rxlim

Yes, precisely like Facebook "Internet" is worse than nothing. Things like these will bite us in the ass in the future, better to stop it as soon as possible.

After some research I'm now able to provide an answer to my own question.

The canvas was partitoned into blocks of 10x10 pixels that was white until sold. You would make a payment for X number of blocks through 2Checkout or PayPal. After transferring the money, you would send an e-mail to Alex Tew with the image, coordinates of wanted blocks, URL and TITLE/ALT text. He would then confirm the payment and upload your banner within 48 hours.

So the entire operation was manual with orders placed by e-mail.

So it was like buying tickets online? if multiple people were interested in the same region, the one which payment went through first got the region? However, this must still have been chaotic once the interest started to rise as space would seem empty until the payment was confirmed, and others would try to buy in the meantime. I guess you would also just have to make a rough estimate on the design of your banner and just buy the space, no time to design it first.

I wonder how he got everything to fit as more and more space was sold and if it was a manual process? It must have been like playing Tetris on expert mode.

> I love the idea of an nearly always on and connected device.

My desktop computer is exactly that.

If this is really true, I might have to eat my own words.

The amount of work that goes into Devuan for pulling out systemd of Debian Jessie is clear evidence that what you are saying is not easily possible.

> Debian is already one of the few distributions that goes out of its way to provide support for non-systemd init systems.

How does this manifest itself in practice? I don't want to use systemd in Debian 9, what has been done so I can easily change to another init like runit?

In practice it's not possible because of so many (unecessary) dependencies on systemd.

systemd was just a symptom. Multiple developers that had been working on Debian for many years, left the project in that period for various of reasons.

Congratulations. The return of Firefox branding makes me feel nostalgic. I remember using Firefox 1.04 on Debian in the early 00's. This was in the golden age of Firefox, when every new release was an improvement and it was a lean non-bloated alternative to other browsers.

In the past Debian was considered to be one of the most stable Linux distributions available. Stability and quality was a priority above anything else. However, around 2014 something changed when systemd was forced into Debian in a way that would never have happened before the new generation of developers took over the project.

Maybe this is just something we have to get used to, young developers seems to value ease above quality and stability, this also explains the current flood of Electron apps.

I did run an older version of binwalk on the firmware image, but it was unable to unpack anything and only printed false positives. I have now tried the newest version and it's able to unpack everything and display a lot of information. The PE modules in UEFI seems to be signed as these signatures are found many times:

  Certificate in DER format (x509 v3)
  SHA256 hash constants, little endian

Very interesting to dig around in the firmware, I even found the boot splash image. Definitely a time sink, but fun.

Good points. I must admit that I have not contacted Gigabyte as my experience with such large companies tells me that I will only get elevated blood pressure and absolutely no usable answer.

My main concern is not if the BIOS is secure, I'm very sure it's full of security vulnerabilities like most other software I use, but I have decided to trust Gigabyte like I have decided to trust the developers who build the Linux distro I'm using in that they are not malicious and trying to steal my information. The packages in my Linux distro are signed, so I can verify that they have not been modified since they left the developers machine, but I can't do the same thing with the BIOS update and that's what makes me uncomfortable.