New buffer 1:2
Many happy returns, Techrights
> This is why I'm against both the terms "Free Software" and "Open Source"
> [They're] ambiguous
> I just specify the license
> GPLv3
> AGPLv3
> BSD 3-clause
> etc etc
> I feel like a lot of this drama could be avoided if people just made it normal to use the exact license in discourse
1. free software isn't more ambiguous than "apple" or "mac" (the latter means apple computer, raincoat, or person with that name).
2. the concepts of free software and open source go far beyond the license, so this is insufficient.
3. the "drama" is largely a manufactured (imaginary) crisis created by open source to discredit (and co-opt) free software.
additional point: open source creates a dishonest appeal to "unity" that essentially means "agree with our different take, because then we wont have to disagree."
what people miss about codes of conduct is that while they are pushed through by focusing on the good they promise-- they will (allegedly) result in everyone being better or "nicer" to each other-- they are really an escalation of problems that poses as a resolution of problems.
its not a lot different from saying that anybody who gets in a fist fight will face a mandatory $20,000 fine.
but this will prevent fist fights and punches! do you support physical assault? why would you be against this?
in reality, more problems are being created-- by design-- than being solved. this is taking control away from communities and giving it to corporations.
but thats not how its promoted. its promoted as being about doing good-- not about destroying communities that were already good communities.
suppose someone is messing with your dog. maybe you dont have an attack dog, just a pet. you tell someone to leave you alone, but it gets worse. theyre now attacking your dog, and you get between them and push them out of the way. now its assault.
they push you back, hard enough to knock you over. you get up and punch them, yelling at them to leave you and your dog alone.
fortunately, there is a 20,000 dollar fine to prevent all this. now that its happened, you pay all the rent money you had for the next year and a half. the attacker can no longer buy that car they needed-- but they probably deserve it. do you?
while the attacker had enough money to pay the fine and pay rent, you find that you cant afford your home anymore, so you have to move or you may even end up homeless.
none of this had to happen, all we were trying to do is get people to stop hitting each other. you'd think mandatory $20,000 fines would eventually get people punching each other to stop. instead, it increases the number of homeless and people still get into fist fights. thats better?
this may seem like an absurd argument, though there are real laws that are badly written and cause problems of this actual magnitude. meanwhile, we are emulating them and escalating-- not solving-- the problems that free software communities have.
its political and often one-sided, but more to the point its mandatory and ultimately arbitrary. the more they try to make it apply to "everyone", the more it applies to some but not others.
its not justice-- its just poorly written rules and one-sided enforcement. its not progress, its just escalation.
all of this is designed to dismantle free software and silence activists-- but whats more, it is doing exactly that. communities arent getting nicer, theyre still full of abuse-- theyre just getting smaller and more isolated, and we are losing leaders left and right. thats not by chance, its by design. they want us to be stranded, so we have to go to them for support. thats a very common abuse tactic, and here its being used against entire activist movements. people who really hate abuse will be against these tactics, and very likely find them too familiar. they are tactics used by abusers to disempower, but now they are rebranded as empowering. look at the results, not the promises.
authoritarian states also use arguments about "for the good of everyone" but here their arguments as well as their regimes are being emulated on a "community" level. this is not progress! its hijacking progress. its co-opting progress.
conflating words with violence and using that to remove credit for contributions and move control of projects into other hands isnt justice, its politically-motivated retribution. its community-shaping, not based on justice but based on the ambitions of larger more powerful groups of people, trying to restructure our communities the same way they restructure their own companies-- to suit their own interests, not ours.
most people are not against the purported goals of these changes. rather, theyre against the actual goals-- and certainly the very flawed methodology. but rhetoric used to push it through is circular, you cant argue against it because thats exactly the sort of thing its trying to solve! in saner times we call that sort of rhetoric "bullshit". obviously, you cant say that!
now everything is so contentious, and escalated, you cant even talk about that-- its out of our hands, we can only hope that the companies with their own interests in play "get it" and fix this for us. because it doesnt belong to us anymore-- weve lost our say in the matter, and just by having a say, we lose our say. and thats the idea. its deliberately divisive, deliberately manipulative-- we say that gaslighting is abuse, but its clearly not abuse when corporations do it constantly and use it to nullify our activism.
