Bonum Certa Men Certa

When Technical Projects Become Politics

10 years ago: BSD vs. GPL: But Why Are PEOPLE Fighting???

Tux diving



Summary: Transcript of Bryan Lunduke's show titled "Divisive Politics are destroying Open Source"

An anonymous source prepared the following transcript of this week's show from Bryan Lunduke, a former Microsoft employee who nowadays worries about Microsoft entryism in Free software. "I have done my best for accuracy," our source told us, "and Lunduke speaks clearly and uses great equipment..."



This relates somewhat to this new post (hours old) which says a lot about the FreeBSD situation (mentioned here a few times before, albeit only in our daily links).








The Lunduke Show

2018-03-05

https://youtu.be/s087Ca9JnYw http://lunduke.com/2018/03/05/divisive-politics-are-destroying-open-source/

Divisive Politics are destroying Open Source

[00:00] Divisive politics are destroying open source. Not just in general but specific projects. There are specific sets of divisive politics and policies being enacted that are causing many open source projects to just break in half. To just destroy themselves and eat themselves from the inside out and I should provide a warning. This might make you grumpy. Honestly this made me grumpy. This is the third time I've tried to record this video. And every time I've gone through it I've stopped myself. I've made myself stop because I've found myself getting grumpy at this. It makes me upset. People are not treating each other well and it makes me grumpy. And I want to be as relaxed and reasonable and straightforward and factual about this as I can be. And hopefully third time's the charm for recording this on that front. Now, this shouldn't need to be said but as we go through this today the facts that I present are simply facts. I'm going to attempt to provide you with enough detailed information who said what roughly when what exact words were said et cetera that it will be very simple for you to use any Internet search engine to verify the things that I'm posting here that I'm showing you what are facts. Don't take my word for it feel free to prove it for yourself by just looking around and there should be enough information for that. That said, the opinions that I am expressing are mine and mine alone. The Lorax of Dr. Seuss speaks for the trees, Lunduke doesn't really speak for anybody but Lunduke. My ideas are my own and the fact that I need to say that is ridiculous but I do feel like I need to say it. Also, I'm going to go on the assumption that me, you, anyone watching this video is going to assume that freedom is a good thing. We're going to go on that. We're going to stick to that all the way through the end.

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All right. Let's get into this. Let's set some ground rules and this is just as much for me as it is for you guys. Again, I, last time I tried to record this I got close to the end and I just got mad. There is so much stuff happening that made me fundamentally upset that I just I had to breathe, stop recording, and move forward. So, ground rules. No political ideology here. It doesn't matter what political party I, you, or anyone else involved belongs to. Doesn't matter if what the political goals are left, right, up, down, none of that matters here. We're just going to be talking about using political things, things that tend to be politically charged to divide and control us. That's what we're going to be talking about here. And we're going to go on a simple assumption. Everyone is awesome until proven otherwise. This is essentially an extension of the Bill and Ted credo of be excellent to each other. It doesn't matter what your ethnicity is, doesn't matter what your gender is, doesn't matter what your religion is, doesn't matte what part of town you came from, none of that matters. You're awesome unless you do something that proves that you're not awesome. Just going with that flat out there's no room for racism or sexism or any of that around here. Or to put it another way I don't who you are i don't care where you're from, what you did as long as you love me.

All right let's start out with FreeBSD's code of conduct what we're going to do here is I've narrowed this down to three examples. I'm trying to make this as succinct as I can because we can ramble about this for days. Three examples within the last year so recent examples that have specifically targeted and impacted in a very negative way the open source world. Open source, free software, free culture et cetera. Specifically causing an issue within that area. Now these sorts of issues are impacting large, huge portions of the technology industry right now

[05:00] and well beyond. This is not isolated but I live in the open source world and many of you do as well and so I can talk a little more knowledgeably about how that's impacting us in this world. If you are not part of the open source world and you simply got here because of the general topic this is still valuable information for knowing what not to do whether you're in other parts of the tech world or within the fast food industry. I mean it all kind of applies.

