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It’s a long weekend and it’s sunny, so I’m going to try to deploy an OpenBSD router I’ve been building and then I’m going to braai.
If it’s not too hot, I might have a play with a Bluetooth CTF I saw a while back.
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South African spotted!
I mean, who else would try deploy an OpenBSD router on the weekend. ;-)
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Could be worse, she might be braai’ing the man.
Understand fair queuing, apparently this is not a concept in South Africa
Like NZ, the available queueing protocols are ruck, maul and scrum.
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I laughed when I saw this as historical. I was working on a Z Series security project last year. They’re everywhere.
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I wasn’t aware that RSS and Atom was at risk of disappearing. I use the excellent rss-bridge to get non-RSS feeds into reasonable formats (instance here if anyone wants to try it out) and rss2email for most of the stuff I pull from there.
I also use the news reader on Nextcloud as a place to put links to investment notices, and use newsboat for tracking sites I like. I’m contemplating reinstalling selfoss for mobile RSS, but tbh I found myself using wallabag more.
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I would love to use my smartphone less. I laze around on it in the morning and at night. I wish there was something that autodisabled my phone when I’m on my bed.
That all said, the smartness of a smartphone is invaluable for me. I use to to look up directions, change plans on the fly, learn about artists when I see artwork, read in the subway. I need a humane smart phone, instead of one filled with apps that aim to colonize my mind.
I sometimes save time by eating out. Quick meals at home are cheaper and less time consuming that going somewhere, ordering, waiting for the food, eating, and coming back. But anything more involved than oatmeal is hard for someone living alone. It takes lots of time to organize recipes, get the ingredients, and cook. You have to choose between eating lots of leftovers or even more time per meal. It can be sensible to eat out if you can, from a time point of view.
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Regarding smartphone usage, I agree I can’t see myself switching away from a device that has substantial daily utility. For starters you can play with blocking websites. I felt like my productivity tanked when switching from Android to iOS, yet only recently realized you can have the same effect of editing the hosts file via settings-restrictions-websites-limitadultcontent, then adding some ‘never allow sites’
Regarding cooking, I feel like that’s a mindset shift. I went from wanting food to be automated to having a process of cooking some routine dishes (tacos, smoothies, pizzas from scratch, rice/quinoa stirfry) in a way that I pretty much know what ingredients to keep around. Time wise things can be mixed too - stretching while the eggs are cooking, doing a bodyweight workout while the oven is heating up/sauce is getting reduced. I live alone and travel pretty regularly, just try to plan ahead and in the rare case give veggies/fruit I can’t use to a neighbor.
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Thanks! I didn’t know you could do hosts blocking on iOS. I hadn’t thought about mixing cooking with exercise like that.
I started making avacado toast as a quick foray into cooking. Then I learned a mouse has been eating my bread. So now I’m block on a mouse trap getting shipped over. What a life man.
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I’m the same. By way of a halfway approach, I use a oneplus 5t and Lineage for Microg. There are cheaper, compatible options out there but I plan to keep this phone for a good few years.
Using Lineage for MicroG means I’m not signed into Google services, but still have access to maps and signal if I want them. The F-Droid app store is a lot lighter than Google Play. I haven’t tried Android Auto though. It might be worth a look, although it might not fully meet every use case.
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My hopes are for Light Phone 2 now. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/light-phone-2-design I pre-ordered one, and basic messaging + navigation would be perfect.
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There are arguments for and against HTTPS for static sites, but what I’ve seen is Troy (and to some extent Scott) making valid points, then talking past other people online (who in turn talk past them). Neither side budges and it descends into the usual online bickering.
There are good reasons to implement HTTPS on a static website, as illustrated by Troy. HTTPS isn’t the only way to secure a transport layer, nor does HTTPS magically stop 100% of man-in-the-middle attacks. There are plenty of attacks on TLS (which is why we use TLS 1.3 and not 1.0), plenty of problems with the openssl monoculture and a web of trust broken by companies and governments to contend with.
