Posted in GNOME, GNU/Linux at 2:51 am by Guest Editorial Team
Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission from the original
M
icrosoft still sends broken Web pages to GNOME Web, while GNOME is adding Office 365/OneDrive integration.
A couple years ago, when I tried to sign into Microsoft Outlook mail with GNOME Web, I noticed that it gets a fallback page meant for obsolete Web browsers. GNOME Web uses (currently) the default version of WebKit that Safari 15 does.
So there’s no good reason for Microsoft to send it broken Web pages meant for Internet Explorer and other obsolete Web browsers.
I noticed at the time that if I used user agent hacks on every site that said I was running Safari on Mac OS that it loaded the full site.
We never did figure out the right user agents to feed each Microsoft domain that loads along the way to reliably get the correct version of Outlook, and the Basic site works. It’s just very ugly.
Michael Catanzaro told me that using “Safari on Mac OS” in general for the user agent generally does more harm than good. Most sites start trying to send you Mac files.
But it’s very clearly Microsoft seeing the Epiphany and Linux user agent somewhere along the way that’s tipping them off that they can screw up the site in this browser.
It’s not the first time Microsoft has sent obsolete or malformed Web pages to a browser with a modern and fully capable rendering engine.
It’s a pattern of bad behavior that at Microsoft, they attack small browsers where few will complain and most will go download or open something else.
Mozilla Suite and Firefox had to deal with this all the time in the early 2000s, and Microsoft detected Opera’s user agent it sent a deliberately corrupt style sheet on MSN, which was a major Web portal back then.
(Microsoft has since fired the editors and has stupid software loading random clickbait. Then they shovel that into their Windows 11 “Weather” widget.)
The Opera situation made it into the news at the time when Opera released a special “Opera Bork Edition” that “translated” everything on MSN into the language of the Swedish Chef, from The Muppet Show.
Opera releases “Bork” Edition (2003)
A technical explanation of the Opera incident.
At the time, Microsoft had a version of the page that worked in Opera, but gave it a corrupt version instead. The only change you needed to perform was to tell Microsoft you were visiting MSN in Internet Explorer 6.
In fact, to prove that Microsoft was sniffing for “Opera” in the user agent and returning a broken page, they changed it to “Oprah” and requested the page, and got the page for IE6, which displayed fine.
Previously, in 2001, Microsoft blocked Opera from accessing anything on MSN at all, and recommended Internet Explorer. Opera filed an antitrust complaint with government regulators, and Microsoft removed the block.
Later, Microsoft came back and performed subtle sabotage to make the page look broken in Opera as revenge for getting Microsoft in trouble with regulators.
I complained to Microsoft in 2021 about the Outlook Mail issue with GNOME Web and got no response and they locked my post on Microsoft Answers.
Amazingly, with all of this going on, proving that Microsoft hasn’t changed at all and attacks GNOME’s official Web browser, GNOME developers are adding support for Onedrive (Microsoft’s “cloud” storage) into GNOME Files.
As I was reading through GNOME’s gitlab instance, I found some chatter that led me to a Microsoft page where they will be shutting down “Basic” authentication and forcing OAuth2 for Outlook Mail as of October 1st, which means your only choices are moving to some client that supports that, or using their Webmail interface.
Apparently, the plan is to support OAuth2 for Microsoft accounts throughout GNOME and to add Onedrive support into GNOME Files.
That probably means that Geary and Evolution will work, but I don’t want to use those. It also seems like a lot of effort to support Microsoft when they deliberately do to GNOME Web what they did to Opera in 2003 on their Outlook Mail site.
Oddly enough, opening Microsoft Office (yuck) seems to function as intended in GNOME Web, but even going to Outlook through that, you get the fallback site.
