Bonum Certa Men Certa

New buffer 2:2

> Speaking of OpenBSD, I'm planning to migrate my Pi to that btw.


that would be awesome. post instructions if you manage it. netbsd is probably a lot easier, they have typically supported the pi better than openbsd. freebsd isnt worth the trouble.


> Maybe I'll roll a new license with that name
> The FRS license.

lord, and you thought zoobab was trolling! (he wasnt. zoobab is literally an enemy of the worst sort of trolls in the world)





1998: Where can I find a key to stop this nagware?


2020: You have 18 notifications.





> Ariadne: i work to make a living by writing FOSS


then you toss it onto a platform that turns FOSS into MSS. essentially youre a microsoft intern getting paid for a side project they will/have acquire/d already. in the short run, youre proud that you get paid to "write foss". in the (not so) long run, youre destroying that livelihood for everyone and eroding the same platform you rely on daily. your livelihood and your fellow hunters are basically hunting penguins into a critically endangered species. you care about "sustainability of funding", but not sustainability of the "product" itself.


your logic is much closer to a ceo in an office than a worker with their feet on the ground, but obviously you do both. youre still kidding yourself like a suit though. suits dont care about long term sustainability, they only care about the next quarter. keep up the good work. when this dries up because youve killed it off, you can pivot-- or maybe retire comfortably. what gets me is that even torvalds has lost control, but his users dont realise theyre just as powerless as he is. he cant get it back, because he was bought out-- but they think theyre doing better than ever. once again: you arent working for linux-- youre working for its owners. and who do you think owns it? i know you do valuable work for the people who say so, but the people who run techrights know who owns linux.


> i have managed to align the interests of my customers with creating and maintaining FOSS


you have managed to conflate the power grab of your owners with the interests of your customers. so have they, but its not really in their interest. if they want to shoot themselves in the foot, you can give them a good deal on ammunition. but then theyre customers, right? they arent friends, and this is just business. youre writing oss, NOT foss, lets not kid ourselves about that. the "freedom" of this is for microsoft, who then attacks the freedom of your users. you say developer, i say pawn-- and github is a pawn shop for code. but what youre really pawning off there, is the very freedom that it is supposed to offer. just like torvalds did. but hey, he does live in material comfort. all he had to do is sell out all linux users. if youre willing to do the same, some people will manage to make a living doing that.


> i'm not saying everyone must use github


no, youre merely contributing to a monopoly that says that-- and that uses dirty tricks for years at a time to make it closer to reality. but as long as countless people do this, you can say that youre an insignificant part of the problem. just dont mistake that as being a small part of the solution. your "vote", however small, is still against freedom. and what votes like that add up to is hideous, controlling and ultimately exploits your customers.





https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyPy non-Microsoft version of Python





> One of the biggest ironies in development is Git being centralised.


Not too surprising though, it's what these sorts of assholes always do: Internet decentralises communication, so LE centralises HTTPS, FB centralises the web, GH centralises git.





In dozens of ways, Democrats are to progress what Open Source is to Free Software-- they only care if they win, they don't care how many principles they have to sacrifice to do it. Ultimately to keep out what's worse, they will all but become it-- co-opting the real thing, nullifying and silencing the will of the people, on the behalf of global war and corporate rule.





> blender is GPL and does really well for funding. But they took getting sold funding model worked out early on.


> MIT and BSD licensed competitors to Blender died.


^ Fair point. Similar/related/relevant to points Keith Bostic made about X11.





> "The damage had been done, however. Whether Trump ultimately wins or loses, he has cast a pall on this election, as he calls the very machinery of American democracy into question."