All right. Let's talk about FreeBSD's code of conduct and hug-gate. Now the short, short version because many of you know all about this and are probably sick of hearing about it because it's one of the more recent examples. FreeBSD, a major operating system, created a new code of conduct. In fact this code of conduct started being created roughly three years ago and they actually hired consultants to come in and help them with it and in the end they literally copied a code of conduct with almost no changes at all like a few words from a web site called Geek Feminism. Now that particular code of conduct really appears to be designed to be divisive and inflammatory. There are some good things in it and you know what we're going to go through a few things really quickly here but it would be impossible to read this in its entirety and not know that you were going to have people who were uncomfortable with it. It's not a simple code of conduct it really gets specific about what is allowed and what is not allowed which is what resulted in hug-gate and for those of you not familiar with hug-gate the FreeBSD code of conduct effectively bans the use of virtual hugs without prior written consent. In other words I cannot send you an animated GIF of a teddy bear offering you a hug without first asking you would you mind if I sent you an animated GIF of a teddy bear offering you a hug and you'd have to say, yes, I would enjoy an animated GIF as such and then I could send it to you that's crazy and I made fun of it and that caused a lot of people to get very very angry which I will talk about shortly.

But I first want to mention some specific tidbits from the code of conduct because it relates to what the actual goals are for the code of conduct. Let's read through this. Here's an overall description from this. This is a direct copy of what they're trying to make sure is prohibited comments that reinforce systemic oppression related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion. All right. I don't like oppression I like to be nice to people we'll just let that sit right there and we'll move on. There was a huge list of things that were outlawed specifically within this code of conduct like hugs I'm going to specifically talk about three that I actually thought were pretty reasonable I don't really think they need to be included in a code of conduct because they're so gosh darned obvious. However I'm going to list them here for very very specific dramatic effect in just a moment. Here's three items you cannot do according to the code of conduct: threats of violence, that's pretty straight forward, incitement of violence towards any individual including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm deliberate intimidation. All right. That's fair. Well if you're making such things where would you be able to make such those things well it goes on. This code of conduct applies to all spaces used by the FreeBSD project including our mailing lists IRC channels and social media both online and off. Anyone who is found to violate this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from FreeBSD Project-controlled spaces at the discretion of the FreeBSD code of conduct committee. Cool. Since this code of conduct is in place and people have been pretty doggone pissed off about it I mean contributors and people who donate money and time have been leaving in droves and yelling about the problems with this and all sorts of things but since this is in place clearly it would be enforced well here's three examples that I thought were somewhat interesting the top left one for those of you watching the video version is from a guy named Benno Rice he is an elected member of FreeBSD core team and he's also one of the driving forces behind a lot of this including basically he's been the public spokesman for this code of conduct. He got into some expletive filled tirades about me online and it culminated in him creating a ASCII art picture of a tombstone saying rest in peace Bryan Lunduke. I assume that's a death threat I've never had an ASCII art death threat posted on Twitter before but I assume that's what that is.

