This article was written in the sense of bashing gnome but yet some points seem to be valid. It explains the history of gtk 1 to 4 and the influence of gnome in gtk. I’m not saying gnome is bad here, instead I find this an interesting to read and I’m sharing it.
Are you curious about Mastodon? Mammoth, the Google-funded app, could be the app that will use all of you to destroy the Fediverse*
Dear friends of decentralization, welcome to the end of the world!
One of the most serious limitations of Mastodon (not to mention other obscene software, such as the cumbersome Friendica or the toy Misskey) is that... it sucks!
No it's not true, it doesn't suck, in fact it has improved the ergonomics a lot, but compared to commercial social networks it still seems to be several years behind.
At the moment only Bluesky seems to do worse, but in that case we are actually talking about a dead fetus kept artificially alive by American journalists, so it's a bit out of competition...
** Did you want to know why I titled it “funded by Google”?*
The app is definitely well made and has some interesting new features.
The updated app will introduce a number of features designed to appeal to former X users, including personalized suggestions of accounts to follow, to help you rebuild your network on Mastodon, as well as curated “smart lists” that help you find interesting conversations that take place on Mastodon.…
Mammoth will also integrate with the editorial staff of Flipboard, the social magazine app for curating news on topics from across the web through accounts such as News , Tech , Culture and Science. And it is a partner with Newsmast , another curator of news and communities on Mastodon, as well as Press.coop, which imports feeds from popular news websites into Mastodon. These integrations allow Mammoth 2 to create a number of other “smart lists,” including those for News, World News, Business, Tech, Environment, and Nature.
In short, to use Mastodon more easily, users will give up the most important aspect offered by Mastodon: decentralization!
That's how: following other people's lists, integrating rubbish like Newsmast (one of the projects most oriented towards the Anglospheric centralization of news which is starting to have some singers even in the Italian Fediverse), everything we always wanted to avoid by migrating from Twitter to Mastodon!
I won't hide from you that seeing Mammoth become so popular in some way in the last few days is truly disheartening: a campaign of a few thousand dollars is enough to infest the entire Fediverse with the editorials of a small US company.
By the way, many of Mammoth's features had already been implemented by IceCubes . Not to mention, IceCubes has always been free and open source!
Mammoth has also become open source. But when you launch it, the first thing it does (how horrible!) is make you automatically follow their account (I got visual messages on the new features screen, but I wasn't able to stop the following on that screen) and they a very shitty icon similar to that of Threads.
Most concerning though is their SmartLists feature: send your handle to their official moth.social instance, which uses a Mastodon fork that serves the “Smart Lists” feature. One can reasonably see how this undermines decentralization…
In the photo, Hänsel and Gretel appreciating the ergonomics of the apps financed by BigTech
A final bitter consideration? It's not true that we always want to ruin the beautiful things we have. But unfortunately it is true that we always have this overwhelming desire to help anyone who wants to ruin what we have. As long as he is rich, beautiful and powerful…
I don’t agree with all of your conclusions here, but I think it is important to note another problem:
Mammoth’s AGPL 3.0 license is currently incompatible with Apple’s AppStore because Apple imposes restrictions which are explicitly forbidden by GPLv3 (specifically, the paragraphs in the license about “installation information”).
So, while the source code is released under this license, the binaries that Mammoth distributes via Apple are not under a free software license at all. Recipients of the source code are allowed to distribute it (and their own modified versions) under GPLv3 only, which means not on Apple’s App Store (which is the only place most iOS users get software).
This may be an oversight, or may be intentional. Other projects like Signal messenger have for years been using the GPLv3-iOS incompatibility to appear to be free software while actually maintaining a monopoly on the right to distribute binaries to iPhone users.
See NextCloud’s COPYING.iOS for an example of how to release an iOS app under GPLv3 in a way that does not restrict that right to a single entity.
Returns a if a is truthy and then checks if b is truthy. If neither are truthy, it returns b.
Not quite. If a is not truthy, then the expression a or b will always return b.
So, there is never any reason to check the truthiness of b.
you can paste this in your repl to confirm it does not.class C: def __repr__(self): return [k for k, v in globals().items() if v is self][0] def __bool__(self): print(f"{self}.__bool__() was called") return False a, b = C(), C() print(f"result: {a or b}")::: spoiler output a.__bool__() was called result: b
just fyi, this isn’t about an NFT but rather about an original, physical, drawing from 1993!
and, believe it or not, this image wasn’t even drawn using a computer… the creator (called a cartoonist in those days) literally physically drew it by hand using ink on paper (which was the style at the time)
could i ask your approximate age? and/or if you remember approximately what year you first saw this comic?
i would guess that someone who doesn’t find this comic funny, not to mention historically important, must not be old enough to remember the time when most people hadn’t been online yet.
if you’re curious, read the two links in this post. i think they answer your question.
