Bonum Certa Men Certa

Gemini Links 14/06/2023: Flatpak’s Sandboxing Works and Social Web



  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • 🔤SpellBinding: AILQYUT Wordo: CHURN
      • Random Japan Thoughts

        1. A cultural difference that I notice is that it would appear Japanese people have a much better sense of their place within a larger whole than Americans do. We are so obsessed with individuality and uniqueness that we miss the value of our place in the whole. Thusly, we often lack pride in the larger things we are a part of, like our country, culture, home.

    • Science

      • Mad movement on main

        I've been thinking lately that I need to be more vocal about my feelings on the mad movement/mad pride and my criticisms of psych as a field.

        I'm always frustrated by how controversial it seems to be to point out that a lot of psych is still pseudo-science, systems of control and bigotry dressed up in p-hacking and wishful thinking.

        I don't know.

        I feel like I often get treated like I'm anti-science when I say these things but I'm not. I just think there's a lot in the past century of history that's flawed and needs to be rebuilt off of different foundations. This doesn't seem controversial to me. I've worked in sciences like physics that are full of reinventions and massive re-understandings of the field, and that's about comparatively simple systems to---say---a living thing.

    • Technology and Free Software

      • [Older] Invidious: Make Youtube cool again

        I have a complicated relationship with Youtube like, I imagine, a lot of people. While I really dislike everything that Google is doing with the platform and their idiotic algorithm, there are tons of exceptionnaly good content on the platform.

      • Working From Alone

        Before the pandemic I did what everyone else did: I came into the office five days a week only to mostly spend most of my time at a computer, with headphones on to block out the noise; we would talk at lunch. For a while we played Switch games together once a week.

        I even worked with a team based in another country, for well over a year, from the office. I would come in every day to my desk in an open plan office full of people working on entirely unrelated projects. It simply didn’t occur to me that it would make more sense to work from home.

        [...]

        Then everything changed. We had to work from home. I got lucky, very lucky: we had just moved from a just-big-enough apartment to a house with room for an “office”. So, I got my new working space—in the basement, but with a pretty nice window.

        [...]

        I love being able to focus on my work: to put on music, if I want; or not, if I want; to dance or do push-ups or sit for a while if it gets to be too much.

        There’s a trend back towards working in offices, or at least there seems to be a push for it coming from somewhere.

        That’s fine for some, I guess. I have discovered what I like, and it’s working from home; to be alone with my thoughts then to step outside my office and be with my family. Bliss.

      • Flatpak's Sandboxing Works

        Flatpak is an alternate distribution method for Linux. By default, programs are sandboxed from the rest of the system.

        An often made statement by critics of Flatpak is the insistence that this isn't real security, because a package maintainer can change its security settings to poke holes in the sandbox. (This is allowed because some software relies on it for functionality.)

        Recently, malware was released through Minecraft mods on CurseForge, and possibly other modding platforms. It was a wide attack that ended up causing several mods and modpacks to be affected. Installing and running any of the mods causes the system to be infected.

      • Internet/Gemini

        • Social Web

          I'm sat in the garden today. It's very warm; breezy too, but the breezy just brings a slightly different kind of warmth. We have a weather warning for thunderstorms later, so we'll see what that brings.

          I'm encouraged at the moment by the social web and the fediverse. There's a growing understanding that the fabric of our online lives can't be run in a VC-backed, for-profit manner.

        • More Social Media

          I've really been enjoying Mastodon. Compared to other social media, there is undoubtedly more of an initial effort to be made in uncovering interesting people to follow. I've been dropping into a few other instances to find those interesting people; FOSS and gamedev related. I guess it'll take a while to understand and refine the process, but it's fun to follow the chain of people and topics ever-deeper.

          [...]

          I've also been liberally using the block button, mainly on bot feeds which are just polluting the water with low-effort RSS spam.

        • Back in the saddle?

          It was fairly easy a transition: except for the part where I could access my capsule for about three minutes, but *too* soon couldn't again for over half an hour, making me wonder if I'd completely wasted my time, and possible others' time for having announced my new capsule address. Egg is never far from one's face online....

