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pizzaiolo
2 days ago
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Windows 95 is now an app you can download and install on macOS, Windows, and Linux
ok but why
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I do not trust Software Freedom Conservancy (and with good reasons), but I agree with most of what is written here, except:
Copyright and other legal systems give authors the power to decide what license to choose […]
In my view, it’s a power which you don’t deserve — that allows you to restrict others.As an author of free software myself, I think that I totally deserve the right to decide who and how can use my work.
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No.
I cannot trust them anymore, because when the project joined Conservancy, I explicitly asked them how my copyright was going to change and Karen Sandler replied that it was not going to change.
One year later I discovered that my name was completely removed by the sources.
According to the GPLv2 this violation causes a definitive termination of the project’s rights to use or modify the software.
Now, I informed Sandler about that mess (before the rebase) and never listen her back after, despite several of my contributions got “accidentally squashed” during the rebase.
That’s why I cannot trust them anymore.
Because they are still supporting a project that purposedly violated the GPLv2 (causing its definitive termination) and despite the fact that I gave them the possibility to fix this, they didn’t… and tried to remove all evidences of this violation and of the license termination with a rebase… (that still squashed some of my commits).
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He’s objecting to restricting others in the way that proprietary software does, that’s the right he says you shouldn’t have. I think you edited out the part in your quote what bkuhn was talking about.
But more to your point, I also think that your right to to decide how others can use your work should be very limited. With software, an unlimited number of people can benefit from using your work in ways you may disagree with while you would be the only who would object. As a bargain with society, your authorial rights should be given smaller weight than the rights of your users.
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As a bargain with society, your authorial rights should be given smaller weight than the rights of your users.
Is this a principle that you believe should be only applied to software?
Because if not, one could argue that a person’s special skills (say, as a doctor) are so valuable to society that that person should work for free to assure that the greatest number of people have access to their skill.
If the principle is restricted to expression, a photograph I take of a person could be freely used by a political party that I despise to further their cause through propaganda. I am only one person, and they are many. My pretty picture can help them more than it helps me. So according to the principle above (as I read it) they should have unrestricted access to my work.
I believe that the current regime of IP legislation is weighted too much towards copyright holders, but to argue that a creator should have no rights to decide how their work is used is going too far.
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Software is different than doctors because software can be reproduced indefinitely without inconveniencing the author. Photographs are more similar to software than doctors.
I also didn’t say an author should have no rights. I just said their rights should weigh less. For example, copyrights should expire after, say, 10 years, instead of lasting forever as they de facto do now.
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This blogpost is a good example of fragmented, hobbyist security maximalism (sprinkled with some personal grudges based on the tone).
Expecting Signal to protect anyone specifically targeted by a nation-state is a huge misunderstanding of the threat models involved.
Talking about threat models, it’s important to start from them and that explains most of the misconceptions in the post.
- Usable security for the most people possible. The vast majority people on the planet use iOS and Android phones, so while it is theoretically true that Google or Apple could be forced to subvert their OSs, it’s outside the threat model and something like that would be highly visible, a nuclear option so to speak.
- Alternative distribution mechanisms are not used by 99%+ of the existing phone userbases, providing an APK is indeed correctly viewed as harm reduction.
- Centralization is a feature. Moxie created a protocol and a service used by billions and millions of people respectively that provides real, measureable security for a lot of people. The fact is that doing all this in a decentralized way is something we don’t yet know how to do or doing invites tradeoffs that we shouldn’t make. Federation atm either leads to insecurity or leads to the ossification of the ecosystem, which in turn leads to a useless system for real users. We’ve had IRC from the 1990s, ever wonder why Slack ever became a thing? Ossification of a decentralized protocol. Ever wonder why openpgp isn’t more widespread? Noone cares about security in a system where usability is low and design is fragile. Ever tried to do key rotation in gpg? Even cryptographers gave up on that. Signal has that built into the protocol.
