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Captain Beyond

@ beyond @linkage.ds8.zone

Posts
3
Comments
268
Joined
5 yr. ago

Caretaker of Sunhillow/DS8.ZONE. Free (Libre) Software enthusiast and promoter. Pronouns: any

Also /u/CaptainBeyondDS8 on reddit and CaptainBeyond on libera.chat.

AI Disclosure: No "generative AI tools" are used to produce any work attributed to "Captain Beyond of Sunhillow" (here or elsewhere).

  • Germany's Merz calls for real names on the internet

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  • conspiracy theory time: "AI" is a psyop designed to manufacture consent for unpopular internet regulations such as this one. We used to take anonymity and privacy for granted and now every other website demands you to "prove you are human" (my instance is unfortunately no exception... its a necessary evil).

  • Android will become a locked-down platform in 194 day

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  • The thing is, there already is a flow to enable "unknown sources" with the appropriate scare messages. So whatever "advanced flow" they're going to come up with is going to be more involved than that.

    My guess would be something similar to the bootloader unlock flow, where it resets the device and sets it to some "unsafe" state similar to a rooted/unlocked device which banking apps etc. can detect and refuse to work with.

  • Android will become a locked-down platform in 194 day

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  • I would say there is a difference between constructive criticism and an "attack" and although the privsec article does bring up valid points I would still regard it as the latter (despite their claims of objectivity), because they ultimately conclude that its premise is inherently flawed regardless of implementation details. They claim

    This article aims to be purely technical. It is not an attack on F-Droid or their mission.

    Yet while the authors claim to be "objective and technical" its not hard to notice all the "attacks on F-Droid's mission" in this article, from the reference to F-Droid's "ridiculous inclusion policy" to all the dismissive references to "ideology." The message is clear, that F-Droid's "mission" is Stupid and Ideological and the problems F-Droid aims to solve are not real. Thus, their suggested "alternatives" are just regular app stores that don't enforce any of the guarantees that F-Droid does (namely, that the app corresponds to its source code and does not include proprietary components), because those guarantees aren't worth anything to the "Objective and Technical" people of privsec - you are Stupid and Ideological if you care about software freedom. In fact, Accrescent even says they allow proprietary software because free software "is not inherently more secure or private" - which is technically true, but very misleading, because free software never has claimed to be "more secure" - it has only ever offered the four freedoms, which as a user I feel entitled to on my own devices, so I only install apps that give me these four freedoms. Far from being "objective and non-ideological" the position of Privsec, Accrescent, and their advocates is that users neither deserve, need, or should want software freedom, as such I would characterize these organizations as hostile to the free software movement even if some of their points are factual.

    I will add I am not entirely uncritical of F-Droid either, but my criticisms are more that they aren't strict enough and should be building as much from source as possible instead of relying on prebuilt Maven dependencies as much as they do. I would also say although as a user I think F-Droid's inclusion policy is a good thing and not "ridiculous" I agree it does put some amount of burden on developers who I imagine develop for the Google world first and the FOSS world second. It might be a good idea for F-Droid maintainers to take a more active role in, well, maintaining these apps instead of pushing the extra work onto the developers (this is typical in the GNU/Linux world, in which distro maintainers take up all the work to package upstreams, but F-Droid sometimes tries to cosplay as an "app store" despite it being a fundamentally different model).

    aside from a bizarre claim that F-Droid supporting multiple repositories is a Bad Thing because it interferes with, and I quote, "UserManager which can be used to prevent a user from installing third-party apps" - what does this have to do with privacy? I think this also speaks to a deeper conflict between security people and free software people, that being uncritical worship of "security models" even when they harm the user. Accrescent offers more or less the same justification for why it locks the user into their own store/repository, and I think it is subtly dangerous to suggest this is an "alternative" to F-Droid because it has very different values.

    According to one of the writers of that article,

    Any better ideas for it are welcome.

    Just allow devs to upload their own build with their own keys like Accrescent. It's not like the whole "audit" system is meaningful anyways.

    Of course, characterizing it as an "audit system" is missing the point entirely, but I imagine he knows that. Reducing the four freedoms down to "you can look at the source code and audit it" to then follow it up with "you can't/aren't going to audit every app you download so why bother with FOSS anyway" is a favorite rhetorical tactic.

  • A list of open source games

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  • Benefit of AI?

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  • I feel like listing copyright infringement next to actual harms is sort of an "arson, murder, and jaywalking" moment.

    But yes, I wouldn't mind banning discussion of this nonsense as well.

  • Not good for business

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  • You wouldn't download a car

  • Closed apps catfishing as FOSS via Google's AI results?

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  • Hallucinations, but also not helped by the fact that people (knowingly or not) promote proprietary garbage in FOSS communities. I remember the "reddit answers" feature when I tried it out frequently suggested proprietary crap in "list of best FOSS" type topics.

