Hi,

On 16/3/20 5:51 am, Andrew McGlashan via Dng wrote:
> On 13/3/20 1:59 pm, Steve Litt wrote:
>> It's called POSIX. With POSIX, I always have shellscripts, AWK and sort
>> ready to do my work for me. With POSIX, I can pipe a stdout into the
>> next stdin. With POSIX, I can plug in anything conforming to POSIX,
>> such as dmenu, a genius of a program that makes many hard user
>> interface situations simple.
>
> POSIX is everywhere (including in Gates and Jobs machines), it's not the domain of only *nix like operating systems at all.
>
> Most things I can do in Linux, I can also do in Winblows .. but I choose to avoid Winblows for other reasons.
>
> GNU tools are very important, I've ran GNUWin32 tools on Winblows forever.....

Actually, we've got more to fear with hardware [and the lower level firmware / EFI / SecureBoot / IME / vPro and other crap] these days whether we avoid Winblows or not.

The Intel and AMD flaws, Intel Management Engine (IME), vPro capabilities and all of that crap; how can we trust our computers? Those run below the OS level and can see everything
that the OS does and it isn't vice/versa.

There are some outfits that go out of their way to give you back freedoms that you should not have lost; including System76 for one, disabling IME as much as is possible and using
Coreboot. There have been other projects in the past, but some with very, very old pre Intel Core hardware. Almost every computer sold since the early Intel Core Duo CPUs have
had serious flaws and components/systems that significantly lessen your freedoms and invades your privacy at the same time -- if they don't do that, they sure can if they want to.

Even if you bought almost any new computer these days and ran an OS of your own making; it will still include all the Intel Management and/or other crap.

The latest round of flaws from Intel make it so that only the very latest processors are immune to serious problems relating to the lack of security of IME system keys; meaning
that bad code could get on to the machines whilst masquerading as valid, secure and signed "Intel" code (whether you trust Intel or not). Even having fixed this particular flaw,
assuming they have, then you've still got to trust Intel.

Cheers
A.