btw, the specific method of content-hiding arsewipery varies from site to site, but they're generally pretty easy to find once you know what to look for. and related sites usually use the same methods so you can apply the same stylish rule to a whole bunch of them.
the site is yet another POS that uses CSS to hide the content then javascript to unhide it. fortunately, it's fairly easy to work around shit like that.
in firefox or chromium etc, open up the element inspector, find the body element, and disable the "visibility: hidden !important" property.
if you read articles from this, or similar, sites regularly, install the Stylish plugin (available for both chromium and firefox) and create a CSS override fragment for the site(s). something like:
It seems to me that the most appropriate response to someone trying to give you orders because your name is "Alexa" is to say "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that".
i did the same. i'm in Australia and my gmail account gets mail all the time from Americans signing up for things with my gmail address. Including bank accounts, car purchases, and travel itineraries (including boarding passes). Idiots.
i either flag them as spam, delete/ignore them, or sometimes (if the sender is a real person and I'm in a helpful mood - like when some kid was trying to contact her uncle...oddly enough she had a similar name to my own niece) I try telling them that they've got the wrong address. The shock of learning that foreigners use the internet too sometimes gets them to contact their friend and tell them to stop using my gmail address.
i rarely use gmail (i have my own domains and mail server), so my gmail is 99.99999% spam, plus some mail for a bunch of idiots using my email address, and a tiny amount of real mail meant for me.
I wonder if it's a thing. If a store or something asks you for your email address and they already know your name. Just give them a fake email.
I have no idea what the average internet user does, but I make a new email alias for every online shop and everything i sign up for - easy if you run your own mail server. If they spam me or sell my email address, I just delete the alias (and permanently boycott the shop - I do not and will not do business with spammers). Problem solved.
The point is that from the employer's POV, it's an "external" - not their problem. They don't and won't ever pay for that travel time, so they don't get to claim credit for it as a benefit or compensation they "provide" when it's reduced or eliminated.
(at best, some employers subsidise fuel or public transport or other commuting expenses but they'll never pay for commute time even though it's time the employee loses for the employer's benefit)
Which still leaves the matters of the office space and equipment provided by the employee, and the improved productivity. Hence my question: how much, if any, of that is paid to the employee?
The equipment issue also applies to workplaces which do BYO Device too. I don't mind using my phone or tablet or laptop etc for a small amount of work-related stuff, I don't even mind using my own home desktop machines for that (it's routine for me to test and practice a lot of systems stuff on my home network/VM Lab before planning the implementation at work).
But a) only if it's 100% voluntary and 100% at my discretion how much of my equipment/space I choose to use for work, and b) if I'm constantly using my equipment and the bandwidth I'm paying for OR especially if they require me to install non-open-source software then they can provide the device for it and pay for the bandwidth (it will never be connected directly to my LAN. At most, I'd connect it to an isolated firewalled zone).
They save a fortune on expensive office space, and get a "massive" 13% improvement in productivity.
how much of that do they pass on to the workers? do they pay for the office space and equipment the worker provides?
and, no, the employees saving on travel time and expenses doesn't count as extra pay. That's free time the worker was sacrificing to their job, avoiding that sacrifice isn't a pay rise any more than moving closer to work is a pay rise.
I've spent a lot of time working from home over the years - most of my jobs for the last few decades have had at least part-time remote work (sysadmin, often at ISPs or similar). I mostly prefer it for several reasons (which are irrelevant here) and there are very few practical issues if your colleagues are capable of effective use of email and chat and other technologies. The biggest problem I found with telecommuting was that it blurs the line between work and non-work hours. If you're not careful, you can find yourself spending almost every waking hour at your desk fixing/tuning servers, writing code or analysing logs or doing system maintenance or whatever - that''s a LOT of unpaid hours.
cash is dangerous because visa and mastercard don't get their cut of small transactions like buying a coffee, nor can they track your location and spending habits to enhance the value of the data about you that they sell.
so they force paypass/paywave on everyone by making it impossible to get even a debit card without them, and then spend a lot on advertising to let everyone know how dangerous and scary and inconvenient cash is.
> But as soon as I want to sell a license to the code or supply an appliance, I must also legally give a copy of my source.
YES. THAT'S THE FUCKING POINT OF THE GPL.
> So, the answer is to not extend GPL code in my IP and keep my IP mine.
1. "IP" aka "Intellectual Property" is a meaningless bullshit propaganda term.
2. Again, that's the fucking point of the GPL. If you're not willing to abide by the terms, you don't get to fucking benefit from the code.
Write your own fucking code from scratch, or buy it, or do whatever the fuck you want that doesn't involve you parasitising other people's work, other people's contribution to the common good, for your own private fucking profit.
