Psst you’re literally on the fediverse right now.

Oof. I want to cheer this project on as much as anybody, but there’s no two ways around it, those terms have every appearance of being extreme and expansive. Just to copy it here for others to see:

When you post Contributions, you grant us a license (including use of your name, trademarks, and logos): By posting any Contributions, you grant us an unrestricted, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide right, and license to: use, copy, reproduce, distribute, sell, resell, publish, broadcast, retitle, store, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part), and exploit your Contributions (including, without limitation, your image, name, and voice) for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, your Contributions, and to sublicense the licenses granted in this section. Our use and distribution may occur in any media formats and through any media channels.

This license includes our use of your name, company name, and franchise name, as applicable, and any of the trademarks, service marks, trade names, logos, and personal and commercial images you provide.

https://loops.video/legal/terms-of-service

Not when they use the conjunction “so”. If they’d used “and”, then sure - there could be any number of reasons. Using “so” as a conjunction like that in the sentence gives it an equivalent definition of “therefore"

You’re technically correct in your narrow focus on the conjunction “so,” but you are missing the bigger picture. Yes, “so” generally functions as a logical connector like “therefore,” meaning that the first statement is directly causing the second. Their sentence could be read as “Vivaldi is closed source, therefore it’s harder for users to investigate,” which isn’t a comprehensive or precise statement on its own.

But that’s a pretty pedantic take. The point that they were making doesn’t rely on an exacting technical breakdown of the closed-source nature of Vivaldi. Rather, they’re making a general observation that closed-source projects tend to be harder to investigate. With that in mind, the use of “so” is informal and reflects a broad conclusion that aligns with general knowledge about open vs. closed-source software. Closed source inherently implies limitations on access, which, while not exhaustive in this single sentence, still holds weight in the general sense.

Why are you making it about that question in particular? There’s a lot of topics that have been raised here, notably Google’s Chromium project, the way it’s killing ad blockers, the way that other browsers also use chromium, people associated with those browsers.

In this range of subjects I’m not sure what the significance is of elevating this libre software question above everything else.

I don’t love Peter Theil by any means, and his association with any project is, to my mind, enough to completely discredit it.

But I get a little worried when it starts turning into references to the bilderberg group, and whatever that link is to NCIO.ca is just completely nuts, low evidence jumping to conclusions.

He certainly has crazy ideas that I want no part of, but I think it crosses the line into conspiratorial to suggest he was instructed by Germany to act as a foreign agent to sabotage the global economy.

Please show me where you explained that Vivaldi’s source code is harder to investigate because “users need to download a 2 GB repo” or a “tarball dump”.

I can see why you think this is not entirely implied. But I also don’t think that it’s incumbent on them to have laid it out with such specificity. You can read this reference to closed source in the most charitable way as alluding to the whole motley of things that render closed source projects less accessible.

It takes a little squinting, sure, but the internet is a better place when we read things charitably, and I don’t think such fine grain differences rise to the level of straight up misinformation.

I mean, there are some real whoppers around here on Lemmy. There’s no shortage of crazy people saying crazy things, I just don’t think this rises to that level.

Brave also uses chromium.

nothing is free

Plenty of things can be and are free at the point of service/point of consumption/utilization.

That’s all they need to be. And there just has to be enough willpower to do that from enough people.

Ok So who is going to give you something for free and why?

People who value the ability to do publish information, or engage in personal expression, for starters.

I think the only real path forward is for a developer to figure out a way to decentralize video hosting

That’s what Peertube is all about. It’s like the Lemmy version of Youtube. And it seems to have real funding and development mojo.

For a second I thought you meant you don’t use Signal, so they all went there on purpose to avoid you.

It is a nice PR but for me I am not impressed. Rolex is also a non profit organization in Switzerland and and mostly help hiding there finance.

Okay but Rolex is Rolex. There are uncountably many non-profits, and many (most?) do good work. I don’t think Rolex is representative of your usual non profit.

My Puxl was from eBay.

To be honest, I don’t know much about how credit cards can be associated with phone hardware. I would think it could conceivably be tied to phone #s. In my case the phone is unlocked and it’s not an esim, which I understand we will all be moving too soon.

I wonder if it might have something to do with Google Pay or Apple Pay that ties hardware information to payments? And as for Esim, it might make it so that you can’t distinguish phones based on their physical sim card so it perhaps introduces a possibility of reliance on hardware.

But this is all speculation on my part. I just don’t know and I haven’t made whatever precautions would be needed.

That’s what I did!

This is not from Google. This is Extinction Rebellion registering a domain to prank Google, by speaking in their voice and resolving to stop funding climate deniers. It’s both a cheeky prank and a way to put pressure on Google to take accountability.

Sorry, I was super unclear there. This was not Google.

However, Google also sometimes has done their own April Fools bits, and historically Google has been big part of April Fools hijinks. So I did mention them as a company that does these, and I did post this which is impersonating Google as an april fools prank, but yeah, this particular one was not at all carried out by Google.

I almost forgot today was April Fools day. I feel like since Covid, the national mood ™ was such that Google and co stopped doing April Fools pranks, and/or if they did them, they were so safe they were groan inducing.

Looking around at the roundup links for 2024, there aren’t many that happened this year, from the looks of it. So I wanted to post this one, because it’s the rarest of rare - one that I thought was really incredibly well done.

Very good to know. After following your Github link, I found my way to the blog post that it looks like you are quoting:

https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/announcement/State-of-the-Pipe-2023/

NewPipe is a killer app I would say, with nearly Youtube Red level functionality in something that’s free and OSS. A bit afield from privacy, but you do get to access youtube stuff without logging in.

Syncthing is brilliant, although for me it has had a heck of a learning curve to keep straight. Might just be me though.