It makes sense to advocate for people to use HTTPS where practical to protect their site and users from casual interception. It does not make sense to resort to dark UX patterns, nor to mandate HTTPS. Browsers mandating HTTPS, or warning users that not using HTTPS with full WoT is insecure, then they are against decentralization. The WoT is a centralized transport layer on top of a decentralized protocol.
In the 90s, there were many that advocated for mandatory IPSEC. Indeed, IPSEC is integrated into the IPv6 spec. Better solutions came along, and now IPSEC is losing ground to TLS VPNs.
Protecting user data is a good idea. Pushing users into a fully centralized web, open to abuse by governments and corporations is a bad idea. There are alternatives to TLS out there for people that want them, and we can even build better decentralized alternatives, but if we mandate moves to a centralized web there’ll be too many incentives to stop moving off.
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IPSEC is integrated into the IPv6 spec.
IPSEC was removed from the IPv6 spec a long time ago. Around 2011 it changed from a MUST to a SHOULD, and now it isn’t mentioned at all anymore in the latest RFC that combined all of the various RFCs comprising IPv6: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8200
I have been using IPv6 in some form since at least 2004 and have never once seen it coupled with IPSEC.
RFC 4294 - IPv6 Node Requirements: IPsec MUST
RFC 6434 - IPv6 Node Requirements: IPsec SHOULD
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BBQ today at a friends place. Tomorrow I’m probably working sadly. I worked the full weekend last weekend, so I really could do with some time to just chill out and spend with my partner. Hopefully the week after next will be free.
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The main (only?) argument for putting static sites behind HTTPS is to prevent visitors from getting MITM’d. I’m a little uncomfortable about the unspoken implication that content publishers should be responsible for the security of their visitors but that’s a separate point.
What really annoys me about the push for HTTP on static sites and other benign content is two things:
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HTTPS is touted as the best thing since sliced bread but we already know the existing TLS certificate trust chain in mainstream browsers is pretty weak. Certificate authorities have suffered serious security lapses and/or incompetence (Symantec, Wosign), or delegate too freely to likewise entities. Pretty much all developed countries in the world either have government-run CAs or can swoop in and “borrow” the private keys of commercial CAs to sign fraudulent certs or (more likely) decrypt traffic as it goes by. There are things happening to make incremental improvements to these problems but right now the mainstream opinion is just to keep putting band-aids on the system. Don’t get me wrong, HTTPS is better than nothing but the whole trust chain is very half-assed and nobody seems interested in fixing it.
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HTTPS is arguably not the right tool for public, non-secret content. As a static content publisher (yes, I use that term loosely), I don’t want to encrypt my content, I only want to sign it to show that it hasn’t been tampered with. But with HTTPS it’s all-or-nothing. If we had secure DNS (however implemented), this would be fairly straightforward: public key in a DNS record and a signature for the page in the HTTP headers. The browser can show the page as signed, clients who don’t have the technology to verify the signature or who don’t care are free to be MITMed at their leisure.
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How can visitors secure themselves against MITM attackers without the cooperation of content publishers? Maybe I should be concerned that requiring free content publishers to do more work makes a less useful web.
Public non secret content is tricky. A blog about food isn’t a secret, but access patterns might be. If I only visit the pages about sugary foods, my ISP might sell this data to an advertiser or a health insurance company. This is prevented by TLS encryption. What is the downside of encrypting as well as signing?
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If I only visit the pages about sugary foods, my ISP might sell this data to an advertiser or a health insurance company. his is prevented by TLS encryption.
Except it isn’t prevented by TLS. The sugary foods site, using Google Analytics (or even Google hosted jquery or webfonts) will still sell the fact that you were there. If it doesn’t use Google then any externally hosted resource could be used to track you. The blog itself would know which pages you visited and could resell the data. Your ISP can integrate technologies that use techniques that TLS does not defend against. Here’s a video of Vincent Berg’s work on deanonymzing Google Maps over TLS from 2012.
At the very least your ISP will have the metadata about the fact you visited a site with sugary pages, how much data was transferred and when.
The problem here is that the HTTPS infrastructure does not grant sufficiently reliable confidentiality and provides some (occasionally broken) integrity confirmation compared to other more difficult to manage methods.
