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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Be mindful that such a program would have to be safer than the situation without. A program on a public repository that isn’t used by any distribution, isn’t audited, hasn’t a lot of comments (and thus eyes on its code) might be a disproportionate risk compared to the default settings of a popular open source distribution IMHO.



  • It doesn’t have to be though. It could be BOTH convenient AND private. It’s only because we, as a society, didn’t fully understand the “cost” of “free”. We thought it was just so nice to get a good search engine without having to pay. We didn’t grasp that it was the beginning of surveillance capitalism. We didn’t understand that this business model would be so successful every company, from news ones like Meta, to “old” ones like Microsoft or Amazon, would try to be hybrids, both selling stuff and but also re-selling data to advertisers.

    So no it’s not a false choice, it’s a corner we strategically got pushed into.

    I believe, maybe naively, that initiatives like https://uattest.net/ or even https://www.taler.net/ are trying to show that it can be both convenient and private, but NOT while relying on surveillance capitalism which is precisely investing a lot of money to bring the maximum convenience, including free (hard to beat) but at the cost of privacy.

    Edit: seems GrapheneOS isn’t into UAttest initiative https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116200110686604617 but I’m not sure what alternative they propose.





  • I think that’s precisely what this is questioning : is this helping fund critical FOSS?

    What if a fraction of that money instead went to Signal infrastructure? Wikimedia? FSF which initially made GNU PG? FSFE? NLNet which supports Delta Chat? Sovereign Tech Fund? etc rather than individuals?

    I don’t think anybody is criticizing that hard working people contributing to a good project are well paid. I believe the question is rather what’s the cost to OTHER projects when there is 1 project, not an umbrella projects which funds others (again like NLNet or the Sovereign Tech Fund).

    What model are we reproducing and what’s the risk?

    FWIW the question isn’t new. It happens also with Mozilla with the compensation of its C-suite staff, not the “random” software engineer.









  • If a kid is smart enough to set up a VM like that they are smart enough to deceive adults.

    That’s my point of Internet Archive software and emulation section : no need to be smart, open a Web page that provides a VM and voila. You don’t have to do anything hard, only understand the concept and know where to find a VM.

    Also if it’s properly all in the browser (no backend setup, no tailscale, which I’m not sure it can be done due to networking, but maybe) then any static host can have it, heck even download a .html and open it would do. In such a situation I can’t imagine it can be blocked/limited at all.

    Yes I also would much prefer everything to be done locally and have no 3rd party that ultimately I won’t trust (one just has to look at leaks from large companies to understand why) still “it’s their responsibility” when I tried to demonstrate it’s fundamentally impossible when emulation exists is a fundamental problem.

    PS: FWIW https://ktock.github.io/qemu-demo/




  • i dont like linux nor use it

    What is this? Arguing with a 5yo? No offense but do you genuinely believe “I don’t like X” without even explaining why could lead to interesting conversations? Do better. At least provider argument on why you like Windows (there are actually some good reasons, even for people who don’t like Microsoft) and why you don’t like Linux (there also are good reason).

    You’re not actually “intersed” otherwise you’d have at least bothered to link to couple articles, videos, etc arguing either way and would have at least taken the time to write 2 sentences properly.

    Blocked as I have to assume it’s either engagement bait or just the laziest person on Earth.