we cant call what theyre doing evil, because that would mean we are against progress!
the example isnt realistic though, in one particular way: if it were like what is happening to our communities, the person who attacked your dog wouldnt have to pay anything. only you would, for defending your pet dog against someone else.
its true that "justice" often misses and gets the wrong person. thats exactly the reason that "justice" should be more focused on helping victims, not ruining lives and careers. to be certain, sometimes a career is justifiably ruined.
but all theyre doing is making that more normal, less of an exception. sometimes a $20,000 fine is justified. but applying that more and more? thats not progress, its just escalation. it says it will help, it causes more problems. as if there are no historical examples of that to learn from! but we cant learn from those now-- it would mean we are against progress.
this is "progress" that will leave people crying out for reform. its shortsighted, overzealous and destructive.
"Nadine Strossen, the former head of the ACLU and a daughter of Holocaust survivors who is generally supportive of the ADL, believes such moves to censor hate speech are generally ill-advised."
cancel her too, eh? if you stop letting people gaslight communities with these tactics, youll find a lot of good people saying all this is a big mistake. we cant talk about those people, or what theyre saying. it (now) means we are bad if we do. we cant talk about this-- talking about this puts us on the "wrong side". the only way to stay in good standing is to be silent, or say what we are told to agree with.
as a bonus, it seems to be being used against the very best people we have. but we cant say that, because defending the best people is now (politically) the same as supporting the worst. its being used by people who really dont care about us, against people that really do. thats just amazing. its such a coup, in every sense of the word. and people keep falling for it. eventually they will come around, but all in all it will cost years of real progress and ruin some really excellent and wonderful people, at least for a while.
this is not progress. its a terrific fraud, all in the name of progress.
if we were allowed to speak freely, we would be able to gather what is needed to prove the harm that all this is doing. but since it is inadmissible, and part of the crime itself to present the evidence against this co-opting-- well, i guess we are all fucked then. at least until enough people stop caring about divisive political bullshit; and truth, scale and perspective matter more than an increase (dressed up as a decrease) of stacked (rigged) justice again.
until then, here is a great big hint: "progress" doesnt ban leaders from or for discussing and analysing progress. that sort of atomic fuckery is just what youd find in an extremely controlling, abusive relationship-- being forbidden from questioning the validity of the abuse you are receiving. thats a huge red flag that bullshit is being used to do evil. whether its done in the name of something that good people know is good is fucking irrelevant.
no, edge is (probably) not safe from activex:
1. there is an "ie mode" for edge which supports activex; i read it is mostly limited to developers.
2. microsoft routinely installs and removes things when they want. so its not like "not enabling it" is a 100% sure way to not have it.
you might prefer the idea that edge will never support activex (by being incompatible so we can finally stop worrying) but point 1 shows that it is not impossible. microsoft could add "support" at any time.
obviously edge is not wildly popular anyway, but it is not a guaranteed break from activex. mondays option can be tuesdays mandatory feature, just ask lennart; his people are the ones that brought almost-forced software to gnu/linux.
zoobab, or glyn moody (always hard to tell from the logs) is calling for "uncensorable networks" from twitter, when they could be calling for them from the pretend-uncensorable networks of the githubiverse. first of all, they brag that the fediverse is uncensorable, but then they brag about censoring people on it. but then they develop these things on a non-free censorship platform like github. so (lets guess its zoobab) why not talk about it there? oh, wait-- maybe its a pretend solution.
roy of course knows that social networks are about social control anyway, not freedom. but then, society is generally about telling people what to do anyway. "dont steal our corn!" "or what?" "or else!" dont date my sister! get a haircut! upgrade to python 3! dont smoke pot! in this social environment that pretends to call itself "civilisation" its a miracle that anything gets liberated, ever. typically when enough people get together, they all want to be king at the same time. "for what?" "for very good reasons which i will come up with later!" which will probably be mostly ad hom attacks, but they still work.