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We’re getting closer and closer to a world where all certificates are in Certificate Transparency logs, which addresses the security concerns around your first point (whether that’s desirable from a data hoarding / secrecy perspective is a totally different aspect).
Regarding your second point, I honestly think that it shouldn’t be you deciding whether you want to encrypt your content. I understand you don’t think it’s necessary, but the goal for all of this is to change the web to provide encryption by default in the long run. Because it makes sense for users.
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Start of article:
Disclaimer: The views in this article are my own, and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer.
End of article:
I’m very excited about the real business improvements that will be enabled by the technical innovations my team is making at VMware. If you would like to join us, please reach out either to one of us directly or through our careers portal.
I’m not being snarky, I just found this funny.
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He mentions self-hosting a personal wiki but doesn’t mention what software he’s using. Anybody have suggestions?
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Hugo + custom theme + GitHub pages + Travis CI, works quite well for me, I don’t write much, if at all but it was painless to setup. Every commit to the source branch triggers a CI that pushes into the master branch of the GH pages, it’s all automated.
Okay it’s not really self-hosting… but Hugo + custom theme is still usable behind a self-hosted static nginx.
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Getting some time for electronics projects, and doing a bit of a grab and grin:
- I’m doing a project with HIDIOT and Neopixel rings for a festival with Devoxx, CERN and the University of Lancaster, to create a particle accelerator simulator for kids.
- I’m also getting the final 44COIN prototype hardware off to the fab.
- Meeting a few partners and clients about security consulting projects.
If I get time, I’m going to do some more work on moving the rawhex site off shopify. It’s been a total nightmare since we moved our main site hosting over as it’s broken SPF and DKIM, so we can’t do mailing list mails or anything.
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As with most of Gary Bernhardt’s writing, I loved this piece. I read it several times over, as I find his writing often deeply interesting. To me, this is a great case study in judgement through attempting to apply Americanized principles to speech between two non-Americans (a Pole and a Finn) communicating in a second language.
There are several facets at play here as I see it:
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There’s a generational difference between older hackers and newer ones. For older hackers, the code is all that matters, niceties be damned. Newer hackers care about politeness and being treated well. Some of this is a product of money coming in since the 90s, and people who never would’ve been hackers in the past are hackers now.
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Linux is Linus’ own project. He’s not going to change. He’s not going to go away. If you don’t like the way he behaves, fork it. Run your own Linux fork the way you want, and you’ll see whether or not the niceties matters. Con Kolivas did this for years.
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There are definitely cultural issues at play. While Linus has a lot of exposure to American culture, he’s Finnish. Finnish people are not like Americans. I find the American obsession with not upsetting people often infuriatingly two-faced, and I’m British. I have various friends in other countries who find the much more minor but still present British obsession with not upsetting people two-faced, and they’re right.
Go to Poland, fuck up and people will tell you. Go to Germany, do something wrong and people will correct you. Go to Finland, do something stupid getting in the way of a person’s job and probably they’ll swear at you in Finnish. I’m not saying this is right, or wrong, it’s just the rest of the world works differently to you, and while you can scream at the sea about perceived injustices, the sea will not change it’s tides for you.
Yes Linus is being a jerk, but it’s not like this is an unknown quantity. Linus doesn’t owe you kindness. You don’t owe Linus respect either. If his behaviour is that important to you, don’t use Linux.
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Finnish people are not like Americans. I find the American obsession with not upsetting people often infuriatingly two-faced […]
- I think this is a false comparison of some sort. Americans worrying doesn’t say anything useful about Finns.
- I emphatically disagree that Linus is representative of the social culture around me in Finland.
- Nonviolent, clear communication is not the same thing as avoiding difficult subjects. It’s the opposite!
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I think this is a false comparison of some sort. Americans worrying doesn’t say anything useful about Finns.
In my experience of dealing with Finns, they don’t sugar coat things. When something is needed to be said, the Finns I’ve interacted with are extremely direct and to the point, compared to some other cultures. Would you say that’s fair?
I emphatically disagree that Linus is representative of the social culture around me in Finland.