Were tradeoffs made? Yes. Have they been carefully considered? Yes. Signal isn’t perfect, but it’s usable, high-level security for a lot of people. I don’t say I fully trust Signal, but I trust everything else less. Turns out things are complicated when it’s about real systems and not fantasy escapism and wishes.
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Expecting Signal to protect anyone specifically targeted by a nation-state is a huge misunderstanding of the threat models involved.
In this article, resistance to governments constantly comes up as a theme of his work. He also pushed for his tech to be used to help resist police states like with the Arab Spring example. Although he mainly increased the baseline, the tool has been pushed for resisting governments and articles like that could increase perception that it was secure against governments.
This nation-state angle didn’t come out of thin air from paranoid, security people: it’s the kind of thing Moxie talks about. In one talk, he even started with a picture of two, activist friends jailed in Iran in part to show the evils that motivate him. Stuff like that only made the stuff Drew complains about on centralization, control, and dependence on cooperating with surveillance organization stand out even more due to the inconsistency. I’d have thought he’d make signed packages for things like F-Droid sooner if he’s so worried about that stuff.
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A problem with the “nation-state” rhetoric that might be useful to dispel is the idea that it is somehow a God-tier where suddenly all other rules becomes defunct. The five-eyes are indeed “nation state” and has capabilities that are profound; like the DJB talk speculating about how many RSA-1024 keys that they’d likely be able to factor in a year given such and such developments and what you can do with that capability. That’s scary stuff. On the other hand, this is not the “nation state” that is Iceland or Syria. Just looking at the leaks from the “Hacking Team” thing, there are a lot of “nation states” forced to rely on some really low quality stuff.
I think Greg Conti in his “On Cyber” setup depicts it rather well (sorry, don’t have a copy of the section in question) and that a more reasonable threat model of capable actors you do need to care about is that of Organized Crime Syndicates - which seems more approachable. Nation State is something you are afraid of if you are political actor or in conflict with your government, where the “we can also waterboard you to compliance” factors into your threat model, Organized Crime hits much more broadly. That’s Ivan with his botnet from internet facing XBMC^H Kodi installations.
I’d say the “Hobbyist, Fragmented Maximalist” line is pretty spot on - with a dash of “Confused”. The ‘threats’ of Google Play Store (test it, write some malware and see how long it survives - they are doing things there …) - the odds of any other app store; Fdroid, the ones from Samsung, HTC, Sony et al. - being completely owned by much less capable actors is way, way higher. Signal (perhaps a Signal-To-Threat ratio?) perform an good enough job in making reasonable threat actors much less potent. Perhaps not worthy of “trust”, but worthy of day to day business.
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Expecting Signal to protect anyone specifically targeted by a nation-state is a huge misunderstanding of the threat models involved.
And yet, Signal is advertising with the face of Snowden and Laura Poitras, and quotes from them recommending it.
What kind of impression of the threat models involved do you think does this create?
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Whichever ones are normally on the media for information security saying the least amount of bullshit. We can start with Schneier given he already does a lot of interviews and writes books laypeople buy.
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He encourages use of stuff like that to increase baseline but not for stopping nation states. He adds also constantly blogged about the attacks and legal methods they used to bypass technical measures. So, his reporting was mostly accurate.
We counterpoint him here or there but his incentives and reo are tied to delivering accurate info. Moxie’s incentives would, if he’s selfish, lead to locked-in to questionable platforms.
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We’ve had IRC from the 1990s, ever wonder why Slack ever became a thing? Ossification of a decentralized protocol.
I’m sorry, but this is plain incorrect. There are many expansions on IRC that have happened, including the most recent effort, IRCv3: a collectoin of extensions to IRC to add notifications, etc. Not to mention the killer point: “All of the IRCv3 extensions are backwards-compatible with older IRC clients, and older IRC servers.”
