jech

Alternate app stores are still allowed. It's just that they are restricted to applications signed by developers who have paid a tithe to Google.

Google are obeying the letter of the law, while openly violating its spirit. Perhaps it'll be possible to attack them in court, but it will take years, and by that time they'll have found another trick.

> I’m aware of alternate mainframe OSs but I’m not sure how common using one was.

Extremely common at major universities and research centres. CTSS, ITS, TENEX, Multics, Unix and even VM/370 were all alternate operating at some point.

> Other than OS2, alternate OSs for other systems were rather rare,

You weren't there, were you? A lot of people replaced MS-DOS with DR-DOS before Microsoft deliberately broke it with Windows. A little later, a number of people were running Unix System V on their PCs, to the extent that there was a regular column about Unix in Byte.

> how does [100BASE-TX] save power vs [1000BASE-T] running at low throughput?

100BASE-TX uses just two pairs (lanes), one for sending and one for receiving. 1000BASE-T uses all four pairs, for both sending and receiving. Therefore, a 100BASE-TX interface that's only receiving needs to power up one pair. A 1000BASE-T interface needs to power all four pairs all the time.

I recall reading about some extensions that allow switching off some of the pairs some of the time ("Green Ethernet"), but I think that they require support on both sides of the link, and I'm not sure if they are widely deployed.

>> You could have messaged an entire organization or department

> This is a mailing list.

The way I understand it, the layering is different. In X.400, multicasting was a feature of the protocol. An SMTP mailing list, on the other hand, is an endpoint that terminates a protocol transaction, and then initiates one transaction for each final recipient.

I guess it boils down to where it is preferable to have the extra complexity: the ITU-T protocols invariably prefer to put it inside the network, while the Internet protocols prefer to put it at the endpoints. The SMTP protocol is simple, and therefore the mailing list software needs to be complex.

> IETF wants a working open source implementation before standardising.

I don't think that's IETF policy. Individual IETF working groups decide whether to request publication of an RFC, and the availability of open source implementations is a strong argument in favour of publication, but not a hard requirement.

If the IETF standards are sometimes useful, it's more a matter of culture than of policy.

One datapoint: at least in practice, it used to be impossible to delete an entry in the French INPI database (trademarks and company names) without eIDAS. It forced me to unearth an old unmodified Android phone (I run LineageOS on my main phone).

If you read French:

* https://www.plus.transformation.gouv.fr/experiences/4531155_...

* https://linuxfr.org/users/jch-2/journaux/l-identite-numeriqu...

The ecosystem. The language is lovely, but dune/opam is not up to the standard of the Go or Rust build systems, and the set of useful libraries is somewhat skewed. Whenever I write a program in Caml, I gain an hour thanks to the nice language, and then lose two fighting with dune/opam.

There's also the support for concurrency and parallelism, which has started to improve recently, but is still years behind what is available in Go (but still better in my opinion than what is available in Rust).

There's nothing more humiliating than a Warsaw taxi driver who looks at you as you try to work out how to operate the door handle and says "Panie!" with a left-bank accent.

> You left out most of the interesting things. For example the vocative case is partially dissapearing.

The grammar is changing in many ways (for example, the inanimate masculine is being replaced with the animated, kroić kotleta), but this was about honorifics.

>> Poland has honorifics that are probably on par to those in Japan

> I'm interested in learning more about this!

It's very simple, actually.

For strangers, you use the third person and the title « Pan » or « Pani » (Sir or Lady). You avoid pronouns, « The Lady has forgotten the Lady's purse on the table ».

For friends, you use the t-form ("ty", thou), and use a diminutive rather than the full name. « Johny, you've forgotten your bag on the table ».

For work colleagues, you traditionally use « Pan » or « Pani » with the full form of the first name. « Mister John, the mister's bag is on the table ». This is perceived as old-fashioned, and is increasingly being replaced by the t-form.

The v-form has fallen into disuse, as it was promoted by the Communist regime.

(The old-fashioned honorifics still exist, but they are only used in administrative correspondence: the only time when you're "the respectable gentleman" is when you need to pay taxes.)

« I've been pulling public records on the wave of "age verification" bills moving through US state legislatures. IRS 990 filings, Senate lobbying disclosures, state ethics databases, campaign finance records, corporate registries, WHOIS lookups, Wayback Machine archives. What started as curiosity about who was pushing these bills turned into documenting a coordinated influence operation that, from a privacy standpoint, is building surveillance infrastructure at the operating system level while the company behind it faces zero new requirements for its own platforms. »

> cursive is the norm for Russians of all ages.