I didn’t say that he’s representative of Finnish culture. He’s a product of it. He wasn’t raised American. He didn’t grow up immersed in American culture and values. It would be unrealistic to expect him to hold or conform to American values.
Nonviolent, clear communication is not the same thing as avoiding difficult subjects. It’s the opposite!
Definitely! Out of interest, what are your thoughts on this in terms of applicability to his communication style? I’m fairly certain there’s a general asshole element to his style, but I wonder how much (if any) is influenced by this.
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He didn’t grow up immersed in American culture and values. It would be unrealistic to expect him to hold or conform to American values.
As an Italian, I can say that after the WWII, US did a great job to spread their culture in Europe.
Initially to counter the “Bolsheviks” influx, later as a carrier for their products.They have been largely successful.
Indeed, I love Joplin just like I love Vivaldi, Mozart and Beethoven! :-)
But we have thousands years of variegate history, so we are not going to completely conform anyway. After all, we are proud of our deep differences, as they enrich us.-
At the risk of getting into semantics, Finland was much more neutral post WWII than other European nations due to realpolitik.
Also, there is something to say for Italian insults, by far some of the finest and most perverse, blasphemous poetry I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. It’s the sort of level of filth that takes thousands of years to age well :)
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Actually the Invettiva is a literary gender on its own, that date back to ancient Greek.
In Italian, there are several passages of Dante’s Divina Commedia that belong to the genre and are spectacular examples of the art you describe.
But since we are talking about jerk, I will quote Marziale, from memory: 2000 years later we still memorize his lines at school
Os et labras tibi lingit, Menneia, catellus.
Non miror, merdas si libet esse cani.Nothing Linus can say will ever compete! ;-)
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Os et labras tibi lingit, Menneia, catellus. Non miror, merdas si libet esse cani.
Google translates this as
Your mouth and lip licking, Menneas, catelle. I am not surprised, merda, if you like to be for the dog.
Which I assume is horribly wrong. Is it possible to translate for us non-worldly folks who only know English? :-)
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The translation from Latin is roughly
The little dog licks your mouth and lips.
Not a surprise: dogs like to eat shits.It’s one of Martial’s Epygrams.
Not even one of the worse!It’s worth noticing how nothing else remains of Menneia. And the same can be said of several people targeted by his insults.
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Hah, that’s great. Thank you!
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speech between two non-Americans (a Pole and a Finn) communicating in a second language.
How is that relevant? On my current team, we have developers from Argentina, Bosnia, Brazil, China, India, Korea, and Poland, as well as several Americans (myself included). Yet as far as I can recall from the year that I’ve been on this team so far, all of our written communication has been civil. And even in spoken communication, as far as I can recall, nobody uses profanity to berate one another. To be fair, this is in a US-based corporate environment. Still, I don’t believe English being a second language is a reason to not be civil in written communication.
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You’re comparing Linux, a Finnish-invented, international, volunteer-based non-corporate project to a US-based corporate environment, and judging Linus’ communications against your perception of a US-based corporate environment. You’re doing the same thing as the author, projecting your own values onto something that doesn’t share those values.
Additionally, by putting the words I’ve said, and following that up with a reference to a US-based corporate environment, you’ve judged the words of a non-American who wasn’t speaking to you by your own US-based corporate standards.
I hope that helps you understand my point more clearly. My point isn’t that Linus does or doesn’t act an asshole (he does), but that expecting non-Americans to adhere to American values, standards or norms is unrealistic at best, and cultural colonialism at worst.
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For older hackers, the code is all that matters, niceties be damned. [..]
Some of this is a product of money coming in since the 90s, and people who never would’ve been hackers in the past are hackers now.No, people who would’ve never been hackers in the past, are not hackers now either.
And hackers have always cared about more than code. Hacking has always been a political act.Linus is not a jerk, his behaviour is pretty deliberate. He does not want to conform.
He is not much different from Dijkstra, Stallman or Assange.Today, cool kids who do not understand what hacking is, insult hackers while calling themselves hackers.
Guess what? Hackers do care about your polite corporate image as much as they do care about dress code.
There are definitely cultural issues at play.