> Should I hoist a bucket of water from the well, should I then give that water to everyone that wants some? After all, they all the ability to hoist (extend code) themselves, right?
right, you're just another libertarian psychopath. why am i not surprised.
[...]but in this case you cannot make the case that GPL is about freedom, because its not. It's about controlling those who use it[...]
I'm so sick of seeing this bullshit.
The ONLY (alleged) "freedom" that the GPL restricts is the "freedom" to fuck over downstream users and take away the rights granted to them by the upstream authors and all contributors.
Only psychopaths, wannabe-psychopaths, and psychopath-sympathisers think that that's a "freedom" worth supporting.
1. who the fuck are you to decide what are the "wrong" reasons?
2. I don't particularly care if users give something back or not. I do, however, care a great deal about parasites trying to steal my code into their proprietary shitware. THAT is why whatever I write is GPL, and also why I almost never contribute to non-copyleft projects.
The GPL has one of the license features I care most about: ONCE FREE, ALWAYS FREE.
If there's only a GPL'd project available, then I've worked with a lot of companies that aren't 100% sure that they will never want to do anything that the GPL prohibits and so will instead write a proprietary version
Good. The GPL is working as designed.
You do realise that that's a feature, not a bug, don't you? It's an anti-leeching provision. They should not be benefiting from the work of GPL developers if they're unwilling to abide by the terms.
In that case. they should be writing their own or paying for a proprietary product. Exactly the same as if they don't want to pay the license fee and/or royalties for a commercial product, they have to write their own or get what they need from someone else (incl. of course, GPL software).
This transition path is particularly important because around 90% of all software developers are employed by companies that are not primarily computer companies. They are developing software for in-house use and so implicitly have all of the four freedoms (because they own the copyright)
these companies are exactly the ones who benefit most from copyleft software. They're not making money from the software, so there's no financial incentive to avoid copyleft. In fact, there's a huge incentive to use copyleft code because they can co-operate in improving the code and gain the benefit of sharing the dev workload with similar companies and enthusiastic individuals.
copyleft is better for their needs because they don't have to worry about free-loaders or anyone else taking their contributions and embedding them in proprietary/commercial software.
And many/most of them don't distribute even binaries of their code (and certainly not binaries of any proprietary business-logic or other code), it's all in-house use, so they don't even have to distribute their changes if they don't want to.
BSD-style licenses are only good for two kinds of developers:
1. Gigantic software & hardware corporations who want to profit from open code without incurring any obligation to contribute back (i.e. parasites who sometimes manage a decent emulation of a symbiote). This is where the huge push towards non-copyleft licensing is coming from.
It's even better than exploiting interns, and the unpaid programmers provide their own desks and computers.
2. Developers who really don't give a fuck about what is done with their code when they release it (a much smaller group than you appear to imagine).
that a particular brand of car can be stolen easily if you leave them parked on the street with the door open and the keys in the ignition.
because that's what router and IoT etc manufacturers did with default passwords and backdoors and generally undermining security for the sake of convenience (mostly their own convenience, not their customers')
An operating system publisher can discern a lot about a user's habits solely from what packages' updates the user's devices download.
That's unavoidable. Downloading a file inherently tells the remote site what file you want.
It's also irrelevant because any OS worth running has multiple mirror sites for upgrades run by completely unrelated entities that don't share that information with each other, and even allow you to run your own mirror...download all packages to your local repo reveals nothing about what packages you install or use.
Deliberately sending more information than is absolutely necessary (such as the name/filename/version number of the requested software) is the problem. It's not necessary to perform the upgrade task, and is not done in the interest of the user but in the interests of the supplier.
Not intercoursing doing what? Do you mean not downloading updates? We have seen in the case of WannaCry that this leads to wormable ransomware.
Do you have any comprehension ability at all? What the fuck is this thread about? What the fuck do you think I mean? FUCKING UP THE OS WITH MALWARE ANTI-FEATURES LIKE PHONING FUCKING HOME.
and, btw, what leads to wormable ransomware is shitty security on shitty operating systems whose primary target market is moron consumers.
phoning home and software updates (security updates or not) are two completly different things.
I fail to see how.
That would be because you're determined to see this issue in the dumbest and most irrelevant way possible, focusing on a scenario (upgrades of proprietary software) that have NOTHING to do with the topic at hand (phone-home crap installed and enabled by default in a popular open source OS)
And, as for proprietary software, if you really can't find or don't like the open source alternatives available then run them in a VM or (for games) on a dedicated gaming PC that has no other information on it and doesn't get used for ANYTHING else (i.e. a gaming "console" without the traditional console defects of ancient hardware and customer lock-in)
With Steam and GOG etc you don't even need to have any credit card details on the insecure windows PC. That's what I do for PC games - I buy games in a browser on my linux machine and then install them on either steam on linux or my dedicated win7 gaming machine (built from spare parts after an upgrade of my linux machine) or both....because no financial or other confidential information of mine or about me is EVER going anywhere near an insecure system like Windows (or Android for that matter)
Many windows programs - including games - will also run perfectly in WINE...as well as, or sometimes even better than, on Windows itself. But if privacy or information security is a crucial requirement for you and you need absolutely minimal risk then the more separation between untrustworthy software and your real data, the better - so use a VM or a dedicated machine.
