madez

I'm in the same boat. If it moves things in the right direction, then it doesn't suck.

We surely need regulation that demands at least delayed publication of firmware source and hardware documentation, I agree. The analogy to regulation in the food industry is enlightening.

It's easier to achieve regulation when people care and show that they care. It seems to me, voting now with your wallet is one of the most direct ways to make a case.

The solution is rather simple; buy devices with better documented and open internals rather than what's cheapest, shiniest, and most convenient. There are alternatives, and we all vote with our wallets.

My impression is that the adversity extends the formal political process. For example the hierarchy in work relationships seems adversarial, because of the treatment and behaviour of labour unions. In the justice system, the harsh sentences and the popularity of /r/justiceserved, which celebrates cruel and archaic ideas of justice, are another example. This is not just dumb, but also dangerous. So much that I doubt that the culture in the USA genuinly cheers these violent escalations but rather foreign intelligence services (Russia?) push things like those subreddits to make the USA look bad. But even in other subreddits and events like shootings people are happy when the shooter is killed and not arrested uninjured, and the cheering of that gets massively upvoted. That reveals an underlying adversity which makes the culture of the USA look immature, uneducated, dumb. I don't mean to judge all the people of the USA here, and I don't even trust what I've read, because all I received was through (social) media and that might be manipulated or portrayed disproportionately. The image of excessive adversity still remains after I take a step back and look sceptically and what I've been shown and told.

As an outsider, it seems Bernie Sanders is a candidate that seriously wants to tackle these serious problems in the USA.

Apart from that, I wonder why the society in the USA is so adversarial. It is apparent in many aspects and it is damaging for the society. There are ways to reduce to adversity, but it seems that many people support and favour an adversial system. Is that a cultural curse of the USA?

Not everything modern is good or positive or even acceptable. JS is not uncontroversial, for good reasons, both technical and political via its influence on society.

Lamenting that it is used when there is no need for it seems reasonable to me. The grandparent even made an effort to not just offer destructive criticism but also constructive alternative approaches.

I understand it as that people with expert knowledge from the field, mathematicians in this case, agree with the classification of the problem on a social and cultural level.

You are not limited to Oracle engineers and access to proprietary source code and documentation to clean your systems pants. That makes individual fixes cheaper and the fixes can be shared publicly, leading to additional cost savings.

If one completely disregards political consequences, and generally anything but personal short-term benefit, I agree with your reasoning. Otherwise, I see not how that would be possible. And I think arguing just for short-term practicality is deeply flawed; by that you'd also cooperate with a murdering dictator if it helped you personally.

When someone in a company agrees on a meeting in their office with someone from outside the company, and the visitor arrives at time well-dressed and is rejected by the companies security without any explanation, then who is at fault? It is not the visitor, it is the awful cooperation between the person in the company and their companies security.

It is entirely reasonable to show how you've handed your mail to gmail and they refused it without actionable explanation, so it is a problem between the recipient and gmail.

I think it is appropriate to specify your statement with a significant detail; a ISA monoculture enables quicker and more efficient development of proprietary software. Free and open software deals efficiently and fast with different ISA's, as can be seen in the ports of Debian and the targets of GCC.

Yes, some don't stand for what they believe but rather try to rationalize why continuing playing Blizzard games isn't supporting Blizzard, or is even damaging Blizzard. Some go even so far as that they attack those that act on their believes and delete their accounts. It is surprising how far people go in their cognitive dissonance just to not do what they know is the right thing to do.

Blizzard does not have free-to-play titles because they are such kind people that want to help others out. They want a community that is engaged in the titles, that talk about it, watch videos, play it. Some of them will pay, and Blizzard wins. The thing that really hurts them is if you, yes, you, delete your account. Stop watching videos about their games, stop talking about them. Everything else is simply still supporting them, no matter how you twist it.

Thanks for the support.

We have more than Tux Racer. There are a lot of games without DRM and with full offline single-game experience, like for example the excellent Factorio. Factorio isn't without issues either, because it isn't free software. It is only released as a x86-64 binary, so when I get rid of my x86-64 desktop and switch to then hopefully RISC-V or POWER, I won't be able to run Factorio. Still, this is much better than anything Activision Blizzard offers. There are many other games like that.

Also, for many consoles the software works in emulators and are outside of the control of any company.

Yet, we need free software. There is no way around it.

Deleting my account was a revealing relief. Not just your account as in some entry in a database gets deleted including the characters stored on their servers, but also every game you paid for and all the purchase you made inside the games. The shock from the revelation of the control the company had about what I thought I bought made me follow through and free myself from the sunken cost fallacy which was trying to stop me from deleting my account. That was a good lesson for me. I'll never again buy any product, be it a game, software, or hardware that any company can that easily take away from me.

I deleted my account on their service over this, and I know so did others. There was more spoken than just English.

That might be true. If 500.000 people block every big street in a city, you will read the signs and think about the cause. What a protest can afford depends on how many are protesting.

Going to the specific event in question, the convention of Activision Blizzard, if one person tries to blocks the event with protest, they will be removed, if necessary by physical force. If sufficiently many block the event with protest, the protest will be successful.