Not an issue. It’s a feature! Hackers around the world are different.
And we are proud of the differences, because they help us to break mainstream groupthink.
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Hacking has always been a political act.
This is a really interesting idea! I’m seeing this kind of idea more and more these days and I haven’t been able to work out what it means. I guess you don’t mean something as specific as “Hacking has always been in favour of a particular political ideology” nor something as general as “Hacking has always had an effect on reality”. So could you say something more precise about what you mean by that?
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This is a good question that is worth of a deep answer. I’ll rush a fast one here, but I might write something more in the near future.
All hacks are political, but some are more evidently so. An example is Stallman’s GNU GPL. Actually the whole GNU project is very political. Almost as political as BSDs. Another evidently political hack was done by Cambridge Analytica with Facebook’s user data.
The core value of hackers activity is curiosity: hackers want to learn. We value freedom and sharing as a mean to get more knowledge for the humanity.
As such, hacking is always political: its goal is always to affect (theoretically, to improve) the community in one way or another.
Challenging laws or authorities is something that follows naturally from such value, but it’s not done to get power or profit, just to learn (and show) something new. This shows how misleading is who distinguish hats’ colours: if you are an hacker you won’t have problems to violate stupid laws to learn and/or share some knowledge, be it a secret military cablage, how to break a DRM system or how to modify a game console: it’s not the economical benefit you are looking for, but the knowledge. The very simple fact that some knowledge is restricted, forbidden or simply unexplored, is a strong incentive for an hacker to try to gain it, using her knowledge and creativity.
But even the most apparently innocent hack is political!
See Rust, Go, Haskell or Oberon: each with its own vision of how and who should program and of what one should expect from a software.
See HTTP browsers: very political tools that let strangers from a different state run code (soon assembly-like) on your pc (ironically with your consent!).
See Windows, Debian GNU/Linux or OpenBSD: each powerful operating systems which their own values and strong political vision (yes, even OpenBSD).
See ESR appropriation of the jergon file (not much curiosity here actually, just a pursuit for power)!Curiosity is not the only value of an hacker, but all hackers share such value.
Now, this is also a value each hacker express in a different way: I want everyone to become an hacker, because I think this would benefit the whole humanity. Others don’t want to talk about the political responsibility of hacking because they align with the regime they live in (be it Silicon Valley, Raqqa, Moscow or whatever), and politically aware hackers might subvert it.
But even if you don’t want to acknowledge such responsibility, if you hack, you are politically active, for better or worse.
That’s also the main difference between free software and open source software, for example: free software fully acknowledge such ethical (and thus political) responsibility, open source negate it.
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Politics is to political parties, what economy is to bankers.
If you read “Hacking has always been a political act” as something related to political parties, you should really delve deeper in the history of politics from ancient Athens onwards.
“Hacking has always attempted to change the world”
No.
This is a neutral statement that could be the perfect motto/tagline for a startup or a war.Hacking and politics are not neutral. They are both strongly oriented.
Politics is oriented to benefit the polis.
Indeed, lobbying for particular interests is not politics at all.Hacking is not neutral either.
Hacking is rooted in the international scientific research that was born (at least) in Middle Age.Hackers solve human problems. For all humans. Through our Curiosity.
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IMO, you’re defining “Hacking is political” to the point of uselessness. Basically, nothing is apolitical in your world. Walking down the street is a political statement on the freedom to walk. Maybe that’s useful in a warzone but in the country I live in it’s a basic right to the point of being part of the environment. I don’t see this really being a meaningful or valuable way to talk about things. I think, instead, it’s probably more useful for people to say “I want to be political and the way I will accomplish this is through hacking”.
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Basically, nothing is apolitical in your world.
Read more carefully.
Every human action can serve the polis, but several human actions are not political.Hacking, instead, is political in its very essence. Just like Science. And Math.
Maybe it’s the nature of knowledge: an evolutive advantage for the humanity as a whole.
Or maybe it is just an intuitive optimization that serves hackers’ curiosity: the more I share my discoveries, the more brains can build upon them, the more interesting things I can learn from others, the more problem solved, the more time for more challenging problems…For sure, everyone can negate or refuse the political responsibility that comes from hacking, but such behaviour is political anyway, even if short-sight.