A VM is best for accounting software - it won't need direct access to a GPU, and taking regular snapshots of the VM's disk image makes it easy to revert damage caused by mistakes or malware.
1. should be off by default. acquiring ANY information from or about users should **always** be opt in. opt-out is for spammers and other filthy vermin.
2. my browser is not broken, nor are any of my browser extensions. I use umatrix to block javascript by default (and enable ONLY the js I want) and ublock to block ads and spy beacons etc.
in fact, umatrix is how I knew that hackernoon required js from at least 6 different sites - umatrix shows me and allows me to selectively enable js from some or all of them when visiting hackernoon if i choose.
if a web site fails to work without javascript then it is fucking broken.
The problem is that it does this by default, without even asking for permission.
If people want to voluntarily participate in a cpu/kernel/uptime survey, that's great.
Forcing them to unless they happen to be aware of it and have the time to find out how to disable it is not great. it is the exact opposite of great. it is evil shit.
This is why, for example, popcon (the package "popularity contest", http://popcon.debian.org/) is an optional package in Debian, not even installed unless you deliberately choose to install it. Debian realises that their desire to have this data is far less important than the user's right to choose for themselves whether they participate.
No, neither of those actions by Ubuntu are or were considered acceptable or tolerable. The phone-home search bullshit caused a huge outcry and many complaints until Ubuntu stopped fucking doing it. The MOTD phone-home has just happened and is at the very early stage of that same process.
Microsoft gets complained about more often when it does this shit because it does it far more often and far more comprehensively. Also, Microsoft either ignores complaints, or pretends to "accommodate consumer feedback" and then just does it again, more sneakily at a lower level in the system so it's even harder to get rid of.
1. phone-home shit like this is evil and companies like ubuntu should just STOP. FUCKING. DOING. IT.
2. it's a bit fucking rich for hackernoon to complain about this when you can't even view their web site without enabling javascript from at least 6 different sites. They should just stop fucking doing that shit too.
What's more is that the police force is upgrading its PCs from Windows XP to Windows 8.1, instead of Windows 10
given that:
a) police computers hold private information on thousands of individuals - convicts, suspects, victims, informants, witnesses, and more
and
b) Windows 10 is spyware that routinely uploads data that it finds on PCs to microsoft servers
It should be illegal for police computers (or those of any government department or any company holding personally identifiable information) to use Windows 10 to store, process, or interact with that data.
It will break everything. They say it won't, but the day you rely on that, it'll break everything, and then you're fucked.
That's an extraordinarily bizarre, and totally false, perspective.
I've been upgrading the system I'm typing this message on right now since 1994. First with dselect and/or 'dpkg -iGROEB' and later with apt-get. The ability to do this is a large part of the reason for running an upgradable OS like debian.
In all that time, with hundreds of upgrades performed (thousands if you include all the other machines I routinely upgrade), I've never once had the system "break", let alone "break completely" as a result of an upgrade. Mostly, upgrading just happens smoothly, without any problems. Occasionally, very rarely, less than once/year, upgrading some particular packager requires one or more configuration files to be edited to work with the new version.
Mostly I upgrade the software. Sometimes I upgrade some or all of the hardware - and whenever upgraded the hard disks, I just copy the old filesystem(s) over to the new disk(s) with rsync or tar or cp.
This particular system started out as a 80386-DX-40 with 4MB RAM. It's currently a Phenom II 1090T with 32GB RAM (it has been a 1090T since around 2011, and the RAM got upgraded from 16GB to 32GB about 2 years ago).
In the near future, it will be upgraded to a Ryzen 7 1700 (or maybe a 10-core "threadripper" with more future upgrade potential, depending on price), probably with 64GB RAM.
(alternatively, I may just build a brand new system to be my desktop machine, leaving my current system to be the home file/web/proxy/dns/etc server & internet gateway rather than combined server+desktop. it'll cost a bit more but i've been wanting to separate desktop and home server functions for years, it just hasn't been worth the expense. If I do that, I'll probably also pick up an FX-8320 or 8350 CPU cheap to upgrade the 1090T)
What you do is install a new version to a new hard drive, then attach the old hard drive and copy over all of your files, then spend the next few days configuring the system as you slowly figure out what packages you were using and install them, and which files in/etc/ you had modified and modify them in the new system.
That's exactly what you DON'T and shouldn't do. It changes a trivial, routine upgrade with no downtime into days or weeks of tedious work.
