Careful system administration and web browsing were relatively safe; nowadays, even upgrading the local libraries carries risk that must be assessed.
replyIt has always been that way. Literally the only distro that encourages an update process with the requisite effort you should be putting in is Slackware. You should be reading the source code you build. You should be building from source. You should fully understand your toolchains. Binary only distros have always been the equivalent of wearing a condom to have sex. Usually fine, but technically outsourcing the hard work to someone that lets be real, 90% never get to know well enough to credibly trust to any degree. NPM & proglang level package management just doubled down on the real-estate you had to shift through.
replyBeing a responsible programmer/sys admin has always been read heavy, as long as I've been alive. Write only code is antithetical to the basis of running a trustworthy system.
The Internet is quite fine at delivering packages over encrypted channels which I can trust. (Except where interdicted by governments, like in China, India, Russia, Turkyie,..)
replyThe Web is a rather different beast, but the question is not "can you trust the Internet", but "can you trust a random website", and now even "can you trust a previously trustworthy website".
You of course should not trust any pictures or videos as critical evidence, they should be corroborated by other means. But this has been true for several years now.
To clarify, I meant it from a lay person's perspective. I do realize that one can argue if the average person will have developed this awareness now. The difference this time, I feel, is that the genAI tools are widely available for normal people to experiment with which will hopefully help develop this visceral feeling.
replyWhile there genuinely was fake content and astroturfed material on the web prior to LLMs, the cost to produce this stuff has fallen enormously. A major corporation or a state actor might pay a bunch of money for inorganic content but it was hard for some rando in Estonia to spin up a network of fake content to monetize on tiktok or whatever. This leads to way more fake content about a much wider range of topics.
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