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I just don’t see it. I think you’re claiming real estate on terminology in order to own a perspective. In my opinion, intent is usually the dominating factor, for example murder vs manslaughter (hey, I’m watching crime drama right now). Or a hate crime vs just beating someone up.
You say:
As such, hacking is always political: its goal is always to affect (theoretically, to improve) the community in one way or another.
But I know plenty of people who do what would generally be described as hacking with no such intent. It may be a consequence that the community is affected but often times it’s pretty unlikely and definitely not what they were trying to do.
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Saying that “intent is usually the dominating factor” is a political act. :-)
It’s like talking about FLOSS or FOSS, like if free software and open source were the same thing. It’s not just false, it does not work.
Indeed it creates a whole serie of misunderstanding and contraddictions that are easily dismissed if you simply recognise the difference between the two world.
Now, I agree that Hacking and Engineering overlap.
But they differ more than Murders and Manslaughters.Because hackers use engineering.
And despite the fact that people abuse all technical terms, we still need proper terms and definitions.
So despite the fact that everyone apparently want to leverage terms like “hacking” and “freedom” in their own marketing, we still need to distinguish hackers from engineers and free software from open source.And honestly I think it’s easy to take them apart, in both cases.
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Good question! You caught me completely off-guard!
Which is crazy, given my faculty at University was called “Political Science”!I use the term “Politics” according to the original meaning.
Politics is the human activity that creates, manages and preserves the polis.
Polis was the word ancient Greeks used for the “city”, but by extension we use it for any “community”. In our global, interconnected world, the polis is the whole mankind.
So Politics is the set of activities people do to participate to our collective life.
One of my professors used to define it as “the art of living together”.
Another one, roughly as “the science of managing power for/over a community”.Anyway, the value of a political act depends on how it make the community stronger or weaker. Thus politics is rarely neutral. And so is hacking.
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Thanks a lot. That does make things clearer. However I am still confused why under the definition of “Politics is the human activity that creates, manages and preserves the polis.” I admit that I don’t understand what ‘Saying that “intent is usually the dominating factor” is a political act’ but at least I now have a framework in which to think about it more.
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That’s very good explanation. I might add:
- The author has the luxury of not having to worry about people dying because they didn’t get the message.
- The author has the luxury of only caring about the message being understood by his own cultural sub-group.
Linus has none of these luxuries. He cannot err on the side of being too subtle.
This blog post is just another instance of an American that believes that the rest of the world has to revolve around his cultural norms.
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I think the author did a pretty good job of editing the message in such a way that it was more clear, more direct, and equally forceful, while ensuring that all of that force was directed in a way relevant to the topic at hand.
(Linus has strong & interesting ideas about standardization & particular features. I would love to read an essay about them. The response to a tangentially-related PR is not a convenient place to put those positions: they distract from the topic of the PR, and also make it difficult to find those positions for people who are more interested in them than in the topic of the PR.)
The resulting message contains all of the on-topic information, without extraneous crap. It uses strong language and emphasis, but limits it to Linus’s complaints about the actually-submitted code – in other words, the material that should be emphasized. It removes repetition.
There is nothing subtle about the resulting message. Unlike the original message, it’s very hard to misread as an unrelated tangent about standardization practices that doesn’t address the reasons for rejecting the PR at all.
The core policy being implemented here is not “be nice in order to avoid hurting feelings”, but “remove irrelevant rants in order to focus anger effectively”. This is something I can get behind.
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I find the American obsession with not upsetting people often infuriatingly two-faced, and I’m British.
[…]
Go to Poland, fuck up and people will tell you. Go to Germany, do something wrong and people will correct you. Go to Finland, do something stupid getting in the way of a person’s job and probably they’ll swear at you in Finnish.
Just wanted to point out that America is a huge country and its population is not homogenous. For example, you could have replaced Poland, Germany, and Finland with “Boston” and still have been correct (though, they’d just swear at you in English 🙂).