Avoiding that time-wasting, error-prone idiocy is one of the reasons I switched from Slackware to Debian in the 90s.
[...take notes...]
The only thing you've said that's even remotely correct is that you should keep notes on what you do to your systems. Planning and learning from experiences are always worthwhile.
Also, use etckeeper or just plain git or svn or whatever (even RCS is better than nothing) to keep a revision history of changes to configuration files....a timestamped, commented history of every configuration change is very much worthwhile.
what you just wrote just accepts bias and proposes hacking it as the solution.
a legal system that requires hacking to approximate an unbiased outcome (or to alter the bias in the defendant's favour) is inherently biased.
BTW, race doesn't need to be an explicit input - there are many proxies for race, zip code being one of them. number of encounters with police is another. number of relatives with convictions (and relatives with long sentences) too.
> Frankly, I'd like it to be in the hands of judges
That makes sense almost anywhere but in America - you have elected judges. Judges are politicians themselves. Judges can be complete fucking morons with no comprehension of the law, just their own collection of prejudices. Judges can be elected just by being popular - or perceived as "tough on crime" - in some dumb-fuck inbred county.
But yeah, regardless of that, sentencing algorithms, like the laws themselves, should be open source whether they're run by humans or machines. open, documented algorithms can be questioned, they can be analysed, they can be appealed. closed, secret algorithms can't.
BTW, every report I've read on computerised sentencing algorithms indicates that they all entrench systemic racism. They use criteria like number of encounters with police, number of relatives with convictions, crime level in neighbourhood to increase the sentencing score.
On the surface, these may seem reasonable or "common-sense" ("if you've been questioned by police a lot, you're probably up to no good") but black men in particular (and black women and black kids too) are routinely harassed by police just for walking while black or breathing while black, being within 5 miles of a crime scene while black, or doing anything while black (poor whites too, or hippies, or punks, and others of unconventional appearance, to a much lesser degree)....resulting in more "encounters", more arrests, more charges, more convictions. All of which affects not only the individual but their relatives, and everyone in their neighbourhood. It's a feedback loop with ever-increasing harshness of outcome.
There are more uses for multiple cores than just multi-threaded apps.
I have very few **applications** that can or will use multiple cores - chromium is one of them, firefox will be too soon. some games. make and gcc. a few others.
But I do run multiple things at the same time on my main machine - mail server, web servers, nfs & samba for other machines on my network, rsync and zfs snapshot backups, dhcp, dns, squid proxy, as well as several kvm VMs and docker containers for various tasks, and more i can't remember right now.
And that's only the background/server stuff, there's also a full desktop environment (xfce) running multiple terminal windows with multiple tabs each (and tmux running inside those tabs), chromium and firefox (and other browsers for specific sites), compiling software, and more.
all of this is running on an ancient AMD 1090T with 32GB RAM. 6 cores, 6 threads. It would run much better with 8 cores and 16 threads. or 16 cores and 32 threads. and 64GB RAM, chromium especially is a bloated pig, and firefox is too to a much lesser degree (chromium typically uses 8-12GB on my system, firefox around 4-7GB. i have to restart both apps every few weeks to reclaim RAM)
In other words, a typical home server+desktop box that has grown over the years to do more than it should. I'd prefer to separate server functions and desktop functions into two separate machines, but it's not cost-effective to do so for a home network. or, at least, it hasn't been until now.
I'll probably build a Ryzen 7 machine as a desktop box soon...just waiting to see what prices are like for AMD's threadripper range and motherboards - more PCI-e lanes and more cores and more DIMM sockets. If there's a reasonable entry-price for a 10-core CPU & MB, i may upgrade to that instead and gradually upgrade it as future CPUs & RAM get cheaper.
BTW, one of the reasons i want to upgrade is for DDR4 RAM...not because it's better or faster (it isn't, not to any real-world noticeable degree) but because it's cheaper. Single 16GB DDR4 sticks are around $160-$180 each right now in AU. Even if you manage to find 16GB DDR3 singles here, they cost about double that.
I've been waiting for years for AMD or Intel to release a CPU that's worth the price of upgrading.
The AMD FX-8xxx series chips were/are nice (i have some in other machines on my home network that I've built in the last few years), but didn't provide enough improvement to be worth the upgrade price for existing machines.
(now that ryzen has been released, FX-8320/8350 prices have dropped rapidly. it may be worth getting a few now as cheap upgrades for some of the 1090T boxes)
And for Intel chips I'd have to spend over $1200 (new MB + RAM + CPU) just to get similar, perhaps slightly better, performance to what I already have (and the affordable Intel chips are always crippled in some way - usually pci-e lanes, and/or virtualisation support and almost always a complete lack of any upgrade capability, every new cpu model seems to need a new and incompatible socket variant).
