Nat Tuck @nat@ferrus.net

WHY DO SO MANY COOL OPEN SOURCE WEB APPLICATIONS DEPEND ON DOCKER, HOLY SHIT LEARN HOW TO WRITE PROPER SETUP DOCUMENTATION

I refuse to run Docker containers inside of Linux Containers so my options are…
- Install manually and make upgrading a pain in the ass
- Don't use the app

As much as I would *love* to use it, the reliance on Docker for managing 100% of the stack is a *hard* no. Figuring out how the image has changed between releases would make manual maintenance absolute hell and I am unwilling to shoulder that burden.

Not everyone is *able* to use Docker and not everyone is *willing* to use Docker. By not supporting any other deployment method, you are preventing some individuals from using what could be *the* application they've spent years looking for.

Let the admin decide how to architect their own systems. They know their backend better than you do.

(reposted because jake wanted to boost)

@fribbledom I have three, dunno which is the most controversial, but let's go with this one:

Writing a program for an imaginary model user is stupid and produces inferior UX. If you don't have a real user at hand, write a program that you yourself would like to use.

proprietary (no source code included) s/w is like supermarket packaged goods without ingredients label. And you know how bad that would be.

It's not that everybody reads the list of ingredients, but that *anybody* could, & that organisations can randomly sample to confirm the list adds up.

We need this for software just as much as food:

- 20% evil, sends data to Google
- 38% screwed, displays adware based on that data
- 17% previous purchases shared with Amazon
- 26% audio history to Apple

Just published Google lawsuit evidence indicates that like always retained users' location data, even if disabled in user interface, to the extent that its own employees flashed LineageOS on their phones to avoid tracking. Full thread on https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1398353211220807682

#privacy #google

Imaginative fiction trains people to be aware that there *are* other ways to do things and other ways to be, that there is not just one civilization and it is good and it is the way we have to be. -- Ursula K. Le Guin

“Current trends in the automotive industry point to a future with you locked in a remote control car, your vendor holding the remote." https://puri.sm/posts/locked-in-a-remote-control-car/

SCI-HUB NEEDS YOUR HELP!

Do you have a few dozen gigabytes of free diskspace and a machine that can seed it via #bittorrent?

You can help save an unbelievable trough of scientific knowledge from disappearing behind the elites' paywalls!

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_mission_for_scihub_and_open_science_we_are/

https://phillm.net/torrent-health-frontend/seeds-needed-scimag.php

Spread the word and seed till you bleed – for the betterment of humanity!

I'm looking for a federated RSS reader with functions like commenting / liking.

Does something like that exist yet?

"I am resigning along with most other Freenode staff"

https://p.haavard.me/407

😬

Periodic reminder. If anyone wants insight into why the US is such a corrupt and generally screwed up country (it's my hyper-militarized homeland, so I feel justified in pointing this out), see this comprehensive explanation from Larry Lessig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJy8vTu66tE

Yup, this is a very solid position: https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2020/12/government-open-source/

> The power to target is the power to discriminate. By definition, targeted ads allow advertisers to reach some kinds of people while excluding others. A targeting system may be used to decide who gets to see job postings or loan offers just as easily as it is to advertise shoes.

Well said.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea

Republican North Dakota legislators have introduced SB2333, a bill that prohibits large tech companies from locking their users into a single app store or payment processor.

https://www.legis.nd.gov/assembly/67-2021/documents/21-1044-01000.pdf

While his has implications for Android and other large tech platforms, its most immediate and far-reaching effects with be on Apple, whose Ios platform uses lock-in to monopolize both apps and payments (and another domain, not mentioned in the bill: repairs).

1/

An article about legal interest in the EU on Right to Repair stuff: https://reasonstobecheerful.world/europe-guarantee-right-to-repair-ifixit/

Pressure in the right direction, though the biggest threat (at least in the US, don't know EU law here as well) to the right to repair is the use of *intellectual restriction laws* to obstruct repair / reverse engineering / jailbreaking.

Set copyright to 10 years

"So, there you have it. It is tinfoil-hattedness to raise these concerns. The one area in computer science where tinfoil-hattedness is of absolutely importance is cryptography; and the maintainer of the only Haskell entropy package dismisses these very valid concerns as tinfoil-hattedness."

https://leonmergen.com/on-the-state-of-cryptography-in-haskell-c272fb0b6478 (Medium)

Very good read, especially since I want to discuss crypto later!