“Microsoft Loves Linux” █
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07.08.22
Posted in Debian, Free/Libre Software, GNOME, Hardware, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat at 7:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The unmasked musketeers of Redmond/Red Hat/GNOME
Matthew Garrett (top): I kill your booting (must ask Microsoft for consent); Lennart Poettering (right): I kill your processes without your consent. Miguel de Icaza (left): I kill your desktop and help my friend Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley get sex without consent (and almost kill women)
A secured Windows monopoly surprises nobody in Techrights
Summary: Techrights was right about ‘secure’ boot; its sole purpose it to take away computer users’ security [1, 2]
“It is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something, When His Salary Depends on His Not Understanding It” –Upton Sinclair
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02.14.22
Posted in GNOME, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 2:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 005c64c85723627f453c0ed2f2bb2b9d
Self-immolation of GNOME Foundation Leadership
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: No more Bully de Blanc (fired), no Nicholson (OSI, stepped down), and Hashman ended up throwing in the towel; now, within less than a year, the most prolific campaigner against Dr. Richard Stallman is also leaving (announced a few hours ago); The GNOME Foundation lost both Bully de Blanc and Mr. McGovern in only a few months and it remains to be seen if Mr. McGovern ends up at Microsoft like his predecessors Miguel de Icaza and and Stormy Peters (Microsoft-connected OpenLogic, HP, Red Hat, now Microsoft)
Any time a bully gets called out or receives “karma” we should take note of it. Today, another bully, who had defamed Richard Stallman for years, finally announced: “Now, nearly 5 years later, I’ve decided the timing is right for me to step back and for GNOME to start looking for its next leader.”
That’s Mr. McGovern, joining the likes of Bully de Blanc and Nicholson, who helped him start the anti-FSF (via RMS) hate campaign. They did this in Microsoft GitHub, so clearly enough they did not have freedom in mind (or even inclusion). That happened just less than 11 months ago, so they’ve barely lasted a year. As I note in the video above, RMS is very active behind the scenes (he has been talking to us about Gemini lately; last public talk this winter with full video here), whereas his haters gradually go away. They’ve rendered themselves irrelevant. More concrete news will hopefully follow soon. New Executive Director to be announced soon by the FSF*?
“Our community is under attack; these supposedly well-meaning foundations get captured by our adversaries and actively work against our communities.”So who next to lead the GNOME Foundation? Did Neil receive a job offer from Microsoft? Probably not, but time will tell…
Regardless, the GNOME Foundation is now without leadership (there’s no instant succession) and we start to see in this foundation much of what we saw in the Linux Foundation. It’s captured by corporations which are hostile towards Free software and as recently as hours ago (noted above in the video, towards the end) we were reminded of “Linux Foundation” badge of environmentalism for Microsoft [1, 2, 3] because someone published “Microsoft, Linux Foundation, others join Carbon Call“ (greenwash).
Our community is under attack; these supposedly well-meaning foundations get captured by our adversaries and actively work against our communities. █
“Idiots can be defeated but they never admit it.”
–Richard Stallman
______
* Damage was nevertheless done during/after the ‘coup’. Here’s the current list of FSF staff, as of today:
And compared to last year (differences highlighted):
The FSF made the right decision though (almost 6,900 signatures were added to the RMS endorsement letter, signed in support of the FSF’s decision to bring back RMS).
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10.13.21
Posted in Debian, GNOME, GNU/Linux at 7:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission from the original
This isn’t easy to say, but it’s true, and I’ve been meaning to write about it for several days now.
In the 1990s, when the Internet at home was becoming more of a thing, Helicopter Parents began to fret that there was a growing “information superhighway” where their kids wouldn’t be “safe”.
In response to this, many corporations appeared on the scene such as Net Nanny and Cybersitter to claim that they would safeguard the PC for parents, so their children wouldn’t be able to access “inappropriate” content on the Web.
Unfortunately, for the stupid people who shelled out money for this crap, Windows 9x/Me had no security mechanisms whatsoever, and a child with even moderate levels of knowledge on how to reboot the machine into MS-DOS mode and run the system from there could disable it, reboot into Windows, do whatever they wanted, and then reboot back into DOS and configure it to turn back on to make their parents think that it was on the entire time. Windows was even worse then than it is now, because it didn’t even pretend at having access control lists, security labels, multiple user accounts (not real ones).
At its core, it was a fancy DOS shell that happened to implement some of the Windows NT APIs.
Most proprietary operating systems now have built-in “Parental Controls” (censorship software).
I couldn’t tell you how well they work, but it’s funny that Microsoft has one, since Bill Gates was palling around with one of the most prolific child rapists of the century, Jeff Epstein.
(As if one affiliation wasn’t bad enough, an engineer named Rick Allen Jones was arrested inside the Gates Mansion for possession of a child pornography trove. And it only barely made the news, and the courts quickly covered it up and the guy even had an illegal handgun, and somehow that went away, and he’s not on the sex offender list, and he’s living in Flagstaff, Arizona with his mother now.)
