Giving permission by saying yes to a “would you mind” question is the hill I die on. Usually I say “I would not mind” but if I’m feeling frisky I’ll say no and watch their brain melt.

Not all FOSS projects need to be profitable to survive. IOW if a project cannot survive without being profitable and it cannot be profitable long-term, then it cannot survive long-term.

I just replied to the other person’s comment.

I don’t. Could you elaborate?

While Linux itself isn’t proprietary, it supports loading proprietary firmware/microcode blobs and running on proprietary hardware. Thus, part of the Linux hardware/software stack is proprietary.

I’m surprised that other people are surprised that for-profit companies constantly try to increase their profits; such companies only contribute to FOSS when that’s more profitable than the alternative. The Linux kernel, AMDGPU, Steam, etc only exist because some part of the software/hardware stack is proprietary (which becomes a more attractive product as the FOSS portion of the stack improves).

I’m definitely not justifying the “rug-pulling”, but people need to stop supporting projects with no potential for long-term profitability unless those projects can survive without any support from for-profit companies. Anything else is destined to fail.

Maybe I’m Jia Tan 😉

It’s a nightmare to search for anything about GUID Partition Tables (GPT) now.

I’d love yearly Debian releases instead of just every 2 years.

My biggest concern is that everyone will eventually be forced by societal and institutional expectations; for now people can easily choose not to wear them, but if/when your employer requires it for work or if/when the only way to talk to your friends is by using it, then you won’t have much of a choice.

For example, Zoom has very shady ties with the Chinese government (and several reports say that they’ve used it to surveil and censor people), yet many schools and workplaces required it (and many still do now). You could refuse to install/use it, but then you’d lose your job or fail your classes. It’s a similar story for TikTok, Discord, and Facebook before that.

Free (As in beer and speech!)

Do you live in a utopia where you get as much beer as you want without having to pay for it, or do you live in a dystopia where you have to pay to be able to speak your mind and only in limited quantities?

Thank you for interjecting.

The data block would be modified but the signature of that block can’t be recomputed without the key used to sign it

Isn’t that also true of an encrypted checksum, though? For some plaintext block q there is a checksum r, but the attacker can only see and modify the encrypted q (Q) and encrypted r (R). How any change to Q would modify q (and R to r) can’t be known without knowing the encryption key, but the attacker would need to know that in order to keep q and r consistent.

I’m not a cryptographer (so maybe this is wrong), but my understanding is that although it’s possible to modify the cipher text, how those changes modify the plaintext are very difficult (or impossible) to predict. That can still be an attack vector if the attacker knows the structure of the plaintext (or just want to break something), but since the checksum is also encrypted, the chances that both the original file and checksum could be kept consistent after cipher text modification is basically zero.

In exchange, FF uses Google search by default. So they’re also getting direct value from the deal.

The classic gonewild is a bit sexist, though. They say it’s for porn of all sexes, but male posts get buried. It’s fine to be female-only, but then just say that.

I vaguely remember the advice actually being to leave it running but disconnect it from the internet. Although maybe hard disconnect the backups if you can.

The real problem is the government not protecting consumers from such predatory business practices. It’s almost certainly not legal, and if it is then it shouldn’t be. After 3-4 companies are absolutely destroyed, companies will stop doing it.

…Because no one else wants to write my documentation.

There was a thread about that on c/selfhosted a few weeks ago. Created by a particular wild-cat-inspired sysadmin, I might add.

But on a more serious note, the interactions between a sysadmin and their servers (that they have enough responsibility for to be able to name) are much more intimate than the interactions between a dev and their variables. The server names also exist in a much larger namespace, so they need to be more unique.