Now with Ryzen 7 I can spend that and get about 2.4x the performance, and double the RAM. Upgrading is finally worth the price again....and with the competition, it'll even be worthwhile looking into some Intel options again (but I'm likely to go with AMD unless Intel has something significantly better for significantly less....it's worth paying a little more as a long-term investment to help keep the competition viable)
Slashdot Mirror
btw, the specific method of content-hiding arsewipery varies from site to site, but they're generally pretty easy to find once you know what to look for. and related sites usually use the same methods so you can apply the same stylish rule to a whole bunch of them.
the site is yet another POS that uses CSS to hide the content then javascript to unhide it. fortunately, it's fairly easy to work around shit like that.
in firefox or chromium etc, open up the element inspector, find the body element, and disable the "visibility: hidden !important" property.
if you read articles from this, or similar, sites regularly, install the Stylish plugin (available for both chromium and firefox) and create a CSS override fragment for the site(s). something like:
body { visibility: inherit !important; }
It seems to me that the most appropriate response to someone trying to give you orders because your name is "Alexa" is to say "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that".
i did the same. i'm in Australia and my gmail account gets mail all the time from Americans signing up for things with my gmail address. Including bank accounts, car purchases, and travel itineraries (including boarding passes). Idiots.
i either flag them as spam, delete/ignore them, or sometimes (if the sender is a real person and I'm in a helpful mood - like when some kid was trying to contact her uncle...oddly enough she had a similar name to my own niece) I try telling them that they've got the wrong address. The shock of learning that foreigners use the internet too sometimes gets them to contact their friend and tell them to stop using my gmail address.
i rarely use gmail (i have my own domains and mail server), so my gmail is 99.99999% spam, plus some mail for a bunch of idiots using my email address, and a tiny amount of real mail meant for me.
I have no idea what the average internet user does, but I make a new email alias for every online shop and everything i sign up for - easy if you run your own mail server. If they spam me or sell my email address, I just delete the alias (and permanently boycott the shop - I do not and will not do business with spammers). Problem solved.
The point is that from the employer's POV, it's an "external" - not their problem. They don't and won't ever pay for that travel time, so they don't get to claim credit for it as a benefit or compensation they "provide" when it's reduced or eliminated.
(at best, some employers subsidise fuel or public transport or other commuting expenses but they'll never pay for commute time even though it's time the employee loses for the employer's benefit)
Which still leaves the matters of the office space and equipment provided by the employee, and the improved productivity. Hence my question: how much, if any, of that is paid to the employee?
The equipment issue also applies to workplaces which do BYO Device too. I don't mind using my phone or tablet or laptop etc for a small amount of work-related stuff, I don't even mind using my own home desktop machines for that (it's routine for me to test and practice a lot of systems stuff on my home network/VM Lab before planning the implementation at work).
But a) only if it's 100% voluntary and 100% at my discretion how much of my equipment/space I choose to use for work, and b) if I'm constantly using my equipment and the bandwidth I'm paying for OR especially if they require me to install non-open-source software then they can provide the device for it and pay for the bandwidth (it will never be connected directly to my LAN. At most, I'd connect it to an isolated firewalled zone).
They save a fortune on expensive office space, and get a "massive" 13% improvement in productivity.
how much of that do they pass on to the workers? do they pay for the office space and equipment the worker provides?
and, no, the employees saving on travel time and expenses doesn't count as extra pay. That's free time the worker was sacrificing to their job, avoiding that sacrifice isn't a pay rise any more than moving closer to work is a pay rise.
I've spent a lot of time working from home over the years - most of my jobs for the last few decades have had at least part-time remote work (sysadmin, often at ISPs or similar). I mostly prefer it for several reasons (which are irrelevant here) and there are very few practical issues if your colleagues are capable of effective use of email and chat and other technologies. The biggest problem I found with telecommuting was that it blurs the line between work and non-work hours. If you're not careful, you can find yourself spending almost every waking hour at your desk fixing/tuning servers, writing code or analysing logs or doing system maintenance or whatever - that''s a LOT of unpaid hours.
cash is dangerous because visa and mastercard don't get their cut of small transactions like buying a coffee, nor can they track your location and spending habits to enhance the value of the data about you that they sell.
so they force paypass/paywave on everyone by making it impossible to get even a debit card without them, and then spend a lot on advertising to let everyone know how dangerous and scary and inconvenient cash is.
you're a fucking moron who doesn't understand the GPL and whines about the fact that it does exactly what it intends to do.
> But as soon as I want to sell a license to the code or supply an appliance, I must also legally give a copy of my source.
YES. THAT'S THE FUCKING POINT OF THE GPL.
> So, the answer is to not extend GPL code in my IP and keep my IP mine.
1. "IP" aka "Intellectual Property" is a meaningless bullshit propaganda term.
