Arthur Besse @ cypherpunks @lemmy.ml

cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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3 yr. ago

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Like one of the bluest.

However with the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party having a majority (by a single seat) in the Senate, this bill will obviously not pass, and if it did, obviously the governor (Tim Walz) would not sign it.

This is just trolling by some deeply unserious politicians.

Tuta's product is snake oil.

A cryptosystem is incoherent if its implementation is distributed by the same entity which it purports to secure against.

If you don't care about their (nonstandard, incompatible, and snake oil) end-to-end encryption feature and just want a freemium email provider which (purports to) protect your privacy in other ways, the fact that their flagship feature is snake oil should still be a red flag.

Clickbait. The VP Engineering for Ubuntu made a post that he was looking into using the Rust utils for Ubuntu and has been daily driving them and encouraged others to try

It’s by no means certain this will be done.

Here is that post. It isn't certain to happen, but he doesn't only say that he is daily driving them. He says his goal is to make them the default in 25.10:

My immediate goal is to make uutils’ coreutils implementation the default in Ubuntu 25.10, and subsequently in our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, if the conditions are right.

yep. (see my other comment in this thread)

The three currently-maintained engines which (at their feature intersection) effectively define what "the web" is today are Mozilla's Gecko, Apple's WebKit, and Google's Blink.

The latter two are both descended from KHTML, which came from the Konquerer browser which was first released as part of KDE 2.0 in 2000, and thus both are LGPL licensed.

After having their own proprietary engine for over two decades, Microsoft stopped developing it and switched to Google's fork of Apple's fork of KDE's free software web engine.

Probably Windows will replace its kernel with Linux eventually too, for better or worse :)

How else are Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi and co getting away with building proprietary layers on top of a copyleft dependency?

They're allowed to because the LGPL (unlike the normal GPL) is a weak copyleft license.

BSD tells me the team probably wants Ladybird to become not just a standalone browser but also a new competing base for others to build a browser on top of

it's about the ladybird browser. i edited my comment to add details.

with mandatory male pronouns for users in the documentation.

(and no politics allowed!)

subtitles “fixed” in them without separate SRT file

can you turn them on and off? meaning, is there a text track embedded in the video file, or is the text actually rendered into each frame?

if the former, you can easily extract them into an SRT file (or another format) using ffmpeg: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/ExtractSubtitles

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-25/a-global-review-of-public-transit-seat-cover-designs

it was an unfortunate choice to make the video thumbnail include the headline the video refutes, without any indication that it is being refuted, given that presumably far more people will see the thumbnail than will watch the video 🤦

I haven't read it yet but I've heard good things about The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It's more about early history than modern history, though.

You can buy it here or download it from libgen.

I’d like u to read nineteen eighty four and then write an argument how the practice’s of big brother have been used to indoctrinate you.

I'd like you to read Isaac Asimov's review of 1984, followed by Orwell's review of Mein Kampf, and finally the Orwell's list wikipedia article, and then to ponder what you yourself might have been indoctrinated by.

props to OP for still writing a first-person title for this post as if it is their own, despite it being a repost from at least a year ago 😂

(it is a good meme imo)

https://www.avclub.com/spotify-donald-trump-brunch is just one of the many reasons not to support spotify.

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify for lots more

I see, here is where Debian patched it out of Xpdf in 2002.

Also lmao @ the fact that Okular's ObeyDRM option still defaults to true today 😂

(Including in Debian, as their KDE maintainer declined to carry a patch to change it.)

I trust Debian developers far more

i definitely agree with you here :)

I think it was poppler or evince that decided they were going to enforce the no-copy-and-paste bit you can set on pdfs. Debian patched it out.

I found the notion of free software implementing PDF DRM rather hilarious, so I had to know more. First I found this help page which confirms that evince does have code which implements PDF restrictions, but it says that its override_restrictions option is enabled by default.

But I wondered: when did this get implemented? and was it ever enabled by default? So, I went digging, and here are the answers:

• in May 2005, the restrictions were implemented in evince in this commit
• in September 2005, the override_restrictions option was added in this commit, after discussion in bug #305818
• in December 2006 bug #382700 was opened, requesting that override_restrictions be enabled by default
• in January 2008, the default changed in this commit - but only after someone pointed out that the PDF spec does not in fact require the restrictions to be enforced. (The spec says "It is up to the implementors of PDF consumer applications to respect the intent of the document creator by restricting user access") 😂

I don't see any indication that Debian patched this out during the time when evince had it enabled by default, but I'm sure they would have eventually if GNOME hadn't come to their senses :)

I’ve seen Mozilla decide they were going to enforce their trademarks. They carved out special exceptions for various distros but that still would have meant you would have to rename Firefox if you were to fork Debian. Debian had none of it.

In my opinion both sides of the Debian–Mozilla trademark dispute were actually pretty reasonable and certainly grounded in good intentions. Fortunately they resolved it eventually, with Mozilla relaxing their restrictions in 2016 (while still reserving the right to enforce their trademark against derivatives which make modifications they find unreasonable):

Mozilla recognizes that patches applied to Iceweasel/Firefox don't impact the quality of the product.

Patches which should be reported upstream to improve the product always have been forward upstream by the Debian packagers. Mozilla agrees about specific patches to facilitate the support of Iceweasel on architecture supported by Debian or Debian-specific patches.

More generally, Mozilla trusts the Debian packagers to use their best judgment to achieve the same quality as the official Firefox binaries.

In case of derivatives of Debian, Firefox branding can be used as long as the patches applied are in the same category as described above.