[10:00] There's also one of the longest term code contributers, Poul-Henning Kamp, making statements on the FreeBSD mailing list which were leaked online because so many people were pissed off about all this happening there's just leaks happening right and left and yeah I know where all the bodies are buried now. Making statements like commiters whine about losing their male white privileges that's racism and sexism he's being derogatory against white males that's just what he's doing right there. That's racist and sexist so both of those individuals should be immediately kicked out of the FreeBSD project based on the FreeBSD code of conduct. Also Freebsdgirl, Randi Harper, has gone on expletive filled tirades about all this as well I picked one that had the least amount of vulgarity in it. I am a white dude that doesn't understand why some people might be uncomfortable and I don't care to learn either. Instead I'm going to sit on my pulpit and talk about how silly people are that they don't want me to virtually touch them. I chose the I chose the least offensive one of hers but she did a lot of things like that too. So, now she's not a current active contributor but she still has a FreeBSD e-mail account all that sort of stuff. She should have all of that revoked as well. It should be noted that nothing has happened. These people still have all of their access they have not been reprimanded in any way in fact this means that the FreeBSD elected officials are allowed specifically by the FreeBSD core team and code of conduct blah blah blah team to make death threats. That's totally ok with them. If it weren't ok they would do something about it. Also FreeBSD key members are allowed to make racist and sexist comments. If it weren't allowed they would have stopped it. Which is kind of makes you cock your head to the side a little bit, because and here's a quote from the FreeBSD code of conduct it is about ensuring a safe, harassment-free environment for all and to ensure that everyone feels welcome. Well they clearly don't want you if you're me or a white person or a male person. They've made that very, very crystal clear. They will either threaten to kill you or just speak derogatorily about your gender or race. So it's not about ensuring a safe, harassment-free environment. It's simply not. It has to be about something else because if it was about ensuring that those individuals, those key individuals, would be kicked out or at the very least punished. Something. A statement would have to be made, something. Nothing has been done. Nothing. Therefore, it's not about that. This is what causes me to just be extraordinarily confused and get frustrated because I look at the FreeBSD project and FreeBSD is an important project. Do you use the Internet? Odds are something that you use runs FreeBSD. A server, a router, something runs FreeBSD and it does a darn good job of it. FreeBSD is a critical part of our modern infrastructure and when the core project behind it is dividing itself literally down the middle and it's just ripping itself asunder with this just awfulness this divisiveness you want there to at least be a good darn reason for it. Well it's not to ensure a safe, harassment-free environment. In fact some of those people who issued death threats at me screamed vulgarity at me, racist sexist comments also walk around if you go over on the FreeBSD "reddit" and other places making statements and podcasts and the like along the lines of if you're against this new code of conduct well it's clearly because you're a bad person who probably wants to rape people that's their response. It's horrible. It's horrible what they're doing and I don't know why, but it's not about ensuring a safe environment and it's not the only example if this was an isolated incident this topic would be done right. We would just be like all those crazy BSD folks they're ripping their project apart and that would be a bummer because FreeBSD is really great. I don't use it on my desktop but it is a great system and it would be sad, but this extends throughout the open source world. Let's talk about Node.js briefly to catch you up on this this happened last July. It started last July, July 2017. One of the more prolific and prominent Node.js developers posted a

[15:00] link on Twitter, and I'm not joking here, posted a link on Twitter to an article written by a professor at a college talking about neuro- actually wrote an article called "The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech" and it's an article about free speech on college campuses and how it impacts or could be tailored to people with various neurological issues whether they're on the autism spectrum et cetera. Right? Kind of an interesting article, not something I know a ton about so I can't really speak knowledgeably on it but it doesn't seem terribly controversial either. He didn't really make any controversial statement around it in fact the person who the Node.js developer who posted this to Twitter simply said and I quote the full thing here "if you've never considered the potential downsides of codes of conduct, here's a good place to start". This is it. No profanity. No racism. No sexism. No attacking anyone personally. Nothing. Well, in response to that an individual from the node.js board issued a complaint about this person. They then got a vote going to expel this person from the project entirely and this is a very prominent person within the project. The vote failed by one vote and he was allowed to stay by one vote. It get a little bit weirder. Now Node.js Foundation if you're trying to think to yourself what's the organization like at the Node.js Foundation. Well, the executive director is a guy named Mark Hinkel. Mark Hinkel previously was a marketing bigwig over at the Linux Foundation ok fair enough so this is a Linux Foundation connection. Oh more so than that the Node.js Foundation is the Linux Foundation. In fact if you go to any of those Node.js pages go look at the bottom and it reads directly copyright 2017 The Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation helped to organize and basically sits as the mommy and the daddy of the Node.js Foundation. The Linux Foundations the pappa. This is part of the Linux Foundation. Ok, so that was happening at the Linux Foundation now at that point you could write all this off and say ok it was of one person who got upset about something kind of innocuous someone else did they did a vote and nothing happened right at that point you could walk away and say no big whoop. Except some of the board members over at the Node.js Foundation which again is part of the Linux Foundation were so upset that this person was not kicked out that they felt that him posting things that ran contrary to their code of conduct were creating an unsafe work environment they forked node.js entirely and created this project called the IO project and moved away from it entirely. So then this whole project just started being torn asunder by this and it gets even more interesting one of the individuals who on the board of Node.js who made these complaints who voted to get this guy ripped out of there is named Ashely Williams. Ashley Williams posted the following tweets over on tweeter [sic] "never underestimate the wrath of a mildly inconvenienced white dude". All right that's racist and sexist but you know you can put up with a little racism and sexism I guess from time to time. She continues "Oh my God when they have the audacity to ask you to apologize bleep you men bleep you I'm not sorry". I'll let you use your imagination to determine what those bleeps are I'll just give you a hint the first letter is the same first letter in food. Also this beautiful, beautiful eloquently, almost "Old Man and the Sea"-esque sentence from Ashley Williams as she posted on Twitter, and me reading it does not do it justice I hope you're watching the video version, because its all lowercase with no punctuation and it just says "kill all men". Beautiful. Well done, Ashely. So now someone made a complaint against Ashely Williams, a board member of the Node.js Foundation, which means she's on the board of a project run by the Linux Foundation this is really important to remember all that. They made a complaint with these along with a dozen other statements that Ashley Williams that were just obscene, just profanity filled, racists, sexist, inciting violence, death threats, it was intense. I mean it's off the charts. Well now Ashley Williams remains a board member of the Node.js Foundation and to my knowledge never received any disciplinary action based on her