Even on a much better designed operating system than Windows, like GNU/Linux, one with real security features, one where security vulnerabilities are fewer and are legitimate mistakes in the code and not NSA backdoors like they are on Windows and the Mac, it’s impossible to “secure” or lockdown a computer when a person has physical access to it.
My guess is there will either be a misconfiguration somewhere or the child will just figure out a way to boot into Tails or something, and then there goes GNOME/FreeDesktop “Parental Controls”. (“Malcontent”)
In fact, putting this on the computer and then trying to remove the GNOME metapackage and Flatpak if you get rid of it is an insult on the part of Debian, which has already betrayed the ideals of Free Software by including Firefox, which now has a Surveillance Capitalism Keylogger malware component.
In the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international law which along with (if I recall correctly) the prohibition on cluster bombs and land mines, only the United States has refused to sign, “acknowledges that children have the right to express their opinions and to have those opinions heard and acted upon when appropriate, to be protected from abuse or exploitation, and to have their privacy protected. It requires that their lives not be subject to excessive interference.”.
So, what GNOME and Debian are doing flies in the face of this Treaty as well. I wonder how the GNOME project feels in pushing this software that takes away people’s voices.
Parents can be every bit as autocratic, corrupt, and evil as a rogue state. And just saying “I pay the bills around here!” doesn’t give them an excuse to commit endless offenses against human rights.
In fact, the Treaty has optional protocols that require signatories to crack down hard on child abuse and to take measures to stop child prostitution.
Since the United States refuses to ratify it on account of some right-wing Christian nutcases rambling on about how they won’t be able to have their children “homeskeweled”, it can’t sign those protocols either.
If we, as a society, want to protect children, it needs to be tough punishment for abusers and the enablers of abusers of children.
No more of this trip to namby pamby land that Epstein and Jones got because they were rich, or Bill came to the rescue to avoid personal embarrassment.
But, you see, this is sort of what courts do. It’s not what you did, it’s who you know, how much money you have to fight back with, can you afford a lawyer that’s buddies with the judge.
For the most part, when I was a child, I had a tough time. I was bullied in school. Right after I turned 9 years old, my parents had another child and turned their focus to him, then I started to do poorly in school due to organizational problems and mental illness (which is also the reason why Michael O’Hare had to leave Babylon 5 after the first season…when it hits, it can hit hard).
Then my parents drifted apart and my mother started cheating on my dad with a truck driver.
They had each other in divorce court slinging mud back and forth. Between her cheating and the weird religious cults my dad has been in over the years, and me bouncing back and forth between their houses where my dad would psychologically abuse me and blame me for my mother leaving him, and my mom’s second husband’s house where he’d come home drunk and beat me to within an inch of my life, I’d say it’s amazing I even went back and completed school and did anything.
Was I exposed to Web pornography when I was a minor?
Yeah, I mean, I was curious and we had the internet in the house. My dad didn’t even know we had the internet. I hid an entire web browser in the C:\Windows subfolder mess and made a hidden folder in there where I shoved anything I wanted to keep. I had “free” dial up ISPs where I figured out how to crash the toolbars and then later to decipher my login credentials and use them ad-free on the (Mandrake) Linux partition.
Dad caught me browsing the news or something (so could have been worse, I guess) and reamed me out for getting the Internet without his permission, and he wouldn’t believe me when I said it was a local telephone call and there wouldn’t be any bills coming.
I guess that’s the long way of saying I was above average intelligence. I’d say I still am. Not a genius, but above average. The average is going down, btw.
And I figured out how to thwart my parents, install GNU/Linux in the 90s on an HP Pavilion from Walmart, freeload off some dotcom ISPs, find anything I wanted to on the internet, and use “BitchX” for IRC, which while Mandrake was installing, I said, “BitchX? What the hell is BitchX?”.
If it was still around, maybe Mitchell Baker would rename it BossX. Who knows.
Your kids, if you have them and you are reading this, are probably a lot craftier than you give them credit for. Than society gives them credit for. If I’ve learned a few things in life, one of those is that you underestimate people at your own peril.
In Chicago, right after I moved here with my ex, I was mugged, and I had to go to Juvenile Court to testify against my attacker. While I was waiting, I was reading some Democrat tripe about how “children aren’t just small adults”, except by the time they’re teenagers, they sort of kind of are.
