that's an awfully high horse you're up on, son

The problem is not everyone agrees on what exactly "editorialized" and "credible" means. You're making the same arguments they would make against you.

I use the DigitalPersona 4500 with libfprint. Unfortunately, there are multiple revisions of the device with the same model number and only some of them work properly under Linux (different encryption method I believe). As far as I know this is not actually documented anywhere. Googling just shows a bunch of unresolved bug reports of people having no idea why it doesn't work.

the link light is powered by the switch

No it's not. If you don't believe me, unplug your PC's power cord and watch the light go out.

If the power cord is plugged in but the computer is shutdown, and the light is still on, then that means the network adapter supports WoL or OOB management and must stay on for that reason, but the network switch connected to the adapter is not physically powering any lights.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

The problem is in our current society it's simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation or government, who are usually driven by profits because we live in a capitalist world whether you like it or believe it or not.

How in the fuck are people actually defending signal for this

Probably because Android (at least) already uses file-based encryption, and the files stored by apps are not readable by other apps anyways.

And if people had to type in a password every time they started the app, they just wouldn't use it.

even if they are not as good

Often for professional users, that makes it a non-starter already. Nobody who is making good money from Photoshop has ever said "I just use gimp instead, it works for me".

irreversibly wipe the device

And for anyone to actually go through the trouble of cloning a flash chip, you'd have to be an extremely high profile target.

You Zarkin' Frood!

take the hdmi stream from my Apple TV

I think there's two big obstacles here: HDCP and processing power. Most legal devices you can buy will not support simply handing over HDCP-unecrypted raw frames for you to mess with as that defeats the whole point of HDCP.

But even if you get past that, you're going to need at least a very high speed FPGA or ASIC, optionally also connected to a reasonably high-end PC, in order to be able to modify the stream in real-time and send it back out... certainly no current rpi can do this in even 1080p in real-time, and many devices now are going to 4k and beyond.

I'm not sure that was the joke they were making, and I don't think that is a majority consensus when OP's picture happens. You may not agree and that's ok.