a society afraid of freedom itself will develop crappy solutions for being more free-ish. fortunately there is an endless string of bullshitters to keep people afraid, plus, many fears are based on actual dangers, and bullshitters can (always do) exploit that so that people continue to think freedom is a terrible idea-- at least until someone proves them wrong, by being free-- no, obviously not that way, its too dangerous. the only "safe" way to prove it would work is on paper, preferably with the sponsorship of an accredited institution, which itself has already purged all troublemakers. yes, that should do nicely.
one of the greatest user-empowering coups there could be, would be to take a full-featured browser and let people turn off any feature they wanted (like <b>, or css overflow: or js document.title-- just to show features you would arguably be crazy to turn off) by listing them in a file. it would behave as if those features were not implemented. (for js this has implications about whether or not it would break as a syntax error, or simply do nothing like not implementing a non-standard css feature would do). these decisions are implemented by standards committees, but the user should not be saddled with them if they dont want them.
taking the idea a step further, being able to "remaster" the browser without those features would be nice as well. but people will say "just recompile without those features" and they dont understand what i mean when i say "remaster", though im confident someone can figure it out.
other than that, being able to disable any feature from about:config (with a list of those features online somewhere) would be a huge start. there are a myriad of plugins that do some of this, but they would need to be abused or rewritten to do this properly, only to have the browser bastards-- sorry, authors once again ditch years of plugin support. in that regard, it is better if this is a native feature than a plugin. i would love to be able to remove many things from the browser, easily. mozilla certainly doesnt care about that. imagine if you could replace gecko with a custom, stripped gecko instead? and thus create your own simplified web specification, your own personal html5-microlight?
you wouldnt have to care about the standards orgs, who clearly dont work for us and who ensure the future of the web is unpleasant. of course it would break website designs, but when css had its little revolution they ensured that forever we would be zooming and occasionally writing stylish templates and clicking fake modal windows forever-- or be forced to drop down to css-free views. as soon as one div could overlap another, i thought it was bad. imagine if you could disallow that? to have the option of divs never overlapping again? instead all we can do is boycott websites with designs we find loathsome. what if we could do much more than that, and force websites to stick to our rules? many would hate such an option-- but then they wouldnt have to use it.
People need to write 100 times on the board to learn:
DITCH ZOOM USE JITSI
DITCH ZVC USE GITHUB DITCH ZVC USE GITHUB DITCH ZVC USE GITHUB DITCH ZVC USE GITHUB
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DITCH ZVC USE GITHUB DITCH ZVC USE GITHUB DITCH ZVC USE GITHUB DITCH ZVC USE GITHUB
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> "Tell me exactly what the frack is wrong with spelling out exactly what constitutes unacceptable behavior in a group or organization just to be clear?: When They're Done Eliminating Our Software Freedom They'll Eliminate Our Freedom of Speech, Too
LOL, techrights explains that ALL THE TIME. but this is one of those fallacies where someone ignores the answer and simply asks it to be restated WITHOUT the point it makes. there are a number of relevant fallacies, but "begging the question" seems to be the top one.
statement from alice: "this policy is bad because in practice, it leads to corruption and censorship and witch hunts, eliminating due process."
reply from bob: "exactly what is wrong with a policy that requires correct behaviour?"
bob is a bullshitter!
but to answer his question: the policy has nothing to do with correct behaviour. it is closer to the reality of things that the policy is an excuse to do bad things-- the policy is not honest in the first place, the people demanding the policy are demonstrably dishonest, the people enforcing the policy are demonstrably dishonest.
the policy does not serve its purpose-- it actually serves a purpose that is negative, but this is justified by pretending to do something good instead.
not that this is a new trick, or anything. war on drugs-- nixon-- lets fight drugs. real purpose: lets create terrible laws and do terrible things to people that we would never get away with unless it was perceived as being for the greater good.
"hey! whats wrong with fighting to eliminate the drug problem?"
"there you go again-- youre a bullshitter, bob!"
heres another, even more recent example:
> "What do you mean? Surely if one works on GPL licensed software, regardless of whether they are using github or not, they are giving to the community, not to proprietary software."
> "Are you concerned that MS will also use the software and therefore benefit?"
roy: "No, that mischaracterises the concern"
it does-- microsoft can use the software either way. roy, could you rephrase for the person who is just going to ignore the actual point being made?
