Nice one :D

I got a notification about a package that changed the maintainer that looks rather suspicious to me… So i would still be careful…

https://aur.archlinux.org/account/svantehedlund

That user doesn’t seem to be blocked… So there might still be more going on.

I only ever heard that in the open source context.

You don’t need to use devices. Other people are, so you will be part of it. Any device in your proximity will listen to you, any photos other people take of you will identify you, public cameras or facitities will surveil you, smart energy meters will know what you do in your home…

That is why the position of “I don’t care, because I don’t use that tech.” or “It is peoples choice.” Is so useless… We need strong regulation… Worldwide.

I like it as well… The mix between all these different game genres is very interesting. Idea is great, execution is lacking a bit, but it is good that they tried… Just sad that it didn’t work out so well… Hope they try again and improve on the concept.

Like they did with EncroChat?

FUTO voice input, I use for voice. It seems to work fine so far. But that isn’t (F)OSS, just source available.

“We finally succeeded in building the ‘Torment Nexus’, inspired by the book ‘Don’t create the Torment Nexus’.”

Routing is something you can control client-side. Well at least you can configure that all traffic should be routed over the VPN. If your company provides an exit to the internet over VPN is another issue, but I suppose most do.

Cachy is Arch, Bazzite is Fedora.

They constantly cry about ThE wOkE aGeNdA when you can select pronouns that LITERALLY have 0 impact on gaming, but apparently including WoKe content in the actual game is ok if you’re on their side.

I don’t like that those ‘woke’ settings don’t have any impact in historic games. Because that ‘woke-washes’ history.

That was one of my gripes with Hogwarts Legacy. The wizarding world in Victorian times where certainly not egalitarian when it came to race or sexual identity. And if they where, it should be explained why they are so different from the muggle world at that time.

That really depends in what you think ‘ownership’ is. You can download offline installers and patches. But you can not use the assets of the game to create and sell a new game. You also cannot just create and sell other games heavily based on those games. Or use the music freely in YouTube videos with enabled commercials, and so on.

You don’t fully own it.

On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.

I don’t think so. She said she wants to make them unable to continue with their business like they did before, with regulations. Just not outright censorship, but instead go fight their data harvesting, decapitating their business strategy.

In terms of analysis, I’m annoyed at Cohn here. This isn’t something we as individuals have control of. Her saying people individually have to make the difference is like saying you individually have to make the difference regarding climate change by making different choices, like recycling.

I understood her differently. I understood that she advocated into making it possible to leave platforms, saying that it currently isn’t. She said the people are the victims here and often don’t have a choice.

People cannot leave platforms because each platform is like an isle, and leaving it means losing connections to other people. It that sense they are locked-in, by social pressure.

This is is a natural monopoly which, gives social media companies so much power and prevents newcomers (like the fediverse) from joining the market.

Making the current social media companies less important, for instance via privacy laws, means people can connect and stay connected to other people via other means. It makes it easier to just leave twitter or meta, if they don’t like it there. Instead of being peer pressured into right extreme politics, because the algorithm decided that it gets more engagement when surrounding thrm with nazis.

She made it clear that replacing an dictator with another dictator that censors differently is bad, so she made a point against bluesky and for Mastodon and the fediverse.

(Sadly ehe wasn’t given the opportunity to fully complete her arguments though.)

Well… It cannot even search databases without errors.

LLMs just produce plausible replies in natural languages very quickly and this is useful in certain situations. Sometimes it helps humans getting started with a task, but as it is now, it cannot replace them. As much as the capital class want it, and sink our money into it.

I guess you are joking? And mean “side-loading” as in injecting custom code via LD_PRELOAD and not the strange definition phone makers use for describing ‘installing an app’.

You are seem to disagree with yourself… On the one hand you say I should ask them to make a case for their argument, but on the other I’m not allowed to ask for evidence.

But instead I need to provide a proof for… them not providing proof that their argument is not a non-sequitur? Did I get that right?

most people can get behind parental control. that is why bad actors are pushing for age verification everywhere nowadays.

Yes. And I would complain if there is a requirement to need third-party for-profit companies in order to verify peoples ages. Companies want data, and government want control. Both are bad in this case.

i think the issue many people have with that field is, that it enables bad actors to do things.

This needs to be proven. Currently it doesn’t do anything. But there is work to integrate it with flathub, that would allow administrators e.g. parents, to limit access to certain apps. Maybe later there could be some kind of web interface, where a site that offers adult content, would ask the browser, and the browser would look into the account data and then respond if the logged in person is an adult or not. No third-party required, just the person that locally set the date of birth on an local account.

all the while, it does not really do the thing it is supposed to do: if i trust my kid with sudo, the field can easily be altered. if i do not trust my kid with sudo, it cannot install anything either way.

Many apps can be installed without root privileges, for instance via flatpak. And in the future it might prevent certain apps for kids.

with your last paragraph i (and probably most people) agree. but we already have those tools, right?

IDK… I think there are more tools available on Windows for that then on Linux… But I my parents never deployed those and I also never had the need for such tools.

But I guess, very often DNS block lists can be used to block adult content… But knowing the internet and adblockers based on DNS alone, that will often lead to many false negatives and positives. So I would argue that we don’t really have anything like it right now for Linux Desktops.

Why do people so often invert the burden of proof?

If someone says “Picking your nose will cause brain-cancer in 40 years.” Then they have the burden to proof that. Nobody has the burden to disprove that.

They made the accusation that this is a step to make this age fields mandatory, and controlled by third-party age verification services, so they have the burden to proof that there is way to do that.

I find it highly unlikely, because most people using Linux systems at home have admin privileges. Which makes this whole point moot, since they can fake whatever they like to the software running on top.

Maybe this is the issue. I have no problems with parents setting the age of the children in their account in order limit their access to certain content.

And there clearly exists a use-case for that.

My main issue is when it comes to third-party age/identity verification services. Age or identity verification in the hands of private for-profit companies is bad.

I’d rather give parents the tools to set individual restrictions locally on their devices, then pushing for a global internet based age filter.