bentley

> They only release books that are in the public domain.

Not necessarily. Project Gutenberg does provide some works still under US copyright, such as F. P. Walter’s 1999 translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2488

There’s an escaping issue in tables of contents. See, e.g., “Roosevelt's” in the “United States” article. https://britannica11.org/article/27-0635-united-states-the/u...

The first article I looked up was New Mexico, because I knew, as does anyone familiar with New Mexico history, that it became a state in January 1912 (before which it was a territory). Arizona also became a state, in February. I was surprised to find both described as states of the United States in this 1911 encyclopedia. I suppose the editors just made a confident guess? The last sentence of both articles is, “In June 1910 the President approved an enabling act providing for the admission of Arizona and New Mexico as separate states.”

I’ve owned three Kindles and never used an Amazon account on any of them.

Life is too short and my reading backlog too large for me to spend any time, money, or effort whatsoever on DRMed books.

There are enough copyright‐expired and copyrighted‐but‐DRM‐free books to keep me fully occupied in perpetuity.

OpenBSD still maintains a floppy disk installer: https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/7.8/amd64/ (floppy78.img)

It’s a healthy constraint but requires careful judgment. Making the installer fit on the floppy is easy if you just leave out a bunch of drivers that exist on the CD and USB installers. It takes discipline to make things fit by trimming bloated code in the kernel and removing vestigial features.

I read about two dozen books a year, the majority as audiobooks, most of the rest as ebooks, and typically one or two in print. I quite like print books, but favor ebooks for the minimal size and weight. I prefer ebooks to audiobooks too, but have far more opportunities to listen to an audiobook than to sit down and read an ebook.

Even though print books are by far the minority of my reading, I still purchase print copies of books I enjoy, for discoverability. I’ve loved reading since childhood because I grew up in a house filled to bursting with my parents’ books. Nobody told me to read Tolkien, or Heinlein, or Verne, or Jack London, or Greek mythology—I simply took those books off the shelf and read them. And when we visited friends and family, I would read books from their shelves too. None of my young relatives have access to my ebook or audiobook history, and I’m not going to hammer my own interests into their heads… but I’m lucky enough to have lots of space, so I keep my bookshelves overflowing.

> the only way I think people actually find those are through free online downloads and not any actual store front.

The other day I commented about my DRM‐free ebook sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47684550

In my opinion, it’s important to support those publishers and stores that do choose to sell unencumbered media, so that they have some justification to keep doing it.

For public domain books, I use Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, and Internet Archive, generally in that order.

For copyrighted books, anywhere as long as it provides DRM‐free EPUB or PDF.

• Humble Bundle introduces a nice sale every few days. Key marker for DRM‐free: “Use on Any Device”. Representative recent purchases: complete Peanuts (42 vols.) for $25, complete Wheel of Time (17 vols.) for $18, complete Malazan (17 vols.) for $18, complete Lone Wolf and Cub (28 vols.) for $18… I check Humble pretty regularly now.

• Kobo Store. Key marker for DRM‐free: “Download options: EPUB 3 (DRM-Free)”.

• Google Play. Key marker for DRM‐free: “Content protection: This content is DRM free.”

• Barnes and Noble. Key marker for DRM‐free: “At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.”

Amazon rolled out DRM‐free ebooks (for some books) earlier this year, but at this point they’ve permanently lost my business.

Also, sites to purchase DRM‐free audiobooks:

• Libro.fm

• Downpour

Well, it has something to do with it. In the context of Pixels, carrier‐unlocked phones always allow the bootloader to be unlocked, Verizon‐locked phones never do (see, e.g., https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/24254-no-way-to-use-my-veri...), and for other carriers it varies but often requires additional manual fiddling. To quote the GrapheneOS FAQ:

> Devices sold in partnership with specific carriers may be locked by the carrier, which will prevent installing GrapheneOS. This is primarily an issue with US carriers and isn't common elsewhere in the world. To avoid this, either don't buy a carrier device, or make sure it can be unlocked.

Standard Ebooks doesn’t produce graphic novels, so Asterix, Tintin, etc. are excluded. And although SE does produce collections of short works like essays and poetry, it does so in a way that doesn’t usually map one‐to‐one to existing published collections, which is probably why essays and poems have been excluded from this list.

The discussion you linked is for a different project (gothub, an alternative frontend for GitHub written in Go) than this one (Game of Trees Hub, a hosting service for the Git alternative GoT’s web interface software “gotweb”).

