oelmekki

Hi, thanks for reply.

I see your point ; I think there is actual and genuine interest in privacy and decentralization from what I see within my friends circle, but I may be biased because I'm active around ssb myself (and my friends may very well be interested in this because ... I'm interested in it). Time will tell :)

Regarding incentive for legal reasons, there's an other possible one that may happen (mentioning it for exhaustivity). Yesterday, I was reading an article about how an extreme-right candidate was favorite in brasilian elections. I was thinking : "oh look, an other fascist about to seize power". It feels like it's been a recurring theme this decade. And this is terrifying : could you imagine what the gestapo would have been with access to facebook data?

It doesn't even need the entire world to go mad before the incentive for privacy becomes very strong, 10 or 20 countries with strong engineers would be enough to kickstart it.

That was a great read, thanks to the author for making sense of entangled history between decentralization and file sharing.

I don't see why they seem to conclude that decentralization can only exist to circumvent the law, though : it's not because it happened like that in the past that it can only happen like that in the future.

The author is noticing that privacy is a big concern nowadays, but is somehow discarding quickly that remark. I see it as fundamental. Nowadays, privacy is not just a theme for activists or weirdos whom most people think "they're going too far". Nowadays, my aunt and my grand mother speak out privacy concerns about facebook (ironically, on facebook). There is also in the general public mind this vague idea that we're allowing a few companies to be stronger than governments (and thus, than democracies) and that they now own internet.

All of this is very fertile ground for decentralization, we'll see if that ground expands or shrinks, but this is clearly not about working around the law.

Did you try it recently?

This was my usual experience as well. But a few months ago, I started using tor-browser for laptop and orfox browser for mobile (equivalent of tor-browser, but for android) as my main browsers and couldn't use google search with them (search blocks tor).

I started using using ddg for almost everything and was surprised how good it was. I could launch firefox to use google, but almost never did it (except to use apps from G suite). I wonder also if in my latest previous attempts, I wasn't most of the time using "!g" because I wasn't trusting ddg results.

> Federation is cool.

I don't want to undermine the hard work of other people, but for the sake of completeness, know that federation has its critics on the decentralization scene.

I discovered that around the ssb community a couple weeks ago, the argument being that in federation model, people always end up choosing the same node, be it because it has more users (like diasp.org for diaspora) or nicer interface (like gmail for smtp), and it just ends up in centralization again. Here is an article discussing it : https://secushare.org/federation

The alternative is to forget about the client/server model entirely, and have distributed database hosted by clients and synchronized through p2p. Secure Scuttlebutt (ssb) is an attempt at that, through the gossip protocol ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol ). The idea being that clients can synchronize with each other directly, even without the internet, using only local network, and transport encrypted data meant for other people (so the data propagates).

From what I understand so far, ssb makes this possible by implementing a database inspired by blockchains : each user has its own append-only database on which you can add an encrypted entry only by signing them with a private key, that people can verify and decrypt using your public key (and their secret key, if it was a private message meant for them).

The networking part still use federated-like nodes (actually regular clients, but running on hosts without firewall) to workaround the fact that most people are behind firewalled NAT and can't listen to ports. The important part here is that one of those nodes (called "pub") can disappear, it won't affect you, even if you first accessed the network using it : your data is on your machine, the pub only help finding peers and can be replaced at any moment (you quickly discover other pubs after the first one), and even is not needed if your peers are on the same local network than you (perfect tool for a family private social network, btw).

Now, while I find ssb cool and that's the project I want to work on, I find secushare article I mentioned above unnecessarily harsh and definitive. A problem has been spotted on in the federation model, it doesn't mean it can't find any solution. For example, a protocol based on federation can forcibly limit the number of users per node (although, the service could just spawn several nodes), or an other incentive for distribution could be created. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of smart people working on this.

This sounds interesting. Does it mean an AP server could exist that would not be based on the federation model?

Or to make my question more precise : would the gossip model be used only for data distribution and we would still have to register on a node, or would it allow to keep and reuse our data and identity should our usual node disappear?

Or maybe not. As Oliver was mentioning, China is shifting from self focus to expansion. This is already something I thought when I saw the China sea quarrels.

If it's the case, it's not just only their population opinion that matters, but they need to have a good reputation in the world - that is, if they really want to be a part of it.

With US withdrawing from the world, China has a good opportunity. But the tyranny/autocracy archaism won't fly past their borders.

I think it's safe until we mention Winnie the Pooh. Woops.

Context: in his China segment, Oliver asserts that China has banned Winnie the Pooh from the internet because it was used to mock the president. And then he (Oliver) used tons of Winnie the Pooh references.