        • New setup for the web

          New setup! When visiting the site from the web, you’re no longer being redirected to port 1966. Instead, Apache now acts as a reverse proxy.

          The following config requests new certificates from Let’s Encrypt automatically thanks to mod_md.

          HTTP requests are redirect to HTTPS. HTTPS requests for “/.well-known” URLs are left untouched for the Let’s Encrypt renewal to work. All other HTTPS requests are proxied to the old port 1966.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



Recent Techrights' Posts

Links 15/02/2026: Slop, Politics, and Gemini
Links for the day
Small is Beautiful (in Cascading Style Sheets/Inheritance Rules)
If done correctly, pages can take a tenth of a second to fully load
Microsoft Has Fallen to New Lows in Hong Kong This Year
That Windows "market share" falls there is perhaps expected
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raised About 1.5 Million Dollars This Winter, Almost 50% More Than in All of 2024 Combined
Verbal advocacy goes a long way
Spread the Word About EPO Strikes and Patent Injustices in Europe
Corruption in Europe is a real thing
The Register MS is Promoting Slop, Promotion Connected to Microsoft (Trying to Replace Judges With Microsoft)
marketing spun as "science"
He Did Not Have Enough Souls
A lot of the subjects we cover here no other site dares touch
When It Comes tom Rust, Keep All the Eyes on the Ball (Technical and Legal Perils, Sustainability Questions)
It's not about security or politics
"Mix Vale" is a Slopfarm
3 "articles" about "ubuntu"
Links 15/02/2026: Roy Medvedev Dead at 100, Rise of "YouTube Politicians"
Links for the day
Links 15/02/2026: How Alexey Navalny Was Executed by Putin, Erdogan Helping Iran
Links for the day
IBM Fedora Keeps Promoting Slop, Red Hat Has Been Turned Into Chaff and Trash to Help IBM's Stock (With "AI" Storytelling)
Red Hat's Fedora is an old brand (20+ years). It no longer stands for what it meant to people in the Fedora Core days (I was a Fedora user back then).
What IBM Said About 2026 Layoffs and What's Happening in Practice
t'll leave IBM at the very bottom, in due course (customers will notice something profound has changed)
Gemini Links 15/02/2026: "Already Midway February" and Loadbars Remembered
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 14, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, February 14, 2026
Microsoft's Bing Down to 0.5% in Armenia
Microsoft does not want shareholders to see this
Libel by Bots: Unexplored Legal Area?
Liability can be traced back to the operator
Maybe Obvious, But Merits Repeating: A Lot of "Demand" for Slop is Faked, Manufactured, Fabricated by Dark Patterns, Bundling, Media PR (Deception/Hype) Campaigns
Over the past few years many products and services got rebranded as "AI"
xAI and X (Twitter) Live on Borrowed Time, It'll Get a Lot Worse Fast
Being associated with a child porn site formerly known as "Twitter" is odorous to say the least
Microsoft is Lobbying Brussels via Opensource.org and OSI
The new (GAFAM) management at OSI is not serving the OSI's original mission
Will Lockett's Newsletter: Microsoft became Microslop and Windows users are "flocking" to GNU/Linux "to escape the mess"
"Users are fed up and jumping ship from Windows to Mac or Linux. In fact, it appears that Windows has lost 400 million users since 2022!"
Photographic Collections
There are going to be over 100,000 JPEG, PNG, and GIF files by the time we turn 20
Norway Curbs Social Control Media as It Harms Norway's Society
A decrease from 11% to just 1.87% is possible to reason about
Accomplishments of Our Community
Why I enjoy writing in Techrights
Microsoft Invented a Slop CEO ("AI CEO") Because Real Interest in Slop is Waning, So It's Just Faking Its Prominence
It's noise
Google Promoting Slop, Not Journalism
The truth of the matter is, Google is part of this problem and it doesn't seem to care
Another IBM Company (Spawned by IBM) is Hiding the Scale of Layoffs, Just Like Red Hat and Kyndryl
Why is the scale of the layoffs there shrouded in secrecy?
Links 14/02/2026: Financial Woes in Hong Kong and "Hong Kong Journalists Face ‘Precarious’ Future After Jimmy Lai Jailed"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 14/02/2026: Fish Shell and Meta Slash-commands
