jake_the_third

Perfect timing.

Yesterday, I urgently needed to run a piece of software on one of my systems. I had two versions of that software on hand: One for linux and one for windows.

The linux version flat-out refused to run. In my desperation, I installed wine and (to my surprise and the surprise of my coworkers) the windows version ran flawlessly.

Granted, the specifics surrounding my situation was far from typical, but I wouldn't be surprised that the majority of wine usage is also atypical in one way or another. Measuring wine's relevance by your own (or my own) use cases will likely only lead to inaccurate conclusions.

> The difference is that this is private companies doing it of their own volition and not by government demand.

Is this really a meaningful difference if the end result is the same?

I think that's his point.

Many years back, I bought an expensive android phone to discover that it did not support my native language. I have the necessary technical skills to add support for it, but because the phone was locked down (something enabled by permissive licenses but not the GPL), I couldn't fix the phone myself and ended up with a very expensive but useless brick.

Corporate interests rarely align completely with your own, and this small difference can be very damaging to your interests. The GPL, while not perfect, alleviates some of the damage caused by this misalignment by ensuring that users remain in a position to address it.

I also have difficulty believing anything bloomberg puts out after what had happened.

With all the independent investigations and the lack evidence found, I'm baffled that they still haven't admitted their mistake and issued a redaction.

Projecting political views onto browser users by default is a big one (new tab). Another is the limiting of user control by not allowing them to install third-party extensions. They also enable telemetry by default, and that not all telemetry can be disabled without going into about:config (i.e the settings in the preference page do not disable telemetry about telemetry itself; the browser can and will still send some telemetry even when telemetry is set as disabled).

I (and many others) use Firefox because we need a trustworthy browser, but issues like these take away from that trustworthiness.

I'd be glad to forget Mozilla's past if they'd show that they have learned from them. The problem is that they haven't. In some cases, they've doubled down on them.

I say this as someone who uses firefox on every device he can.

> I am getting increasingly annoyed by the fact that buying anything is becoming a minefield

Not only that, but they keep repopulating the minefield with new mines after you've spent considerable time clearing them. (Google, I really don't want you to use wifi to "improve" location precision and silently re-enabling the setting after a system update isn't going to change my mind.)

One way or another, this has to stop.

If that's really the reason, then I and (likely) the majority of other Linux users are completely fine with that.

Except no one is going to jail.

Unless the developer has enough foresight to account for, and sufficiently handle, every single instance where that brick wall would stop a legitimate false positive, I stand vehemently against them.

There are enough examples in the past that clearly demonstrate that developers are not benevolent or competent enough to have complete and final control over the software their users run. Sometimes this control even results in the exact opposite of what the developers originally intended, as was the case with firefox addons just a couple of days ago.

Ultimate control over software should always reside in the hands of the user.

> I wouldn't have expected Lenovo to mess with the ThinkPad brand like that. My image of ThinkPad has always been no-nonsense, get-stuff-done, power-user-favored.

I used to think the same until I got a T480. I was drawn to it because it was one of the few laptops that still has a direct hardware Function-key row (I use linux, so software Function Keys are not fun).

The keyboard, while mechanically excellent, is horribly designed if you depend on it to do your job: They "innovated" by moving the Home/End keys up to the Function row, they "innovated" by completely removing the context menu key from the keyboard and placing the PrintScreen key (of all things) in its place, and they also placed the Fn key at the bottom left corner of the keyboard where Ctrl is usually located (you can fortunately swap Ctrl/Fn with each other in the bios, so the last one isn't a issue if you're willing to live with mislabeled keys).

If you're a heavy keyboard user, I strongly suggest properly testing a laptop's keyboard before buying.

I though the issue was with getting your mails accepted. Even gmail has no problem sending email to a server that isn't properly set up as long as it is willing to accept.

Can you mention (or link to) situations where gmail refuses to send mails to another domain?

> De-centralized hosting of the packages (news to come soon!)

Is the index also going to be changeable? Will I be able to completely avoid your servers if I wanted to?

> although AppImage doesn't have a concept of automatic upgrades like Snap

And that's a good thing. If I wanted my system to force software updates on me, I'd use windows.

Users should always have the ability to control updates. Always.

