linuxandrew

Many people can't upgrade.

Running an unsupported and insecure OS on the internet is untenable.

Windows 10 may be a 10 year old OS but Windows 11 has only been around for 2.5 years.

Last I checked, Windows was also an end-user product and not just for industries.

There will absolutely be computers that are less than 5 years old that will go to e-waste.

Google has been using fingerprinting (aka Detection Bits as mentioned in the settlement agreement) to identify individuals for a long but they don't implement RFP (Resist Fingerprinting) in Incognito Mode.

Thankfully there were some small wins in the settlement, otherwise one might ask what exactly the point of Incognito Mode actually is?

Nomad isn't FOSS anymore, for one

My previous workplace used Guacamole, it was pretty good. We used it for both SSH (Linux) and RDP (Windows).

My biggest annoyance was trying to break my habit of using ^W to backspace words in bash because it would close the tab in Firefox.

Fans and light clothes, mostly.

A lot more people live out in cheaply built homes with small, barren yards and dark roofs that are literally designed for air conditioning. Older homes often have better airflow.

An example of a newer suburb in Sydney is Marsden Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzV3H_K73To

I don't use/have aircon in my home in Brisbane and I get by fine :) Although it is nice to have aircon in the summer when I'm working on the computer and need to concentrate (my office at work is air conditioned, like most).

Ever since Proton and Wine, Linux has been objectively the best desktop os.

You get the advantage of having all the software that doesn't work under windows, while having a windows dev environment that works very well even with Cuda for ML.

FTFY

> Between 2010 and 2016, Engel Systems sold a range of devices that provided illegal access to pirated TV content. The business initially sold TV decoders reliant on card-sharing systems delivered over the internet, before progressing to pirate IPTV services offering access to around 1,600 channels.

Relevant Wikipedia articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional-access_module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_decryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_sharing

That's a cost of doing business, much like paying tax. It's entirely on Facebook for censoring users in Australia. They could choose... not to do business in Australia, shut down their office and stop taking ad dollars from Australian companies.

It's hard to feel bad for Facebook because they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars and monetise news headlines in user feeds. It's really not huge money for Meta, it's really peanuts for them ($20M from recollection?). I work at a small institution that pays 1/20th of that in Oracle licensing.

The money goes to various news outlets (not just News Corp - Fairfax/Nine, ABC and many smaller outlets) and helps diversify their funding.

Last time Facebook decided to censor the news in Australia they ended up censoring links a bunch of government pages like links to emergency services[1].

Fortunately I've since deleted my account but the whole posturing around ownership of people's posts and shares is just wild to me.

On a semi-related note I once had a message in FB Messenger that was blocked - it refused to send and gave me an error that the link wasn't allowed. Can't remember what it was as it was a long time ago. But the Facebook censorship situarion has been dire for some time...

1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/29/deliberat...

https://www.manyver.se/ is one of the leading implementations of Scuttlebutt. They're currently working on a protocol replacement called PPPPP which addresses some of the shortcomings they identified, the leading one being storage requirements and growth.

> I mean, Element and Matrix are 2 separate entities

Separate but they work closely from what I gather. New Vector develops Element/ElementX and has seats on the Matrix.org board. Element is the Matrix.org flagship client.

I do appreciate that Matrix.org has its own foundation and I don't mean to disparage New Vector in any way, but they are undeniably closely linked. I'm not sure if Matrix would survive without New Vector.

This happened with MSN Music back in 2008: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/04/drm-s...

My family was impacted, hundreds of dollars of legitimately purchased music files were mostly useless. Fortunately, there was a way to replace those music files (cough BitTorrent cough). Seriously, DRM just compels people into copyright infringement. I won't touch anything DRM with a barge-pole anymore. BandCamp has a good DRM-free model but it's only really used by a few small-time artists and bands.

Does Mozilla even need a CEO and its weird company+foundation structure? They should run it more like KDE or TDF and use that $6M to pay a few dozen engineers.

I wonder how much DNS blocking would contribute to a unique browser fingerprint? Like a tracker could use a range of domains, some of which are known to be blocked by certain end-user software, to build a fingerprint.

I currently use a vanilla LibreWolf which has uBlock Origin and reasonable defaults out of the box for this reason.

My only other line of thinking is that a combination of DNS, IP and in-browser blocking could be more effective than just in-browser alone.