I think because most American tech comes out of San Francisco/Silicon Valley that it skews what is presented as “Americanized principals” to the international tech community.
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Just wanted to point out that America is a huge country and its population is not homogenous.
Down here in the South, they have an interesting mix of trying to look/sound more civil or being blunt in a way that lets someone know they don’t like them or think they’re stupid. Varies by group, town, and context. There’s plenty of trash talking depending on that. Linus’s style would fit in pretty well with some of them.
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stevelord
2 months ago
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link
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Office 365, Skype, MS Teams, and VS Code are all being rewritten in React Native
Some thoughts:
- Microsoft’s acquisition of Github gives them Electron, a competitor to React native.
- Gary Bernhardt’s prophecies are coming true
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This week I’m:
- Donating 50 EUR to OpenBSD
- Updating the list of 44CON talks
- Continuing the Raw Hex migration to self-hosting everything without external dependencies
Last week I was at two conferences which was fun but I’ve been pretty ill. Finally started getting better this weekend, so I’m going to take it a little easy but I have a lot of catching up to do.
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stevelord
2 months ago
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link
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'upend/IF_MS_BUYS_GITHUB_IMMA_OUT' disappeared from Github's trending repos page
This should be merged into the github thread.
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Nevermind, after looking at the github+microsoft thread, I get what you are saying. Hey @pushcx.
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This just makes me think of when Facebook bought Oculus and everyone was like, “Well fuck, I really wanted on, but I guess not now.”
It’s interesting even how, a decade past the days of Bill Gates as a Borg, even as our community has matured and we don’t had on MS anywhere near as much as we use to, we still see this as not something we really want.
I agree, Microsoft is really not the company to be running Github. I wonder if it will still stay strong or end up going the way of Source Forge.
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Well, for me, it’s not the ancient past so much as present. They patent troll the crap out of companies. That’s anti-innovation that will control an innovation hotbed. The Windows 8 UI debacle and them putting ads on paid services like Live makes me weary of UI-facing changes they might do. Then, they put surveillance into their products mostly for advertisers but maybe governments, too. They do this is in paid products which arent those you expect to sell your info.
So, the company’s current actions show they suck in a lot of ways which include screwing over their customers and suing innovators. Bad fit for Github.
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Not even the ancient past:
- Spying on your activities through telemetry
- Not providing full opt-outs in compliance with GDPR
- Installing stuff onto your computer without your consent like Candy Crush
- Forced updates, sometimes regardless of whether you’re doing something uninterruptable at the time
That’s just off the top of my head for Windows 10 as of now.
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Spying on your activities through telemetry
Telemetry seems to be getting built into everything now as well, Visual Studio and Code, SQL Server, the OS (backported into Win 7 and 8 too), not sure about Office (offline) but it can’t be far behind if not already in there.
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Installing stuff onto your computer without your consent like Candy Crush
Is the crapware issue really on Microsoft, or OEMs like Dell and HP?
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No, it’s really on Microsoft. It was in an update - https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1369179-how-can-i-prevent-windows-10-from-automatically-installing-sponsored-apps
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Damn. Windows got even shittier. I honestly didn’t think it possible.
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It doesn’t matter to me if it’s Microsoft or not. If Microsoft hadn’t acquired Github, then some other megacorporation probably would have. It just so happens that Microsoft is trying to mind its manners after getting pimp-slapped by Google, Apple, and Facebook, but I’m not going to trust them just because they’re currently the underdog.
The problem isn’t Microsoft. The problem is the way we allow corporations to operate in the US. Every time one corporation acquires another, the acquiring corporation becomes bigger and more powerful.
This might seem quaint, but I don’t think that corporations as large as Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, AT&T, Alphabet, Comcast, Samsung, Disney, etc. should be permitted to exist. I think they’re inherently inimical to free markets and to democracy. I think that when a corporation’s market capitalization exceeds a certain threshold, it should either be regulated as a public utility, broken up, or dissolved.
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This week I’m:
- Sorting out talk and speaker announcements for 44CON to go live on Wednesday
- At Infosecurity Europe’s Geek Street doing soldering workshops
- At BSides London on Wednesday doing soldering workshops, 44CON table and mentoring a rookie
- Dying on Thursday
- Sorting out a HIDIOT project involving Devoxx, Cern and the University of Lancaster to teach kids coding and hardware hacking this summer.