If you actually look at the protocols? Slack is a clear case of Not Invented Here syndrome. Slack’s interface is not only slower, but does some downright crazy things (Such as transliterating a subset of emojis to plain-text – which results in batshit crazy edge-cases).
If you have a free month, try writing a slack client. Enlightenment will follow :P
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I’m sorry, but this is plain incorrect. There are many expansions on IRC that have happened, including the most recent effort, IRCv3: a collectoin of extensions to IRC to add notifications, etc. Not to mention the killer point: “All of the IRCv3 extensions are backwards-compatible with older IRC clients, and older IRC servers.”
Per IRCv3 people I’ve talked to, IRCv3 blew up massively on the runway, and will never take off due to infighting.
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There are swathes of people still using Windows XP.
The primary complaint of people who use Electron-based programs is that they take up half a gigabyte of RAM to idle, and yet they are in common usage.
The fact that people are using something tells you nothing about how Good that thing is.
At the end of the day, if you slap a pretty interface on something, of course it’s going to sell. Then you add in that sweet, sweet Enterprise Support, and the Hip and Cool factors of using Something New, and most people will be fooled into using it.
At the end of the day, Slack works just well enough Not To Suck, is Hip and Cool, and has persistent history (Something that the IRCv3 group are working on: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/batch/chathistory-3.3.html)
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At the end of the day, Slack works just well enough Not To Suck, is Hip and Cool, and has persistent history (Something that the IRCv3 group are working on […])
The time for the IRC group to be working on a solution to persistent history was a decade ago. It strikes me as willful ignorance to disregard the success of Slack et al over open alternatives as mere fashion in the face of many meaningful functionality differences. For business use-cases, Slack is a better product than IRC full-stop. That’s not to say it’s perfect or that I think it’s better than IRC on all axes.
To the extent that Slack did succeed because it was hip and cool, why is that a negative? Why can’t IRC be hip and cool? But imagine being a UX designer and wanting to help make some native open-source IRC client fun and easy to use for a novice. “Sisyphean” is the word that comes to mind.
If we want open solutions to succeed we have to start thinking of them as products for non-savvy end users and start being honest about the cases where closed products have superior usability.
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IRC isn’t hip and cool because people can’t make money off of it. Technologies don’t get investment because they are good, they get good because of investment. The reason that Slack is hip/cool and popular and not IRC is because the investment class decided that.
It also shows that our industry is just a pop culture and can give a shit about good tech .
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There were companies making money off chat and IRC. They just didn’t create something like Slack. We can’t just blame the investors when they were backing companies making chat solutions whose management stayed on what didn’t work in long-term or for huge audience.
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My point was there were companies selling chat software, including IRC clients. None pulled off what Slack did. Even those doing IRC with money or making money off it didn’t accomplish what Slack did for some reason. It would help to understand why that happened. Then, the IRC-based alternative can try to address that from features to business model. I don’t see anything like that when most people that like FOSS talk Slack alternatives. Then, they’re not Slack alternatives if lacking what Slack customers demand.
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Thanks for clarifying. My point can be restated as… There is no business model for federated and decentralized software (until recently , see cryptocurrencies). Note most open and decentralized tech of the past was government funded and therefore didn’t face business pressures. This freed designets to optimise other concerns instead of business onrs like slack does.
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Right, as I said I think it’s important for proponents of open tech to look at successful products like Slack and try to understand why they succeeded. If you really think there is no meaningful difference then I think you’re totally disconnected from the needs/context of the average organization or computer user.
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That’s all well and good, I just don’t see why we can’t build those systems on top of existing open protocols like IRC. I mean: of course I understand, it’s about the money. My opinion is that it doesn’t make much sense to insist that opaque, closed ecosystems are the way to go. We can have the “hip-and-cool” factor, and all the amenities provided by services like Slack, without abandoning the important precedent we’ve set for ourselves with protocols like IRC and XMPP. I’m just disappointed that everyone’s seeing this as an “either-or” situation.
