Non-Microsoft web sites owned by Microsoft now pin CPU

Using their global monopoly position, Microsoft must be tempted to abuse their customer's processing power by running some obscured payloads in their browsers. I noticed first that it is happening on Github: when its page is loaded, it pins 50% of one core. Then I visited other sites and noticed the same behavior on Linkedin, but with nearly 100% load of one core. Then Office365 and Teams exhibited the same behavior.

This consumes anywhere from 5-10Wt of electric energy to 20-30Wt. Multiply this by the millions of users, and you arrive at megawatts stolen by Microsoft from its user base and the general public, which subsidizes electricity in many countries.

What is the payload? Is Microsoft mining crypto-currencies on user devices? I believe this question is worth looking into. Even if they do not, even if this is just a very bad and inconsiderate design, common these days, this practice must stop. Such ginormous waste on a global scale is unacceptable for the human civilization.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:54 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Another Linux lie: we have a community, and it is friendly

Nothing could be further from the truth. Linux "community" is the most viscious, cruel, and unforgiving. Linux enthusiasts eagerly and readily team up to bully and harass everyone who questions the swamp and torrent of bugs that Linux pours onto its users.

The UNIX&Linux stack exchange is the standing monument to this kind of behaviour. Its moderators are clearly activists on payroll of RedHat and Canonical, and they use any PR spinning practice invented, such as verbal abuse, character assassination, and cancel culture, to expel anyone and everyone who has audacity to ask questions about problems and bugs in Linux. Any problem-related questions are immediately swarm-downvoted and eventually closed as not fitting high standards of UNIX stack exchange.

So, where does the now-frustrated user go? To the distro-related resource, I guess. Be it Fedora forums or Ask Ubuntu. But there, again, each problem question is met with similar hostility of a few select enthusiasts. To them it does not matter that we have to get our job done. The only thing that matters is that distro maintainer prescriptions, perpetual upgrade and blind following of the dogmas, is obeyed.

Careful reader might ask: but what about the slogan of freedom that Linux had been introduced under? Forget about it! Linux is no longer that which it started off as. You have no freedom to refuse unwanted technologies being shoved down our throats. You either obey and accept, or they see you out of the door.

Linux has morphed into a gigantic clusterfuck of lies by today because there is a ton of money to be had by Linus and Kox. Remember: Android is Linux. This smells $$$

Posted by: LinuxLies at 08:51 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Another Linux lie: Linux is stable and being developed by competent developers

I have already blogged about full-on backdooring of Linux via systemd and hijacking of its security by polkitd. Turns out that the developer of the latter is also an inconsidering troll and disrespectful fascist, like the majority of so-called "open source community" is.

Read this excellent research by Jonathan de Boyne Pollard: The PolicyKit service. It is a damning guilty verdict to Linux gestapo uberschturmgruppenfuhrer David Zeuthen from... tada!.. RedHat (surprise! Who wudda thunk that RedHat employs inept trolls?). In short, PolkitD pins CPUs around the globe because the developer considered it a good idea. Why did I put a period just before this sentence? Because this is it: David Zeuthen thought it was a good idea to keep incessantly polling directories that polkitd has no permissions to, in the assumption that someone might notice that their CPU is pinned and start doing research.

For posterity:

Sometimes /usr/local/share/polkit-1/rules.d/ is installed owned by the superuser
with rwx------ permissions, and so not accessible to the unprivileged user.
Sometimes /usr/local/etc/polkit-1/rules.d/ is installed owned by the superuser
with rwx------ permissions, and so not accessible to the unprivileged user.
Sometimes /usr/local/etc/polkit-1/ is installed owned by the superuser
with rwxr-x--- permissions, and so not accessible to the unprivileged user.
Sometimes the ConsoleKit service is simply not running.

The polkitd program's failure mode in such scenarios is to keep trying,
incessantly, to access these, every few seconds. This is visible as
the dæmon constantly consuming (some) CPU time and continually appearing
in the listings of top -I and suchlike. 

How about a message? But no pip squeak from commandante Zeuthen. He did not bother to publicize his exploits, and millions of Linux users around the globe keep paying inflated electricity bills and suffer degraded performance on their systems because... tada!.. many distro maintainers and software packagers have no idea of polkitd's permission requirements.

Fuck you, David! I hope that you rot in hell soon.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:27 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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