[20:00] extreme sexism, racism, and just general incitement of violence which is awful which means, point blank, that the Node.js Foundation and the Linux Foundation sanction sexism, racism, and incitement of violence. That's what that means. Otherwise they would have done something because they could have. They had the ability to they simply didn't want to. They, there's, it's baffling to me. It's absolutely baffling to me and to make it even more just truly, truly disturbing and troubling Ashley Williams that same person going around being racist, sexist, and violent on the Internet has now as of January of this year just two months back joined as a core team member of the Rust community She's now the community team lead over on the Rust community which means we have people that are inciting violence based on sexual orientation, based on gender, based on race and just being vulgar and obscene about it and the organizations involved sanction it. I'm going to repeat this. To-date, to my knowledge, and I've looked hard, neither Node.js nor the Linux Foundation have taken any real action against the racism and sexism against their board members This holds true of the Node.js Foundation, the Linux Foundation, and the FreeBSD project. None of them have. Not to my knowledge. If I'm wrong please correct me. Please do. But I'm not ok with racism, I'm not ok with sexism, I'm not ok with incitement of violence and death threats, against me or against anyone for any reason. Bill and Ted, guys. Be excellent to each other. Be cool. We don't have to be like this. So why is this happening? If the codes of conduct of these organizations have been so controversial you'd think that when they were put in place they were put in place for a good reason. Right? You'd think that when the people who wrote them or copied and pasted them and put them into place they thought you know what this is so important to do we are clearly going to put this in place and enforce this then they themselves would enforce it. But not only are they not enforcing it on each other they are actively at least some of them, including the people who put these in place, these codes of conduct in place, going out into the community and just shoving it in everyone else's faces that they can with complete impunity do so many of the things that the code of conduct says you can't do. Which means it's not really there to protect people. Let's continue to another example. Let's talk about Mozilla, because I like this example, I've talked about Mozilla's issues in the past but this example it kind of ties it all together. This last year Mozilla gave $100,000 to an organization called Rise-Up. Rise-Up is an anonymous organization that provides communication services for a lot of different organizations and let's, just for the sake of all this, let's put all the politics aside let's not talk about what organizations we may like or we may hate that Rise-Up provides communication support for. Right? Because honestly it doesn't do any of us any good to talk about it. What I want to talk about here is the exclusionariness and the divisiveness of things. Because Rise-Up membership is invite-only. It provides secure e-mail and other services and you can only get it if you're invited but what's more, once you've been invited if your political views change and your political views are not exactly the same as Rise-Up itself and some of their more prominent members you will be actively banned and this is kind of an on-going thing you can find many, many examples online if you just with a quick DuckDuckGo or Google or [unclear] search of people being banned for this. Now some of the people being banned for this are people that you, me maybe find distasteful. Some of them we may agree with. But none of that really matters. What matters is that it's an exclusionary and divisive organization. Now Rise-Up itself being exclusionary is not the problem. It really isn't. As far as I'm concerned Rise-Up has the rights to offer their free services to whoever they want and exclude whoever they want. It's their right. I'm not going to yell at them. I'm not going to make videos about how they're evil because they want to have

