JacobKfromIRC

I agree, I think.

I may have been too focused on the "false dichotomy" part and forgotten that you were talking about old Microsoft and not current Microsoft. I don't know enough about old Microsoft to say whether they were "evil" all along, so I won't comment on that part. I do agree with "don't hate the player, hate the game" in general though.

Why are we dependent on Google to enable MTE on the OS-side? If it's a hardware feature, why couldn't GrapheneOS enable it in GrapheneOS even if Google's OS wouldn't enable it?

Reality vs explicit evil is a false dichotomy.

Microsoft doesn't just choose not to release source code; they send takedown notices to projects that redistribute Microsoft's proprietary software (e.g. Ninjutsu OS). They also put clauses in the EULA for Windows to disallow reverse engineering and certain kinds of remote access (something related to if you change who has access too frequently).

Microsoft takes extra effort to prevent people from sharing or modifying Microsoft software, in order to make more money.

Even just knowing whether the car has a wireless connectivity device (i.e. modem or Wi-Fi chip) would be useful, since those were probably added at different times for different manufacturers.

Is there a good way to avoid programs like this in general?

Do you think Transluce is intentionally doing marketing on behalf of OpenAI or Anthropic? Or do you think Transluce just copied OpenAI's word choice?

Free licenses all allow requiring payment. A license that disallows charging for the software as a whole would be a nonfree license. An example of a license condition that does this is the "Commons Clause" [1]. See the FAQ question on that page which says "Is this “Open Source”?" (short answer: "No.").

If someone decides to charge businesses more than individuals, that is arguably discrimination based on fields of endeavor, but if the discrimination isn't written into the license, the software could still be free. Corporations are still free to use free software however they wish, but they can't force software repositories to choose to distribute software to them directly.

It's true that someone could set up a different software repository that offers largely the same software to corporations at no charge, so the proposal only works if companies would prefer to pay the fee rather than set up a different repository. It sounds like companies already pay to use an intermediary repository, if I'm correctly understanding what Artifactory is, so maybe the proposal wouldn't actually work.

If 99% of the public used a piece of software, there's a good chance people really would be forced to pay for it through taxes. This apparently already happens with some proprietary software (though I didn't look into it); see "Public Money, Public Code" [2]. Taxes are a different situation though.

Software freedom can't exist without free software. The better funded free software is, the more free software will be able to compete with proprietary software, and the more free the world will be, with regards to software freedom. The proposed system of charging corporations could conceivably be better even from the perspective of the corporations, if it leads to free software becoming more reliable.

I know you don't mean "nobody" literally, but I actually have asked people to write free software and to license existing nonfree code with a free license. It might be true that you didn't ask for people to make free software, but would you prefer a world in which they didn't?

[1] https://commonsclause.com/ [2] https://publiccode.eu/

You don't need to change the license at all in order to do this. Withholding source code while providing an executable would violate some free licenses, but all free licenses allow withholding both an executable and corresponding source code simultaneously.

An action like this could split the community, but I don't think it would be very visible to people contributing to the software, since I imagine the source code would still be available on a public git repository with the same license, for the purpose of development. Do people complain about Krita being on Steam [1]? It's not exactly the same situation, since Krita never was on Steam before, but do you think the situation would be so different if Krita had been free-to-download on Steam and then they changed it?

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita/

Despite the submission title, I don't think I would call this proposal a way to force companies to pay for free software. They could choose not to pay if they don't want to use the software. If they've already downloaded the software, then they wouldn't need to pay unless they want to download it again, but they are free to make as many copies as they want so re-downloading is mostly going to be a matter of convenience I think.

I believe free software is better than proprietary software, so I think it's good to better incentivize the production and maintenance of free software.

Somewhat related: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/GbLTwLzkj4f2TenJX/pretrai...

The authors aim to train a model without mentions of consciousness, which seems like it would imply excluding mentions of emotion too.

My family bought a big Vizio TV around a year ago (IIRC), and I'm pretty sure we didn't have to sign in to anything for it to work. We didn't connect it to the internet. It often prompts for an update to the remote but the prompt goes away on its own if you don't do anything.

The model is V4K75X-0810 on firmware 86.710.52.1-4. The "Last Update" field says "Dec 31, 1969 04:00 PM" :D

The remote firmware is 6.02.1. I wonder if the reason it prompts for an update is because the TV has a newer remote firmware built-in or if it is just guessing that a newer update is available online.

I don't remember if we had to do anything weird to get the TV to set up without internet.

I agree regulation is probably needed.

I wish Haketilo [1] would have caught on more. There's so many free JavaScript apps but we're mostly just missing a way to actually control which version or derivative of the JavaScript is run.

