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I’m glad he updated his blog post to reflect that this wasn’t surreptitiously done. When recently helping a student we installed homebrew and we did receive the notification about usage analytics reporting and declined.
I wonder if the notification of this new feature was rolled in to a brew update and most people ignored the terminal scroll where it provides the commands to disable analytics.
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User: my wifi doesn’t work
Guru: that is the price of admission into the free world
User: but I have to be able to access the internet
Guru: “Have To” Is a Relative Phrase, there can sometimes be hard choices to make
User: nevermind, I dropped the binary firmware blob onto my file system and now my wifi works
Guru: proprietary software can’t be the answer because proprietary software is the problem
User: uh, okay, but I have wifi now, so I’ll continue using Linux
Guru: more people using free software doesn’t necessarily mean more people believing in free software ideals
User: that’s great and all but ideally my wifi will work
Guru: It’s more important to spread the ideals of free software than the actual software itself
User: in that case I’ll just use Windows
Guru: People will naturally start using free software if they believe in the ideals
User: not if their wifi doesn’t work
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And then when the user goes and cries about their data getting owned or locked up or how they can’t get something they want or how they are getting spied on they have nobody but themselves to blame.
It’s not an ideal system, mind you, but for schadenfreude it works pretty well. The hell of it is, of course, that RMS et all are right–we are all just doing the expedient things over the correct ones.
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The point is compromise. Spreading the ideals of free software is harder if you can’t connect to the internet, and people can believe in ideals all they want but that won’t help them route packets. Is using Trisquel with no internet access really more free than using Debian with binary firmware to make the wifi work?
It makes about the same difference as using Debian with a modern wifi card that needs the binary firmware to be uploaded to the device, or using Trisquel with an older wifi card that has the binary firmware already present in ROM.
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It makes about the same difference as using Debian with a modern wifi card that needs the binary firmware to be uploaded to the device, or using Trisquel with an older wifi card that has the binary firmware already present in ROM.
Depends what your concerns are. If you’re worried about very sophisticated malware (stuxnet-style) using the wifi card as an attack vector then it makes a big difference.
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“Native apps are doomed”…“Native Apps are Not Dead Yet”
Which is it?
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I found quite a time ago that full syntax highlighting just distracts me, so I configured vim’s limelight plugin to stretch the highlighting for two paragraphs; which gives exactly what the author describes: limited, conditional highlighting. (limelight was designed with more textual input in mind, but still works great with my python/ruby/bash code).
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The release notes are more relevant for this crowd: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/YakketyYak/ReleaseNotes
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I always had very bad experienced with Ubuntu. It was the first non-Windows OS I used (2008) but I found it very buggy.
Then I tried it again a few years later and it was even worse. A normal update nuked grub and made the system completely un-bootable!
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vadik
1 year ago
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link
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Meet the Man Behind ‘Solarized,’ the Most Important Color Scheme in Computer History
“The core problem of my entire life is the struggle between minimalism and aesthetics,” Mr. Schoonover told the Observer.
My aesthetics is minimalism.
Those are just Mr. Schoonover’s preferences, and the justification behind those particular choices is extremely personal.
Didn’t you just say it was “one of the most meticulously developed” with “design rigor”?
“There are literal holy wars fought over window managers and multi-monitor displays.”
No there aren’t.
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pushcx
2 years ago
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link
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Jacob Appelbaum, Digital Rights Activist, Leaves Tor Amid Sexual Misconduct Allegations
Appelbaum has responded, and I’m copying here because it looks like a pastebin site:
Berlin, June 6, 2016
In the past few days, a calculated and targeted attack has been launched to spread vicious and spurious allegations against me. Given the way these accusations have been handled, I had little choice but to resign from my position as an advocate at the Tor Project and devote my full attention to completing my doctoral work on cryptography at the Technical University of Eindhoven.
Vague rumors and smear campaigns against me are nothing new. As a longtime public advocate for free speech and a secure internet, there have been plenty of attempts to undermine my work over the years.