I know. I always feel utterly embarrassed when Russian-speaking friends write down a movie title for me, and I have to ask them to rewrite it in block capitals.

> I don't know anyone under 40 who doesn't write in cursive (in Russian)

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/%D0%9B%D...

Understandable.

> GNOME uses gjs

I don't think gjs is a webview. It uses JavaScript, granted, but binds to a native toolkit, not to DOM and CSS.

As far as I know, it's implemented in the proprietary part of Android (Google Mobile Services, GMS), so it won't affect LineageOS users as long as they don't install the GMS.

> So far [Galene is] much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality

Latency is better, since Galene uses an unordered buffer instead of a jitter buffer. Lipsynch should also be slightly better, as Galene carefully computes audio/video offsets and forwards the result to the receiver so it can compensate.

Audio and video quality, on the other hand, should be roughly the same, unless Jitsi is doing something wrong.

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but UPnP requires my ESP32 to initiate communication.

Not quite. Using UPnP, any host on your internal network can open a port for any other host. You may be thinking of NAT-PMP.

Additionally, by default UPnP mappings don't expire (unlike NAT-PMP mappings), so if a host crashes with an open port and your ESP32 inherits its IPv4 address, it will be exposed to the Internet.

> I don't have a shortage of IPv4. Maybe my ISP or my VPN host do, I don't know.

Your ISP has paid 40€ for your IPv4 address. That's a cost they're most probably passing on to you.

> Every host routable from anywhere on the Internet? No thanks.

Every time you start a videoconference, there is a couple of seconds' pause while the peers perform NAT traversal.

Oh, fully agreed.

What would be more useful, however, would be the ability to selectively block network connections: for example, to allow the public transportation app to access its API endpoint, but not the advertising and tracking endpoints. I don't think LineageOS allows that, and I don't know if Graphene does.

It's also possible in LineageOS and its derivatives.

But it's not very useful in practice: if an application doesn't need networking for its core functionality, then there usually is an open-source equivalent that does not use the network in the first place. The few applications that lack a good open-source equivalent (public transportation, proprietary messaging protocols, banking) don't do anything useful without network access.

There's certainly a number of Russian words in older Warsaw slang (barachło, ustrojstwo, wierchuszka, etc.), but the videos were not using slang, especially not older slang, and they had no reason to use prawilny except by accident.

> But on the other hand, we also don't know if this is a foreign misinformation campaign or just a politically disgruntled Pole

The videos contain at least one mistake that indicates that they were written by a native speaker of Russian (the use of the word prawilny, which is a Russian word (правильный) and doesn't exist in Polish).

It's circumstantial evidence, granted, but enough to point at a Russian origin, at least in the absence of further information.

> Someone (Russia)

One of the videos uses the non-existent word prawilny, which is Russian (правильный). The Polish equivalent would be prawidłowy or właściwy.

> in a foreign country [...] If he had an eSIM it would have quickly solved the problem for him. Instead he had to wait until he got home to pop in a new SIM card.

Are you sure that his carrier allows activating an eSIM while roaming? Mine definitely doesn't, which means that if I break my phone while abroad, I lose access to online banking.

> Give an example of UB code that you have committed in real life

    struct foo {
        ...
        atomic_int v;
        ...
    };
    
    struct foo x;
    memset(&x, 0, sizeof(x));

“We, the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, are opposed to the unwarranted monitoring of chats. That would be like opening all letters as a precautionary measure to see if there is anything illegal in them. That is not acceptable, and we will not allow it.”

Reported by Patrick Breyer, <https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/citizen-protest-halts-chat-...>

The EU is not a single person. There are some people among the EU elites who fight for an open Internet, and some who want to control the Internet. They are not the same people.

I only know of one project which is reserved for free software, it's NGI0 <https://nlnet.nl/NGI0/>, which is going to be cut in 2027 <https://edri.org/our-work/european-commission-cuts-funding-s...>.

However, most other EU programmes do allow and even claim to encourage free software companies to apply.

> The big ecosystem of SBCs confuses me a bit. Who is buying these?

They make decent home servers, unless you need fast storage.

> LineageOS, iodé and /e/ are in a much different space than GrapheneOS.

They have different priorities, granted.

> They greatly reduce the privacy and security of the Android Open Source Project

That's going to depend on your threat model. Many people don't feel that having an unlocked bootloader is a significant threat.

> GrapheneOS is a non-Google Linux distribution. [...] If you have an issue with using lots Google code [...]

https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1964561043906048183

Even you seem to agree that we're relying too much on Google's goodwill.