The recategorization removed them from search results by default.

> We can't easily rule this out. … they don't have the resources to defend against expensive litigation and they could just be exercising an abundance of caution.

If F-Droid were being cautious:

• They would have restricted social media apps, which a lot of public hysteria targets, which many of the new laws explicitly target, and which other app store providers like Google and Apple have already faced and continue to face massive financial and legal consequences over. If F-Droid is unwilling to take a stand against censorship, this would be an obvious step to begin shielding themselves from liability.

• They would not have prioritized blocking apps providing ancient religious texts, since there’s no public hysteria over Bible and Quran apps, none of the new laws explicitly target them, and no app store provider has faced consequence or threat of consequence over providing them.

• Once the policy was in place, they would not have reversed it simply after receiving angry comments.

I’m completely comfortable disbelieving F-Droid was ever actually concerned that religious apps could be a liability risk.

> They're trolling Republicans with malicious compliance. They don't like the laws being enacted, they know the people enacting them like the Bible, so they apply the policy in the way which is maximally adversarial to the opponents imposing it on them.

If the targets of their trolling (and I’m glad you agree, it is trolling) are legislators in backwards U.S. states, they hit far off the mark. The only people impacted by F-Droid’s censorship have been its users, who are (for the most part) members of the free software community. What’s the point of a troll that is unnoticed by your enemies and only harms your friends who already agree with you?

> "If you don't like the consequences of your law then feel free to repeal it."

In case you haven’t noticed, these laws are being passed everywhere from the UK to Brazil to Australia to Singapore to the EU. And yes, some U.S. states, too. So your “realpolitik” remark in another comment is similarly pointless, because those other politicians and regulators are also completely unaffected by F-Droid’s actions.

> Which one of these is even objectionable?

In response to a law saying F-Droid must punch some of its users in the face, F-Droid of its own volition decided to punch a different set of users in the face rather than refusing to punch anyone at all. I find that objectionable, and the flurry of comments they received shows others do too. Instead of taking principled actions or practical actions, F-Droid’s maintainers decided to take a swipe at users of religious apps on F-Droid, refused to explain themselves (“kayfabe,” as you called it), then upon receipt of unexpected blowback on their forums and issue trackers, backtracked and reversed the policy without further comment. It was a boneheaded move that drove away some app developers and some users like me. How can I trust them to not make some other boneheaded move in the future? Can you imagine Debian or OpenBSD doing such a thing? Now F-Droid has a big banner up top pointing to https://keepandroidopen.org/ and making themselves (noticeably, not other FOSS app stores) out to be the defenders of app freedom. It’s completely tone‐deaf and shows poor judgment. If current or future F-Droid leadership actually addressed the issue, I might be convinced to use it again. But I won’t hold my breath.

Except, of course, that the Bible in any translation is not NSFW, certainly in the common usage of the term. It contains depictions of violence and sex, yes. But so does Fanny Hill, and that hasn’t legally been considered obscene in the UK or the USA in over fifty years. F-Droid’s excuse, that they needed to restrict Bible apps to protect F-Droid from legal liability, is not believable.

You’re free to believe that. But the topic here is F-Droid and its board of directors, along with the context that governments are attempting to censor operating systems and app stores. The question is, if you controlled an app store, would you prevent users from making religious choices for themselves? F-Droid is, probably, the biggest and most mainstream free software app store for mobile operating systems, and is trying to drum up community support (“Keep Android Open,” etc.) in response to the new laws. But F-Droid initiated a sudden change in policy—censoring religious apps—wilfully censoring content that’s never been illegal by any reasonable interpretation of the law. Such decisions obviously negatively impact parts of the free software community, and bring up questions about how effective F-Droid and F-Droid’s leaders can be in this fight.

Bible apps often don’t contain the text directly, but allow the user to download a preferred translation on initial startup. That didn’t prevent them from being marked NSFW.

And clearly that wasn’t the standard anyway. Before the introduction of the policy restricting religious texts, the only apps F-Droid had marked NSFW were frontends to porn sites, even though the apps presumably contained no sexual content directly.

> The law could be poorly written, or it could be poorly and over-cautiously interpreted by F-Droid maintainers. But I didn't get the feeling they were acting on any kind of moral judgement or own belief about what's appropriate for children.

