Giving permission by saying yes to a “would you mind” question is the hill I die on. Usually I say “I would not mind” but if I’m feeling frisky I’ll say no and watch their brain melt.

Not all FOSS projects need to be profitable to survive. IOW if a project cannot survive without being profitable and it cannot be profitable long-term, then it cannot survive long-term.

I just replied to the other person’s comment.

I don’t. Could you elaborate?

While Linux itself isn’t proprietary, it supports loading proprietary firmware/microcode blobs and running on proprietary hardware. Thus, part of the Linux hardware/software stack is proprietary.

I’m surprised that other people are surprised that for-profit companies constantly try to increase their profits; such companies only contribute to FOSS when that’s more profitable than the alternative. The Linux kernel, AMDGPU, Steam, etc only exist because some part of the software/hardware stack is proprietary (which becomes a more attractive product as the FOSS portion of the stack improves).

I’m definitely not justifying the “rug-pulling”, but people need to stop supporting projects with no potential for long-term profitability unless those projects can survive without any support from for-profit companies. Anything else is destined to fail.

Maybe I’m Jia Tan 😉

I’d love yearly Debian releases instead of just every 2 years.

My biggest concern is that everyone will eventually be forced by societal and institutional expectations; for now people can easily choose not to wear them, but if/when your employer requires it for work or if/when the only way to talk to your friends is by using it, then you won’t have much of a choice.

For example, Zoom has very shady ties with the Chinese government (and several reports say that they’ve used it to surveil and censor people), yet many schools and workplaces required it (and many still do now). You could refuse to install/use it, but then you’d lose your job or fail your classes. It’s a similar story for TikTok, Discord, and Facebook before that.

Thank you for interjecting.

The data block would be modified but the signature of that block can’t be recomputed without the key used to sign it

Isn’t that also true of an encrypted checksum, though? For some plaintext block q there is a checksum r, but the attacker can only see and modify the encrypted q (Q) and encrypted r (R). How any change to Q would modify q (and R to r) can’t be known without knowing the encryption key, but the attacker would need to know that in order to keep q and r consistent.

I’m not a cryptographer (so maybe this is wrong), but my understanding is that although it’s possible to modify the cipher text, how those changes modify the plaintext are very difficult (or impossible) to predict. That can still be an attack vector if the attacker knows the structure of the plaintext (or just want to break something), but since the checksum is also encrypted, the chances that both the original file and checksum could be kept consistent after cipher text modification is basically zero.

In exchange, FF uses Google search by default. So they’re also getting direct value from the deal.

Assuming this story is true, Linux is going to be a nightmare for that woman. It’s come a long way, but it’s still not as dead simple as it needs to be for non-technical elderly people.

Meh, it’s a hobby. Lots of people talk about their hobbies.

Still a funny comic, though.

SMH my head

That’s what my “friend” did. Reddit banned every account he used on his phone at once, but with a different IP, desktop browser, and cookie isolation, they haven’t noticed so far. He might sound like some professional troll, but he was actually banned for a stupid reason.

I don’t care about the n word specifically, but I think it’s a good example of something that can be positive or negative depending on the context. There was a similar post about the q word. My concern is more generally about limiting what people can do with their own hardware.

Your style of argument has been used to argue against many different kinds of personal rights and freedoms that most people now recognize as important. It seems that the slur filter was removed a little while ago, but my point still stands.

What role do you think Lemmy developers should have in limiting the way that private instances can be used?

For example, (IIRC) you can’t say the n word on any unmodified Lemmy instance—even one that you host yourself. I wonder what other such limitations are currently in place or may be added in the future. Can any open source contributor add such a limitation?

Edit: Regardless of whether you think such limitations are appropriate, I think it’s an important question. I also expressed this comment in a neutral manner.

I feel like compiling your own kernel officially makes you not a normie. So… Welcome to the club!