At least personally, I don't find this all that surprising. Windows privacy took a crash with windows 10 and given that I don't trust it, I'm surprised people committing cyber crimes do.

This doesn't impact graphene at all

The interpreter is then executed in unprotected real mode for full privileges.

Good thing I'm running sudo from real mode so it can elevate me to real mode

But Linux also has containers and I haven't found a networking setup I can't do with it so while this may be true it seems anecdotal

To be clear, I'm not saying I don't want open hardware, what I'm saying is I don't get the point of allowing closed hardware that doesn't require a firmware blob as opposed to closed hardware that does. That's a very arbitrary and silly line that does nothing useful. They're going on this crusade of "no blobs." But why? There's lots of hardware that already has closed blobs on the HW, but because it's not uploaded by the driver those blobs are ok? You either have to say all closed firmware is bad and we're going to take a stance against any devices which have any amount of closed firmware, even when shipped on ROM in the HW. Or, closed firmware is tolerable so long as the driver is fully FOSS. I love the idea of not having closed firmware but I just don't get the intellectual inconsistency here.

Out of curiosity what provider did you guys move to that gives better bang for the buck than vultr?

Calling Tor a VPN is a bit scuffed. Yeah you can kinda use it as one but ultimately it's really a TCP proxy and has a lot of limitations because of that which traditional VPNs don't. There are some ways to make a VPN out of Tor but it doesn't change the fact that it ultimately isn't one.

Also I might add that in 2025 whether or not a VPN has IPv6 support should be relevant.

What would likely happen is VPN providers would be IP banned but people could still setup their own custom VPN solutions as that's hard to ban without banning corporate VPNs? Of course my fear is as this idea spreads VPNs and even Tor will become increasingly useless as all exits will be age gated and censored as well. This is something where technical work arounds will only work in the short term, laws like this are a slippery slope that we seem to be sliding down.

I'd love to think you're right but there are bills in blue states for age verification too. It's nice to think that partisan politics will kill it in Michigan...and maybe it will but this is so much more than a one party problem IMO. Both parties seem complicit.

My fear is that even Tor won't help, if every exit node is censored then where do you go? Also it's not like you can't fairly easily detect exits. Sure hidden services are exempt but the amount of services there are tiny compared to the internet. I really feel like we as the citizens have to convince the governments to not do this. Otherwise things will only get worse.

This might be the first time I've ever approved of the use of DRM

But CDs are lossless to start? Raw PCM is raw digital audio data, it's completely uncompressed lossless audio so transcoding to flac is the most sensible thing to do. The flac will just be transcoded back to raw PCM for output anyway, as raw PCM is what audio hardware accepts for playback.