What BBC (Bribed Broadcasting Corp) hack wrote that line? Trump "called the very machinery of American democracy into question" when he was elected by it four years ago. Surely the fact that he's in office now proves that something is broken, and again when the impeachment system (it has ONE JOB, which it can't even do) failed to remove him. There's a lot that is broken. This is obviously not a defence of Trump, however. Though the BBC is-- Bribed, Backwards-- Clueless? Sounds like par for the course these days. Eff the Beeb. https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2020/09/30/a-damning-fact-about-the-bbcs-assange-coverage-just-emerged/ It just won't stand for little people or anybody else (and Trump is without question, a tiny prick of a man) calling democracy corrupted, while it's busy sucking a corrupt democracy off. No, that simply won't do!

Thanks to shills like the BBC, when all this is done we won't even be able to talk about election reform without some idiot saying everybody questioning elections wanted Trump to win. Not too farfetched with the Dems saying that about Greens already. But this will be even better-- they'll make Trump the new face of election reform, just as they boot him out the door.





> Stop wasting your time. All your messages are ignored

He is really annoying, on a platform like Phoronix I think he really does more harm than good. However despite his incessant pedantry he does make valid points that other people wouldn't (because they aren't pedantic enough to consider them in the very first place) and he's actually very useful to IRC in more ways than one-- both in terms of understanding the enemy, and in terms of other tidbits that he brings to the table. I found it difficult to get used to him, though I have come to the conclusion that we are better off with his help. Not that Roy would ever ban him in the first place. You're really wasting your time, if you expect that to happen. (Plus, even annoying is a useful trait sometimes. He's not a troll.) You can ignore him of course, but the rest is worth mentioning. It might even help. He's sort of like having a lawyer around, but at least he's not (afaik) a lawyer.





Are we doing Right to Repair? It seems to be coming up in this election. State level, of course. There's also the Critical Medical Infrastructure Right-to-Repair Act of 2020 (S. 4473, H.R. 7956) But I haven't checked its status.





> It's not just GitHub


is is mostly github. in theory the same thing could happen anywhere, and thats a reason to be picky whenever possible and to self-host whenever possible, and to chose the most-freedom respecting hosts when you cant self-host. so its not just github, no. but mostly and by far, its github.





They are both great, and rms will always be the true father and founder of Free Software, but the difference between rms and Aaron Swartz is that Aaron died for freedom, rms died of it. And before you ask-- no, he's only MOSTLY dead!






Microsoft GNU Bison uses their own git as a mirror of the Microsoft version.


Aspell on the other hand, claims that the Microsoft version is the secondary, not the primary.


GitHub watchdogging takes mirrors into account (and does not consider mirrors a threat) though Aspell is not a mirror. If you're using issues and pull requests, you're collaborating with Microsoft. If you're collaborating with Microsoft, then by their OWN definition, you are ceding control and giving them what they want. Aspell is a Microsoft project, NOT a GNU project anymore. Microsoft is happy with the level of control they have. That's very, very stupid of the GNU traitors/maintainers. Even worse, there are no alternative spell checkers (except on GitHub)-- Microsoft GitHub enjoys a monopoly on spell checking in the free software world.





Although I don't have an RSS-based workflow like Roy, it's still an awesome technology and I understand Roy's love for it, not just from his perspective but indeed as a general concept. I don't use it much (except for Techrights stuff) but it's fantastic technology-- passionately promoted by the patron saint of free software and free culture, Aaron Swartz. This is to clarify that RSS is (truly) awesome and I have nothing (at all) against it.





Article posted 11 'east coast' time. --User:Schestowitz|Schestowitz 18:09, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

----


> The GPL is dead.


