Arthur Besse @ cypherpunks @lemmy.ml

cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

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4 yr. ago

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short answer: because nobody flagged that other one. (it is deleted now too.)

re: riseup, is it even possible to use their VPN without an invite code? (i don't think it is?)

in any case, riseup says clearly that their purpose is "to provide digital self-determination for social movements" - it is not intended for torrenting, even if it might work for it.

feel free to PM me if you want to discuss this further; i am deleting this post too. (at the time of deletion it has 8 upvotes and 33 downvotes, btw.)

This headline and article are focused on antidepressants, but the line which mentions them in the executive order which this reporting is based on is actually broader.

It also seems to attribute the authorship of the executive order to Kennedy, linking to it while saying that he "issued a statement", despite it not actually mentioning his name and it being phrased in the first person from the president (beginning with "By the authority vested in me as President" as is usual for an executive order).

The article says (emphasis mine):

The government, he said, would “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, [and] mood stabilizers.”

While the executive order says:

(iii) assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs;

Great article, BTW

I disagree, the headline is clickbaity and implies that there is some ongoing conflict. The fact that the Fedora flatpak package maintainer pushed an update marking it EOL, with "The Fedora Flatpak build of obs-studio may have limited functionality compared to other sources. Please do not report bugs to the OBS Studio project about this build." in the end-of-life metadata field the day before this article was written is not mentioned until the second-to-last sentence of it. (And the OBS maintainer has since said "For the moment, the EOL notice is sufficient enough to distance ourselves from the package that a full rebrand is not necessary at this time, as we would rather you focus efforts on the long-term goal and understand what that is.")

The article also doesn't answer lots of questions such as:

• Why is the official OBS flatpak using an EOL'd runtime?
• Why did Fedora bother to maintain both their own flatpak and an RPM package of OBS?
• What (and why) are the problems (or missing functionality) in the Fedora Flatpak, anyway? (there is some discussion of that here... but it's still not clear to me)
• What is the expected user experience going to be for users who have the Fedora flatpak installed, now that it is marked EOL? Will it be obvious to them that they can/should use the flathub version, or will the EOL'd package in the Fedora flatpak repo continue to "outweigh" it?

Note again that OBS's official flathub flatpak is also marked EOL currently, due to depending on an EOL runtime. Also, from the discussion here it is clear that simply removing the package (as the OBS dev actually requested) instead of marking it EOL (as they did) would leave current users continuing to use it and unwittingly missing all future updates. (I think that may also be the outcome of marking it EOL too? it seems like flatpak maybe needs to get some way to signal to users that they should uninstall an EOL package at update time, and/or inform them of a different package which replaces one they have installed.)

TLDR: this is all a mess, but, contrary to what the article might lead people to believe, the OBS devs and Fedora devs appear to be working together in good faith to do the best thing for their users. The legal threat (which was just in an issue comment, not sent formally by lawyers) was only made because Fedora was initially non-responsive, but they became responsive prior to this article being written.

While USAID definitely funds/funded many ridiculous things (such as this) they also provide much-needed food and medicine to a lot of people - for cynical politically-motivated soft-power reasons, but still. It seems very likely that abruptly cutting off those programs will cause some people to die. I really hope someone (the PRC seems likely) will step in and replace some of those programs!

i don't usually cross-post my comments but I think this one from a cross-post of this meme in programmerhumor is worth sharing here:

The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).

The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:

I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey

(there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog...)

The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).

The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:

I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey

(there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog...)

please put a link to the source in your post description!

(in this case, it's https://existentialcomics.com/comic/418 )

They have to know who the message needs to go to, granted. But they don’t have to know who the message comes from, hence why the sealed sender technique works. The recipient verifies the message via the keys that are exchanged if they have been communicating with that correspondent before or else it is a new message request.

So I don’t see how they can build social graphs if they don’t know who the sender if all messages are, they can only plot recipients which is not enough.

1. You need to identify yourself to receive your messages, and you send and receive messages from the same IP address, and there are typically not many if any other Signal users sharing the same IP address. So, the cryptography of "sealed sender" is just for show - the metadata privacy remains dependent on them keeping their promise not to correlate your receiving identity with the identities of the people you're sending to. If you assume that they'll keep that promise, then the sealed sender cryptography provides no benefit; if they don't keep the promise, sealed sender doesn't really help. They outsource the keeping of their promises to Amazon, btw (a major intelligence contractor).
2. Just in case sealed sender was actually making it inconvenient for the server to know who is talking to who... Signal silently falls back to "unsealed sender" messages if server returns 401 when trying to send "sealed sender" messages, which the server actually does sometimes. As the current lead dev of Signal-for-Android explains: "Sealed sender is not a guarantee, but rather a best-effort sort of thing" so "I don't think notifying the user of a unsealed send fallback is necessary".

Given the above, don't you think the fact that they've actually gone to the trouble of building sealed sender at all, which causes many people to espouse the belief you just did (that their cryptographic design renders them incapable of learning the social graph, not to mention learning which edges in the graph are most active, and when) puts them rather squarely in doth protest too much territory? 🤔

It’s on F-Droid if you load their repo.

It is not allowed in F-Droid's official repos because it is not open source; anyone can run their own F-Droid repo and distribute proprietary software from it.

Also it’s open source but I understand some people don’t like their license.

It is not open source; that is a term with an internationally recognized definition. Even FUTO themselves now acknowledge it is not.

there is a thread about the moderation of this thread here.

Thanks for editing, but I deleted your comment anyway because it was still just recommending something that is not open source.

fyi there is a thread here discussing the moderation of this thread.

i bet you're going to love to hate this wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochrome_painting 😂

because it’s stupid.

you were bamboozled

presumably you find value in some things that some other people think are stupid too; it's OK