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> This new DNS system makes everybody use a single DNS endpoint, the same one across the world located in the US.

This was only the case in this experiment. From the article:

> We’re also working on privacy preserving ways of dividing the DNS transactions between a set of providers, and/or partnering with servers geographically.

That is still less different providers than can currently be used, so it is something that we should be concerned with long-term, but I don't think, it makes sense to throw the technology away. Just be concerned that there are the right kind of providers used for this.

I figure, this is become like the CA infrastructure, for better or for worse.

https://www.minetest.net/ would probably be your best option.

There's a number of mods around education for it: https://wiki.minetest.net/Mods:Learning

And here's a somewhat elaborate discussion on using it in class: https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9482

It also has a really good modding API in Lua, which you could probably get middle school students to have fun with and actually create something in a video game.

Micro-code, I don't care about. As you say you'd have to ban the use of computers entirely, but having to write your documents in Word etc., I do not think is good.

As a student, you should be able to install the software that you use in class on your PC at home, without having to jump through infinite hoops or asking your parents to buy it for you.

Sure, Microsoft Office, you can sort of expect to need and need again in the future. But with other software, you can hardly guess how often you're going to be using it. So, you're not going to buy it just to play around with it at home. You might even skip doing homework, if it's too much hassle to install.

A required internet connection can also be particularly inpairing, depending on your situation. I was for example provided an educational version of Matlab in university, but ended up mostly learning in GNU Octave (which was thankfully fantastic), because I traveled to university by train and so did most of my learning in the train, where I had no internet connection.

Another example is me having to pirate an outdated version of Delphi in middle school, because we were writing a program with that in school, that I wanted to continue at home. The teacher did not intend for anyone to continue working at home, so we weren't provided an educational version or similar. The version of Delphi we used was also so old that you actually couldn't buy it anymore.

Lastly, if you can't transfer your LibreOffice knowledge to Microsoft Office, I don't think you should claim any particular computer skills on your CV. We're not talking about rocket science being done in Excel. You generally only need the most basic of features, which function almost identically even in Gnumeric.

It's a legally binding contract between Cloudflare and Mozilla. If Cloudflare were to violate it, Mozilla could sue and a judge would determine the penalties for Cloudflare. There should be some rough guidelines written into law as well.

And we're definitely not talking about small amounts. Cloudflare violating it would result in Mozilla violating the privacy of millions, which can be interpreted as significant damages to the citizens. They're also both situated in California, so privacy will be valued by a judge. Given Mozilla's public image as a privacy-friendly organization, they could also push charges for damaging that image.

That penalty + the damage to Cloudflare's own reputation, I cannot imagine they would survive.

Over the past two months at my job, I had the task to sift through our intranet, finding as it turns out mostly PowerPoint presentations and then sticking all of that information into a OneNote document.

Transfering information from one badly indexable, not deep-linkable and completely inappropriate documentation format to the next.

And then I was told to put the link to the OneNote document into a PowerPoint presentation, so that the PowerPoint with the link in it could be uploaded to the intranet.

In my experience, the main-difference between Google and other search engines, aside from personalized results, is that Google tries very hard to interpret your query.

For example, if you search for some programming topic, it will generally pull results more towards the top, if they reference the current or a recent version of whatever programming language/tool you're searching for.

That helps, if you just want to type in "how do i do this? [programming language]" or similar.

In other search engines, you'll instead first search "how do i do this? [programming language]", then possibly not really get any good results and then instead search for "how do i do this? [programming language] [current version]".

This is how Google worked as well, some few years ago. Knowing what keywords to type in to get the right results was an actually valuable skill ("Google-fu"). Today's Google is instead designed to minimize the need for skill in phrasing your query. Great for the average user, but in my experience, if you do still possess Google-fu, then this interpretation actually hinders you.

With other search engines, you get the results that your query asked for. You know immediately when your query was ambiguous or just bad and can adjust accordingly. And with that, you can more easily narrow down the results, given that you know how to narrow down the results.

So, maybe give other search engines another try, while keeping that in mind. I personally very much prefer other search engines, because of that, even if I sometimes have to type one word more.

My comment has absolutely nothing to do with preaching free software or even trying to push people to make their software available under a free license. You could even take out the word "libre" from my comment, if it irks you that much. The meaning is the same. And the meaning is simply my interpretation of that sentence. After having read that sentence, the last thing I expected was for it to be patented and I was so sure of that, that I did also feel it was dishonest to put that sentence on the webpage.

Yes, I generally would prefer for people to publish their software as libre, especially if it does not interfere with their way of making money as is the case here, yes, I was somewhat annoyed that I could not actually try this keyboard out, since yes, I am enough of a free software zealot for my personal use that I only have F-Droid installed and yes, I do actually find it unacceptable for a keyboard app on Android to not at least allow its source code to be inspected, as once enabled it can read everything you type from personal conversations down to passwords and Android does fuckall to prevent a keyboard app from just sending all of that to somewhere on the internet, but none of that was expressed in my previous comment.

The sentence itself implies libre, not being patent-encumbered. Donating a great innovation to humanity means making the knowledge freely available for use. It does not mean using the knowledge to create a product and then making this product freely available.

Well, personally, prior to using a password manager, I had one user name (plus variations for when that user name was already taken) and something like three different passwords for all of my services.

The passwords weren't horrible, brute-forcing them would have taken a while, but if you have the same user name and password in many services, then it just takes for one of those services to get compromised to have many of your accounts be compromisable.

And generally speaking, unless you're a high-ranking target, it's far more likely for a service to get compromised than for someone to even bother attacking your device.

And yeah, sure, I could have just remembered more different passwords and user names, but I'm a human and that requires effort.

Now when using a password manager, I can easily choose different user names, e-mail addresses, passwords and far more complicated passwords as well. And all of that with basically no effort.

This also improves privacy, as with different user names it's much harder to link up my different accounts' postings. And I can now easily maintain multiple accounts for the same service, too, allowing me to spread out postings across those, so that you can't follow back my post history for all eternity to link up all kinds of information that I've posted over time.