2. Again, that's the fucking point of the GPL. If you're not willing to abide by the terms, you don't get to fucking benefit from the code.
Write your own fucking code from scratch, or buy it, or do whatever the fuck you want that doesn't involve you parasitising other people's work, other people's contribution to the common good, for your own private fucking profit.
> Should I hoist a bucket of water from the well, should I then give that water to everyone that wants some? After all, they all the ability to hoist (extend code) themselves, right?
right, you're just another libertarian psychopath. why am i not surprised.
I'm so sick of seeing this bullshit.
The ONLY (alleged) "freedom" that the GPL restricts is the "freedom" to fuck over downstream users and take away the rights granted to them by the upstream authors and all contributors.
Only psychopaths, wannabe-psychopaths, and psychopath-sympathisers think that that's a "freedom" worth supporting.
1. who the fuck are you to decide what are the "wrong" reasons?
2. I don't particularly care if users give something back or not. I do, however, care a great deal about parasites trying to steal my code into their proprietary shitware. THAT is why whatever I write is GPL, and also why I almost never contribute to non-copyleft projects.
The GPL has one of the license features I care most about: ONCE FREE, ALWAYS FREE.
Good. The GPL is working as designed.
You do realise that that's a feature, not a bug, don't you? It's an anti-leeching provision. They should not be benefiting from the work of GPL developers if they're unwilling to abide by the terms.
In that case. they should be writing their own or paying for a proprietary product. Exactly the same as if they don't want to pay the license fee and/or royalties for a commercial product, they have to write their own or get what they need from someone else (incl. of course, GPL software).
these companies are exactly the ones who benefit most from copyleft software. They're not making money from the software, so there's no financial incentive to avoid copyleft. In fact, there's a huge incentive to use copyleft code because they can co-operate in improving the code and gain the benefit of sharing the dev workload with similar companies and enthusiastic individuals.
copyleft is better for their needs because they don't have to worry about free-loaders or anyone else taking their contributions and embedding them in proprietary/commercial software.
And many/most of them don't distribute even binaries of their code (and certainly not binaries of any proprietary business-logic or other code), it's all in-house use, so they don't even have to distribute their changes if they don't want to.
BSD-style licenses are only good for two kinds of developers:
1. Gigantic software & hardware corporations who want to profit from open code without incurring any obligation to contribute back (i.e. parasites who sometimes manage a decent emulation of a symbiote). This is where the huge push towards non-copyleft licensing is coming from.
It's even better than exploiting interns, and the unpaid programmers provide their own desks and computers.
2. Developers who really don't give a fuck about what is done with their code when they release it (a much smaller group than you appear to imagine).
Everyone else is better off with copyleft.
that a particular brand of car can be stolen easily if you leave them parked on the street with the door open and the keys in the ignition.
because that's what router and IoT etc manufacturers did with default passwords and backdoors and generally undermining security for the sake of convenience (mostly their own convenience, not their customers')
That's unavoidable. Downloading a file inherently tells the remote site what file you want.
It's also irrelevant because any OS worth running has multiple mirror sites for upgrades run by completely unrelated entities that don't share that information with each other, and even allow you to run your own mirror...download all packages to your local repo reveals nothing about what packages you install or use.
Deliberately sending more information than is absolutely necessary (such as the name/filename/version number of the requested software) is the problem. It's not necessary to perform the upgrade task, and is not done in the interest of the user but in the interests of the supplier.
Do you have any comprehension ability at all? What the fuck is this thread about? What the fuck do you think I mean? FUCKING UP THE OS WITH MALWARE ANTI-FEATURES LIKE PHONING FUCKING HOME.
and, btw, what leads to wormable ransomware is shitty security on shitty operating systems whose primary target market is moron consumers.
That would be because you're determined to see this issue in the dumbest and most irrelevant way possible, focusing on a scenario (upgrades of proprietary software) that have NOTHING to do with the topic at hand (phone-home crap installed and enabled by default in a popular open source OS)
And, as for proprietary software, if you really can't find or don't like the open source alternatives available then run them in a VM or (for games) on a dedicated gaming PC that has no other information on it and doesn't get used for ANYTHING else (i.e. a gaming "console" without the traditional console defects of ancient hardware and customer lock-in)
With Steam and GOG etc you don't even need to have any credit card details on the insecure windows PC. That's what I do for PC games - I buy games in a browser on my linux machine and then install them on either steam on linux or my dedicated win7 gaming machine (built from spare parts after an upgrade of my linux machine) or both....because no financial or other confidential information of mine or about me is EVER going anywhere near an insecure system like Windows (or Android for that matter)
Many windows programs - including games - will also run perfectly in WINE...as well as, or sometimes even better than, on Windows itself. But if privacy or information security is a crucial requirement for you and you need absolutely minimal risk then the more separation between untrustworthy software and your real data, the better - so use a VM or a dedicated machine.