> The quicker that message spreads the better.


and here is where youre wrong-- most of the copylefted software is gpl, and gpl and agpl are incompatible licenses. so when you say gpl is dead, what youre saying is that free software should throw away everything and start over, without saying why.


it probably will be necessary to start over some things, but only on a per-case basis. saying the gpl is dead on the other hand is like saying "oh! we shot ourselves in the foot! but dont worry, we can fix all that with this nifty grenade!" on top of that, you mischaracterise the strength of the agpl. it is already being used in the most strategic way. if it really is better, people will gradually choose it over the gpl. but that again, is dramatically different than what youre proposing, which is we just ignore gpl software even though its a) still rather good for many things and b) the license most copyleft software uses anyway.


the truth is that a lot of free software is permissively licensed-- and while that means it is possible to abuse it (it is certainly a weaker free software license than the gpl) good things still happen. so by your argument, isnt permissive licensing dead, too? you should hope not, because if you remove all the permissively licensed software you use now, youre going to be very unhappy-- and you wont be able to compile the gnu operating system anymore. go ahead, try it. note that when it comes to relicensing permissive software (forks) as copylefted, i advocate doing this when it helps-- while the fsf officially argues against it. its not a priority for them, which implies that to the experts (for what thats worth...) permissive licenses arent dead either-- theyre simply not advocated for most purposes. and let us know when you create active agpl forks of python and perl... hopefully not on github.


> But why make life harder for ourselves when AGPL makes that clear?


this question contradicts itself. keeping the gpl (for a good while at least, until agpl proves itself better as a general purpose license, not just in theory or for certain purposes) only makes one thing harder. declaring the gpl dead (it isnt) clearly makes lots of things much, much harder. youre starting with the premise that agpl will be better for everything, but your argument doesnt go far past "its better for some things" which we already know.


open source argues that people should switch to open source because it makes one thing clearer as well-- as if thats the most important (or sole) factor in whether you choose something that stands for progress, or something that has a limited benefit. i find that cynical, but either way its a ridiculous oversimplification.






> The US is one of those countries where it is very easy to criticise the election system, even without going into concrete details.


> However, I strongly disagree with the sentiment that this means voting doesn't matter. In a sense, that makes it matter more, because if it's harder to make the voice of the demos heard, then the demos should express it louder.


1. it isnt really that it doesnt matter, but that it doesnt count.


2. the reps defraud the dems, the dems defraud progressives. if the dems are louder it will only further drown out that democracy that both reps and dems work to utterly fake, in lieu of real elections. being louder only means more fraud. what is needed is more reform-- but both reps and dems are against reform, with the (exclusive) exception of cynical "reform" that helps their party only. everybody is naturally alright with that sort of reform, but calling it "reform" is bullshit.


3. the one good thing about trump getting in was it was an opportunity for everyone to see how bad things can get when everybody (bipartisan) fakes an election. of course nobody learned from it, and they did it again this year. this is a fake election, where there are more than two choices but only two choices are counted. i dont think amplifying that is going fix dick, but at least theyll make a profit from trying. thats what elections are all about! big retail has the christmas season, and big media has election coverage. ho, ho, ho!





> http://techrights.org/irc-archives/irc-log-techrights-011120.html#tNov%2001%2010:54:50

> complete and utter bullshit ^W ^W ^W ^W I respectully disagree.


it isnt any more practical to offer freedom to people on the windows platform, than it is to liberate china from inside one of its prisons. the best you can tell people to do is "start removing everything in windows", but its far easier to install something else. as someone with intimate knowledge of what it took to remove antifeatures from windows as far back as 10 years ago, its gotten much worse. windows doesnt have a backdoor-- it IS a backdoor, and anything else is fooling ourselves.





An election is a process whereby two evils become one evil and one good.





> but really, techrights
> techrights is kinda soft
> i mean yes you're on the right side, but you seem kinda soft about it


perhaps sometimes, for five minutes. take the latest ibm piece. on average i wouldnt complete agree. if techrights is soft, who is really harder on the industry? not phoronix. not rhetorical; id really like to know. the register used to be "biting the hand that feeds i.t.". now it softly nibbles the hand, maybe even kisses the ring on the hand. even the ibm article, on average... i wouldnt have even commented on it if this hadnt come up.





> they ban Microsoft critics


> they're worthless as a project unless they realise how foolish this is... what good is a "foundation" for a project Microsoft controls?


The FSF also bans Microsoft critics, but it's typically a soft ban. Instead they tend to "upvote" people who are neutral or favourable.





