Sometime during my junior year of high school, I found it and asked if I could tinker with it. My mom said yes, as it was just sitting there collecting dust, and I got to work. I found an old hard drive lying around that still worked well, and a wifi adapter that I used for an old Raspberry Pi 2. That was all it ended up needing, and it worked again! I threw some OS on it (I think Windows 10 at first, but later on it ran various Linux Distros) and used it as my primary computer until I got a new one for college. At that point, my brother took it, and used it until the screen broke and the hard drive gave out. At that point, he just used his tablet and his school-issued Chromebook until he got a laptop for college. From there, it sat in a closet for a couple of years until I dug it out again, and decided to see if I could fix it.

It's not a very impressive laptop by any means. It has some sort of Intel Pentium CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and currently has no traditional SATA drive at the moment. The screen is broken, and most of the keyboard no longer works, so I decided to just use it as a desktop with an external monitor, keyboard, mouse and hard drive. Yes, even the hard drive. That should tell you just how janky this thing is. But of course, where there's a will, there's a way.

Fixing it up

I originally tried getting this working as a desktop with a built in keyboard and trackpad, (inspired by news articles like this I had read in the past) but I quickly found out the keyboard was kaput, so I just decided to use it like a desktop. First, I needed a way to power it, so I went to Walmart and bought a universal laptop charger that had a barrel adapter for this kind of laptop. Once I confirmed that it would power on in the first place, I stuck in a Linux install drive, (I think it was BlendOS, but ended up trying a lot more) and installed Linux to the hard dive. Of course, I found out that this hard drive had issues, so I used what resources I had on hand, and used an external USB hard drive I had lying around. It isn't the fastest thing, obviously, but it does the job for now. After trying some different distros, I decided to install NixOS, and it's working really well so far!

This definitely isn't the most ideal computer setup, but I like it because it is janky enough to be cool (at least in my eyes) and it allows me to have a Linux machine while I have to run Windows on my Framework Laptop because of Visual Studio. I may do some more with this, such as getting a propper SSD to use for storage, or adding some more RAM, but whether or not I do, I still really like this setup!

Over the past couple of days, I've come across a couple of interesting things talking about the future of the internet (or as the people involved, and a lot of other people refer to it, Web 3.0.) Now I know, a few of you probably just cringed at the mention of Web 3.0 because at this point it's pretty synonymous with cryptocurrencies and NFTs, but that's not what these pieces of media were really talking about. They were talking about what they saw as the potential future of the internet in general.

The first being episode 310 of the Destination Linux podcast, where they talked about what they thought "Web 3.0" might be like, and what they hoped it might be like. Here they mentioned decentralization in various forms, (the fediverse, Berners Lee's Solid Pods and the blockchain seperate of any type of crypto tokens,) artificial inteligence tools like ChatGPT, and a pseudo-metaverse experience. It was an interesting episode, so I'd recommend listening to it if you are interested. The second was a post by Johan Lajili I found on Hacker News also mentioning tools like ChatGPT and the way it could be used to access information in the future (as well as an understandingly bleak look at how advertising could rear it's ugly head.) Both of these have gotten me thinking: what is the future of the internet going to be like? What would be my perfect idea of the future of the internet? And what's probably going to happen instead? Now that I've unloaded the entirety of my "Bag of 2022 Tech Buzz Words," lets move on.

Privacy will be (hopefully) a focus

I think one of the biggest things that's been gaining traction on the internet over the past few years has been data privacy. As people have become more aware of big tech companies collecting their personal data, a bigger push for privacy has been happening. And while we're definitely far off from a utopia where everyone ditches Facebook, and stops saying "I've got nothing to hide," I've seen more and more projects being focused around privacy, and more and more people using them. This is why I personally think privacy will be better in the future internet. Now, I know this probaly wouldn't usher in "Web 3.0" on it's own, (maybe more like a Web 2.x) I still think this will be a big part of the next step of the internet.

Decentralization

This is probably one of the biggest things people think of when talking about the new internet. Everyone from people involved in the Fediverse, to Tim Berners Lee, to crypto bros fist bumping about their dogecoins, or whatever they fist bump about. Even Silicon Valley dedicated 3 whole seasons to creating a whole new, much better decentralized internet. I think (or at least hope) that this is a part of the future. I've been on Mastodon, which is decentralized, for a couple of years now, and I've absolutely loved it. And a lot of other people have joined now with the mess that is Twitter nowadays, but one big thing I've heard is how hard it is to join. I'm hoping that this improves over the coming years, because I absolutely love it. I've also been playing with Solid Pods, which is a project worked on by Tim Berners Lee to try and make the web decentralized, and keep data with the users by storing them in "Pods" that can only be accessed by the users. Websites can then read data from that Pod, but you can decide what data is allowed to be seen by these sites. Fun fact: this new blog of mine is run on Plume, which is hosted on my own Solid Pod. And of course, you can't deny that the blockchain will probably be a part of this as well, hopefully in a way that is independent from cryptocurrencies (unless a genuinely good one happens to show up.) While a lot of people don't like the blockchain, regardless of whether or not it is associated with cryptocurrency, but I personally don't mind it, and if it ends up being how the web is decentralized, I will welcome it.

Internet? More like Skynet (cricket noises)!

Yes, now we're going to talk about artificial inteligence tools like ChatGPT. We're already seeing companies like Microsoft integrate ChatGPT into Bing so searches can be more conversational, and (in theory) give clearer results without a bunch of garbage. I think that at this point, if this doesn't end up being a flash in the pan, there is a good chance these tools will be a big part of the future internet. Now, this could be good, or bad. For example, it could be used to search for information without having a bunch of clutter or ads, making search a lot better. However, this doesn't mean that ads couldn't make their way into ChatGPT (as Johan Lajili mentions in his post.) Also, there is the usual privacy concerns and such that can come with any platform. Either way, this will definitely have some part to play in the future of the internet, and hopefully, it isn't in a way that makes it a worse place.

Obviously, I can't predict the future, and neither can anyone else (except for maybe those guys who claimed to be the future a long time ago? What ever happened to them?) but I think it's safe to say these technologies will affect the future of how the internet works in some way shape or form. Hopefully this future will be a better place than the current internet, but who knows. Maybe the future of the internet will summon rats or something like in Silicon Valley. Only the future will tell.