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Open, standard chat tech has had persistent history and much more for decades in the form of XMPP. Comparing to the older IRC on features isn’t really fair.
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I don’t see how Good and “good enough to solve a problem” are related here. The first is a metric of quality, the second is the literal bare minimum of that metric.
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Alternative distribution mechanisms are not used by 99%+ of the existing phone userbases, providing an APK is indeed correctly viewed as harm reduction.
I’d dispute that. People who become interested in Signal seem much more prone to be using F-Droid than, say, WhatsApp users. Signal tries to be an app accessible to the common person, but few people really use it or see the need… and often they are free software enthusiasts or people who are fed up with Google and surveillance.
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Ossification of a decentralized protocol.
IRC isn’t decentralised… it’s not even federated
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I don’t really see how a youtube alternative could function without having a replacement for ad revenue. There are thousands of people making youtube content as full time jobs and small businesses… This doesn’t seem to solve that use case, which imo is the most important.
One example would be “mouse trap mondays” they review mousetraps by actually using them and setting up a motion camera. The channel owner clearly only does this to make money, there are millions of channel views, and yet there is no way to bypass advertiser censorship and content policy violation strikes have almost gotten the channel taken down.
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Why should that have to be part of the media-distribution platform? Even now, while YouTube is still predominant, we see many YouTube content creators using external sites like Patreon to fund themselves more reliably that having to hope that your audience doesn’t use ad-blockers.
And even if this couldn’t be copied 1:1 from YouTube, it’s not even too much of a problem. The point isn’t to clone YouTube and with all it’s faults. The Ad-system incentivises click-bait videos, tabloid-esqe content, mass-producing “top 10” channels, etc. which I wouldn’t mind not having. There’s a reason I use uBlock to remove the suggested videos section, after all…
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I said replace ad revenue, not implement ad revenue. Things like https://en.liberapay.com/ seem interesting, you are right there.
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youtube’s content was arguably better before the partner program, albeit they didn’t have stuff like hot ones or that mouse trap review channel. at any rate i don’t think the use case of making youtube videos as a job is the most important, if that’s what you were saying.
youtube would still exist, just as tv still exists, but having a freer alternative where you can share videos in a setting without the influence of advertisers would be cool.
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Well, embedded ads are most likely not going to be there, but sponsored content should still work just fine in PeerTube, right? Audible.com and Squarespace shoutouts don’t seem to be going nowhere in the near future.
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this is an advertisement
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I always opted for Google Maps for quick and easy maps for web. And I still thought they were way easier to setup than OSM could ever be (the javascript API is absolutely straightforward).
I doubted myself and checked what’s available for OSM on their website and man, I’m glad I did that!
Their js maps library just looks like GMap one but it’s not Google stuff: sweet! Definitely gonna switch to OSM for simple weekend projects as well!
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This might help: https://switch2osm.org/
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I am honestly surprised this hasn’t happened before. Always check what you are downloading from the AUR.
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mwcampbell
1 month ago
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Forced Labor Is the Backbone of the World’s Electronics Industry
Any suggestions on what we in the west should do to help put an end to this? Would it do any good to reduce all new electronics purchases to a minimum and go to some trouble to get more life out of old or malfunctioning devices? Or would that merely be a hollow, symbolic gesture?
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The best we can do is to spread knowledge of the blood footprint of consumerism.
It’s naive to think that not buying from a multinational company exploiting poors is enough to annoy them.
But if you actively spread knowledge of the pain the cause to other humans, if you publicly blame them, you are going to be a problem for them.
And if you manage to create a culture that put shame on people mindlessy buying gadgets as status symbols, if you attack the assumptions of their propaganda/marketing, you will force them to address the issue.If they cannot kill you for cheap, they will fix their supply chains.
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I love this post for teaching me about the existance of PeerTube
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jkirchartz
2 months ago
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GitPub: An extension to ActivityPub for web-based Git services federation
Now, all that’s left for them to do is create a team and write the code that extends ActivityPub for web-based Git services federation.
