ReactOS is cloning NT, so the 2000 part of that is correct.

95/98/98se/ME are completely different beasts, even if they happen to share the same GUI.

A lot of this reads like you have, like all of us will, just kinda gotten old and aren’t into or interested in the same things you were 20 years ago.

But, while the magic does wear off, you also went back to the same kind of locations an expected your new adventures to measure up to your past adventures, and that’s a recipe for disaster because comparison is the theft of joy. Maybe you need to go to somewhere dramatically different, like perhaps Africa or the mountains in Chile or Bolivia?

(Also you sound shockingly bitter and come across in text as more than a little grumpy, and people can pick up that aura so uh, some of this might also be on you.)

until you were able to watch porn

You mean you never watched 3gpp encoded 240p porn over WAP sites via a java browser on your dumb phone?

…what? Stop judging me.

I have to ask: what are you going to do? Shoot Facebook? Snipe iCloud?

Start blasting Google?

Pretty sure a rifle is in no way a useful tool for any sort of online privacy.

<MAGA would like to know your location.>

The implication seems like, “we all talk to each other and if you lie to me you lose all of your accounts”.

Well uh, yes, in some cases, that’s exactly the correct interpretation.

A lot of tracker admins DO talk to each other, because this is a fairly small world, and yeah, nobody wants a shithead around so they’ll definitely let other people know who their shitheads are so they can be handled before they become a problem.

Nothing inherently wrong with that, imo.

Honestly when you mention child predators and terrorists, the first place I tend to think of a church these days.

I mean, are they planning on showing up and keeping an eye on all the ‘youth pastors’ too?

No? Then this must be about something else.

nothing of value will be lost

I’d argue the opposite: there’s actually a lot of stuff out there that’s actually interesting: old-school lets-players who’d have done actual informative playthroughs of games. It’s kind of a dying art, but it’s also exactly the kind of content that’s going to get purged by this kind of action.

It’s interesting to spend, say, 10 hours watching some guy play Sierra games and actually talk through shit about the game and whatnot, and it’d be a shame to have that vanish.

But not entirely unexpected since that’s not profitable content in the way that the current morons babbling about bullshit reaction videos, totally-not-camgirls totally not showing their tits, and whatever other brainrot nonsense most of twitch is. (Also alt-right propaganda, but eh.)

Mismatch is trying to kill her brothers, who are tolerating it much like any brother anywhere tolerates their little sister being a pain.

No no, you don’t understand!

He’s one of the good billionaires!

(/s for some of you, and for others perhaps you should reconsider why you feel the need to defend a billionaire, regardless of your opinion on video game platforms)

Now now, they’re not just inconsiderate assholes and leeches.

They’re inconsiderate nazi oligarch assholes and leeches.

I’d say combining these necessary data points is probably enough to identify me

The EFF has had a couple of websites that would profile you on exactly this data, so you’re completely correct in that even the basic normal required metadata is more than enough to identify you pretty well.

coveryourtracks.eff.org is where it’s living now, and a quick glance shows that just using browser capabilities and such is absolutely enough to identify me.

In general, signal has proved they store no data besides the phone number itself, and in court they have only been able to give phone numbers.

My problem with signal is actually this, because it’s only part of the story.

Let’s say the FBI suspects you of doing something horrible, like say you played baby shark in public. They have good cause to believe you’re a Signal user, so they get a judge to authorize a subpoena based on your phone number, and Signal complies - and, yes, all they’re doing is confirming to the FBI that you have an account with them.

Now they’re going to go after you with ‘We know you have a secret messaging app you use, Signal, and we know you used it to plan playing baby shark at the mall last Tuesday.’

And so, if you’re not really clear on how all of this works, it’s a fantastic wedge to try to pry actual incriminating information from you. Or, hell, you let them look at the app on your phone negating the whole damn encrypted part in the first place, because you’re sure they already know.

Properly secure messengers shouldn’t be tied to that level of PII, because, well, cops can still try to use it to bludgeon you.