I didn't mention the part of the timeline where (after talking to Alex Oliva) I get a Lemote Yeeloong and do the upgrade to GnewSense 3.0. Although I give up on Trisquel, GnewSense is used on that.


It doesn't mention that I ran Debian Wheezy (non-chroot) on a tablet either.


Also not mentioned: RMS' Mostly Slax. I think at one point I was running that on everything. It was applying for, but never got FSF approval. So was ConnochaetOS. The timeline in the upcoming article certainly doesn't mention every distro I used. It barely mentions Tiny Core, but the Windows-free era does start with Tiny Core's predecessor.











While "Software Freedom" is less ambiguous and isn't as much of a problem as "Open Source" in any regard, I still prefer the term "Free Software". Free may have two meanings, though that sort of ambiguity never prevented Apple from teaching people the obvious difference between Apple the company and apple the fruit, and Open Source began in many ways (at least in practice) as a solution in search of a problem. It's truly overrated as a brand: http://techrights.org/index.php?s=openwashing while the bulk of its popularity comes from the familiarity created by a sycophantic (bribed, more corporate-friendly) tech press saying it constantly. It's more popular for the same reason Windows has "marketshare"-- it sucks, but it can nearly afford to prevent you from hearing about better alternatives.


Free Software is not etymologically immune to hijacking, no phrase in the world really is. "Freedom" isn't. RMS himself says that to talk about freedom meaningfully, you have to specify what sort of "freedom" you're talking about. "Software Freedom" solves the ambiguity of "Free" but is still not immune to being hijacked. There is and will be Librewashing, but since it is yet more cynical than Open Source, there should be less of it-- hopefully. (There is certainly incentive, but it is a gamble with higher stakes that "risks" promoting real freedom.)


My reasons for avoiding the term "Software Freedom"-- I still use it, but I try to consciously avoid letting it take the place of "Free Software" is twofold: first, I think it works well enough in practice (no matter what ESR says) and it points to the original term, which is of historical (and contemporary) importance-- there is no Software Freedom Definition, but there is a Free Software Definition, which I consider the true cornerstone of the Free Software movement. (RMS may prefer the GNU Manifesto, and I think he's more than entitled to if so-- he wrote both.)


But just as importantly, I would hate for anybody to think that the phrase "Software Freedom" (which I do use sometimes) implies support of the despicable traitors at the SFC, which is named after the same phrase and thus promotes the phrase, with money from well known enemies of Free Software and against both truth and founder. So I'm entirely against "Software Freedom" being used more often, though I really only control how often I use it personally. '''Open Source likes to pretend that Free Software makes an unreasonably big deal over which term is used, but that's pretty profoundly dishonest (to us, to literally everyone they mention it to) when they're the ones who introduced the contention in the first place.''' Open Source is not unlike a scam. It pretends to give you freedom, but it really takes it and gives more to someone else. These days more than ever, it's a surrender cleverly disguised as victory. "Hooray! We won! They ACCEPTED the terms of our surrender!" Occupied Source Software, Rah, Rah!


At any rate, I lean towards using it to name a goal, but I continue to refer to the movement as Free Software, with or without the FSF. If you're going to use only one, "Free Software" is better. How significant its ambiguity is, is inversely proportional (as with Apple) to how sufficiently it is promoted. Unless you're sucking up to Microsoft, that should be okay.















The tasks that Open Source moles like the most are the community/UI tasks, the ones that have the least to do with software freedom. That's their typical fulcrum: GNOME, Jono, Deb (Membership), Outreach, Anti-harassment, etc. If you read the Halloween documents, you could have nearly predicted it that way. They basically hint about those roles as points of infiltration.


They're not bad things to have, provided that they aren't taken over by traitors and moles. When these roles are given too much power over the rest of a project, mutiny seems to happen again and again-- across not only organisations, but projects large and small: Python, Debian, Devuan-- for some reason, these roles keep getting taken over by traitors, liars and sociopaths. If you value your project or org, you'll be careful and even cautious not to let these roles subsume the original purpose itself.