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The wording may sound a little clunky but the development done so far shows this projet can do (and is already doing) a lot of good - while being still in beta. Digging a bit more on the project you can see the video streaming in P2P is not the only thing that could be game-changing. There’s a whole consideration for technologies that could bulid a different web. ActivityPub is maybe the most famous, but there could also be the integration with DBpedia for semantic tagging, the development of retribution protocols with other federated platforms, or simply the improvement of the overall commenting experience while still federating it. This work helps not only the PeerTube network grow, but the federated networks as a whole too.
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The comment which started it is here: https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/352#issuecomment-377204232 - maybe I misunderstood something.
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Why reinvent the wheel?
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Very good question.
Hackers reinvent wheels whenever the available wheels do not seem to work as expected.
Second, we reinvent wheels whenever the available wheels do not work as required by our use case.
Finally, hackers reinvent the wheels just for fun, for curiosity. To train to critical thinking.
Actually, a relevant part of the fun comes from answering to people asking “why reinvent the wheel?” :-)-
And, of course: when figuring out the oddities of the old works is less fun than making a new one.
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Or when fixing the oddities of the old works is not possible, due to licensing issues.
That’s what gave us GNU/Linux. And what could give us more copyleft licenses.For example GNU GPLv3 starts with:
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 3, 29 June 2007
Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. https://fsf.org/
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
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pizzaiolo
3 months ago
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Congratulations to Tesla on Their First Public Step Toward GPL Compliance
SFC has the sort of diplomacy I would never be capable of in face of something so infuriating
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Kind of funny to see this coming from Gruber, who has been a consistent defender of keeping systems closed in the name of user experience. Facebook used to have RSS feeds, too, and Google Chat used to support XMPP; the writing’s been on the wall for a while. I am surprised that he (and the third-party app maintainers) are really naïve enough to imagine that Twitter can be talked into maintaining these APIs (which allow people to use their service without being advertised to) in the long term.
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Later services like Instagram only offer API access for the real customers - the advertisers.
Instagram is an even worse example of API bait-and-switch than Twitter - they offered API access to developers (in 2014), deprecated it this January ¹, and then completely removed access this spring, months before the deprecation deadline ².
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I honestly never understood why anyone cares what Gruber has to say. I give him credit for inventing markdown. Really great idea!
All the rest he produces seems to be some variation of “apples is so amazing” and “google is so awful”. Most probably that is confirmation bias on my end, but really: Why does anyone care what Gruber has to say?
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The title is a little misleading. The author is not against adblocking in the abstract, but is against Adblock Plus, a specific adblocker.
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The title capitalizes Adblock, which makes it pretty clear that it’s talking about a specific product.
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AntennaPod: podcast app (a little buggy but mostly works)
DNS66: systemwide rootless adblocker
Firefox Klar: Firefox Focus, but free
Silence: texting app
Simple Gallery
Tusky: mastodon client
Unit Converter Ultimate
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Firefox Klar: Firefox Focus, but free
they are exactly the same. They changed the name to ‘Klar’ (german for ‘clear’) in Germany due to trademark issues (focus.de is a magazine there). It is also not in the main repositories, but in a seperate one that does not build from source.
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One difference between that two is that Klar have telemetry turned off by default, AFAIK: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/issues/235
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Here’s a few that I use and fully recommend:
- Obsqr: a qr code scanner with sensible permissions.
- Riot.im: the most popular matrix client, currently.
- Tiny Tiny RSS: frontend for the self-hosted RSS reader of the same name. (Requires you to host a server.)
- StreetComplete: contribute to OpenStreetMap by helping fill in meta data that it can tell is missing or flagging inaccuracies.
And, actually, I’ve got a request: Does anyone have suggestions for a Free app that I can use to record GPS tracks? When my wife and I go hiking I like to record it, so looking for something that doesn’t depend on a data connection and it would be nice it if showed some stats about speed, elevation, etc and the track that has been recorded so far.
