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It's yet another scheme to gather data about Chrome users for the benefit of advertisers. Aside from the fundamental problems with that whole idea which people most often point to, it's also underhanded in a way that cookies, tracking scripts, and browser fingerprinting aren't: It's code that's built in to the web browser itself which exists for no purpose other than to act directly against the interests of its users. It may be the first time that's happened in such an obvious and unambiguous way.
My time was wasted by LLM-generated nonsense just yesterday. I wanted to know when whistling tea kettles similar to the classic design we know today first became popular. The first search result I got was a 3000-word essay all about the history of kettles, so I started reading. You'll know you've found the same one I did if at various points it claims that the kettle was invented "ca. 8000 BC", "4000 years ago", "around 3000 BC", "15,000 years ago", and "approximately 906-1127 AD".
There are various other inconsistencies and things that make no sense at all by human standards, but it's written in an authoritative tone, looks pretty nice, and was the first result on my searx instance, appearing in the results from several well-known search engines. It wasn't immediately obvious to me that it's all bullshit, and there's probably at least some truth mixed in there somewhere.
It's not exactly something to panic over I'd say, but it sure is annoying.
the packagers had not changed it as they were asked to do
Were they really? Or were they told "change it if you don't like it"? Genuine question, and it would make some difference.
But in either case I'm sure not all of them did, and failing that it is all down to the one person (or worse, one team of people) administering the system. Badly configured networks resulting in DNS problems is not exactly rare, but that is beside the point. It's clearly wrong no matter how uncommon is the situation that makes it materially detrimental.
It's just one more annoying little thing to go on the big list of items to be corrected when setting up a systemd-equipped system, but more importantly believing that it's acceptable to just leave it there demonstrates extremely poor judgement to a degree that makes many of us doubt the trustworthiness of the entire project. Perhaps in 2013, or whenever the decision was initially made, substantial numbers of people were sufficiently clueless as to think that adding in the possibility of inadvertently having your system quietly direct all its DNS queries to Google was better than the more obvious alternative of not doing so, but after everything that's gone down since then it's quite hard to imagine why anyone would stick up for such a bizarre point of view today.
The main thing that turned it into a serious issue rather than just a stupid thing to joke about was that Poettering refused (as of five years ago) to admit that it was a mistake.
Remember when Google's DNS server address was hard-coded in systemd-resolved? Good times, what a laugh we all had.
monopolisation of the init system
That's the one thing about systemd that is sort of nice. We don't really need to have more than one init system, and it does a sufficiently comprehensive job of being one. If it were only an init system and nothing else, there basically wouldn't be any remaining complaints about it by now.
She would have expected people to name figures such as Quintus Lollius Urbicus, who became governor of Roman Britain
Look, I know everyone in Britain is required to know the names and dates of all the monarchs going back to the 9th century, but expecting everyone to be able to come up with that name when put on the spot is going a little too far.
This point is remarkable, a truly astounding display of applied logic, but it if we consider it in the effulgent glory of its full implications it does raise one important question for the honourable member: I know you are, but what am I?