Funny that you mention this now.
A few days ago we had to splice an euro plug into a US cable (we needed it urgently and the replacement was going to take too long to arrive). Once we had cut the cables we found out that the color schemes for the wires are different in the US than the EU, so a coworker asked chatgpt which wires he should connect together. Long story short, the fuses got tested that day, and not intentionally. He ended up connecting live to ground.
The issue is that some idiot suddenly appeared on the systemd repo to immediately push a change that adds the posibility of logging the user’s age into systemd. The community complained and explained that nobody wanted that change, and yet this idiot pushed through, ignored the feedback, and ended up getting the pull request merged. Not only that, but the discussion thread was locked to prevent criticism, and the merge was done by Microsoft employees. After the merge, someone tried to undo the change, and the effort was blocked by a Microsoft employee.
Despite the excuses, Systemd is not an OS, and it doesn’t even need to comply with any age verification laws. The fact that someone went and implemented a deeply unpopular change into a system that shouldn’t even deal with that info and that is used by most Linux distros, just to aid a surveillance government in implementing better surveillance on the entire world’s users is what lead to the pushback.
Additionally, Lennart Poettering used Claude to review the pull request, and has been using it for developing SystemD. I’m not gonna go too deep into that, but trust me, it’s really bad.
Double additionally, Lennart Poettering also defended not properly securing this sensitive data, because that would be too bothersome for him.
Maybe those users will learn to look for information somewhere else.
The issue with this is that if you try not to disturb or inconvenience anyone, you’re never getting any sort of meaningful protest done. This was not the fault of the person who deleted the post, but the fault of the CEO who forced them to.
It wasn’t even the only time. They also accidentally dropped 4 more nukes in Spain, 3 of them over land. And the bombs actually detonated (but failed to trigger a nuclear explosion), spreading radioactive material around.
If you want a decently hidden VPN, I recommend setting up an OpenVPN instance, with a TCP tunnel, encapsulated within Stunnel. It manages to stay hidden even with DPI.
The setup is a bit convoluted, especially if you want everything to use certificates for maximum security. It’s also not the fastest VPN, and TCP isn’t the most efficient for a VPN. But it’s decent enough for a normal user.
You can set it up on both Linux and Windows, even having both ends of the tunnel on Windows, but it’s easier and better to set it up on Linux.