There's also the problem of most free apps not doing a good job of providing license info and a link to source code, but this could be sidestepped by a trusted repository which provides license info itself.

[1] https://haketilo.koszko.org/

Thank you,

It's been on my mental to-do list to do a 911 test call (with pre-authorization from my 911 center) from the device at some point, but I've been procrastinating. I decided to try this today.

I didn't expect updates to get in the way because they are usually not required immediately. For example, Windows will force an update eventually but it has to download it first and you can use the computer while it is doing that. I've never had a problem with being unable to use a device due to missing updates, except for an Xbox One which I think was new out of the box.

I did expect charging the device to take some time, like 5 to 10 minutes. I know this isn't good for some kinds of emergencies, but for others it might be okay, so I think it would still be better to have than not have; however, I severely underestimated the time it takes to charge the device though. It took between 60 and 80 minutes to power on. After that, it said the temperature was too hot to operate, which I think was because my car was off and it was hot outside. I took the phone inside at this point and let it cool off while charging connected to my laptop. Then I tried to call the non-emergency number (the one listed here: [1]) from my JMP VoIP phone, and I got no response. I'm not sure if it was because they didn't answer or because of an error in the software I'm using [2], as I've made other calls to Vanilla (the gift card company)'s automated systems today and some of the calls seemed to get no response. I don't want to spam them by calling over and over again until it works though, so I'm going to wait until a different day to try this.

I found a YouTube video [3] that suggested buying a pre-paid feature phone for $20 at Walmart [4], with the caveat that this will not send GPS location data. Maybe I'll end up buying one of these. Ideally I would get a cellular-enabled device that is designed to hold a charge for years if unused, but I'm not aware of any device like that. Or maybe I could get a USB modem like this $20 one I found on Amazon [5], and then I could connect it to my laptop, but I'm not sure if those can make 911 calls.

Good catch on the typo. I saw your message right before I went to sleep and considered editing it, but I thought it would be weird to edit but not reply so I decided to wait until today to do both, and now I'm out of time to edit the post.

[1] https://texasecc.org/contact [2] https://app.cheogram.com [3] https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=HSu9tnnpKXg [4] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Tracfone-TCL-Flip-3-16GB-Gray-Pre... [5] https://www.amazon.com/Portable-Router-300Mbps-Hotspot-Unloc...

I tell people I don't have a cell phone, but when pressed I say I technically do have many smartphones, because I keep buying them at garage sales for super cheap and not actually using them. And technically, I also have the iPhone 6s in my car in case of emergency, but its been powered off for multiple years. Other than that phone, I think it's been over a year since I took one out of my house. Oh wait, I forgot, I also have a smartphone that I keep offline and use only as a camera, but I don't even think of that as a phone and I only take it out of my house once every couple of months or so.

When I explain all of this, some people say the first thing I said (that I don't have a smartphone) is a lie, but I see it more as a simplification because whatever someone asked me to do that led to my statement obviously can't be done with the phones that I have but not on my person. On the other hand, I do have a phone number that I use through JMP [1], so if someone asks me to text or call them, then I actually can do that from a laptop. So, practically, for many purposes I do have a smartphone. I can make and receive calls and text messages, and I can install apps (just not iOS or Android apps).

It's an interesting (to me) question of whether I am lying by saying I don't have a cell phone. In other contexts, I might say that my phone is in my backpack (referring to my laptop), or I might give someone my phone number and then when they ask if I got their message I might say that I can't access my phone right now but I'll reply later. It kind of seems like one of those things has to be a lie, but all seem kind of true.

(I considered making this a reply to simu1acrum's comment, and it is inspired by it (specifically by "I don't pretend to have things I don't have, and I don't pretend that I don't have things I do have."), but it's not really a reply so I made it a top-level comment instead.)

This is not the case with current systems, but could future systems be designed to be tamper-evident in a way that makes it impractical to sign fake images or extract the signing key without leaving evidence on the device?

If that were the case, I can imagine a subscription service in which you get a camera for some specified period of time, and then return it to the company that sold it for them to verify the camera hasn't been tampered with. Then the company could publish a list of which keys (unique per camera) have been verified to not be tampered with. Maybe this wouldn't stop everyone, but now the person trying to fake images has to re-do the process every so often and I imagine it's more expensive to avoid leaving evidence.

This might be too impractical to work, and it would be bad for privacy, but maybe for some people the tradeoffs actually would be worth it, someday. For now, I assume there are much cheaper and easier ways to detect faked images, at least for expert humans.

