Rentalization 2
After my old computer crashed suddenly in July (my own damn fault) I quickly rigged up a computer that had been in storage. This proved to be inadequate, so I ordered a refurbished Lenovo. This is an excellent computer, QUIET and fast.

Courseware was carefully backed up, so nothing was lost in that department. But I'd been sloppy about things like web bookmarks and my 'amusement' stuff, so I've been rebuilding those.

Yesterday I decided to recapture my local copy of the images for this blog, which had only been backed up from 2005 to 2015. I needed to FTP about 1GB from my web storage to the computer. First I tried to do it in Firefox, which had previously contained its own FTP system. Immediately ran into a prime example of INSANE NANNY-STATE CYBERSECURITY.

From Firefox's announcement:

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) has long been a convenient file exchange mechanism between computers on a network. While this standard protocol has been supported in all major browsers almost since its inception, it’s by now one of the oldest protocols still in use and suffers from a number of serious security issues.

The FTP protocol itself has been disabled by default since version 88 and now the time has come to end an era and discontinue the support for this outdated and insecure protocol — Firefox 90 will no longer support the FTP protocol.

If you are a Firefox user, you don’t have to do anything to benefit from this security advancement. As soon as your Firefox auto-updates to version 90, any attempt to launch an attack relying on the insecure FTP protocol will be rendered useless, because Firefox does not support FTP anymore. If you aren’t a Firefox user yet, you can download the latest version here to start benefiting from all the ways that Firefox works to protect you when browsing the web.

Public Health. Nurse Ratched all the way. You don't need to do anything to BENEFIT from losing half of your data forever. As soon as we GITHUB-LOBOTOMIZE** you forcibly and automatically, you will lose half of your data and you will BENEFIT.

Jesus.

This is an integral part of the RENTALIZATION of the world. You're not allowed to have your own house or your own computer or your own software or your own books or your own data or your own skills or your own mind. Everything must be rented from Lord Bezos, ON CONDITION OF OBEDIENCE AND ORTHODOXY.

And best of all, you will BENEFIT from letting us control your mind and property entirely. You'll never have to worry about being ATTACKED by your own data. You'll never worry about the threats we create, like "hacking" and "terrorism" and "misinformation" and "viruses". You will love Big Sibling Of Indeterminate Gender.

The rulers, of course, don't need security. They don't need muzzles and distancing and lucite and SSL and anti-FTP nurses. They can live normally and breathe normally and use IBM tape drives for storage because they're IN CHARGE OF THE HOAX.

Fortunately there are still some non-Ratched humans in the world. After trying FileZilla, which refuses to do its own fucking job because of "security", I found WinSCP, made in Czechia, which performs perfectly without any quibbles about TLS or other shit. Even better, the UI is rigged in Norton Commander style for easy keyboard use. WinSCP flawlessly transferred six years of MY work to MY computer where I can OWN it and amortize it and gain inspiration from it.

= = = = =

** Protecting you from your own data IS a lobotomy. That's exactly what it does.

Labels: #WholeOfSociety, skill-estate, storage

  ¶ 10:16 AM