Excuse my ignorance but is this in fact a well known meme, that I somehow never noticed in all those years on reddit?
Is this in fact a well known meme? I’d say it was one of the very first internet memes; it was a meme before the word “meme” was used to refer to images on the internet. It was a popular image in print which many people literally saw before (and/or shortly after) they first got online.
Here is the New York Times article (I used their onion service to avoid their paywall):
Cartoon Captures Spirit of the InternetBy Glenn Fleishman Dec. 14, 2000 BY now, it’s almost an old saying: ‘‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.’’ You can count on seeing it at the start of plenty of articles on Internet privacy and anonymity. The sentence, which originated as a caption to a New Yorker cartoon, has slipped into the public consciousness, leaving its source behind. So it’s just as accurate to say that on the Internet, nobody knows that you coined a phrase. That particular sentence was originated by Peter Steiner, a regular contributor to the magazine since 1980. He wrote it as the caption for his July 1993 single-panel cartoon showing a dog sitting at a computer talking to another dog. ‘‘I feel a little like the person (whoever it is) who invented the smiley face,’’ Mr. Steiner wrote via e-mail. The cartoon didn’t receive much attention at the time, but interest has grown over the last seven years, and the saying has become practically an industry of its own. The panel is the most reproduced cartoon from The New Yorker, according to Robert Mankoff, the magazine’s cartoon editor and the president of the Cartoon Bank, an affiliated division that handles reprints, licensing and merchandising of New Yorker art. Mr. Mankoff said the cartoon had been reprinted hundreds of times. It is also available as a framed print and as a T-shirt via the Cartoon Bank’s Web site. The cartoon appears in many books about technology and regularly shows up in magazines and newspapers. In mid-November, it was reprinted in eCompany Now, a magazine, and in The Seattle Times. But bad scans of the original also appear on hundreds of Web sites that have not paid to reproduce it or asked permission to post it. The Cartoon Bank charges range from less than $100 for using the cartoon in a business presentation to several hundred dollars or more for Web and print use, depending on the site traffic, print run and type of publication. The caption appears in its original and modified forms (‘‘nobody’’ is often rendered as ‘‘no one’’) on thousands of Web and print pages. The Google.com search engine produces more than 103,000 potential matches. The saying is often cited as ‘‘that old phrase’’ or ‘‘the adage.’’ The sentence has made its way into programming code: in the first three editions of ‘‘Just Java 1.1 & Beyond,’’ Peter van der Linden used the example of a server trying to detect whether a user was a dog (www.wol.pace.edu/bergin /InternetProgramming.html). Essays borrow the caption for their titles. Search the news archives of any publication, and there will probably be at least one reference. It even inspired the play ‘‘Nobody Knows I’m a Dog,’’ by Alan David Perkins, which is about chat room participants and has had a dozen North American productions. When told in a telephone interview that the phrase had turned up in a play, Mr. Steiner said, ‘‘It’s shocking to me to hear that, but still I can’t quite fathom that it’s that widely known and recognized.’’ Mr. Steiner said no publication had ever interviewed him before about the panel. ‘‘People treat cartoons as though they come from somewhere out in space,’’ he said. ‘‘Whenever you see articles or books, they name the author. When you see a cartoon, you see the place it appeared in.’’ Readers may see the signature in the cartoon but remember and cite only the publication. Although Mr. Steiner knew about the Internet and had an account at an online service when he created the cartoon, he wasn’t particularly focused on the Net. ‘‘I did the drawing of these dogs at the computer like one of those make-up-a-caption contests,’’ he said. ‘‘There wasn’t any profound tapping into the zeitgeist. I guess, though, when you tap into the zeitgeist you don’t necessarily know you’re doing it.’’ In a 1995 interview with PBS for the program ‘‘Understanding the Internet,’’ Rick Adams, one of the developers of Arpanet, the Web’s precursor, said, ‘‘The fact that the New Yorker could use the word Internet as the punch line in a cartoon was to me the defining popularization of the Internet.’’ In a 1996 interview in OnTheInternet (a Web publication that has ceased publishing), Jon Postel, an Arpanet pioneer, said the cartoon signaled to him that the print media didn’t have to define the Internet every time it was used. (Mr. Postel died in 1998.) Adam Clayton Powell III, vice president for technology and programs at the Freedom Forum, quoted the cartoon when he was talking about the potential for online voting during a talk at Poptech 2000: Being Human in the Digital Age, a conference in late October in Camden, Me. In an e-mail interview, Mr. Powell said, ‘‘The cartoon was the perfect one-line summary printed at just the right moment.’’ Mr. Powell said it precisely described the Net’s ambiguity. ‘‘Assuming literacy in written English,’’ he said, ‘‘anyone in the world can get a Hotmail account and write to the president of M.I.T. – or the president of the U.S. – and who is to know he is really an 11-year-old in Mali?’’ Mr. Steiner’s own obscurity hasn’t cost him, however. He and the magazine have split more than $100,000 in fees paid for reprinting and otherwise licensing the cartoon, with more than half going to Mr. Steiner, according to Mr. Mankoff, the cartoon editor. ‘‘It’s become an icon,’’ Mr. Mankoff said. ‘‘It provokes a response. It’s chunked in memory.’’ The original of the cartoon was sold before it became popular for a sum so small that he doesn’t remember it, Mr. Steiner said. William H. Gates’s publisher came calling to use the panel in Mr. Gates’s 1995 book, ‘‘The Road Ahead.’’ At the time, Mr. Steiner said, The New Yorker ‘‘was not great at negotiating these fees.’’ A magazine staff member and Mr. Gates’s representative agreed on a fee of $200, Mr. Steiner said. He told the staff member that the $200 would be paid by ‘‘the richest man in the world, who’s going to publish a book that’s going to sell a million copies,’’ he said, but she answered, ‘‘That’s what we charge for a first book.’’ When Mr. Steiner was asked if people would still be citing his cartoon in 50 years, he replied, ‘‘Isn’t that horrifying – to think that’s the thing I’ll be remembered for?’’ A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 14, 2000, Section G, Page 8 of the National edition with the headline: Cartoon Captures Spirit of the Internet.
On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat....
I have mixed feelings about this article. It gets some stuff right, but also some stuff wrong and it misses some important details.
I don’t think Signal has actually received money from OTF (Radio Free Asia) since 2015 or so; if it needed any today it would likely get it from one of the less transparent US government internet freedom funding vehicles. There is no indication they are “facing collapse” beyond a blog post talking about their expenses and soliciting donations.
This article mentions “over a billion” people repeatedly, but doesn’t explain that number is actually referring to WhatsApp (which uses the encryption protocol developed by Signal). Signal says they have 40 million active users.
It doesn’t mention that Brian Acton (billionaire WhatsApp founder) gave them a $50M interest-free loan when he co-founded the Signal Foundation with Moxie in 2018, and became its “executive chairman” or whatever. That “loan” had increased to over $100M by the end of 2018, and is presumably much larger today.
It doesn’t mention that Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker worked at Google for over a decade, and co-founded a department there that worked alongside OTF on various internet freedom projects (and was later on the OTF advisory board herself)
it doesn’t mention the salient properties of Signal which actually make it particularly beneficial to US interests (keeping the communications of privacy-desiring people associated with their phone numbers while concentrating their metadata on Amazon servers)
Did you read my other comment which is linked to from the one you’re replying to?
The parts of this reply that are in italics are direct quotes from it.
First, we have to assume a worst case scenario, where Signal not only logs all IP addresses (despite what multiple court cases have shown us), but that they do it both secretly and intentionally in order to store that data. Your theory already requires serious collusion between that company and the government, with no whistleblowers.
No, you don’t need to assume that Signal does anything. As I said, Signal says that they don’t retain any of this metadata, and I think it is likely that Signal employees are sincere when they say that. But someone with the right access at Signal’s ISP (Amazon) and anybody who can coerce, compel, or otherwise compromise those people (or their computers) can log it without Signal’s cooperation or knowledge.
And if that was the case, they wouldn’t want Sealed Sender actually functioning. So we also have to buy into an additional conspiracy that they added it as a red herring. What does your theory say about this: did they know they could work around it, or is it secretly flawed?
I think sealed sender does what it says it does, which is let you send messages without explicitly telling the server who the message is from. But that doesn’t change the fact that you’re connecting to their servers from the same IP address to send and receive and you need to identify yourself (with your phone number) to receive, so, the identity of the sender can be easily inferred if the server (or its operator) wants to correlate the information available to it.
Sealed sender only makes sense if the server is honest and doesn’t link the ‘anonymous’ sender with the non-anonymous receiver activities coming from the same IP address. But, if the server is honest, then a “no logging” policy would accomplish the same thing. Sealed sender is performative cryptography.
You can use words like “conspiracy” to dismiss the point, but tell me: if you’re completely confident that the adversaries you want to protect against are unable to compromise the server infrastructure, why would you need e2e encryption at all?