Protest is supposed to interrupt, to be there where it isn't wanted. It is supposed to be inconvenient and blocking.

Changing IPs can be dealt with network-wide DHT or a known-peer approach.

The NAT traversal shenanigans only have to be successful on one side. When the geek manages to be reachable, they can talk to their grandparent, given they use software that tries to connect them, like RetroShare.

This doesn't cover all cases, but enough to be useful and valuable.

To go a bit more off-topic here, It isn't obligatory that decentralized p2p platforms manage network obstacles badly nor that you even connect to random strangers at all.

When RetroShare was still in the Debian repositories, I managed to establish fast and direct connections with my peers, and only my peers, especially after forwarding a port.

Meanwhile the (outdated) version of Syncthing in Debian only connects through a relay which limits its speed and is a problem for privacy. For chat, there is Jami (outdated, too) and Tox.

It looks like most of these problems are because of a lack of people working on them, and possibly misaligned incentives. The technical issues are secondary.

The parent probably meant Threaded Intercal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL).

I assume you ask that because you are aware that any device with the capabilities of a smartphone can be made into a powerful surveillance device by whoever the entity is that has control over it.

I see variations of that argument very often. Its essence goes like this:

A: This is a proven threat.

B: But so could be this and that.

A: Right, could be.

B: But we can't get rid of them all, so let's just do nothing.

Here person B somehow convinced themselves that doing anything in that regard to be futile because they can't solve this class of problems once and for all.

There is a distinction between possible threats on one side and an existing threat based on evidence on the other side.

Any device with the capabilities of a smartphone can be nefarious, but doesn't have to be. Any Android device certainly is.

So I'd like to tell people to turn off their Android devices, but may they keep using their open hardware and software phone, because I don't see them as the threat, but the entity that controls their Android device.

I wish it were socially accepted to tell people to turn their Android device off while they are in company. I wish I could tell people that visit me to turn their device off or put it into rf and sound shielded containers.

I don't mind people using computers and their powers to ease their lives. I don't want to deny them that just because they are next to me or in my home. I just don't want them to use that power to collect and track and surveil everything at all times around them, wittingly or unwittinlgy.

I bought the original Nexus S and the Galaxy Nexus when they were released, and I was excited about the device and Android. Since Snowden, the ever increasing reliance on Google of many people and institutions via its cloud services, and the encroachment into our private lives via constant listening devices like Googles Nest, I want to get Google as far from my life as possible.

In the German version of this announcement, the first thing written under the title is that you if you order soon enough, you'll get a free Google Nest Hub with the phone. Well, uhm, no, please don't.

Further down, Google praises itself with "Stets an deiner Seite: Google Assistant ...", which means "Always at your side: Google Assistant ...". This is just creepy to me now.

I'm astounded by how much my perspective of Google has changed since a couple of years ago. Their marketing is off-putting to me now.

Can you get the sources for the board for the Raspberry? Can you run it without blobs?

The MNT Reform seems to have open sources for the case and boards but a proprietary SoC and modules. There is also the Teres-I laptop from Olimex with open sources for the case and boards but a proprietary SoC and modules. The Librem 5 from Purism will have open sources for the case and board but a proprietary SoC and modules.

It is good that we have at least the choice to buy a device with a blackbox from China (Allwinner A64, Teres-I) or from Europe (NXP i.MX8M, both MNT Reform and Librem5). But I think we would benefit from reusing common components in hardware just like in software.

What do you think about cooperating with other developers that have similar goals to yours? Are you already?

Do you mean the Librem laptops from Purism?

That is exciting! Open and well-documented FPGAs are definitely useful and very interesting to have in a device. Have you looked into OpenPiton [0], PULP [1], BOOM [2], or lowRISC [3]? While I'm hopeful that you find these projects personally interesting, I'm also looking forward to eventually see them in devices. Sorry for not listing any open POWER CPU/SoC projects as I'm not aware of any. Please share if you know any.

[0] https://github.com/PrincetonUniversity/openpiton [1] https://github.com/pulp-platform [2] https://github.com/riscv-boom/riscv-boom [3] https://www.lowrisc.org/

Let me take this opportunity to ask you a question here after you making clear the problems you see.

Hardware becomes more complex and can include internal software that from a user perspective is just part of the hardware. But in fact, it is software running doing complex things outside of the oversight and control of the user.

Do you have plans to not just have open software but also open hardware? Do you hope to offer a device in the future with not just free software, but with the source files of the integrating hardware like the motherboard as well as of the chips like CPU and auxiliary ICs? Do you see a possibility to start with an open RSIC-V CPU?

Things are getting worse, not better, on many fronts when it comes to user freedom and control over their devices. Apparently many responsible engineers in this area lack the ethical consideration of their work. The more I see this, the more I worry about bridges, airplanes, and every other piece of technology that is developed by engineers that may or may not have ethical principles.

You, and everyone else for that matter, can go and buy a software defined radio (SDR) and play with a radio to your hearts liking. If there is a restriction on redistribution of open down to the radio firmware WiFi devices, then it's dumb. If there is none, please don't spread incorrect speculation that there is.