On July 4th, Mozilla confirmed my worst fear: that Firefox was sunsetting support for Windows 7. It'll continue receiving security definitions until September 2024, but after that, it's over, and Windows 7 truly dies and gets buried. To further the analogy, technically Windows 7 has been on life-support since Microsoft axed it two years ago, and Firefox was the only thing keeping it alive. As long as you switched from Chrome or whatever Chromium fork to Firefox and became as miserly as possible about what you downloaded and ran from the internet, you were still mostly safe from zero-day attacks since they had no real way to reach your operating system. But now, it's all over. Mozilla's pulled the proverbial plug and now Windows 7 is dead.
"So what? Who the hell cares about that old-ass OS anyway?" Well, people who care about ownership and privacy for a start. I never had to worry that Microsoft was going to issue an unavoidable "security definition update" that made my installation of Microsoft Office 2010 go away, like they did to my Windows XP laptop, because I could turn off all forms of communication with the home servers, thereby making Windows 7 unable to phone home. You could do that with the first few versions of Windows 10, but not since 2020. You could never do that with Windows 11. I actually own my Windows 7 computers because Microsoft can't remotely void the install if it suits their fancy. Windows 10 users are going to boot their computers up into Windows 11 one day soon without any ability to roll the change back or complain to the law because "oh, it was in the end user license agreement. Suck eggs, plebeian." Also, Windows 10 and 11 do an awful lot of blabbing to Microsoft's advertising partners about things that you do with your computer. Not like installing software, but the contents of your files. It's gotten quite Google-like in its quest to profit off its users; just as Google Docs parses your files for anything it can use to make a swift quid, Windows 11 does as well. Windows 7, on the other hand, being a product of the Before Time, did no blabbing. You installed a DVD ripper that could defeat CSS/CPPM, it wouldn't immediately inform the federal government and your ISP. It wouldn't tell Amazon that you had installed an ebook reader on your laptop so it could try and push Kindle on you. It wouldn't tell Facebook if you wrote a journal entry in WordPad about how you miscarried, so you wouldn't have a Texas SWAT team breaking your door down and arresting you for first-degree murder. Windows 11 does all that and more. Windows 7 was the last mainstream OS where you could be assured of privacy.
Am I exaggerating a little? Probably. Texas isn't going to send state troopers to your apartment in Helsinki if they get word that you failed at pregnancy. The fact of the matter is that this is the state of home computing now: you expect to have no privacy because the corporate feudal state has convinced everyone that you only want privacy if you have something to hide. Every "smart" device ever built is nothing more than a corporate agent that relays everything it hears back to the home servers for monetisation and law enforcement. "Computers" are things that existed in the '90s. You say to your class that you're going to be using the computer for this assignment and they all look at you weird until you rephrase, replacing "computer" with "chromebook". And, no, Mr. Zero Reading Comprehension, it's not the kids' fault they don't know what a computer is. It's the fault of the millennial and Gen-X parents, who dropped computers like a math class once smartphones came out, for teaching their kids that the centre of the universe is an iPad. Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one in the world anymore who cares about privacy—even my own mother uses the YouTube app on her smartphone and lets the algorithm make her viewing decisions for her. Our lack of concern for privileged information is what led us to this point. The big data companies started digging a hole in the ground and set out bright colourful signs saying "Everyone loves our hole in the ground!" and continued digging as we all stood in it. Now everyone with a smartphone, tablet, and/or laptop computer built after 2013 is standing in that hole and the likes of Microsoft and Google dug a moat around it. Now that we're in here, the only way to get out is to stop using technology, and that's not going to work.
Heretofore, I'd been thinking about migrating to a Linux distribution, such as Ubuntu or Fedora. I thought, "free and open-source operating systems will save us from ourselves", but it turns out I was totally wrong about that. Ubuntu is only open source insofar as elements of Microsoft software are open source: the client-side bits are FOSS, but the stuff on the servers is proprietary. I've been reading HackerNews on Gopher lately and I'm seeing increasing frustration from people who know more about computers than 10 of me in regards to unilateral decisions Canonical has made on behalf of all Ubuntu users; and I thought, "golly gee willikers, that sounds an awful lot like something Microsoft would do". Moreover, both Canonical and Microsoft are able to determine if the most recent version of Ubuntu is running as a virtualised instance within Windows 10 or 11. I don't really know what they're going to do with that information, but I'm sure Microsoft has some designs on that. Another rankle that Ubuntu 23 has caused with its userbase is something called Snap. As I understand from reading HN, Snap is a system whereby installed programmes are treated as apps would be on a mobile phone, rather than fully-integrated software. Canonical said they did this to prevent users unknowingly fouling up their operating system and then blaming the instability on a broken update; the userbase has pointed out how this puts Canonical in the position of content police, giving Ubuntu the ability to restrict access to certain kinds of software. Whatever the case may be, Microsoft and Apple only keep Ubuntu and the other Linux distros around to create the illusion of free market competition. Either of them could afford to buy Canonical, Red Hat, or any of the other distros out of petty cash, but keeping them around keeps the regulators off their backs. I won't go into the intricacies of American politics right now (even though I could do pages on it), but as long as Microsoft and Apple don't look like the home computing duopoly that they are, the SEC won't come knocking on their doors. All it's going to take is one change in leadership for the federal government to kneecap the SEC and allow Microsoft to acquire Canonical, Apple to acquire IBM, and Google to acquire both of them. It may not happen tomorrow, or in 2024, but it will happen. That's the nature of this stage of capitalism: the corporate feudal state has run out of individual people to exploit, so they turn on each other.
As for a potential solution to the problem, I don't know of one. I had considered installing PuTTY and using Gopher for all my internet needs; I had also considered abandoning Windows 7 and using TailsOS, but TailsOS is pretty stripped down and not really useful for anyone except software pirates and political dissidents. I already mentioned Ubuntu—that's a non-starter. For a long time, I'd had an idea for a Windows-compatible operating system that I'd tentatively called "WiskOS"; it only exists in technical documents at the moment and is not likely to get developed anytime soon; but even if I had the ability to make WiskOS myself and release it to the public, there's nothing stopping Microsoft, Google, and Facebook corrupting me or my successor with huge sums of money to allow their trackware to run in it just like every other operating system in the world. What it comes down to, unfortunately, is that there is no solution. We live in this hole in the ground and there's no way I can see at the moment to climb out of it. Maybe that will change, but I doubt it.
--7 July 2023--