How about the ease of which somebody could use Signal with a VPN? That defeats half of your metadata complaints.
A VPN hides your actual IP address from the server, but that is not the kind of metadata I’m talking about. I’m talking about who (which phone numbers, since that is Signal’s identifier) is talking to who, and when. A VPN only helps with this problem when there are other Signal users coming from the same VPN IP address at the same time as you, and then it only helps a little. It could help if you used a VPN for sending but not receiving, or vice-versa, or used different VPNs for each, but, Signal doesn’t do that (and if they did they’d probably run the ‘different’ VPNs themselves on cloud services anyway).
But if you were being fair, you would have to level the same accusation against every other messaging app, and the only ones I can think of have worse encryption (Session) or explicitly have servers under unilateral control (SimpleX) or fare far worse (Matrix, Threema, Wire, etc).
It’s ironic that the five things you picked actually all have the same major advantage over Signal (and WhatsApp, and Telegram): those five actually all are usable without a phone number! They each have their own problems, but at least it’s possible to use them all without a phone number!
What do you mean about SimpleX having servers under unilateral control? The software comes with several of the author’s servers baked in which you use by default, but I think it is easy to use a different one or to run your own. And a cool thing about SimpleX is that each direction of a conversation is on a different server, so within a single conversation you are often not sending and receiving from the same server, which is the opposite of the metadata centralization of Signal’s design. (Of course, when all of the servers involved are run by a single entity, which I think is probably the case for most SimpleX users today, that entity can still observe who is talking to who. But the protocol is explicitly designed to decentralize metadata instead of to centralize it. And it doesn’t use phone numbers, much less require them.)
it sounds like you’re formulating a conspiracy that implicates Signal themselves, claiming you believe they are being technically correct.
No, again, I think Signal employees sincerely believe that nobody is logging Signal metadata.
If I’m misreading your argument, please correct me. But there is a fine line between Just Asking Questions to promote a conspiracy theory, and just asking questions authentically, and it’s often hard to tell the difference.
There isn’t anything theoretical in what I’m saying, except for the implication that Signal’s financial backing might be related to its surveillance-friendly architecture.
You can use words like “conspiracy” to dismiss the point, but tell me: if you’re completely confident that the adversaries you want to protect against are unable to compromise the server infrastructure, why would you need e2e encryption at all?
Because I’m not 100% confident, like most people under a broad range of reasonable threat models.
Good answer. So, when analyzing the security properties of thing that purports to protect against a compromised server, shouldn’t we logically consider the case that the server is compromised? And how does Sealed Sender fare in that case? Do you not see how it is performative cryptography?
Precisely. I think the design is good, but it’s a single entity controlling basically all the servers, which means that not only can they effectively be considered a single server, but using your argument they can effectively be assumed to be collecting the exact same metadata
Why do you think the default configured servers are “basically all the servers”? The way SimpleX works, if you’re using one of the default servers, and I am not, and we add each other as contacts, you probably wouldn’t even notice. And then we’d be each sending and receiving to eachother using servers operated by different entities. But again, even if we are both using the same default server, this is not “the exact same metadata” as Signal because there are no phone numbers involved.
A diplomatic cable from 2009 published by WikiLeaks quotes Colin Roberts saying “We do not regret the removal of the population” and explains the plan to declare it a marine reserve (which they subsequently did) so that “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands”.
My preferred way is to create an encrypted disk image using LUKS, backed by a sparse file. Sparse means that, while you’ll still need to specify a size for the encrypted volume, it won’t actually use the space on the underlying disk until you use the space on the encrypted volume. You could even make the encrypted volume bigger than your physical disk (though of course you’d get an error if you tried to actually use that extra space).
There are a few ways to setup a LUKS container; if you want to learn how to do it manually, this howto i just found looks like a good overview of the steps (though I wouldn’t recommend doing its final Setup auto mount section).
These days, you can also create a LUKS volume on a sparse file entirely using a GUI such as the GNOME Disks program. Using it, just click the hamburger menu and select “New Disk Image” and then with your new disk image selected click the gears menu and “Format Partition” and there should be a checkbox for LUKS on that screen. If you leave “Erase” turned off (which is the default), then the backing file will be sparse.
One downside to the sparse disk image approach is that when you delete files from the encrypted volume you will not regain that space on the outer disk automatically. It is possible to, but requires work to do so which I won’t try to document here.
Another approach which doesn’t have that downside is to use eCryptfs instead of LUKS. It stores each encrypted file separately (with an encrypted name) and thus doesn’t hide the directory structure or file sizes - only directory and file names and file contents are encrypted. It also appears to have not been updated since 2016, but, it is still included in various distributions so it is also an option. You can read about how to use it (and other caveats about it) on the arch wiki.
tomb looks like a nice wrapper around LUKS but it doesn’t appear to support creating a sparse file, so, it will immediately use however much space you allocate to it.