Hardly worth the trouble, TBH, as it seems the person is unwilling to research. --User:Schestowitz|Schestowitz 22:28, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
----
I love gopher, and while I think the solution to the web is something between gopher and the web-- one example exists which is reassuring, though it is developed on Github which is a deal-breaker, might as well be ActiveX/ASP/NET if it's developed on Github ("why not gemini?" thats why)-- hosting on gopher is a way to demonstrate solidarity with the idea.
It's also fun, and you can use scripts like the ones that make the IRC logs to convert HTML pages to stripped-down gopher. The one thing to be careful of is security. You wouldn't want the gopher server exposing the same server/container that runs other services, because there are no robust gopher servers. That isn't a priority, there aren't enough people running them to make it a priority, and it is largely a hobbyist protocol at this point.
As long as you are prepared to take measures around that and are aware of the caveats, I would say go for it. Don't let it be a route past your security though, be very cautious.
"Also, the Green Party (GOP-backed trolls) were kicked off the Montana ballots."
^ shades of "assange worked for trump" and other such nonsense
inconvenient truth: his favourite candidate did more to push the patriot act than ralph nader did, so...
"And a rare person (from the two parties) gotten to power with the current system will be interested in changing it." <- true
"The people don't have a say in this through the legal means," <- slightly less true
i wish someone would explain that the whole notion that the democratic party already has votes which a they fight to prevent a third party from "taking away" from them isnt merely entitlement, its the basis/excuse for their perpetual election fraud against the voters of the united states. this is yet another reason that real progressives despise democrats. its also why democrats never actually fix anything-- with a monopoly on "progress" there is no means (not even by voting) to hold them accountable. you dont like the fake dnc? go pound sand, republican scum! you have two choices: democrat, and wrong.
"hey, what about the republican election fraud?" what about it? so youre saying that you both work to defraud progressive voters? heck, ive been saying that for years!
and then you cheer about how you defrauded them, strutting around like a cock that a third party was kicked off the ballot! congratulations, traitors! youre keeping elections fake and youre proud of it-- you know what you get from fake elections? fake leaders. youve been enjoying that result for years now, and taking zero responsibility for your role in that treachery! then you say anybody who doesnt do things your way is the problem? no, YOU made that problem. suck it up! if your own party hadnt defrauded its own voters, trump would have never gotten in. so lets talk about what side YOU are really on.
it isnt third parties that are responsible-- its your own party not caring who your own party votes for. YOU are to blame-- youre not to be trusted with the solution, you are the problem, it is YOUR fraud that got the world here. your party should be dissolved for its crimes against humanity, for its war crimes, for its complete lack of legitimacy and its complete selling out to corporations. you are nothing but a scam, and a deadly scam at that.
you have no accountability, take no responsibility, your party doesnt even care who its own voters want in office-- and you say youre NOT the party of trump? youre the other fascist party, with the other fascist candidate. and you know exactly where you can put that.
voter suppression is treason: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voter-suppression-treason_b_1964790
so if you deem yourself a true patriot, then perhaps your duty now is to try, convict and condemn yourself-- but since you had no DIRECT hand in that treason, perhaps you could simply turn away from supporting traitors like yourself, and actually support the democracy that countless people like yourself PRETEND to uphold. after all, voter suppression and fake elections are the rule, not the exception, and no one is really going to hold you accountable except (possibly) yourself.
"He'd rather not use a microwave if it uses code he doesn't have (seriously)." — Simon Phipps (@webmink) October 25, 2009
in 2009 that was probably meant to make rms look unreasonable, but in 2020 with internet-enabled refrigerators and people hacking cameras in baby monitors, he was "unreasonable" by virtue of being ahead of his time (again).
i used to be a happy amazon customer, who said (thinking of "the right to read") that the ultimate evil for drm would be to put it in books. im still boycotting amazon, more than 10 years later.
perhaps someone from osi would like to call kaitlyn tiffany "autistic" for writing this 2018 article: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/21/17886682/amazon-new-smart-home-microwave-speakers-internet-of-things oh, nope-- because she gets the title on the money, and then writes an article that ignores her own warning.