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I asked in my local OSM community and got the following responses:
- https://fossdroid.com/a/osmtracker.html
- https://github.com/BasicAirData/GPSLogger
- https://github.com/mendhak/gpslogger (careful, uses playservices)
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However, setting up such a “Google free” phone requires a significant amount of time, dedication, and skill (not to mention a personal server), definitively far beyond to what I’d trust my mother to comprehend.
To me, this is the biggest bottleneck at the moment. We need to move the architecture from self-hosted to distributed, instead of expecting users to be sysadmins.
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While I’m not going to argue against their findings per say, you do have to wonder if the drop off in contributors is in large part simply due to the completeness of the wiki. Not that Wikipedia EN actually encompasses all of human knowledge, but that 90% of the low hanging fruit has been plucked already. As time goes on contributions will only become more or more specialized. I don’t think this is a bad thing at all, and I believe actually mimics the growth of software projects.
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One should also keep in mind that the bigger and more mature a wiki becomes, contributing becomes a bit more difficult for newcomers, since they either might not know where or whether to add something or they might not be familiar enough with the user’s/admin’s etiquette, thus “scaring” them away from contributing.
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I was an editor during 2003–06 and the culture was just toxic but, amazingly, most of the articles (95–99 percent) were excellent, even then. If a topic wasn’t controversial, you’d find something decent. The product itself, I think, has even gotten better. I don’t see a slight decline in the number of editors as necessarily a bad thing, although it will have to bring in new talent.
I do think Wikipedia was easier to get into, in 2003, probably because the standard to which one had to write an article to make it fit in was lower. These days, articles tend to have pictures with captions, footnotes, and a lot of other adornments that make the pages better, no doubt, but possibly make the editing process more intimidating. That said, I hope the toxic hostility I encountered in the mid-2000s has abated.
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This might be unpopular, but I find articles on controversial topics to be high-quality and well-sourced due to the editing wars those articles endure: If you can’t edit a paragraph into a sloppy form because people are actively monitoring that article to ensure that old fights aren’t starting back up, the paragraphs are going to be pretty tight; similarly, they’re not going to be one-sided because both sides will know the system well enough to start a resolution process when well-sourced material is being kept out.
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I don’t edit in particularly controversial areas, but I haven’t found the bar for contributing lately to be all that high. The main way it’s gotten higher is that sources aren’t optional anymore. In the early days it was common to just write a bunch of text without necessarily citing anything, with the expectation that it could be properly referenced later if necessary (more of a classic wiki style of working, like how things were done on the old C2 wiki). Now, if you’re creating a new article, it’s expected you’ll cite some decent sources for it. But like one or two decent sources and one paragraph of text is fine. I create a lot of short biographies of historical figures, and short articles on archaeological sites, and nobody has ever complained about them as far as I remember.
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The notability requirement has always seemed bonkers to me… that made sense in a paper encyclopedia, but wikipedia can have as many articles as it wants…
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Notability is still useful because you have to draw a line somewhere, lest Wikipedia becomes an indiscriminate collection of information.
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It’s probably to block self-promotion. A lot of people used to write articles about themselves.
In reflection, now that I am borderline “notable”, the absolute last thing I would want is a Wikipedia article about me. There’s likely to be one after my book comes out (mid-2019) and I’m dreading the thought.
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For currently living people, the standards have been tightened up (especially around sourcing) partly because a lot of people share that view: they’d rather have no article about them than a bad one. The subject still doesn’t get a veto over the article, but there are some interests to balance there. I mean any bad article is bad in some way just because it spreads disinformation. But a bad article about a specific person who’s currently alive, especially if they aren’t even a major public figure, is bad in a more personal way in that it can harm the reputation, job prospects, etc. of that person directly.
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How does it compare to pihole?
Pi-hole combines lists from multiple sources, and has some pretty stats and a UI to configure it. So overall it’s a much more complete product.