(I think it doesn’t support a sparse backing file because I searched the word “sparse” on their github, and for the word “seek” (which is the dd argument for creating a sparse file) in the tomb bash script, and both searches yielded no results.)
I just got up from conversation with a couple of older black men, that I said “well I got to go back to work and start cracking the whip.” And it occurred to me then that it was probably a really insensitive stupid thing to say....
what if I, for example, had a job in Google and I liked Linux so much I install Ubuntu on my Chromebook, would that be illegal/send me to prison?? Or, if I had the job, would I be kicked?? I like Chromebooks because they are so smol and nice. But I don’t know if it’s legal to install a Linux distro on it. Thank you!!
I think most chromebooks allow you to disable their boot security? some even allow you to re-enable it with different keys so that you can have a different trust anchor instead of google.
Is there any future for the GTK-based Desktop Environments? (ludditus.com)
This article was written in the sense of bashing gnome but yet some points seem to be valid. It explains the history of gtk 1 to 4 and the influence of gnome in gtk. I’m not saying gnome is bad here, instead I find this an interesting to read and I’m sharing it.
[Announcement] Starting 1 January all of the posts that do not have a tag such as [Question], [Help], [Project], [Other], [Promoting] WILL be REMOVED.
Julian Assange Could Face Extradition to the U.S. by Early 2024 (theintercept.com)
Marine Le Pen to stand trial on EU embezzlement and fraud charges, along with 26 other members of her party (www.rfi.fr)
French PM addresses security, health, immigration during visit to crisis-hit Mayotte (news.yahoo.com)
Venezuelan and Guyanese Presidents agree to meeting (www.telesurenglish.net)
Would have been genius (startrek.website)
know the features of your language (lemmy.world)
I prefer to be the one who writes code (fed.dyne.org)
cross-posted from: fed.dyne.org/post/43780
yellow guy (feddit.de)
"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" comic sold for $175K, becoming the most expensive single-panel cartoon ever sold at auction (www.newser.com)
en.wikipedia.org/…/On_the_Internet,
"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" comic sold for $175K, becoming the most expensive single-panel cartoon ever sold at auction (www.newser.com)
en.wikipedia.org/…/On_the_Internet,
I'm sorry. (lemmy.world)
The man, the myth, the legend (startrek.website)
Signal Facing Collapse After CIA Cuts Funding (kitklarenberg.substack.com)
On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat....
Researchers predict that eventually all memes will be Trek. (startrek.website)
UK drops plans to hand Chagos Islands back to Mauritius (www.telegraph.co.uk)
en.wikipedia.org/…/Chagos_Archipelago_sovereignty…
Guayana Esequiba: Geo-Economics of an Occupation (www.telesurenglish.net)
Is there a tool to real-time encrypt folders?
I’m looking for a veracrypt/truecrypt equivalent but at the folder-level and dynamic sizing...
I wonder if you can roll back the miles on a starship? (lemmy.world)
Ah, Kirk, my old friend... (lemmy.world)
The Wreath of Khan (pxscdn.com)
looking at `listingType=All` with the new `sort=Scaled` on lemmy.ml (which upgraded yesterday to a 0.19 release candidate) you might be surprised at how vast the lemmyverse has become (lemmy.ml)
0.19 brings many improvements but “Adding a scaled sort, to boost smaller communities” is the one I’m most excited about....
This may seem kind of stupid but I am kind of stupid, is there a list somewhere of phrases that are stupid or insensitive racially or gender biased?
I just got up from conversation with a couple of older black men, that I said “well I got to go back to work and start cracking the whip.” And it occurred to me then that it was probably a really insensitive stupid thing to say....
Media Holocaust Revisionism After Canada’s Standing Ovation for an SS Vet (fair.org)
Sunday's Gaza Guests Linked to Military Industry, Pro-Israel Funding (fair.org)
Why though (lemmy.ml)
This is a PSA (startrek.website)
I have to post something to follow the RULE (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
US Border Patrol sending migrants to unofficial camps in California's desert, locals say (www.npr.org)
counting (lemmy.world)
would it be illegal to download Ubuntu on a Chromebook?
what if I, for example, had a job in Google and I liked Linux so much I install Ubuntu on my Chromebook, would that be illegal/send me to prison?? Or, if I had the job, would I be kicked?? I like Chromebooks because they are so smol and nice. But I don’t know if it’s legal to install a Linux distro on it. Thank you!!