"Amazon’s Alexa-enabled microwave"
that would be a good thing to have a the source code to. though really the whole concept is flawed, and hardware switches (along with not enabling internet on your microware) would be better. but thats an example of roy being right.
> This is why I'm against both the terms "Free Software" and "Open Source"
> [They're] ambiguous
> I just specify the license
> GPLv3
> AGPLv3
> BSD 3-clause
> etc etc
> I feel like a lot of this drama could be avoided if people just made it normal to use the exact license in discourse
1. free software isn't more ambiguous than "apple" or "mac" (the latter means apple computer, raincoat, or person with that name).
2. the concepts of free software and open source go far beyond the license, so this is insufficient.
3. the "drama" is largely a manufactured (imaginary) crisis created by open source to discredit (and co-opt) free software.
additional point: open source creates a dishonest appeal to "unity" that essentially means "agree with our different take, because then we wont have to disagree."
what people miss about codes of conduct is that while they are pushed through by focusing on the good they promise-- they will (allegedly) result in everyone being better or "nicer" to each other-- they are really an escalation of problems that poses as a resolution of problems.
its not a lot different from saying that anybody who gets in a fist fight will face a mandatory $20,000 fine.
but this will prevent fist fights and punches! do you support physical assault? why would you be against this?
in reality, more problems are being created-- by design-- than being solved. this is taking control away from communities and giving it to corporations.
but thats not how its promoted. its promoted as being about doing good-- not about destroying communities that were already good communities.
suppose someone is messing with your dog. maybe you dont have an attack dog, just a pet. you tell someone to leave you alone, but it gets worse. theyre now attacking your dog, and you get between them and push them out of the way. now its assault.
they push you back, hard enough to knock you over. you get up and punch them, yelling at them to leave you and your dog alone.
fortunately, there is a 20,000 dollar fine to prevent all this. now that its happened, you pay all the rent money you had for the next year and a half. the attacker can no longer buy that car they needed-- but they probably deserve it. do you?
while the attacker had enough money to pay the fine and pay rent, you find that you cant afford your home anymore, so you have to move or you may even end up homeless.
none of this had to happen, all we were trying to do is get people to stop hitting each other. you'd think mandatory $20,000 fines would eventually get people punching each other to stop. instead, it increases the number of homeless and people still get into fist fights. thats better?
this may seem like an absurd argument, though there are real laws that are badly written and cause problems of this actual magnitude. meanwhile, we are emulating them and escalating-- not solving-- the problems that free software communities have.
its political and often one-sided, but more to the point its mandatory and ultimately arbitrary. the more they try to make it apply to "everyone", the more it applies to some but not others.
its not justice-- its just poorly written rules and one-sided enforcement. its not progress, its just escalation.
all of this is designed to dismantle free software and silence activists-- but whats more, it is doing exactly that. communities arent getting nicer, theyre still full of abuse-- theyre just getting smaller and more isolated, and we are losing leaders left and right. thats not by chance, its by design. they want us to be stranded, so we have to go to them for support. thats a very common abuse tactic, and here its being used against entire activist movements. people who really hate abuse will be against these tactics, and very likely find them too familiar. they are tactics used by abusers to disempower, but now they are rebranded as empowering. look at the results, not the promises.
authoritarian states also use arguments about "for the good of everyone" but here their arguments as well as their regimes are being emulated on a "community" level. this is not progress! its hijacking progress. its co-opting progress.
conflating words with violence and using that to remove credit for contributions and move control of projects into other hands isnt justice, its politically-motivated retribution. its community-shaping, not based on justice but based on the ambitions of larger more powerful groups of people, trying to restructure our communities the same way they restructure their own companies-- to suit their own interests, not ours.
most people are not against the purported goals of these changes. rather, theyre against the actual goals-- and certainly the very flawed methodology. but rhetoric used to push it through is circular, you cant argue against it because thats exactly the sort of thing its trying to solve! in saner times we call that sort of rhetoric "bullshit". obviously, you cant say that!
now everything is so contentious, and escalated, you cant even talk about that-- its out of our hands, we can only hope that the companies with their own interests in play "get it" and fix this for us. because it doesnt belong to us anymore-- weve lost our say in the matter, and just by having a say, we lose our say. and thats the idea. its deliberately divisive, deliberately manipulative-- we say that gaslighting is abuse, but its clearly not abuse when corporations do it constantly and use it to nullify our activism.