We already are seeing a lot of partisan arguments in this thread (as one could have expected, I guess). For my part, I don't care about the politics on this topic, I'm just glad someone stands up against internet censorship. Making tons of Winnie the Pooh references is the way to go, we must prove censorship doesn't work.

I've switched to firefox last year for privacy reasons, but soon realized it was way not enough.

I used different profile to do what sandboxing is doing for facebook. Both methods are very good at isolating cookies, but it's still an easy job to know who you are based on IP address and a bit of easy fingerprinting (IP address + screen resolution + browser version gets you a long way).

This year, I decided to start using tor-browser as my main browser, keeping a firefox profile for facebook and making an other for google products.

It's a bit slower, I had to change a few habits (like being always logged in or retrieving url from history by simply typing part of it), but in the end, I'm glad to not have this paranoid-friendly feeling of constantly being watched anymore. I realized that even if I never thought anyone was looking at me specifically, I was acting as if it was the case, because of the perception that everything was recorded and could be used. Mass-surveillance and private social profiling are creating generations of paranoid, this can't be good.

There are a few things I wonder about this article, but it sadly hasn't a comment section. In case anyone from Purism is reading this:

Does this mean PureOS (and thus librem 5) will be on purpose biased toward 100% free software system (my experience with debian is that while you can run non-free sofware on it, it's made more difficult than it could be)? I'm especially worry about this : does this mean it will be difficult to install spotify-linux on librem 5? Spotify is an important part of my mobile experience, I wouldn't want to sacrifice it.

Thanks for sharing. I was discussing trackerless p2p social network with offline publishing and syncing when close to a friend a few months ago, I'm amazed how Scuttlebutt seems to be exactly that.

I was thinking of using high frequency sounds (inaudible) for peer discovery when in the same room, like chromecast is doing when phone and chromecast are not on the same local network, but simply scanning network seems to work just as well, apparently.

This may be true for most (non-tech) people, but there's a huge difference for us : we know that you can't refuse cookies and still be able to log in to an app (since cookies are used for session permanence).

The GDPR is very different : it does not prevent offering legit features by itself. So I often happen to leave a site if I'm not satisfied by their GDPR implementation and they try to force tracking on me, I won't sell my privacy that cheap if I'm given the choice. That's something I couldn't do with cookies and I just was accepting their notice blindly.

Same here. I went up to the partner list, didn't get what the toggle buttons were supposed to mean (should I toggle them on or off?), closed the page. The title (on HN) will have to do, good job to them.

I thought "strong typing" and "static typing" were interchangeable. I stand corrected, thanks.

Oh, I see, given the interpreter is written in strongly typed language, allowing to go without static typing is a feature by itself, and allowing to test for methods presence allows to do duck typing, thus it allows to say that ruby implements duck typing.

It makes more sense than talking of duck typing explicit usage by end users, given it's quite rare we assert proper received parameters extensively.

EDIT : which makes me realize we have a machine language without typing (binary), on top of which we use a language implementing strong typing (C), used to build a language without strong typing (ruby), on top of which Stripe is building strong typing. Making a definitive decision is hard :)

I've digged a bit on the subject (better late than never), it seems that duck typing is seen in ruby as a guideline, rather than a language feature. Basically, it's about recommending to use `#respond_to?` rather than `#is_a?`, `#kind_of?` or `Class#===` in end user code.

Ruby has been my first professional language and I've sticked with it for a decade, but I never really understood duck typing before switching to Go, with its interfaces (a type implements an interface if it implements its methods, so we can use interface as function parameter type).

I don't get why we talk of duck typing about ruby : if I pass as parameter an object that does not quack like a duck, nothing will prevent me to do it and it will generate an exception when quacking. Did I miss something obvious?

Actually, I double checked (can't edit anymore), the total cost is the double of net salary, not brut salary. Employer taxes are 43% of the brut salary.

Bottom line : a good dev salary of €45k costs about €65k, before any tax reduction.

Sorry to hear about your abusive firing, wish you success.

> all startups I've seen quickly moved to London or Berlin in the moment they got VC funding

Are you sure this was related to the cost of employees? As pointed in the article, London is the historical tech hub in europe, so moving to London after funding can have many reasons.

You're right though, having employees is really expansive. I'm afraid it's not just a France problem, though :) It costs you double than what employee gets pre-tax, but all in all it's not more expansive than in other countries. In US, a good dev salary is $100k a year (€85k).

