• 9 Posts
  • 215 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • https://help.kagi.com/orion/faq/faq.html#oss

    We’re working on it! We’ve started with some of our components and intend to open more in the future.

    The idea that “open-source = trustworthy” only goes so far. For example, the same tech company that offers a popular open-source browser also has the largest ad/tracking network in history, with that browser playing a significant role in it. Another company with a closed-source browser (using WebKit like Orion) is on the forefront of privacy awareness and technologies in its products.

    So, does anyone here remember when all chromium browsers had a secret api that sent extra data to google? Brave, Opera, and Edge got hit by this one, but I think Vivaldi dodged it. They all removed this after they found out, but still…

    When it comes to things like browsers, due to the sheer complexity and difficulty to truly audit chromium, I don’t really consider chromium to be “open source” in the same sense as many other apps. Legally, you can see and edit the code. But in practice, it’s impossible to audit all of it, and the development is controlled by a single corporation who puts secrets in it, or removes features that harm their interests (manifest v3). Personally, I consider Minecraft Java to be closer to open source than chromium is.

    To say that:

    The idea that “open-source = trustworthy” only goes so far

    is really just a cop-out and excuse for not being transparent with their code and what they are doing.





  • I honestly don’t know how this could turn out.

    It could be an amazing change that results in much more progress for hardware acceleration on guests of various types (since that is what vmware is good at) in kvm…

    Or it could mean that they are dropping that feature from vmware altogether.

    Regardless, I like this change because it means I would be able to run vmware machines and libvirt kvm machines at the same time, at least when I am forced to use vmware workstation.

    I also dislike proprietary software in general, so I think less proprietary software and more FOSS is a good thing.



  • I disagree, because they are not the same thing.

    Immutable means read only root.

    Atomic means that updates are done in a snapshotted manner somehow. It usually means that if an update fails, your system is not in a half working state, but instead will be reverted to the last working state, and that updates are all or nothing.

    I create a btrfs snapshot before updates on my Arch Linux system. This is atomic, but not immutable.*

    There is also “image based” which distros like ublue (immutable, atomic) are, but Nixos (also immutable and atomic) are not.

    *only really before big updates tbh, but I know people do configure snapshits before all updates.


  • Yeah. this was in high school, in my math class, and we were playing a math game.

    The way it worked, was that every table was a team, and each team had a “castle” drawn up onto the whiteboard. A random spinner was used to determine a team, who would then solve a problem the teacher assigned. If you successfully solved the problem, you could draw an X on another teams castle. 3 X’s mean that you are out.

    My team was out. But, since this was a class, we could still solve problems, and still draw X’s. Our table got selected to solve a problem, and I did successfully. I looked at the board, and realized that only two teams had a single X, every other team had either two or three. In other words, I could choose who won the game, even though I could not win.

    So, I started trying to get bids. I tried to get real money, but someone tried to scam me with some “draw the X first” nonsense. But, the other team offered to pay me four of the school’s fake money, and I accepted that and allowed them to win.

    I may not have won the game, but I certainly felt victorious that day.


  • Is installing a package as simple as $ nix install vscode ? And would it “just work”?

    You fool. You absolute buffoon. You’re doing it wrong. That’s the wrong command, and even if it was the right command, this method could cause issues down the road. It goes against the declarative philosophy of nix. You’re supposed to refer to packages by their attribute, rather than name. If you launch the installed app that way, it won’t have any hardware accererated graphics becuase hardware accelerated graphics are impure, don’t you know this?

    You need to read the nonexistent documentation to find all of this out, and then select a declarative solution, like home manager or nix-shell or nix develop, to install software, and nixgl to get hardware accelerated graphics for nix packages on non nix systems.

    (/s (ish) over)

    Yeah. Nix has some issues. If you just want more packages available, I would recommend distrobox.

    It’s a very powerful tool, and I use nix to manage all of my development environments, but it has some severe limitations that only have hacky workarounds. I could not get hardware accelerated nix packages to have a working dekstop entry. So instead, I have to type nixGLIntel gzdoom in my terminal when I want to play doom.

    In addition to that, the documentation is very poor.

    The other comments in this thread elaborate on these, and a few other issues.


  • I don’t understand how this comment pertains to F-droid specifically.

    But, in networks that are more locked down, they can use stuff like deep packet inspection to figure out what traffic is happening, and automatically block it. Socks is a protocol explicitly for proxying, and runs over TCP. Depending on the setup, deep packet inspection can catch it.

    On the other hand, disguising traffic as HTTP/HTTPS makes it very, very hard to detect that someone is doing something other than visiting an innocuous website.

    At the high school I went to, they had Deep Packet Inspection set up to such a level that they could automatically detect and block VPN connections. Wireguard and OpenVPN would be caught basically instantly, and then you would be kicked off of the internet for 10 minutes. Although very extreme, a “10 minutes no internet” punishment is nothing in comparison to prison time or any number of extreme punishments authoritarian countries can come up with.

    To get around the school firewall, I set up a web proxy called Metallic: https://github.com/cognetwork-dev/Metallic/ . This is basically a website, that lets me access other websites from within that website, and it’s very, very difficult to block because of that nature.





  • Is it possible to allow DRM content for just 1 website ( Netflix ) , while other websites on the same browsers are not allowed to do it?

    I would use multiple firefox profiles for this. If you go to about:profiles or use the command firefox -P to launch firefox, you can view and create other firefox profiles. Each firefox profile is essentially it’s own instance of firefox, complete with different history, extensions, and setting. You could have a “Netflix” profile and a regular browsing profile.






  • Stallman doesn’t seem to get that pedophilia is wrong because of the hierarchy of power, and the power imbalances between older/younger people, not because of some inherent wrongness about being attracted to a prepubescent person. This is shown by how he condemns some pedophilia, but is accepting of 12+/past puberty. (I despise this logic, because it would also make gay sex and sodomy wrong, as well).

    I find this deeply ironic, because his primary issue with proprietary software is the way that it gives developers levels of power over users. From his article Why Open Source Misses the Point

    But software can be said to serve its users only if it respects their freedom. What if the software is designed to put chains on its users? Then powerfulness means the chains are more constricting, and reliability that they are harder to remove.

    You would expect someone who is so in tune with the hierarchies that appear with software developers, publishers, and users, to also see those same hierarchies echoed in relationships between people of vastly different ages, but instead, we get this. I’m extremely disappointed.

    These failures to understand hierarchy and power, are exactly why Stallman shouldn’t be in a position of power. Leaders should continually prove that they understand hierarchy and the effects of their actions on those below them. Someone who doesn’t understand how their power could affect another, shouldn’t be a leader.