we cant call what theyre doing evil, because that would mean we are against progress!
the example isnt realistic though, in one particular way: if it were like what is happening to our communities, the person who attacked your dog wouldnt have to pay anything. only you would, for defending your pet dog against someone else.
its true that "justice" often misses and gets the wrong person. thats exactly the reason that "justice" should be more focused on helping victims, not ruining lives and careers. to be certain, sometimes a career is justifiably ruined.
but all theyre doing is making that more normal, less of an exception. sometimes a $20,000 fine is justified. but applying that more and more? thats not progress, its just escalation. it says it will help, it causes more problems. as if there are no historical examples of that to learn from! but we cant learn from those now-- it would mean we are against progress.
this is "progress" that will leave people crying out for reform. its shortsighted, overzealous and destructive.
"Nadine Strossen, the former head of the ACLU and a daughter of Holocaust survivors who is generally supportive of the ADL, believes such moves to censor hate speech are generally ill-advised."
cancel her too, eh? if you stop letting people gaslight communities with these tactics, youll find a lot of good people saying all this is a big mistake. we cant talk about those people, or what theyre saying. it (now) means we are bad if we do. we cant talk about this-- talking about this puts us on the "wrong side". the only way to stay in good standing is to be silent, or say what we are told to agree with.
as a bonus, it seems to be being used against the very best people we have. but we cant say that, because defending the best people is now (politically) the same as supporting the worst. its being used by people who really dont care about us, against people that really do. thats just amazing. its such a coup, in every sense of the word. and people keep falling for it. eventually they will come around, but all in all it will cost years of real progress and ruin some really excellent and wonderful people, at least for a while.
this is not progress. its a terrific fraud, all in the name of progress.
if we were allowed to speak freely, we would be able to gather what is needed to prove the harm that all this is doing. but since it is inadmissible, and part of the crime itself to present the evidence against this co-opting-- well, i guess we are all fucked then. at least until enough people stop caring about divisive political bullshit; and truth, scale and perspective matter more than an increase (dressed up as a decrease) of stacked (rigged) justice again.
until then, here is a great big hint: "progress" doesnt ban leaders from or for discussing and analysing progress. that sort of atomic fuckery is just what youd find in an extremely controlling, abusive relationship-- being forbidden from questioning the validity of the abuse you are receiving. thats a huge red flag that bullshit is being used to do evil. whether its done in the name of something that good people know is good is fucking irrelevant.
no, edge is (probably) not safe from activex:
1. there is an "ie mode" for edge which supports activex; i read it is mostly limited to developers.
2. microsoft routinely installs and removes things when they want. so its not like "not enabling it" is a 100% sure way to not have it.
you might prefer the idea that edge will never support activex (by being incompatible so we can finally stop worrying) but point 1 shows that it is not impossible. microsoft could add "support" at any time.
obviously edge is not wildly popular anyway, but it is not a guaranteed break from activex. mondays option can be tuesdays mandatory feature, just ask lennart; his people are the ones that brought almost-forced software to gnu/linux.
zoobab, or glyn moody (always hard to tell from the logs) is calling for "uncensorable networks" from twitter, when they could be calling for them from the pretend-uncensorable networks of the githubiverse. first of all, they brag that the fediverse is uncensorable, but then they brag about censoring people on it. but then they develop these things on a non-free censorship platform like github. so (lets guess its zoobab) why not talk about it there? oh, wait-- maybe its a pretend solution.
roy of course knows that social networks are about social control anyway, not freedom. but then, society is generally about telling people what to do anyway. "dont steal our corn!" "or what?" "or else!" dont date my sister! get a haircut! upgrade to python 3! dont smoke pot! in this social environment that pretends to call itself "civilisation" its a miracle that anything gets liberated, ever. typically when enough people get together, they all want to be king at the same time. "for what?" "for very good reasons which i will come up with later!" which will probably be mostly ad hom attacks, but they still work.
