Communist philosophy is somewhat anti-authoritarian. It's literally about putting the everyday people in power. It's often anti-democratic though. You have to turn to Nordic socialism if you want to bring democracy in, which was developed basically as a direct result of Stalin insisting that Soviet communism was the only communism, and you could either join their (violent, awful) communism or die.
Except, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, all wrote about how important it was to be self critical, how important it was to stay grounded in reality, to make reality drive your decision making and goals.
And then they all purposely and aggressively built themselves cults of personality with the express purpose of being just garden variety dictators. They surrounded themselves with boring "Yes men" by murdering anyone who pointed out the clear contradiction between their writing/philosophy/"theory" and reality.
There's a grand canyon between what they all wrote about, and what they clearly did. The closest they ever came was Mao being like "Whoops, a lot of people died, maybe it's partially my fault" but that sure didn't dissuade him, or make him change direction.
Meanwhile their hundreds of millions of insane, murderous followers had no qualms about such a contradiction, such a destruction of reality, because they had been so poorly treated for so long in the old system that all they really cared about was tearing it down (gee, sound familiar?).
A Cult of personality is toxic to functionality. It's toxic to any progress. It's toxic to productivity and success. It's toxic to competence. It's toxic to reality.
Marx is like a doctor who diagnoses a disease then offers a cure that is worse than the disease itself. It's a bit like removing a leg to fix a broken toe. I figured this out in college thinking about it for 10 minutes, I don't get anyone whose observed human nature for 25 years not to see the obvious flaws in it and why it always breaks down.
He also fundamentally misunderstands human nature and our ability to care about anything outside a "tribe" or rather put aside our own desires for those not in our immediate tribe. It simply breaks down at scale.
Just because someone can adequately critique and point out the flaws in a system does not make them qualified to architect a working solution. Especially first draft. The problem with communism is will always devolve into authoritarianism, because its the only way to enforce people putting the needs of others over their own, not to mention those in charge will do whats best to serve their own ruling tribe.
It's how we evolved, its human psychology, and at mass population scale you can't escape it. Capitalism or trade at least to some extent incentivizes mutual benefits on a basic level, but Marx tosses out the one thing about it that works, otherwise the same problems that occur in capitalism as it devolves come about the same way they do in every other form of human governance, with groups/organizations with a shared purpose or identity (tribes) jockeying for authority and power to serve their own interests.
Since i‘ve been doing this sort of thing for many years here are some basic rules:
- Get LTSC (W10) or IoT/Enterprise (W11) images to begin with
- Get https://www.ntlite.com/ .. you won‘t find any other tool which does a better job at removing packages, adding drivers, etc. Worth every penny with great support.
- Use GroupPolicies to configure your system. Take the time and download them for Office, Edge, Chrome, Firefox and update those that come with Windows.
- Integrate drivers not only for the base image but also in the recovery and setup image.
- Install a firewall (binisoft is fine)
- Use NextDNS
- If you don’t mind the security implications: Disable Defender, SmartScreen, BootGuard and VBS (use bcdedit)
- Disable Microcode loading (delete the DLL)
- Disable Spectre/Meltdown mitigations
- If you need Office: Use the LTSC version
Most third party tools are outdated or do stupid stuff which isn’t needed. You can silence Windows with the right GroupPolicies quite easy.
No one should follow those suggestions. They’re wholly unnecessary and plain bad security practices. You make yourself/users significantly more vulnerable with these suggestions for no gain.
Exactly what is this trying to achieve? Running a third party tool to modify the OS, disabling security features, using "downloaded" group policies (what policies?), and sending all your DNS traffic to a third party (when on PC it's possible to just modify the etc/hosts file) -- these aren't exactly the best security practices. The only reasonable suggestion is the IoT Windows version.
Agreed with the "what does this achieve". In Corporate environments you would use SCCM or simply the Windows ADK plus WDS.
Installing a custom Firewall and Antivirus ist straight counteproductive, as ist disabling security features... obvisouly.
Downloading and installing group policies however is often required and a typical enterprise scenario.
Whenever I hear people praise these kind of things I know they don't really have any professional knowledge. It's fine to configure your own system, but suggesting these things SHOULD be done pisses me off to no end.
Seems i lack a lot of professional knowledge so please enlighten me on how you would do it.
Why use ADK or SCCM for a personal install?
The custom firewall is just a frontend for the builtin firewall.
GP reg keys are used by many third party tools to alter the system. So why use extra software if you can get this directly from the vendor?
And also a rant about anti virus:
What do think is the first thing malware does? How does your system get infected if you are using an updated browser, open mails in it and use it for viewing attachments like PDF? Maybe there is even malware out there that does take advantage of high jacking the anti virus and its system priviliges? But who knows… it always depends on the user and the use case.
Make the system need way less ressouces and get way more raw compute power.
There‘s a reason i wrote a hint about the security. If you keep this in mind and know what you are doing (like take such a setup as a base for VMs) this totally fine.
I am also not aware of any Spectre/Meltdown exploits ever to be found in the wild. If you are not running on a shared system i don’t see a need for those mitigations.
Regarding the third party tool: NTlite uses `dism` under the hood with which you can achieve the same results.
You are already sending your DNS to a third party (like your ISP).
You also should never ever alter the hosts file and abuse it for ad blocking and such.
Microsoft supplies the latest group policies for their software. Or how else do you handle those on a local system?
I never said my post was about security but on how to alter your local system in a „more correct“ way with a clear hint about security. If you don’t know what you are doing then you should think twice when touching your system.
Doing things for many years doesnt mean you are experienced. Half the stuff you recommend would land straight in the bin of any person who truly has some idea of security, not speaking of true professionals.
So then what is the official way to get the latest version?
I mean… how does the state itself handle those laws or are you telling me that every German court and government agency buys those books?
I'm not sure if they still buy the books, but I know from someone who worked as a judge in Germany, that they personally stopped buying the books only ~5-10 years ago, because they saw that the online availability was good enough now.
But my point is that, as far as I know, there is no official version of the final text. The official publications are made in the Bundesgesetzblatt (which had been privatized in the past, but that's another story). The publications might look like this:
1947: We hereby make the following text a law called Grundgesetz "Artikel I: Human dignity is inviolable"
2026: We hereby change the law called Grundgesetz by changing the first article to say "Human or Alien" instead of "Human".
Now there are a lot of entities that will consolidate these changes into a final text. But this consolidation isn't done officially. So, while in this example its easy to see, that in 2026 the law would read "Human and Alien dignity is inviolable", it becomes less clear when these changes are spread over 80 years and are only available as PDFs.
Why not use some kind of interlacing and randomly sort the lines. The result is a valid video file which could be uploaded to YouTube. Then deinterlace with a browser plugin and the random pattern used to scramble the lines. Same can be applied to the audio.
Not sure I’m understanding you, but it sounds like you’re asking why not upload a video that’s scrambled until viewed with a browser plugin that knows how to unscramble it?
That would be cool, but it won’t be very effective as a viral video if everyone needs to have a browser plugin installed :)
The challenge here is to circumvent the copyright algorithms while still looking like a normal video to the user (who has no external tools installed).
However, for things like hosting pirated streams or sharing content out-of-band, it would be interesting. It’s basically the a minimally lossless form of steganography.
Yeah I was going to say the III one is surprisingly good. I used to know the director and he was super cool. Also produced re-animator. He also did a weird low budget movie called "society" which is interesting.
There are a few horror and sci fi movies with similar themes to Society that all came out around the same time. Society is probably the wildest. Worth a watch.
Update the BIOS/UEFI which includes an updated microcode.
Via software at runtime after each reboot (Windows/*nix).