This is literally also how cert signing works for tls. Unsurprisingly miss-issued certs have been far from common.

This model can work. It's just that microsoft is being sloppy.

While your at it Mozilla, stop spamming the new tab page with your podcasts.

It's all about decreasing the odds. US -> China -> CPU is longer than just US -> CPU.

I agree. I hope this ML meme becomes more popular if only for their entertainment factor.

And only in the EU...

Hey Google, how about supporting choice and competition in the rest of the world?

This is really good news. Hopefully a more well-developed and thorough reference will allow for a GCC rust frontend to be developed.

It can also be implemented purely on the client side: store the counter in the browser, increment on each visit, and prompt the user after N visits.

This way, no information about the client is sent to the server at all.

Perhaps, but then following the same line of logic would make all hardware vendors equally suspect. All hardware vendors will eventually comply if "asked" by their government (including US, remember prism?). The only difference is the formalities followed.

I plan to continue using huawei as long as their pricing remains competitive or real hard evidence of foulplay is made public. Expecting people to single out a single vendor just because the a government with a history of lying said so is just silly.

> multiple intelligence agencies investigating them and stating that their hardware shouldn't be used, practically being an arm of the Chinese military intelligence

Has anyone come forward with /any/ hard evidence that implicates huawei spying on their customers? This is my biggest gripe in this whole mess. The fact that no evidence has surfaced yet, despite how easily obtainable it would be for govs, indicates to me that that these accusations are motivated by geopolitics and have little to do with whether huawei customers are being spied upon or not.

As for disingenuity, I think that hurtling accusations at people without any sort of supporting evidence is what's disgustingly disingenuous.

> Why not require the watcher to enable a webcam & mic while watching videos containing children and create an algorithm to detect wanking?

Just how far are we willing to go to make our selves feel safer?! If you think that recording viewers is an acceptable and proportional solution to this issue, then your sicker than the creeps who get off videos of children.

I sincerely hope you're joking.

> I would start by closing all the accounts that made creep comments on children's videos, or showed a pattern of viewing videos that are obviously intended for that audience, and banning them from creating other accounts

While banning accounts that post multiple comments with questionable timestamps may be a somewhat reasonable way to proceed, just banning people based on the pattern of viewing they exhibit will lead to an unacceptably-large percentage of false positives. Just think back how many times you're feed got filled up with videos of a certain topic because youtube misclassified you somehow. The issue is further exasperated when the same account is used by multiple people (a family computer in some living room, an adults phone used as a pacifier, and other situations in which viewing patterns get muddled).

Just permanently banning people on patterns alone is a very bad idea.

>(hard to enforce, but at least they can hold that in their pocket if one of these creeps shows up on their radar again), and then forwarding their information to law enforcement. Lots, or almost all probably, of those accounts can be linked to a real person (either by the username or their IP). If police knock on some doors a lot of these guys are going to be too stupid to lawyer up and will probably confess to much worse things or agree to hand their laptop over for inspection after a couple of questions.

The thing is, what they're doing, while sickening, is not illegal. I strongly doubt law enforcement would be interested in getting flooded with reports of non-crimes that have a high false positive rate. I also doubt people will take kindly to being misreported to the police.

I personally believe that the issue of people creeping off videos can't be addressed without causing unacceptable (and sometimes significant) collateral damage to others. I think the damage done from banning comments on videos of children will far outweigh the damage caused by those comments themselves.

People should evaluate this issue rationally and not overreact.

Just how would you solve this if you were in their position?

I think you're making a mistake. The primary intention behind warrant canaries isn't to shield you from legal retaliation, but to make it very hard to /legally/ force you to lie directly or by omission.

This is apparently github's doing, and not the people behind faceswap: https://github.com/deepfakes/faceswap/issues/392

Github has an infamous history with imposing their feelings on projects they don't like.

Does it include the fix for apt's recent mirror redirect vulnerability? If not, any update to a fresh system would be trivially susceptible to a MITM attack if redirects aren't disabled. This includes docker images as well: https://justi.cz/security/2019/01/22/apt-rce.html

Canonical really should enable https as an additional layer of protection. This isn't the first time a bug in apt's authentication was found and it's unlikely that this bug will be the last.