So the interests of the US are the continuation of its imperialist control over the world through oil and the dollar, and those of Israel the expansion of its hegemonic domination over the middle East.

However this time, while Israel does indeed extend its hegemonic ambitions over the region by invading and bombing Lebanon, the US seem not to be in total control of what's happening in oil markets, the strait of Hormuz, and the toppling of the Iranian regime. There are many factors why, among which the fact that the regime has prepared for years for such a scenario and can not easily be killed by decapitation, and that it actually has partisans and the Iranian people is not going to simply revolt as one.

This war is also a highly assymetrical one, and that's why the comparison with Vietnam is valid.

I don't quite get that argument. It's the same as the old download installer from random website, double click to run that people have been doing for decades. It only skips the download step. And it's arguably better since at least you can review the contents. When building a Go program it will also happily download stuff from github but I've seen way less complaints about that. And to be fair it's also been an infection vector, from people installing things from shady places (or reputable places but with ill-intent like installing unwanted browser toolbars, DRM rootkits ...), but it's nothing new. Same advice applies, know what you're doing, use reputable sources.

What's a better alternative ?

In that world, authoring technology that enables this even more is either completely mad or evil. To me Linux is not a technological object, it is also a political statement. It is about choice, personal freedom, acceptance of risk. If you build software that actively intends to take this away from me to put it into the hands of economic interests and political actors then you deserve all the hate you can get.

My points :

- I don't have a shortage of IPv4. Maybe my ISP or my VPN host do, I don't know. I have a roomy 10.0.0.0/8 to work with.

- Every host routable from anywhere on the Internet? No thanks. Maybe I've been irreparably corrupted by being behind NAT for too long but I like the idea of a gateway between my well kept garden and the jungle and my network topology being hidden.

- Stateless auto configuration. What ? No, no, I want my ducks neatly in a row, not wandering about. Again maybe my brain is rotten from years of DHCP usage but yes, I want stateful configuration and I want all devices on my network to automatically use my internal DNS server thank you very much.

- It's hard to remember IPv6 addresses. The prospect of reconfiguring all my router and firewall rules looks rather painful.

- My ISP gives me a /64, what am I supposed to do with that anyways?

- What happens if my ISP decides to change my prefix ? How do my routing rules need to change? I have no idea.

In short, so far, ignorance is bliss.

Are massive infrastructure projects a failure ? Most definitely. But is corporate driven development the panacea this articles makes it out to be ? I don't think so. Especially telling is the last bit explaining how 3 households of a village sign a contract, then 30, but never does the whole village get solar. Public projects have that universality that is sorely needed. Should that one person that can't pay be left in the dark ? Too poor, too sick, too old, too unique, not profitable!

- Many APIs have been moved to Google Play Services (which is not open source), and many apps have come to rely on them. You can emulate it partially but not fully, see second point below.

- Some features like device attestation / SafetyNet fail on non-"official" devices, for example many banking or government ID apps refuse to work on open source os like GrapheneOS

Yes, "we" were, definitely. I already can't freely choose the OS that I have installed on my phone because I'm limited in the apps that I can install. For example many government ID and banking apps will refuse to work on GrapheneOS even though that OS is security-focused and will probably keep you safer than your regular Chinese Android flavor. But it's not sanctioned by a big international corporation so it's a no. Is your argument that we shouldn't complain since it is already happening somewhere ?

What's an "official" copy of Android ? AOSP is supposed to be open-source. "Official" means controlled by a multinational corporation. I'm very puzzled that the reaction to these entities gaining even more power, outside of democratic control, is met with a "oh it may me worse, it may be not" type of reaction.

Would you be ok if for example your government's website to pay your taxes mandated a device with attestation knowing you can only get one from Google, Apple or Microsoft ?

This is exactly where passkeys go too far. "to keep their accounts safe" is always the excuse used to reduce the freedoms of users. Web sites have no business deciding how things are handled on user devices but it's precisely what passkeys enable. The boundary of control of a website used to stop at the interface between the site and the user. Now that boundary will extend to the devices. The idea of property and ownership is attacked again. The device is not something the user owns and has full control over but something that is a gateway to access content controlled by the big Internet companies.

Knowing this, how long until Netflix, Disney other content providers (sorry I don't know which ones are popular right now) demand use of a passkey originating form a device with a Trusted Platform (aka Untrusted User) Module ? This is part of a long plan initiated years ago with Windows TPM requirements, Microsoft account requirements. The gap between closed and open platforms will widen and the path is clearly to apply the Smartphone model where everything is closed, controlled, DRM'd, to other computers. We're lucky the IBM PC architecture was an open one but the war on that is on.