[25:00] only certain political ideologies in their system. What I do find problematic though is Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, and whose core mission statement when you go to their web site talks a free and open Internet for all, is actively funding exclusionary organizations. It causes divisiveness. People within Mozilla got pissed off about it. People outside of Mozilla got upset about it. People stopped using Firefox because of it and what's more it's funding divisiveness and it seems to be an ongoing pattern here. It bothers me. It bothers me tremendously. Why would an organization dedicated to openness for all fund divisiveness? Why would the FreeBSD project push a code of conduct that just ripped its community in half and at the same time clearly it doesn't actually even believe in the core values of the code of conduct because they don't follow them. And they don't enforce the code of conduct on their own elected officials. So it's not about the conduct. It's about exclusion. It's about divisiveness. And these, those are my assumptions but the rest of the things I've said are facts and when I stated these facts about Mozilla it caused people to get pissed. When I stated those facts about FreeBSD and how they basically effectively made it impossible for people to virtually hug each other without going in violation of the code of conduct people got mad. People started swearing at me, death threats, you saw some of the random slurs and death threats. People got mad. It's pretty intense. People have been so worked up over this stuff. It's absolutely insane. In fact, many technology journalists that I've known for years, that I've worked with for years, just out and out block me on social media because I point out these things happening. It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. It's tearing apart the very tiny tech journalist community. There's not that many of us. And it's literally dividing us in half. On one side are people who are like, yeah, you know, I'm going to move on because I'm about to get angry again and I want to try and stay as calm as I can. Moving on. So, what is this about? It's not about particular politics or diversity. We've established that. Right. Both in the case of node.js and FreeBSD if this was about the specific goals the political goals or about truly true diversity or if it was about ensuring a safe, you know, working environment they would have punished the people who were truly causing the most problems. But they didn't. So it's not about diversity. It's not about a good, happy environment for us all to work in. My opinion is that this is about exclusionary, divisive practices. Why? Control. I believe very much this is about control. I don't know if it's a conscious effort or it's sort of a subconscious thing where people want to exert control but I would guess this is about control more than anything else. I don't have anything to back that up with. I truly don't. That's my opinion. The other things are facts. You know we can look through all the facts and come to our own conclusions and, honestly, if other people have better theories about what this is about and what is causing a lot of this, I'm all ears. I just hate to see it, because, again, we're all awesome until proven otherwise. Be excellent to each other, regardless of race and gender. But when so many of these people, and when I say "these people", I mean that derogatorily. I mean the racist, sexist people that have been stating things and you saw some of them right here, who sit on the elected core team or the boards of some of these really prominent foundations are doing these sorts of things to other people, it's disgusting. It's distasteful. It's not ok and those same individuals are either themselves actively censoring or on the same side as people who are actively censoring anyone like me with a dissenting voice. On the FreeBSD project alone you can't find good conversation on this. Countless, I mean dozens