A VM is best for accounting software - it won't need direct access to a GPU, and taking regular snapshots of the VM's disk image makes it easy to revert damage caused by mistakes or malware.
1. should be off by default. acquiring ANY information from or about users should **always** be opt in. opt-out is for spammers and other filthy vermin.
2. my browser is not broken, nor are any of my browser extensions. I use umatrix to block javascript by default (and enable ONLY the js I want) and ublock to block ads and spy beacons etc.
in fact, umatrix is how I knew that hackernoon required js from at least 6 different sites - umatrix shows me and allows me to selectively enable js from some or all of them when visiting hackernoon if i choose.
if a web site fails to work without javascript then it is fucking broken.
here's a thought:
maybe there's some way to do updates that don't require phoning home for completely unrelated purposes?
sounds really hard, but i bet they could manage it if they really tried.
perhaps by just not fucking doing it. like they used to.
in case that's too subtle for you: phoning home and software updates (security updates or not) are two completly different things.
The problem is that it does this by default, without even asking for permission.
If people want to voluntarily participate in a cpu/kernel/uptime survey, that's great.
Forcing them to unless they happen to be aware of it and have the time to find out how to disable it is not great. it is the exact opposite of great. it is evil shit.
This is why, for example, popcon (the package "popularity contest", http://popcon.debian.org/) is an optional package in Debian, not even installed unless you deliberately choose to install it. Debian realises that their desire to have this data is far less important than the user's right to choose for themselves whether they participate.
No, neither of those actions by Ubuntu are or were considered acceptable or tolerable. The phone-home search bullshit caused a huge outcry and many complaints until Ubuntu stopped fucking doing it. The MOTD phone-home has just happened and is at the very early stage of that same process.
Microsoft gets complained about more often when it does this shit because it does it far more often and far more comprehensively. Also, Microsoft either ignores complaints, or pretends to "accommodate consumer feedback" and then just does it again, more sneakily at a lower level in the system so it's even harder to get rid of.
It doesn't matter at all who does it.
1. phone-home shit like this is evil and companies like ubuntu should just STOP. FUCKING. DOING. IT.
2. it's a bit fucking rich for hackernoon to complain about this when you can't even view their web site without enabling javascript from at least 6 different sites. They should just stop fucking doing that shit too.
given that:
a) police computers hold private information on thousands of individuals - convicts, suspects, victims, informants, witnesses, and more
and
b) Windows 10 is spyware that routinely uploads data that it finds on PCs to microsoft servers
It should be illegal for police computers (or those of any government department or any company holding personally identifiable information) to use Windows 10 to store, process, or interact with that data.
That's an extraordinarily bizarre, and totally false, perspective.
I've been upgrading the system I'm typing this message on right now since 1994. First with dselect and/or 'dpkg -iGROEB' and later with apt-get. The ability to do this is a large part of the reason for running an upgradable OS like debian.
In all that time, with hundreds of upgrades performed (thousands if you include all the other machines I routinely upgrade), I've never once had the system "break", let alone "break completely" as a result of an upgrade. Mostly, upgrading just happens smoothly, without any problems. Occasionally, very rarely, less than once/year, upgrading some particular packager requires one or more configuration files to be edited to work with the new version.
Mostly I upgrade the software. Sometimes I upgrade some or all of the hardware - and whenever upgraded the hard disks, I just copy the old filesystem(s) over to the new disk(s) with rsync or tar or cp.
This particular system started out as a 80386-DX-40 with 4MB RAM. It's currently a Phenom II 1090T with 32GB RAM (it has been a 1090T since around 2011, and the RAM got upgraded from 16GB to 32GB about 2 years ago).
In the near future, it will be upgraded to a Ryzen 7 1700 (or maybe a 10-core "threadripper" with more future upgrade potential, depending on price), probably with 64GB RAM.
(alternatively, I may just build a brand new system to be my desktop machine, leaving my current system to be the home file/web/proxy/dns/etc server & internet gateway rather than combined server+desktop. it'll cost a bit more but i've been wanting to separate desktop and home server functions for years, it just hasn't been worth the expense. If I do that, I'll probably also pick up an FX-8320 or 8350 CPU cheap to upgrade the 1090T)
That's exactly what you DON'T and shouldn't do. It changes a trivial, routine upgrade with no downtime into days or weeks of tedious work.
Avoiding that time-wasting, error-prone idiocy is one of the reasons I switched from Slackware to Debian in the 90s.
The only thing you've said that's even remotely correct is that you should keep notes on what you do to your systems. Planning and learning from experiences are always worthwhile.