  • Which one are you?

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  • Anyone with an Android device is level 1 by default.

    I guess being in this community puts me at least at level 3 by definition. I contributed a package to GNU Guix but I'm not quite a "maintainer" or even a regular contributor to it yet. Maybe I can claim level 5 just by virtue of having contributed to an "advanced" distro.

    In "the real world" my mild-mannered alter ego would be level 4 because I use GNU/Linux at my day job.

  • Why there’s no European Google?

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  • I always had the impression that the free software idea had a stronger presence in Europe (and, generally, non-Anglo areas) and have generally chalked that up to the fact that the ambiguity of free (as in freedom)/free (as in beer) largely does not exist outside of English. Note that "open" is every bit as ambiguous as "free" here - i've had way too many arguments with people who thought "open" just means you can look at the source code (imagine thinking that a store was "open" just because you can look through the window and see products).

    However IMO the author goes a bit too far in presenting free software seemingly as some sort of uniquely European concept - he seems to suggest that the creation of Linux came about entirely out of thin air, and almost reads to me like Linus Torvalds originated the idea of copyleft - with no mention whatsoever of the American GNU project upon whose shoulders he stands. Allegedly he was inspired by a talk Richard Stallman gave at his university in 1990.

    https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch09.html

    Edit: Git also did not come out of thin air, Linux developers were using a proprietary (American) VCS in the beginning, under a gratis license specifically granted for Linux development. The Australian developer Andrew Tridgell is arguably the person most responsible for inciting the development of git, as the proprietary VCS developer withdrew the gratis licenses once he developed a free tool which could interoperate with the proprietary servers.

    https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/mcvoy.html

    (That proprietary tool is now licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, but as far as I know no one uses it anymore)

  • LLM/"AI" Policies | Jellyfin

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  • A curated list of awesome FOSS games

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  • CC non-commercial is not a free license. FSF lists it under documentation licenses because it doesn't recommend any CC license for software but the concerns are still valid.

    Note that selling copies of free software is explicitly encouraged; free refers to freedom (specifically the "four freedoms") and not to price. Commercial usage restrictions conflict with freedom zero (although it's unclear how this applies in the case of a game) and commercial distribution restrictions conflict with freedoms two and three.

  • Lawsuit claims Meta can see WhatsApp chats in breach of privacy

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  • Being proprietary is enough of a reason to refuse it. On top of that, being owned by Facebook is another good reason.

    With proprietary software the developer is in control, and in this case the developer is known evil.

  • Which software license for research/academic work?

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  • Ultimately it's your work so it's up to you how you want to release it. BSD/MIT aren't really any more or less free than the GPL because they still guarantee the four freedoms. The GPL just prevents downstream projects from denying those four freedoms further down stream, which is seen as important in the free software movement, but it doesn't have to be to you.

    One thing to keep in mind with these permissive or "pushover" type licenses although they are free software licenses, normalizing them means that the proprietary software industry ultimately gets to choose what is allowed to be released as free software. There is a warning that "business friendly" free software licensing does not ultimately mean business will be friendly back, especially in an age where there is increasing concern over proprietary software companies taking advantage without either giving back nor funding upstream projects.

  • What do you think of loss32?

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  • I would say not running Windows is itself a practical benefit. I would also say the four freedoms constitute a very practical benefit (even if the software you're running on top of the OS is proprietary).

  • Malicious GPC messages

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  • I think it's even worse than that. I imagine the point is to mislead people into believing that privacy laws mandate obnoxious banners in order to get them to oppose said laws.

  • PSA: Nova Launcher added Facebook and Google Ads tracking

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  • FOSS bros stay winning

  • App for sharing my phone screen on tv through androidtv?

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  • App Nora - Is it safe and private?

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  • This is a web wrapper for several proprietary social apps. It is effectively a browser locked into a pre-approved set of URLs. Just use a real browser.

  • Removed

    What's up with FUTO?

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  • I do not believe FUTO's campaign to redefine open source has had a positive effect on the open source movement, given all the confusion it has caused. Maybe its "ownership" of Immich has had a positive effect on Immich, but I wouldn't know.

  • Open Source @lemmy.ml
    Captain Beyond @linkage.ds8.zone

    Drew DeVault: So you want to compete with or replace open source

    drewdevault.com /2024/07/16/2024-07-16-So-you-want-to-compete-with-FOSS.html
  • Open Source @lemmy.ml
    Captain Beyond @linkage.ds8.zone

    Write Free Software: A comprehensive educational resource for the Free Software movement

    writefreesoftware.org /blog/introducing-writefreesoftware.org/
  • Libre Software @lemmy.ml
    Captain Beyond @linkage.ds8.zone

    Write Free Software: A comprehensive educational resource for the Free Software movement

    writefreesoftware.org /blog/introducing-writefreesoftware.org/