Links for the day
Links 14/02/2026: "Bias and Toxicity in" Slop, Microsoft's Vista 11 System Update Breaks Systems Again
Links for the day
Links 14/02/2026: "Suppression of Free Speech" and "Climate Change Puts Winter Games on Thin Ice"
Links for the day
EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part I - Getting the Word Out About What the 'Alicante Mafia' Did to Europe's Second-Largest Institution
Can't everyone in the European media agree that letting cokeheads run Europe's second-largest institution is a terrible idea?
Richard Stallman in the United States - Part I - Huge Audience (Offline and Online), 'Cancel Culture' Attempted and Failed
the comeback of Richard Stallman (RMS) in the United States
GitHub Cannot Survive for Much Longer
Microsoft is trying to just hide the debt
Ed Zitron: Microsoft Is A Decaying Empire That Bet The Future On Making In Excess Of $500 Billion In New Revenue Within The Next 4 To 6 Years From AI — And It Hasn’t Made A Dime In Profit Yet
Microsoft bets its future on a bunch of nothing
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 13, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, February 13, 2026
Gemini Links 14/02/2026: "Throwback VR Headset" and OFFLFIRSOCH 2026
Links for the day
IBM's Accounting Claims Don't Add Up
IBM is an enigma. To Wall Street is claims to be doing extremely well, but insiders tell the complete opposite.
Links 13/02/2026: "Cofounders Fleeing MElon’s xAI" and IOC Opposes Solidarity With Ukraine's Fallen
Links for the day
IBM is Becoming "Garbage In, Garbage Out" (GIGO) "Just like Arvind and Krabanaugh." (CEO and CFO, Respectively)
There are some decent new comments about IBM this morning
Gemini Links 13/02/2026: Square Function with Diode Network and Calls Against Discord
Links for the day
Links 13/02/2026: SUSE Uses Microsoft Internally, MElon's Company Helps Turn Epstein Files Into Child Abuse (After the Pornography Scandals)
Links for the day
If Your Company Lost About 30% of Its 'Value' in 3 Months, Then Maybe It Was Never Worth What You Claimed
Does that make sense?
Pleroma is Dying
The last social control media that I joined was Pleroma
African Browser Choices Show a Growing Problem in the World Wide Web
World Wide Web (WWW) becoming little but a transport layer for a particular proprietary application (Google Chrome) [...] we're back to the late 1990s
Asia and Social Control Media
statCounter reckons it's down from over 10% to just 3% since it began tracking those things
If You Want Digital Freedom, Then Follow Richard Stallman, the "Linux" Brand Has Changed and OSI is Microsoft (GitHub)
If you want something stable and predictable, then stick with GNU, the GPL, and GCC
Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal and SRA Failing to Curb SLAPPs Against People Who Expose Wrongdoing
We'll soon show messages that we transmitted to politicians
Beware the Latest IBM SPAM, IBM is Already Down "After Hours"
After a harsh day in Wall Street IBM's shares area already down again (after trading hours)
Radicalism in Our Communities is Mostly Corporate, Not Grassroots
Infiltration and systematic destruction can be shallowly painted as "inducing manners"
Anonymous Threats Against My Wife and Against Yours Truly
Promoting GNU/Linux and condemning people who attack GNU/Linux is not a crime
Decades-Long Microsofter (Darryl K. Taft) and TIOBE Conflate Microsoft GitHub (Proprietary) With FOSS in Microsoft-Sponsored 'News' Site
We do not intend to do a lengthy debunking because we covered this subject several times in the past
Life Gets Better After Social Control Media
Don't become part of these experiments
statCounter Suggests Americans Are Dumping Social Control Media
Are Americans getting fed up with social control media and quitting in droves?
Back Doors and Fake Security
They've militarised everything, even people's home computers
Cost-Cutting and Book-Cooking at IBM
It's like cutting salaries by more than 50%
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 12, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, February 12, 2026
Microsoft Cuts Continue, Visitor Center in Redmond Shut Down
This goes on and on, leading up to the next giant wave of mass layoffs