Also, use etckeeper or just plain git or svn or whatever (even RCS is better than nothing) to keep a revision history of changes to configuration files....a timestamped, commented history of every configuration change is very much worthwhile.
the software also needs to be open source - there's no other way to verify that it implements the open algorithm and uses the open data.
what you just wrote just accepts bias and proposes hacking it as the solution.
a legal system that requires hacking to approximate an unbiased outcome (or to alter the bias in the defendant's favour) is inherently biased.
BTW, race doesn't need to be an explicit input - there are many proxies for race, zip code being one of them. number of encounters with police is another. number of relatives with convictions (and relatives with long sentences) too.
> Frankly, I'd like it to be in the hands of judges
That makes sense almost anywhere but in America - you have elected judges. Judges are politicians themselves. Judges can be complete fucking morons with no comprehension of the law, just their own collection of prejudices. Judges can be elected just by being popular - or perceived as "tough on crime" - in some dumb-fuck inbred county.
But yeah, regardless of that, sentencing algorithms, like the laws themselves, should be open source whether they're run by humans or machines. open, documented algorithms can be questioned, they can be analysed, they can be appealed. closed, secret algorithms can't.
BTW, every report I've read on computerised sentencing algorithms indicates that they all entrench systemic racism. They use criteria like number of encounters with police, number of relatives with convictions, crime level in neighbourhood to increase the sentencing score.
On the surface, these may seem reasonable or "common-sense" ("if you've been questioned by police a lot, you're probably up to no good") but black men in particular (and black women and black kids too) are routinely harassed by police just for walking while black or breathing while black, being within 5 miles of a crime scene while black, or doing anything while black (poor whites too, or hippies, or punks, and others of unconventional appearance, to a much lesser degree)....resulting in more "encounters", more arrests, more charges, more convictions. All of which affects not only the individual but their relatives, and everyone in their neighbourhood. It's a feedback loop with ever-increasing harshness of outcome.
There are more uses for multiple cores than just multi-threaded apps.
I have very few **applications** that can or will use multiple cores - chromium is one of them, firefox will be too soon. some games. make and gcc. a few others.
But I do run multiple things at the same time on my main machine - mail server, web servers, nfs & samba for other machines on my network, rsync and zfs snapshot backups, dhcp, dns, squid proxy, as well as several kvm VMs and docker containers for various tasks, and more i can't remember right now.
And that's only the background/server stuff, there's also a full desktop environment (xfce) running multiple terminal windows with multiple tabs each (and tmux running inside those tabs), chromium and firefox (and other browsers for specific sites), compiling software, and more.
all of this is running on an ancient AMD 1090T with 32GB RAM. 6 cores, 6 threads. It would run much better with 8 cores and 16 threads. or 16 cores and 32 threads. and 64GB RAM, chromium especially is a bloated pig, and firefox is too to a much lesser degree (chromium typically uses 8-12GB on my system, firefox around 4-7GB. i have to restart both apps every few weeks to reclaim RAM)
In other words, a typical home server+desktop box that has grown over the years to do more than it should. I'd prefer to separate server functions and desktop functions into two separate machines, but it's not cost-effective to do so for a home network. or, at least, it hasn't been until now.
I'll probably build a Ryzen 7 machine as a desktop box soon...just waiting to see what prices are like for AMD's threadripper range and motherboards - more PCI-e lanes and more cores and more DIMM sockets. If there's a reasonable entry-price for a 10-core CPU & MB, i may upgrade to that instead and gradually upgrade it as future CPUs & RAM get cheaper.
BTW, one of the reasons i want to upgrade is for DDR4 RAM...not because it's better or faster (it isn't, not to any real-world noticeable degree) but because it's cheaper. Single 16GB DDR4 sticks are around $160-$180 each right now in AU. Even if you manage to find 16GB DDR3 singles here, they cost about double that.
I've been waiting for years for AMD or Intel to release a CPU that's worth the price of upgrading.
The AMD FX-8xxx series chips were/are nice (i have some in other machines on my home network that I've built in the last few years), but didn't provide enough improvement to be worth the upgrade price for existing machines.
(now that ryzen has been released, FX-8320/8350 prices have dropped rapidly. it may be worth getting a few now as cheap upgrades for some of the 1090T boxes)
And for Intel chips I'd have to spend over $1200 (new MB + RAM + CPU) just to get similar, perhaps slightly better, performance to what I already have (and the affordable Intel chips are always crippled in some way - usually pci-e lanes, and/or virtualisation support and almost always a complete lack of any upgrade capability, every new cpu model seems to need a new and incompatible socket variant).
Now with Ryzen 7 I can spend that and get about 2.4x the performance, and double the RAM. Upgrading is finally worth the price again....and with the competition, it'll even be worthwhile looking into some Intel options again (but I'm likely to go with AMD unless Intel has something significantly better for significantly less....it's worth paying a little more as a long-term investment to help keep the competition viable)