a society afraid of freedom itself will develop crappy solutions for being more free-ish. fortunately there is an endless string of bullshitters to keep people afraid, plus, many fears are based on actual dangers, and bullshitters can (always do) exploit that so that people continue to think freedom is a terrible idea-- at least until someone proves them wrong, by being free-- no, obviously not that way, its too dangerous. the only "safe" way to prove it would work is on paper, preferably with the sponsorship of an accredited institution, which itself has already purged all troublemakers. yes, that should do nicely.
one of the greatest user-empowering coups there could be, would be to take a full-featured browser and let people turn off any feature they wanted (like <b>, or css overflow: or js document.title-- just to show features you would arguably be crazy to turn off) by listing them in a file. it would behave as if those features were not implemented. (for js this has implications about whether or not it would break as a syntax error, or simply do nothing like not implementing a non-standard css feature would do). these decisions are implemented by standards committees, but the user should not be saddled with them if they dont want them.
taking the idea a step further, being able to "remaster" the browser without those features would be nice as well. but people will say "just recompile without those features" and they dont understand what i mean when i say "remaster", though im confident someone can figure it out.
other than that, being able to disable any feature from about:config (with a list of those features online somewhere) would be a huge start. there are a myriad of plugins that do some of this, but they would need to be abused or rewritten to do this properly, only to have the browser bastards-- sorry, authors once again ditch years of plugin support. in that regard, it is better if this is a native feature than a plugin. i would love to be able to remove many things from the browser, easily. mozilla certainly doesnt care about that. imagine if you could replace gecko with a custom, stripped gecko instead? and thus create your own simplified web specification, your own personal html5-microlight?
you wouldnt have to care about the standards orgs, who clearly dont work for us and who ensure the future of the web is unpleasant. of course it would break website designs, but when css had its little revolution they ensured that forever we would be zooming and occasionally writing stylish templates and clicking fake modal windows forever-- or be forced to drop down to css-free views. as soon as one div could overlap another, i thought it was bad. imagine if you could disallow that? to have the option of divs never overlapping again? instead all we can do is boycott websites with designs we find loathsome. what if we could do much more than that, and force websites to stick to our rules? many would hate such an option-- but then they wouldnt have to use it.
People need to write 100 times on the board to learn:
DITCH ZOOM USE JITSI
DITCH ZVC USE GITHUB DITCH ZVC USE GITHUB DITCH ZVC USE GITHUB DITCH ZVC USE GITHUB
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> "Tell me exactly what the frack is wrong with spelling out exactly what constitutes unacceptable behavior in a group or organization just to be clear?: When They're Done Eliminating Our Software Freedom They'll Eliminate Our Freedom of Speech, Too
LOL, techrights explains that ALL THE TIME. but this is one of those fallacies where someone ignores the answer and simply asks it to be restated WITHOUT the point it makes. there are a number of relevant fallacies, but "begging the question" seems to be the top one.
statement from alice: "this policy is bad because in practice, it leads to corruption and censorship and witch hunts, eliminating due process."
reply from bob: "exactly what is wrong with a policy that requires correct behaviour?"
bob is a bullshitter!
but to answer his question: the policy has nothing to do with correct behaviour. it is closer to the reality of things that the policy is an excuse to do bad things-- the policy is not honest in the first place, the people demanding the policy are demonstrably dishonest, the people enforcing the policy are demonstrably dishonest.
the policy does not serve its purpose-- it actually serves a purpose that is negative, but this is justified by pretending to do something good instead.
not that this is a new trick, or anything. war on drugs-- nixon-- lets fight drugs. real purpose: lets create terrible laws and do terrible things to people that we would never get away with unless it was perceived as being for the greater good.
"hey! whats wrong with fighting to eliminate the drug problem?"
"there you go again-- youre a bullshitter, bob!"
heres another, even more recent example:
> "What do you mean? Surely if one works on GPL licensed software, regardless of whether they are using github or not, they are giving to the community, not to proprietary software."
> "Are you concerned that MS will also use the software and therefore benefit?"
roy: "No, that mischaracterises the concern"
it does-- microsoft can use the software either way. roy, could you rephrase for the person who is just going to ignore the actual point being made?