EDIT: for non french people, a good dev salary in France is €45k, so it may cost at most and roughly double than that, but you have a lot of tax cut you can take advantage of to reduce it

As a french developer with a 10+ years career, I second that. I've also been a CTO, so I'm well aware of the employer point of view.

I've seen many people worrying about not being able to fire people once hired. But what I've seen in facts are only two people needing firing, and it was done without any problem. What I saw incredibly more often is company getting into panic because their good developers would leave. It's not firing that is hard, it's retaining.

I've been using rss again for a few months, and it's been really nice. It's like twitter without the noise.

The "wow" moment for me was when I discovered google alerts allows to get alerts as a rss feed (individually for each alert). So this means content discovery through RSS is now possible (the main reason why I started to replace RSS with twitter). Alerts have two modes, one "main articles only" where google applies some blackbox magic to limit the amount of items talking about the same thing, and "all articles".

I'm seriously thinking about using this to build my own privacy oriented clone of google feed. I could have a browser extension performing keyword extraction from my web history to detect my interests, then have google alerts set up on those keywords and a local app chewing all similar content from items through textrank to produce a "news", with a list of sources, maybe sorted through alexa rank. Sounds like quite a job, but worth it.

I wonder what the doctype is supposed to mean:

> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//Dow Jones//DTD DJ-HTML//EN">

What is supposed to be a copyright notice or something?

Awesome, thanks for the info!

Yes, that's what I read before deciding to try it :)

But my question was more about what you were saying about the TI chip, what makes you say it will be a problem? (eg different architecture, known limitations, etc)

Thanks for mentioning it, I don't care about waterproofing but I intended to attempt a port (I get a librem5 as soon as they're out so my android wear will be basically useless by then), so the chip thing may be a problem.

Do you know if anyone documented a previous attempt somewhere? Or do you have any other knowledge that makes you say this will be a problem?

> Shame that most Wear OS watches don't come with pins for USB access.

I thought I was out of luck with my moto360 1st gen, but I found this : https://www.rootjunky.com/moto-360-adapter-usb-cable/

Basically, there is usb connection on that watch, it's just hidden and made difficult to use.

Which makes me think : maybe it's the same for other apparently usb lacking watches? I can imagine manufacturers' developers would want a mean to debug devices out of factory.

Even for HN, this discussion will probably be biased, anyway : if you use an underdog like DDG, you probably are more willing to let people know about that than if you use plain old google search.

That being said, a discussion about searching habits is always interesting. Eg, comment from user "NewEntryHN" is both unexpected and an interesting point of view.

Regarding browser payment API, I had this in mind : https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/payments/

Credit card autofill never really worked for me (either on chrome or firefox). It happens on rare occasion that my credit card is pre-filled, but most of the time, it's not (not sure why). And you still have to get your phone and copy the 3d secure code from it (although, 3d secure is only used in europe, if I got it correctly). So yeah, credit card is good, but not enough, especially if we want to perform a big amount of microtransactions like the "pay to expand" example I was talking about.

It reminds me how we were told in the 2000' there will soon be no quality music anymore because of bittorrent.

If journalism business model is not working anymore, it's journalists' fault, not readers' one : they are the ones who must adapt and find new ideas to make money. Allowing to buy article per article instead of requiring year long subscription would be a good start (I've already seen that, although I don't remember which title it was). Making it easy to buy an article would help too : using cryptocurrency, browser payment api, whatever, provided we don't have to go fetch our credit card, type a long sequence of numbers, and possibly wait for a 3d secure text message and still have to type an other code. Providing paypal as a payment option already helps a lot in that regard, for people who are logged into it (you basically just have to hit the "pay" button, no further step).

Then, there is obviously the attention span problem. Is there still a market for long articles? I often tell myself press kind of missed the hyperlink train. It would be so great to have a concise form of article, then you can expand a part of its content through hyperlink (or javascript) to learn more about it. This would make a good business model, by the way : cheap for short content, then the more someone wants to see (thus, the more that person is interested in the subject), the more they pay. There was something alike in the movie "Starship Trooper", where each video news sequence was short and there was multiple "learn more about" at the end of each sequence. With text, this would allow for even way more exploration possibilities. Of course, this would be a major shift in the way of writing an article, where journalists are currently basically writing essays in one block.

I see, thanks. I used vanilla `strip` on my binary and it did not produce any size gain (so the strip flag of go compiler is plenty enough).

Indeed, given how browsers already handle gunziping resources, it's probably best to rely on it. My binary, stripped by the go compiler and gziped, is 525ko (against 480ko using upx).

This would be cool: shared objects over internet. Interesting direction to explore.