[30:00] of threads have been deleted and censored over on the FreeBSD "subreddit" because people and not because they got all vulgar and awful but because people leveled legitimate concerns and criticism, like why do we have this really intense code of conduct banning hugs when apparently the people running the FreeBSD project are totally allowed to go ahead and swear and talk about how bad white people are and everything else. Why do we even have any of this? Censored. It's about control and it doesn't make me comfortable. It doesn't make me comfortable. It doesn't make me happy and what realy bums me out we've got FreeBSD doing this, we've got this in the Node.js project which means it's part of the Linux Foundation, which means it's impacting Linux, FreeBSD, Node.js, the whole works. Now I haven't seen these sorts of problems in the Linux kernel project themselves. My guess is Linus probably wouldn't allow it. I don't think that many of the Linux kernel developers would stand for this. Thank God. Let's just hope it doesn't spread any further. If you are out there, let me just say this, if you're out there right now and you are one of the many, many people trying to do good in this world, whatever it is you're pushing for, whether it's more diversity in the projects you work on, safer working environments for all, or just higher quality code, thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate people trying to make things better. However, if you notice you or anyone else making these sorts of sexist, racist, derogatory, just awful statements, hold those people accountable and kick them the hell out of your project before they destroy it further. My guess is FreeBSD is not going to survive 2018 in quite the same state it currently is in. I would be really surprised if it was anything more than a shell of its former self by the end of the year, and that stinks. That's not cool. Well, I made it through the end of this without yelling and screaming this time. I got pretty pissed off the last few times I they went through because it's kind of an important thing and it impacts all of us in such a tremendously deep way. I know I'm going to get a lot of comments about this. I know I'm going to get a lot of e-mails around this and, you know, a lot of people will take stances that are less extreme than me and more extreme than me in a variety of different ways and that's all really cool. That's totally ok. We should have a diversity of opinion on all of these things and diversity of opinion should be encouraged. Let me just ask this, when you are going on to YouTube or "reddit" or anywhere else in talking about this, let's be cool to each other. Let's be excellent to each other. If someone's being just right rare I'm not racists against someone else, call them out, downvote them, report to the projects they're involved in and get them kicked out right now. It doesn't matter what race they're being mean towards, it doesn't matter what sex they're being mean towards, it doesn't matter. Racism and sexism suck no matter what. End of story. All right. Now, I'm going to shake that off for a second.

*** Look at all the cool goodies behind me. Ok, what's happening? What's happening? This show was sponsored in part by System76 who I know for a fact are some truly amazing people that make amazing laptops loaded up with Linux. You can load them up with Ubuntu or PopOS, which is cool. Having a choice is cool. I love these systems. The Bonobo workstation their top of the line system it's a bit pricey but it's big it has like fans in it it's like a big rig but it has a desktop CPU in it and, I kid you not, it has a desktop GPU in it. It can fit a couple of hard drives in there. I mean I could easily run my entire production studio full 1080p, live streaming, recording, compositing, everything without even breaking a sweat on that Bonobo workstation from System76. Just glorious. I mean if I needed a portable on-the-go like TV station in a box, the Bonobo workstation. Hands down. My heavens I mean the Serval workstation's a little less expensive also can totally handle it but then that Bonobo is so tight it's tight System76 dot com and LulzBot, also freedom-loving. They make that little 3D printer I've got sitting back there. In fact I've got a little 3D printed version of my LulzBot mini. Look at that beautiful guy right there. A buddy of mine printe that up for that so my LulzBot Mini had a mini LulzBot. This is a mini LulzBot mini or a micro, a LulzBot Micro. Let's call it a LulzBot Micro. I've also got a LulzBot Taz over there I've been testing with which is a little bit bigger,

[35:00] same basic format, same basic structure, just instead of a six by six inch print bed you've got a more of an 11-ish inch by 11 inch print bed, much bigger, print much bigger parts. You can find it over at LulzBot dot com and if you want to support the show and it is truly helpful you can pick up many different things, t-shirts, cups, and whatnot if you go over to Lunduke dot com. Also, a big thans to my Patreon supporters at Patreon dot com slash Bryan Lunduke. Those Patreon supporters get to be involved in monthly Q&As that are exclusive just for them,DRM-free versions of special videos. In April I'm going to be releasing two of those. I'm doing a couple of events up at LinuxFest Northwest and two of those videos are not going to be released on YouTube. The rest of them will. Almost everything is released for free everywhere but those two are going to be released just for the Patreons and why, why am I doing that? To raise money to make those trips possible. So if you want to make some of these trips possible to do shows like Linux Sucks and all the othe big shows that I put together go ahead and go over to Patreon dot com slash Bryan Lunduke, give a dollar, give two dollars, what have you. If you just go to Lunduke dot com there's a little how to help the Lunduke show in the top lefthand corner and you can help out the things beyond that that are really, really helpful here is that people that help out are helping with the hardware upgrade and replacement costs that just simply happened. This show has been running almost daily for over a year now. Cameras, lights, hardware, computer hardware, everything and every now and then things break or just need to get upgraded to look a little bit nicer. So those that pitch in really help make things better. Also, we're looking at moving off of YouTube for at least an option. We want to provide a totally free software option that is self-hosted by us and controlled by us so that we can really keep it free and make sure it stays online but in order to do that, I do need some assistance. So if you want to pitch in, go over to Lunduke dot com and there's multiple ways you can pitch in and I would love to bring in some more editing help so we could do a couple more edited versions of things and the live events and whatnot. Here's some of the Patreon supporters. Truly, truly wonderful people.

