Tag Archives: computers

The Politics of Future Tech

These are notes from a panel at Capricon 46. Any mistakes here are mine, not the panelists’. I have amplified my notes with web links for further clarification. Here is the blurb from the convention program:

As the means of production falls into fewer and fewer hands and new technologies like GenAI arrive on our phones with unseen agendas and impacts, the value of thinking about the political dimensions of future tech grows. What political ramifications should we consider in our near future? How has SF commented on the politics of its futuristic technologies? Our panelists explore these and other political questions about the future we’re building now (and the future still to come).

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Removing Windows 10

Microsoft support for Window 10 ended on October 14, except for those who are willing to jump through some additional hoops, which I am not. I found relatively cheap Windows 11 systems to replace the Windows 10 boxes my wife and oldest son had been using. My own two Windows 10 systems also had Ubuntu and Debian Linux installed, so I deleted Windows 10 from them. They are perfectly useable with Linux. I am writing this on one of them now.

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Cory Doctorow on Apple, Big Tech, and Smaller Tech

Following up on Cory Doctorow on Apple, Doctorow has written again about Apple in Plenty of room at the bottom (of the tech stack), the key point being:

Apple’s security model works well. To the extent that Apple is both benevolent and competent, it makes products that are safe and reliable. But this model fails horribly, because any time Apple decides to trade off its customers’ privacy, safety, or utility for its own priorities, those customers are rendered defenseless by Apple’s total control:

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Installing Debian 13

Following up on Replacing an old HP computer for $35: Debian 13 is now out, so I deleted the Debian 12 installation on that machine and replaced it with a fresh installation of the new version. The first thing I did was download debian-13.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso and put it on a USB stick with Rufus. Installing from this failed, with a message that some obscure file was corrupt. I don’t know if this was a file on the iso or one that had been downloaded in the installation process. A second attempt also failed.

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Replacing an old HP computer for $35

My backup desktop system, an old HP SFF box, failed. It was running Windows 10, Ubuntu 24.04, and Debian 12. Somehow it stopped booting correctly. GRUB would not show all the systems. My boot repair drive failed to fix it. I replaced the SATA SDD drive, but that did not help. So I replaced it with another SFF desktop for a cost of $35.

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Ubuntu vs. Debian

I installed Ubuntu 24.04 on my Dell desktop. This went well, but after installation I noticed the same problem with Thunderbird that I had seen on an Ubuntu upgrade on an old HP desktop. When I wrote before about not seeing the issue on a fresh installation it probably meant my testing was inadequate. This is a big problem: I am not willing to give up my multi-level email folders.

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