The gangs in Chicago think they’re fine to use as child soldiers as soon as you can shove a gun in their hand and tell them to steal someone’s cars and cell phones and wallets.
The whole reason they can convince teenagers to start a life of crime is, basically nothing happens once they get to court. And they learn that nothing happens, and then they keep offending for life.
In closing, if anyone from GNOME, Debian, or FreeDesktop happens to read this, “Parental Control” software isn’t the answer.
Free and Open Source Software should empower users, including children, who use it.
We shouldn’t aspire to confine, deny information and ideas to, and help oppress people like Microsoft and Apple do.
They say they want to go after child abusers, and I say it takes some to know some. █
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10.03.21
Posted in Debian, GNOME, GNU/Linux at 5:08 am by Guest Editorial Team
Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission from the original
GNOME Web 41 on Debian 11 GNU/Linux
Just several days ago, I gave a mostly favorable review of GNOME Web 3.38.2 as packaged by Debian 11 GNU/Linux.
While I think 3.38.2 was a good browser, I decided to move on and pull in the Flatpak version of GNOME Web 41.
“The YouTube Ad Block script mostly works. Sometimes you see a second or two of the ad, but it mostly gets rid of them, and they never interrupt a video.”Visually, the two versions are pretty similar, but there have been some improvements to stability, performance, minor UI tweaks, and a new AdGuard script that complements the built-in Webkit Content Blockers-based Ad Block feature.
When I got started, I made the mistake of pulling in the Flatpak without removing the DEB.
When you bring in the Flatpak of Firefox, it can be installed side-by-side with Firefox ESR from Debian, but GNOME Web does not get along well with its Debian package cousin, and the Debian version takes priority in the GNOME Shell overview.
So I ended up purging epiphany-browser and epiphany-browser-data with apt, and then deleting the local config and cache folders for “epiphany” under my Home folder (which are hidden behind the Ctrl+H hotkey to toggle invisible items).
This made way for the Flatpak, which now started.
The YouTube Ad Block script mostly works. Sometimes you see a second or two of the ad, but it mostly gets rid of them, and they never interrupt a video. Which is nice, because Google has gotten totally carried away to the point of making it unusable without this.
“Bill Gates was a liar when he swore up and down that IE was integrated deep, deep, into the guts of Windows 98, in court, under oath. So why can’t I remove Firefox ESR from Debian?”Performance of GNOME Web 41 has been improved, due to improvements in both the browser and in the newer version of WebkitGTK it brings in from the GNOME 41 platform Flatpak.
Today, I decided that I didn’t really need two Firefoxes, Firefoxen(?), whatever. 😉
So I went to apt-get purge the Firefox ESR from Debian to keep the Flatpak, only Debian told me that it would remove Firefox ESR and bring in Chromium. At first I thought something was broken, but then I found out that several of the metapackages require a Web browser, and they don’t recognize browsers from Flatpak, and when I decided I’d get clever and apt purge firefox-esr chromium … It told me it would get rid of a bunch of stuff, including the X11 server(!!!!) and bring in the DEB package for GNOME Web.
But that’s when it gets really strange.
I told it apt purge firefox-esr epiphany-browser chromium and now it wants to bring in Konqueror and half of KDE, including its Dolphin file manager.
So at this point, I became intrigued and told it apt purge firefox-esr epiphany-browser chromium konqueror, and it agreed to remove all browsers and not put a browser on the computer, if I would remove the X server, some fonts, all of LibreOffice, and the GNOME and desktop metapackages.
I think that this has to be some sort of a bug, because nothing should force you to have a Web browser, plus I still have Vivaldi installed, and alternatives recognizes that as one of the options for x-www-browser.
So I searched the problem, and a suggestion for how to hack around it came up suggesting to build an empty package that lies and says it’s a provider for “chromium” and dpkg -i it, and it would fool apt so that when you remove firefox-esr it doesn’t try to install anything.
I’m just not that sure Firefox ESR bothers me that much, but the idea that we “must” have a browser in a GNU/Linux OS is a bit nuts, isn’t it?
When I was 14, I set up Windows 98 and then used an unofficial script called Revenge of Mozilla, written by Bruce Jensen, and the Explorer shell from Windows 95 OSR 2.1 (FAT32 compatible), and it gave Windows 98 an enema and got it down to less than 100 MB.