Now, however, these unsubstantiated and unfounded attacks have become so aggressive that I feel it’s necessary to set the record straight. Not only have I been the target of a fake website in my name that has falsely accused me of serious crimes, but I have also received death threats (including a Twitter handle entitled ‘TimeToDieJake’).
I think it’s extremely damaging to the community that these character-assassination tactics are being deployed, especially given their ugly history of being used against fellow members of the LGBT community. It pains me to watch the community to which I’ve dedicated so much of my life engage in such self-destructive behavior. Nonetheless, I am prepared to use legal channels, if necessary, to defend my reputation from these libelous accusations.
I want to be clear: the accusations of criminal sexual misconduct against me are entirely false.
Inevitably, there may have been moments in my professional or private life when I may have inadvertently hurt or offended others’ feelings. Whenever I was aware of these instances, I have, and will continue to, apologize to the friends and colleagues in question and to continually learn how to be a better person. Though the damage to my reputation caused by these allegations alone is impossible to undo, I nonetheless take the concerns of the Tor community seriously. To dispel any further rumors, to the best of my knowledge, the Tor network is not ‘compromised.’
I’ve dedicated my life as a journalist, activist, and longtime member of the Tor Project to advocating for the transparency of public processes and to speaking out about the necessity of privacy, security, and anonymity. These are ideals that I will continue to uphold, despite the vicious campaign that is currently being waged against me.
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Last I checked, the first sentence is carefully crafted to look like it says that the allegations are false, see Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries. See also: weasel word.
Do not let that first sentence stop you from reading the rest.
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Maybe you misunderstand me. I’m not trying to be sarcastic or anything here. No dogs in the game, and such. I did read the whole article, and it both starts and ends with the point that he hasn’t denied the allegations.
Which, I mean, that’s an odd thing to criticise. Most of the time, in the face of potential legal action, we’re given the advice: shut up, get a lawyer.
Regardless, I can’t see how “vicious and spurious allegations”, “vague rumors and smear campaigns”, and “unsubstantiated and unfounded attacks” are unclear. On the topic of weasel words, is the implication that what he’s denying isn’t the same charges that we’re talking about?
Basically, where are the weasel words in “the accusations of criminal sexual misconduct against me are entirely false”?
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That’s one well-rounded and completely unconvincing dementi.
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I’m quite sure the default in Debian will stay reasonable.
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I haven’t noticed it – I actually very much prefer Debian’s well-integrated systemd over the sysvinit hackery. My opinion of Debian’s systemd integration is as high as my personal opinion of Lennart Poettering is low. (And I really couldn’t care less about the man.)
Now the change, just as I expected, has been reverted.
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“Init system freedom”, “only supports sysvinit style init systems”
That’s an uncharitable way of reading this announcement. Your second “quote” doesn’t even appear on the page.
They are enabling init system freedom by supporting an alternative. It would be silly to expect them to support systemd installations when that is already covered by Debian.
If your needs are not met by sysvinit, openrc, runit, or sinit, Devaun suggests additional systemdless distros here: https://devuan.org/os/init-freedom/
I’m not saying what they’re doing is bad, and there are plenty of people around the internet who prefer sysvinit style init systems, but to claim “init system freedom” is pretty outlandish. Especially when their core packages explicitly conflict with systemd. You also presumably can’t install upstart without causing massive headaches or breaking everything.
In no way am I trying to make a value judgement about specific init systems here, but claiming you have freedom of choice in your init system with Devuan is a little like saying you can have a car painted any color so long as it’s black, extra noir, super dark gray, or #000.
Isn’t Upstart defunct since Ubuntu abandoned it?
that’s not really relevant – anything that supports systemd d-bus interfaces won’t work on devuan
Well what else is there?
What additional init system should they be supporting?
Debian offers exactly this (an ability to run sysvinit) without the ideology-based purging of all systemd-related libraries from the distribution. There is literally no advantage in running devuan right now (and devuan has to rely on Debian for the security updates, they simply do not have manpower to provide proper security support).