In all seriousness, we need more information about surveillance in Free Software.


If only there was some kind of organisation that was dedicated to fighting for your freedom, or whatever.


Nope! NOT REALLY. They only fight for the software to have a free license. If it also accidentally shoots your pets or something, Hey! Write your own compass app and stop complaining. But feel free to send money and tell the developers (who shot your pet or something) that they're great. And if they also spy on you and sell the data to Google, that's just part of being free.


Unless you think this is still about "ethics" or whatever. There was that guy-- um, Schtolman? Shopman? Oh, I know what it was-- Torvalds! He used to say something about that, but seriously-- who codes in a bathrobe?


Greg never talks about nonsense like that. Too busy coding and putting on real clothes! You could learn a lot from that guy.


But really: if you haven't forked the codebase, you can't complain about ethics. Don't boycott software you don't like, or anything-- or talk about software that does bad things to the user when you won't even bother to fix it. Complaining is for losers. Surveillance is for winners!


Open Source isn't "spying", it's "winning"-- don't you read ZDNet?






https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4tlc4s/how_does_google_know_my_location_even_when_i_am/

How does Google know my location even when I am using a laptop or a device with no GPS?

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/137418/how-does-google-know-where-i-am Google uses BSSID information from your WLAN Access Point to get an approximation of where you are located, even with GPS and WiFi turned off. Taken from "How does Google Maps estimate my location without GPS?". Google and others like Apple and Skyhook build a Database which links WLAN BSSIDs to a geographic location. A BSSID is like the MAC address of a access point that gets broadcasted ...




"Fake democracy" sort of implies that someone is being fooled, rather than simply going along with the ruse. When people know what it is and support it anyway, that's actually more of a Mock democracy, a Mockracy, like the mockolate of democracies. Tofurcracy works as well, because everybody knows it's just beans.






> Isn't it originally... UNIX?

Yes, but they aren't legally allowed to call it that so it's sort of moot.






https://web.archive.org/web/20190708130119/https://www.tfir.io/2019/07/08/microsoft-linux-private-security-list/

what? "Windows 10 will soon bring the Linux kernel to the mainstream desktop market, becoming the most widely used ‘Linux distro’."

lol, nope-- pretty sure theyve heard of android. microsoft weasel is not widely used.






Handbook Revisited: idea is to link to relevant stories before and (especially) since.

> --User:Schestowitz|Schestowitz 19:40, 13 October 2020 (UTC) It's possible to co-edit any given Wiki pages (it would be locked if one edits).

at the moment the focus is on stuff newer than the book, as the idea is "they havent really changed". i didnt want to throw out the idea of showing older examples (it already quotes the 20-year-old halloween documents) but at the moment, there is more than enough new stuff and its fun to be able to say "all of this happened since".

of course the fact that they barely change (except on the surface, maybe adding a sort-of new tactic here or there) means you can typically guess what theyll do next year based on what they did last year. new examples are a lot better than old, there may already be enough older examples.


"198S -- Nineteen-Eighty-Source"



"Newspeak is the official language of Oceania, scheduled for official adoption around 2050, and designed to make the ideological premises of Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism, the Party’s official political alignment) the only expressible doctrine. Newspeak is engineered to remove even the possibility of rebellious thoughts—the words by which such thoughts might be articulated have been eliminated from the language. Newspeak contains no negative terms. For example, the only way to express the meaning of 'bad' is through the word 'ungood.' Something extremely bad is called 'doubleplus ungood.'"

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/section11/

hmm...

"blacklist" = "unwhitelist"*

"idiot" = "ungenius"

"gfy" = "go doubleplus ungently love yourself"

* i am told (but do not believe) that its impossible to be racist against white people. so "white" cant be a negative/racist term, and therefore should be alright to use?