It turned out that it ran pretty well after that, and that many patches no longer applied to you because you didn’t have the bloated and buggy code on your computer.
Bill Gates was a liar when he swore up and down that IE was integrated deep, deep, into the guts of Windows 98, in court, under oath. So why can’t I remove Firefox ESR from Debian?
Lastly, I finally got around to installing the email client, Geary, out of Flatpak. For privacy, I won’t post screenshots of that, but it’s pretty much as pictured on Flathub, except I use Adwaita Dark.
There’s no pesky guessing at how to set this thing up if you use GMail or Outlook Mail, which you can log into via OAuth through GNOME, in the Settings application.
In fact, this is VERY nice because I use two-factor authentication on all of my accounts and making app passwords is a hassle.
Technically, GNOME already has an email client called Evolution, and it has been around for a very long time (originally from Ximian, then Novell, and now “The Evolution Team”).
But Evolution is a big “Groupware” suite, and Geary is just an email client. If you’re like me and just need email, and want a fast and efficient workflow and a performant client, Geary fits the bill.
Microsoft’s Outlook Webmail occasionally gives GNOME Web an outdated version that’s a holdover for Internet Explorer 7 and earlier, and it looks like Hotmail.
It’s pretty gross. I asked Michael Catanzaro to look into using User Agent tricks to make it work, but we never found anything that reliably brought up the “modern” version that other browsers get.
It’s interesting, because Microsoft doesn’t do this to Safari.
They have done similar nasty things to Opera, back when it was really a company in Norway with a real browser. They had a very good rendering engine, better than anything else out there at the time, and Microsoft sabotaged MSN. So Opera released a Bork Edition of Opera, which translated Microsoft’s website into the language of the Swedish Chef.
Regardless, since Geary does what I need it to, and pairs well with GNOME Web, I won’t have to be using Microsoft’s nasty webmail interface. Even if you do get the “modern” one, it will take up a bunch of the screen with “Are you using an ad blocker? Click here to pay us and we’ll give you part of the screen back!”.
I really need to get everything over to one email service that Microsoft has nothing to do with. That won’t be easy. *sigh* █
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06.22.21
Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF, GNOME, GNU/Linux at 5:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: The GNOME Foundation has one member of staff fewer; the attack on the founder/father of Free/libre software activism and GNU (the “G” in GNOME) failed and backfired spectacularly
A governance of governments
And government-connected corporations
Influence through Gulag of Work (GSoC)
Reprehensible manifestations
IBM buying GUADEC
Through Red Hat staff, what the heck
Software patents in check
As long as they write the cheque
It’s about the money
Freedom doesn’t buy honey
A coalition that just ain’t funny
Its deterioration makes today more sunny
Karma and blowback still work
Unlike Watson and her Sherlock █
“I’d like to see Gnome applications written in .NET in version 4.0 – no, version 3.0. But Gnome 4.0 should be based on .NET.”
–“Gnome to be based on .NET – de Icaza” (Miguel de Icaza, now at Microsoft along with his successor Stormy Peters)
“We could refresh the look and feel of the entire desktop with Moonlight”
–Miguel de Icaza
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06.17.21
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software, FSF, GNOME, GNU/Linux, IBM, Microsoft, Windows at 5:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: The media is full of Microsoft fluff and technical blog posts still focus on the Freenode fiasco, among other things that don’t matter all that much; but we certainly need to talk about steps undertaken to undermine the FSF’s power because long-term ramifications may be huge
THIS past week, especially the past few days, may have seemed rather turbulent. Microsoft has resorted to vapourware (they really could use a distraction from all the scandals, which extend to and include Bill Gates) and many projects that rely on IRC are (or were) still on Freenode, so there’s a big debate about what happened and what to do next.
“It’s about giving more control to monopolies.”Sadly, I worry that many people lost sight of what GNU C Library (glibc) and GNU Portability Library (gnulib) are doing — a subject we covered here before. There are efforts to weaken the FSF, in effect giving more control (over GNU projects) to companies such as IBM. We’re talking about this at this very moment in IRC. There’s a lot at stake because licensing and copyright assignments are a very big deal from a legal perspective. As somebody put it this week, “MsPL has a clause added specifically and only to make it incompatible with the GPL and related licenses.” It’s about giving more control to monopolies. █
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