Thank you to everyone for hanging out. I hope that everyone here is always awesome to each other regardless of what color, gender, anyone else is because people deserve to be treated awesomely unlike the couple of people that I pointed out during this show that don't treat people awesome. So. Oh, oh what? Am I making a derogatory hand signal right now? Maybe at those people but everyone else is awesome, yeah.







There are many other examples one can think of, Mozilla included.

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LLM Slop is Ruining the Media and Ruining the Web, Ignoring the Problem or the Principal Culprits (or the Slop Itself) Is Not Enough
We need to encourage calling out the culprits (till they stop this poor conduct or misconduct)
Christmas FUD From Microsoft, Smearing "SSH" When the Real Issue is Microsoft Windows
And since Microsoft's software contains back doors, only a fool would allow any part of SSH on Microsoft's environments, which should be presumed compromised
Paywalls, Bots, Spam, and Spyware is "Future of the Media" According to UK Press Gazette
"managers want more LLM slop"
Google Has Mass Layoffs (Again), But the Problem is Vastly Larger
started as a rumour about January 2025
On BetaNews Latest Technology News: "We are moderately confident this text was [LLM Chatbot] generated"
The future of newsrooms or another site circling down the drain with spam, slop, or both?
"The Real New Year" is Now
Happy solstice
Microsoft OSI Reads Techrights Closely
Microsoft OSI has also fraudulently attempted to censor Techrights several times over the years
"Warning About IBM's Labor Practices"
IBM is not growing and its revenue is just "borrowed" from companies it is buying; a lot of this revenue gets spent paying the interest on considerable debt
[Meme] The Easier Way to Make Money
With patents...
The Curse (to Microsoft) of the Faroe Islands
The common factor there seems to be Apple
Electronic Frontier Foundation Defends Companies That Attack Free Speech Online (Follow the Money)
One might joke that today's EFF has basically adopted the same stance as Donald Trump and has a "warm spot" for BRICS propaganda
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, December 20, 2024
IRC logs for Friday, December 20, 2024
Gemini Links 21/12/2024: Death of Mike Case, Slow and Sudden End of the Web
Links for the day
Links 20/12/2024: Security Patches, Openwashing by Open Source Initiative, Prison Sentence for Bitcoin Charlatan and Fraud
Links for the day
Another Terrible Month for Microsoft in Web Servers
Consistent downward curve
LLM Slop Disguised as Journalism: The Latest Threat to the Web
A lot of it is to do with proprietary GitHub, i.e. Microsoft
Gemini Links 20/12/2024: Regulation and Implementing Graphics
Links for the day
Links 20/12/2024: Windows Breaks Itself, Mass Layoffs Coming to Google Again (Big Wave)
Links for the day
Microsoft: "Upgrade" to Vista 11 Today, We'll Brick Your Audio and You Cannot Prevent This
Windows Update is obligatory, so...
The Unspeakable National Security Threat: Plasticwares as the New Industrial Standard
Made to last or made to be as cheap as possible? Meritocracy or industrial rat races are everywhere now.
Microsoft's All-Time Lows in Macao and Hong Kong
Microsoft is having a hard time in China, not only for political reasons
[Meme] "It Was Like a Nuclear Winter"
This won't happen again, will it?
If You Know That Hey Hi (AI) is Hype, Then Stop Participating in It
bogus narrative of "Hey Hi (AI) arms race" and "era/age of Hey Hi" and "Hey Hi Revolution"
Bangladesh (Population Close to 200 Million) Sees Highest GNU/Linux Adoption Levels Ever
Microsoft barely has a grip on this country. It used to.
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 19, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, December 19, 2024