If you just want to get away from Google, there are other operating systems that don't use as many Google services: see [1] and [2]

I didn't realized when I started writing this, but apparently even so-called "degoogled"* operating systems use some Google services. For example, LineageOS still talks to Google in order to check DNS connectivity and for Widevine DRM, among other things listed in the table.

GrapheneOS seems to be the only Android-based operating system that really doesn't communicate with Google at all by default, but if your main goal is to avoid Google Play Services, then there are other options.

*"degoogled" seems to be a term people use to describe operating systems even if the operating system page does not describe the OS that way.

[1] https://fsfe.org/activities/android/liberate.en.html#OS [2] https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm

When did this start? I didn't even realize at first because I use Redlib.

This is a minor nitpick, but I don't think postmarketOS is GNU/Linux.

I am not sure what the correct term would be to refer to the group of operating systems including those you mentioned but excluding Android, since all of them include Linux, but it does seem like there's something different about Android that puts it in a different category compared to other Linux-based operating systems.

Are there somewhat popular social networks that require commenters and posters to license their work under a free license (e.g. CC-BY-SA-4.0)? Then anyone would be free to create a "clone" of the website and even make derivatives, all without breaking copyright law.

There are many wikis like this (e.g. Wikipedia) and at least one forum (trisquel.info), but I don't know of anything for more general purposes. Even most fediverse sites, which implicitly grant permission for some specific kinds of mirroring, don't usually have a free license that allows redistribution in completely different contexts, as far as I know.

How do you circumvent printer dots? I don't see how that could be trivial.

I think the new account would have to be a Microsoft account also, so you wouldn't have even gained anything by not migrating.

Some servers allow joining without a Microsoft account even these days, but probably can't play on any of the servers you regularly play on, if you don't have a Microsoft account.

I would be curious to know what kind of vulnerabilities the latest version of Eudora (7.1.0.9 I think) has. With how old it is (2006), surely there are several critical vulnerabilities, but all I could find when looking online is that an IMAP server or SMTP server can execute arbitrary code, which doesn't seem likely to cause a real problem, because I wouldn't expect Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. to use this trick.

The article links to a vulnerability from 1998, which I expect is already fixed in the versions of Eudora people still use.

I agree it would probably be easy for AI to find exploitable bugs though.

I'm not familiar with Canva but I don't see any technical reason why every interaction would need to rely on the server. Since Canva uses client-side JavaScript, it could be designed so that the local version of a document updates immediately and the cloud version syncs with the local version as soon as possible.

I would guess Canva already does something like this.

Is this actually feasible? How do you tell when a page uses ads? How do you find pages without ads when you search for something?

How do you decide when to update?

Good to know! Thanks.

I notice the README file for signal-cli [1] says registration "may require solving a CAPTCHA challenge", which might involve running proprietary software. I found a forum post that says this also sometimes happens on sign-in [2], which might make it difficult to use Signal without proprietary software. I might try it anyway at some point because it does say "may" :)

[1] https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli [2] https://community.e.foundation/t/signal-and-hcaptcha/83470

Oof, this is a problem at my workplace. Crew [1] and Connecteam [2] (workplace communication apps) both require an SMS code to sign in. Technically, you don't have to have a cell phone, because you can use a VoIP service, but it means that someone who does have a cell phone has to replace it with a VoIP service instead of just getting rid of it.

[1] https://crewapp.com/ [2] https://connecteam.com/

Not who you replied to, but I do sometimes have problems like this, and as a result I am sometimes an hour late with no warning. It's bad, but it only happens very rarely. This also sometimes happened when I did use a smartphone, if it ran out of battery (though, in hindsight, why didn't I bring a charger?).

Not all banks require SMS. I use Chase bank and the two factors are my debit card and my PIN. I don't use any app, but instead just go to the ATM or talk to a human. Some things, like wiring money, have an extra charge if you don't use the app.

A major downside of this is that if someone did figure out how to withdraw a bunch of my money from my account, I wouldn't notice until I go to the bank, which I only do once per month or so. I wish my bank had an option to send me an email on every transaction, but as is I have to go to the ATM and request an email with the recent transaction info.

Partially as a result of this limitation, and partially because I enjoy playing the "Where's George?" game (which involves using cash), I pay for everything with cash and only use my debit card for withdrawing cash. I've heard that it's possible to get an ATM-only card for this purpose, so I will probably do that eventually, so that if someone gets my card information they will not be able to make online transactions.

If this works without proprietary software, it might actually convince me to use Signal.

I already have a VoIP phone number through JMP and would be happy to use it for Signal, but I've read that registration isn't an option on the desktop client, even if I also have a phone number. I looked for a fork or alternate compatible client that allows registration but didn't find one.