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paulv

425 karma · joined August 14, 2007

Sysadmin for the Software Freedom Conservancy.

My comments do not necessarily represent the views of my employer.

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paulv··on Banning words won’t make the world more just
> The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color.

You missed a couple at the beginning of your list. A really significant one in particular.

paulv··on X.org Security Advisory: Security issue in the X server
My ubuntu 22.04 LTS (jammy) is running Xorg as root. I have just dist-upgraded since I installed 18.04, so maybe fresh installs don't?
paulv··on Visual design rules you can safely follow
> In response the really elite players just go back to bending over to pick up the ball with their hand, signaling that they're too skilled to bother signaling how skilled they are.

Truly elite players have ball boys and girls pick up balls for them.

Your point, though, reminds me of the Sneetches by Dr. Seuss

paulv··on Times New Roman is being phased out at the State Department, replaced by Calibri
I recently watched the video where he said it, but I can't remember which one it was. It was one of the ones on the Tested channel, either an ask Adam or one of the questions from a live stream they made in to a video.
paulv··on Migrating from AWS to Fly.io
Doesn't fly.io have tailscale integration?
paulv··on Docker on MacOS is slow and how to fix it
I'm not sure I understand the question? I close the lid. How do you do it?
paulv··on Twitter applies 7-day suspension to half a dozen journalists
> he owns the worlds largest auto company

No, he doesn't. That would be Volkswagen.

paulv··on The Twitter Files
It isn't, though. His daughter worked for him in the White House. His sons stumped for him. Hunter Biden has done neither.
paulv··on At Xamarin I left every day at 5pm
The "someone else" in bullet point 3 is the co-founder of Xamarin (as well as the former GitHub CEO post Microsoft sale) with the person in bullet 4.
paulv··on Blip: A tool for seeing your internet latency
I discovered this issue on my rpi3 and rpi4s. There is always just enough latency when using ssh to drive me up a wall, but it went away when I tried to debug with ping. The first ping packet always took a bit longer than the others. I just assumed that was because of the arps, until I checked with tcpdump. Turning power_save off solved the problem immediately.
paulv··on Prepare for the OpenSSL 3.x Secvuln
This is a pretty coordinated release, I think the ubuntu security team probably has packages ready to be released. The security repository should have the update right away.
paulv··on Removing SMS support from Signal Android (soon)
I pretty much only use the signal protocol to chat with my husband, who I convinced to install the app because I could help with any problems that arose. I'm not going to use one app to communicate with just him and another to communicate with everyone else, nor is he.

The result of this change is that we will stop using signal all together. They've accomplished the exact thing they said they want to avoid.

paulv··on Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird
> Brendan Eich also happened to be an anti-gay-marriage activist and donator (afaik, only his spare time, not at work)

Presumably the donations were of money that he made at work.

paulv··on American policy is splitting state by state into two blocs
Abortion bans impact liberals and others who didn't vote for Trump in red states. The majority of the country wants abortion to be legal. Making people suffer for the bad decisions that their states make is...disgusting.
paulv··on FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores
They also have access to a lot of other metadata (IMEI, IP address, OS version, MAC address, email/phone number that you signed up with, etc) that they could combine with data from brokers to identify you as well.

I'm not saying that they should be collecting this data, to be clear, just that, from everything I've read, it doesn't seem like they are doing anything uniquely untoward. I'm hoping there's something I'm missing.

paulv··on FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores
That...seems completely reasonable to me.
paulv··on FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores
Can someone explain the capturing "keystroke patterns" part? Are they saying the app is somehow capturing keystrokes while other apps are running?
paulv··on Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
The issue is that an exploit could write a file in ~/bin/ and trick you in to executing it. But, if something malicious is writing files in your home directory, you've already lost.
paulv··on SF Conservancy now accepting copyright assignment for any GPL software
You can take a look at the 990's, Bradley is _definitely_ NOT getting rich off of his work with the SFC.
paulv··on Intel's $20B Ohio factory could become world's largest chip plant
Same. My high school was very near a GE plant in northern Cincinnati and I frequently heard how we were a target because of that. Seems plausible but based on other comments in this post, it may have just been cold war propaganda.
paulv··on Roku releases IDK to allow consumers to develop applications for their Roku
> IDK applications cannot be run on Roku TVs, Roku streambars, or updatable/legacy streaming player models.

This is unfortunate. I was only interested in the IDK because roku is built in to my tv.

paulv··on FCC plans to rein in “gateway” carriers that bring foreign robocalls to US
FWIW, there was a multi-year period, just after the do not call list went in to effect, where the amount of spam phone calls I got dropped to zero.
paulv··on A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities
"Radical feminism" is a branch of feminism. It is not used as a pejorative in the acronym.
paulv··on A backlash against gender ideology is starting in universities
> 2. Feminists (TERFs)

I worry that this can be read as "all feminists are terfs", which is not accurate.

paulv··on Pitch doctoring should be the biggest scandal in sports
It is letting pitchers throw pitches that are on the edge of what they can control. Also, when pitchers throw balls the same way they have for years, changing the way balls move in ways the pitchers haven't been able to account for. The result is that the number of batters hit by pitches has gone up, and some of them have gotten seriously hurt (orbital bone fractures, broken noses, etc).
paulv··on Sixth grader expelled after Zoom provided possibly inaccurate IP address
> “toxic masculinity” is a political dog-whistle, not a legitimate psychological concept.

This is misleading at best. Toxic masculinity has been written about in great detail and at great length in academia (in gender/women's studies literature) for going on 30 years.

paulv··on TikTok Remix Culture
I know a significant number of progressive users that frequently get their videos taken down or have some videos "shadowbanned" where the engagement metrics are dramatically different than even their non-popular videos.
paulv··on What3Words sends legal threat to security researcher for sharing an alternative
Think of the 3 words like a phone number. They could try to sell access to the only phone book that exists. Requires some kind of critical mass, but I've heard of worse business plans.

They could also probably sell novelty "phone numbers", like every professional sports team buys the equivalent of "boston red sox" for the location of their stadium.

No clue what their actual business model is, I'm just spitballing.

paulv··on Show HN: Verilog2factorio
> how many man-millennia have been wasted because of the armies of people who have posted something they're proud of, but is complete rubbish, on npmjs.org?

None. If someone is proud of something they worked hard on, why shouldn't they post it? What is the harm their hard work being public causes? It hurts literally no one.

paulv··on Two people killed in fiery Tesla crash with no one driving
Likewise using that pejorative.
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