If F-Droid were being overcautious, they would have blocked social media apps too. Social media is explicitly the single biggest target of these “think of the children” app store laws after outright porn sites. F-Droid left Reddit and Mastodon clients unmarked. Am I supposed to believe that F-Droid honestly thought the law applied to apps containing only ancient religious texts, and not to social media? Has any other app store interpreted the regulations the same way? And if they truly believed that was a legal requirement, why did they reverse the policy after only a couple days of user complaints?

Were any of the current directors or new nominees involved in the incident where F-Droid marked Bible and Quran apps as NSFW, hid them from search by default, and expressed the intent to remove them completely (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026)? (Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45638096)

If I’m charitable, I could assume they intended to make a controversial move to drive public attention to the growing government restrictions on innocuous apps. As far as I know, though, nobody at F-Droid admitted to this; and if they were, why didn’t they mark other widely used apps like Wikipedia and Reddit frontends that provide easy access to much more sexually explicit content in the same protest?

If I’m less charitable, and go by what F-Droid admins actually said, they took this action out of a sincere belief that these apps contained content unsafe for minors that necessitated flagging, and sincerely believed that Wikipedia and Reddit frontends somehow don’t qualify for the same. If they honestly believed this, it demonstrates (to me) poor judgment; and since the action was walked back almost immediately due to negative public response, that indicates further that they never actually believed this in the first place, and that instead somebody took it upon himself to specifically target religious apps out of his own bias.

Either way, it really soured me on the judgment of the F-Droid maintainers. After a stunt like that, I no longer trust them to fight the battle against oppressive government restrictions on operating systems effectively. Formerly an F-Droid user of many years, this caused me to switch away completely: I’ve started donating monthly to Accrescent instead, download as many apps as I can from there, and switched from F-Droid to Obtanium for any apps not yet on Accrescent.

(Correction: a PIJ rocket, not a Hamas rocket.)

Theo de Raadt, 2010, on the removal of emulation: “we no longer focus on binary compatibility for executables from other operating systems. we live in a source code world.”

(Since then, OpenBSD has gained support for virtualization for some operating systems including Linux, through the vmm(4) hypervisor.)

It seems to have started two weeks ago. A spammer realized that one can find a Zendesk‐based help forum, open a new ticket without an account, fill the ticket with spam URLs, and put an email address scraped from GitHub commit logs in the author email field. Zendesk would “helpfully” send the “author” the contents of the ticket, becoming in effect an open relay for spam emails. Two weeks ago is when the spammer started the attack in earnest: I received hundreds of these spam emails, typically one or two per Zendesk‐hosted help forum, sent to email addresses that I’ve only ever used on GitHub. It was discussed a bit on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46685768

Since then, Zendesk seems to have strengthened their system so that opening a ticket requires account activation first. Leading to today, when I’ve received thousands of signup attempt emails (again, typically one or two per Zendesk‐hosted forum). This is way more emails than I got last time. I hypothesize that the spammer is doing a “last gasp” attack: now that Zendesk has burned the exploit by no longer including the ticket text in the emails, the spammer is trying every Zendesk site it knows in hopes that some of them are slow to update and still forward the ticket text to the victim.

> There were no fascists in the DDR.

That was certainly the party line of the DDR at the time. Do you honestly believe it?

It’s no coincidence that Vladimir Putin, a former KGB man who served in East Germany, claims that his war in Ukraine is justified in the name of denazification. It’s an easy rhetorical trick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_...

That was already public domain twice over—uncreative catalogues of data aren’t copyrightable in the United States (see Feist v. Rural), and works of the U.S. federal government aren’t copyrightable in the United States.

> And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD?

I have no interest in cassette or vinyl. I love CDs because they provide the highest music quality, uncompressed audio that’s trivial to rip to lossless FLAC files, complete with metadata.

“fixed-length name fields in structures such as directory entries”

“the trailing null is unnecessary for a maximum-length field”

That is a non–null terminated string.

strlcpy is in POSIX now, actually.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/functions/s...

Yes, in American English it depends on which syllable has stress. Compare:

dueled, paralleled, canceled, pedaled, but controlled, compelled, extolled, appalled

levered, snickered, but occurred, deferred

focused, biased, censused, but compressed, embussed, outgassed

worshiped, but entrapped (although even in America kidnapped seems more common than kidnaped—one of Webster’s less successful reforms)

“tchi” is the Hepburn romanization of っち. (Knowing very little Japanese myself, the first example that comes to mind is たまごっち → tamagotchi.)

Worse than typosquatting is EV’s problem that anyone can register a corporation with an identical name.

https://web.archive.org/web/20171211181630/https://stripe.ia...