Hardly worth the trouble, TBH, as it seems the person is unwilling to research. --User:Schestowitz|Schestowitz 22:28, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
----
I love gopher, and while I think the solution to the web is something between gopher and the web-- one example exists which is reassuring, though it is developed on Github which is a deal-breaker, might as well be ActiveX/ASP/NET if it's developed on Github ("why not gemini?" thats why)-- hosting on gopher is a way to demonstrate solidarity with the idea.
It's also fun, and you can use scripts like the ones that make the IRC logs to convert HTML pages to stripped-down gopher. The one thing to be careful of is security. You wouldn't want the gopher server exposing the same server/container that runs other services, because there are no robust gopher servers. That isn't a priority, there aren't enough people running them to make it a priority, and it is largely a hobbyist protocol at this point.
As long as you are prepared to take measures around that and are aware of the caveats, I would say go for it. Don't let it be a route past your security though, be very cautious.
"Also, the Green Party (GOP-backed trolls) were kicked off the Montana ballots."
^ shades of "assange worked for trump" and other such nonsense
inconvenient truth: his favourite candidate did more to push the patriot act than ralph nader did, so...
"And a rare person (from the two parties) gotten to power with the current system will be interested in changing it." <- true
"The people don't have a say in this through the legal means," <- slightly less true
i wish someone would explain that the whole notion that the democratic party already has votes which a they fight to prevent a third party from "taking away" from them isnt merely entitlement, its the basis/excuse for their perpetual election fraud against the voters of the united states. this is yet another reason that real progressives despise democrats. its also why democrats never actually fix anything-- with a monopoly on "progress" there is no means (not even by voting) to hold them accountable. you dont like the fake dnc? go pound sand, republican scum! you have two choices: democrat, and wrong.
"hey, what about the republican election fraud?" what about it? so youre saying that you both work to defraud progressive voters? heck, ive been saying that for years!
and then you cheer about how you defrauded them, strutting around like a cock that a third party was kicked off the ballot! congratulations, traitors! youre keeping elections fake and youre proud of it-- you know what you get from fake elections? fake leaders. youve been enjoying that result for years now, and taking zero responsibility for your role in that treachery! then you say anybody who doesnt do things your way is the problem? no, YOU made that problem. suck it up! if your own party hadnt defrauded its own voters, trump would have never gotten in. so lets talk about what side YOU are really on.
it isnt third parties that are responsible-- its your own party not caring who your own party votes for. YOU are to blame-- youre not to be trusted with the solution, you are the problem, it is YOUR fraud that got the world here. your party should be dissolved for its crimes against humanity, for its war crimes, for its complete lack of legitimacy and its complete selling out to corporations. you are nothing but a scam, and a deadly scam at that.
you have no accountability, take no responsibility, your party doesnt even care who its own voters want in office-- and you say youre NOT the party of trump? youre the other fascist party, with the other fascist candidate. and you know exactly where you can put that.
voter suppression is treason: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voter-suppression-treason_b_1964790
so if you deem yourself a true patriot, then perhaps your duty now is to try, convict and condemn yourself-- but since you had no DIRECT hand in that treason, perhaps you could simply turn away from supporting traitors like yourself, and actually support the democracy that countless people like yourself PRETEND to uphold. after all, voter suppression and fake elections are the rule, not the exception, and no one is really going to hold you accountable except (possibly) yourself.
"He'd rather not use a microwave if it uses code he doesn't have (seriously)." — Simon Phipps (@webmink) October 25, 2009
in 2009 that was probably meant to make rms look unreasonable, but in 2020 with internet-enabled refrigerators and people hacking cameras in baby monitors, he was "unreasonable" by virtue of being ahead of his time (again).
i used to be a happy amazon customer, who said (thinking of "the right to read") that the ultimate evil for drm would be to put it in books. im still boycotting amazon, more than 10 years later.
perhaps someone from osi would like to call kaitlyn tiffany "autistic" for writing this 2018 article: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/21/17886682/amazon-new-smart-home-microwave-speakers-internet-of-things oh, nope-- because she gets the title on the money, and then writes an article that ignores her own warning.
"Amazon’s Alexa-enabled microwave"
that would be a good thing to have a the source code to. though really the whole concept is flawed, and hardware switches (along with not enabling internet on your microware) would be better. but thats an example of roy being right.