Dark patterns should be illegal. They make us all unsafe by making our computers behave less predictably, like malware, for anti-competitive or anti-privacy reasons.

Are there any reasons why Kiwix doesn't use WARC/WACZ directly?

Then just host it elsewhere. Spotify isn't an American company and not everyone who uses Spotify lives in America.

yggdrasil can use WiFi on Android, I haven't tried it yet - https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/. yggdrasil gives you the ability to use TCP/IP applications over its mesh network but doesn't offer any end-user functionality itself.

Manyverse can use WiFi for decentralised social networking - https://www.manyver.se/. They're currently in the middle of a rewrite of the backend and a protocol switch away from Secure Scuttlebutt to their own protocol currently named PPPPP.

Reticulum/Sideband offers a P2P messaging system over WiFi or other mediums - https://github.com/markqvist/sideband

You could say the same about memory protection and isolation, and yet, here we are.

I do somewhat sympathise with the sentiment that running untrusted apps is bad and FLOSS ecosystems are good. But even then, building a security framework around windowing does seem appropriate given the broad range of uses that Wayland will see.

I do agree that 99% of users don't want to run infrastructure.

I think there's a difference between Fediverse-style federation/decentralisation and true P2P/BitTorrent-esque dectralisation. BitTorrent, in its current iteration, does have many semi-technical users, but perhaps your grandparents would struggle to use it. I think a much more friendly UX could be built; maintaining its decentralised properties would be more difficult but not inconceivably so.

I actually think transparent decentralisation is possible but the current policy settings (copyright, surveillance and advertising) somewhat disincentivise people from working on it, to the extent that most of the current projects are hobbies, crowdsourced or funded by research grants.

Exactly. The protest against Reddit's ban on third party clients needs to be more widespread. We want FOSS clients for all IM, discussion and social media platforms.

Unshackle yourself from Google/Apple and use F-Droid/LineageOS or something similarly FOSS minded.

Something like https://www.manyver.se/ ? It is available on Google Play, Apple App Store and F-Droid.

It seems they have had some issues with Google Play and the App Store with their weird catch-all policies, requiring integration with Google/Apple login etc. but they have managed to work around it for the time being.

MS Teams doesn't support Firefox: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/unsupported...

Or the VMware console: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1769175

There's probably a bunch of other web apps that exclusively support Chromium-based browsers, unfortunately.

> government offers schooling. if you wish to seek additional, that is offered in other ways. when i went to school, YT didn't exist. yet, i still sought out additional resources that were available outside of school. this argument carries no weight with me.

Go back to school and let us know what you find? Yes, school is important, and schools from time to time lean on YouTube content (from authoritative sources, generally, because not all videos are from internet randos).

> What critical service does YT provide that it should even be considered for being considered a critical anything?

Government announcements, instructional videos by governments (e.g. for voting), educational content for children, etc.

Governments should really be banned from putting that kind of stuff on a site like YouTube. That aside, the point on criticality is not really a good one, it is important for any sort of cultural content to be widely accessible and not behind walled gardens.

> Users don't have a right to use YT. They have to privilege to use the website in the terms YT offers it.

Users should have a right to use a client that doesn't serve up ads.

A monopoly like Google/YouTube should't be allowed to block users on a right that they should have, to control their client and a right to privacy. In many countries they are parts of contracts that are simply not enforceable because they are overwritten by legislation.

YouTube is, by the way, basically a monopoly on user-created videos (except perhaps for shorts) and network effects prevent true competition. The argument that users should "go elsewhere" is pretty distasteful if you ask me. I like to be a part of culture and if someone sends me a link to a YouTube video I should be able to watch it. Copyright reform and P2P liberalisation would really help in this regard.

And users have a right to demand rights, reform and otherwise organise to work around such abhorrent practices.

> YouTube server's not running on your computer.

The client is, my browser is, and the ads that I suppose they want me to watch would be displayed through my computer.

Is it really cheating though? My computer, my rules.

Copyright effectively gives YT an arguably illegitimate monopoly status on a lot of content which hasn't been uploaded elsewhere. Compared to, say, "modern" Usenet where files are distributed and users choose their provider.

Ads are trash and I'm somewhat willing to pay, but not on the Google terms that takes away my privacy and right to run FOSS.