Maybe a little paranoid, but I’ve decided to embrace some of the paranoia since not doing so means you have to trust in the rules and policies that the law puts in place and well, uh…

There’s no such thing as too much seeding.

Well, maybe the 85tb of Ubuntu 24.04 I’ve done is too much, but I mean, whatever.

(I’ve got basically everything I’ve downloaded in the last 7 years seeding, some 6000 torrents. qBittorrent isn’t the most happy with this, but it’s still working, if using a shit-ton of RAM at this point.)

I mean, eBay exists. You can get a Commodore 64, a Mac II-era mac, or a 486 for not that much money.

I have a giant pile of retro stuff including those, and an absurdly expensive Pentium 1ghz box with a proper Vortex 2 and 3dfx voodoo 5 card, sitting around for retro gaming.

Which uh, mostly is all I do anymore. There’s also a TON of modern improvements to emulate floppy drives, replace hard drives with SD cards, and even new video and sound cards that are waaaaay better than what you had to deal with when the hardware was new.

It’s not as cheap as it was 5 years ago, but it’s still reasonable if you have an era you’re after and kinda stay focused on one or two retro computers and don’t, say, decide you want to own one of every G3 and G4 tower that was made or anything insane like that.

…stop looking at me like that.

There’s also a ton of Youtubers that are touching all sorts of rare and expensive hardware that’s a good watch, too. (8 Bit Guy, LGR, Adrian’s Digital Basement, Necroware)

I’m not quite THAT old, but I certainly remember the early 90s.

Tech was all new and cool, and I remember very much reading computer shopper or going to various computer stores looking at all the new cool shit I desperately wanted but could in no way afford.

And, of course, the BBS lists that were in the back of computer shopper and various other things like that: I spent uh, more time than I should admit arguing about stupid shit online via local BBSes and Fidonet and a couple of other networks. But, even then, you’re right: the absolute hostility was very high, but it was about who had the “right” computer, or my dumb 13 year old opinion of which games were fun, and the level of absolute grumpiness was way lower.

(As an aside, those FTN-style networks do still exist, and still have people having conversations on them, and it’s still pretty great.)

Now even the hardware is boring: oh gee, the new CPUs are 5% faster for $600! Oh yay! New video cards which are 10% faster for $1800! Like who gives a shit anymore. The days of there being generational or even every-other-generational improvements sufficient to justify prices of buying it are quite dead, and I don’t know if that’s just physics being a pain or if it’s straight up engineering design choices. Both, probably.

Anyway I’ll stop internet Boomering and go take my metamucil and watch the wheel.

I really, really wanted one as a kid, but they were quite expensive. Like, actual-real-computer expensive, if I recall correctly.

The good news is the tech pretty much ended up in the S60 Nokia phones, of which I had uh, a lot. And some of them even had normal keypads, and not one from whatever meth-induced fever dream some guy in Finland had.

I still have one!

It’s broken because it was designed by crazy people.

(The battery is required, the battery failed in such a way that it leaked and ate everything on the battery charger/temperature board, so uh, I have to find a replacement controller board and then put a new battery on it and I have to admit I just haven’t been motivated enough to try to find a non-destroyed board from a tiny production run that’s like 30 years old now.)

I don’t think you’d need to use an A-series SOC, considering the power usage of even a M4 is basically a rounding error - and they’ve already got M-series stuff running passively jammed into a tiny case anyways.

I’d be on something like that immediately, but I somehow doubt Apple will ever make a 12" Macbook ever again, given that the majority of people seem to like the 13" airs just fine.

Love to be wrong, though.

Man, I had one of those. And I hated every minute with it.

It was, by far, the slowest “modern” computer I ever used, and I legit do not miss the whole netbook thing with slow-ass atom CPUs and the world’s slowest hard drives.

(They probably would have been far less awful with a more modern SSD option, but well, that wasn’t a thing soooo…)