At least on Friday I’ll be playing with Neopixels most of the day. I hope.
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GreyLensman
edited
2 months ago
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Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Coding Site GitHub
Observed MS since the the early days. And depending on how long you have been around is probably how well you really know them. This is not a company that you want to be working around or dependent on. And no they have not changed.
Moving all 108 of my repos to Gitlab now. If you are smart you will as well. Do not be fooled by these people. The purchase of Github is solely to make you a pawn, a play thing, in their 10-Q “Cloud Revenue” report to Wall Street. They will screw you over in a heartbeat and will do so without fail or regret. Not a whit. Oh, they are much more careful now and will do things slowly, but their goal is clear, to solely manipulate and corral you over time. MS does evil. It has been so, is today and always shall be their very DNA.
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Hopefully he meant to say “self-hosted Gitlab”.
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GitLab is really worth a look as an alternative. One big advantage of GitLab is that the core technology is open source. This means that anybody can run their own instance. If the company ends up moving in a direction that the community isn’t comfortable with, then it’s always possible to fork it.
There’s also a proposal to support federation between GitLab instances. With this approach there wouldn’t even be a need for a single central hub. One of the main advantages of Git is that it’s a decentralized system, and it’s somewhat ironic that GitHub constitutes a single point of failure.
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git has built-in pull requests They go to the project mailing list, people code review via normal inline replies Glorious
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It’s really not glorious. It’s a severely inaccessible UX, with basically no affordances for tracking that review comments are resolved, for viewing different slices of commits from a patchset, or integrating with things like CI.
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I couldn’t tell if singpolyma was serious or not, but I agree, and I think GitHub and the like have made it clear what the majority of devs prefer. Even if it was good UX, if I self-host, setting up a mail server and getting people to participate that way isn’t exactly low-friction. Maybe it’s against the UNIX philosophy, but I’d like every part of the patchset/contribution lifecycle to be first-class concepts in git. If not in git core, then in a “blessed” extension, à la hub.
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The only one of those Github us better at is integration with CI. They also have an inaccessible UX (doesn’t even work on my mobile devices, can’t imagine if I had accessibility needs…), doesn’t track when review comments are resolved, and there’s no UX facility for viewing different slices, you have to know git stuff to know the links
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Just re: running your own instance, gogs is pretty good too. I haven’t used it with a big team so I don’t know how it stacks up there, but I set it up on a VPS to replace a paid Github account for private repos, where it seems fast, lightweight and does everything I need just fine.
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Yeah, stuff like gogs works well for private instances. I do find the idea of having public federated GitLab instances pretty exciting as an alternative to GitHub for open source projects though. In theory this could work similarly to the way Mastodon works currently. Individuals and organizations could setup GitLab servers that would federate between each other. This could allow searching for repos across the federation, tagging issues across projects on different instances, and potentially fail over if instances mirror content. With this approach you wouldn’t be relying on a single provider to host everybody’s projects in one place.
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GitLab has first-class support for git-annex which I’ve used to great success
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BASIC programming and 6502 assembly, possibly with some COBOL.
I’m nearing the point where I can start writing my next debugging book review which is themed around old-school debugging. I’ve read four books and have another couple in the pipeline. The advice in the books is, unsurprisingly, not totally applicable (although I love the hint for adding debugging code to your card stack: use different coloured cards for your debugging instructions!). So to try to understand the advice a bit better, I’ve been doing some old-school programming. BASIC is the easiest to work with since mainframe emulation is not a great time.
That said, if anyone knows a decent mainframe emulator for 70s architectures, I’d be happy to check it out.
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Doing lots of 44CON stuff this week, including a TNMOC tour ticket giveaway. If anyone wants to see the new Bombe gallery at TNMOC over in Bletchley Park, sign-up details are here.
Hopefully getting some time to work on more ANSI art for the 44CON BBS and moving the raw hex site away from shopify, which has totally screwed us.