It’s structural - you can be open or locked down, and it’s hard to decentralize if you’re not open

You can make it easier or harder to work with that data, but ultimately it’s obsfucation - you could make it hard to parse and obscure details, but ultimately if you want decentralized federation you can’t hide too much

And Facebook has some of the best open source work of all time, from the react ecosystem to making php feasible, to LLMs. There’s certainly a ton missing and a lot of it is for their own products, but some of it goes far beyond their own needs

Facebook also did unethical human testing and debatably broke democracy and the social fabric

Just be even handed. Praise the good, denounce the bad, and keep in mind these are monstrously large companies and the people that did the good probably have little to do with the ones that did the bad

Google shouldn’t get a pass because they bought Android and only partially used that ownership to control the ecosystem and push their own products

It’s quite possible, although I’m inclined to blame it on turnover and pressures for deadlines

I’ve come to see software kinda like a plant. If you neglect it, it rots, because all software is contextual and the world moves on. If you keep growing it, it starts to rot from the inside. If you carve out down to something smooth and streamlined, it can last a long time and just need TLC to bounce back

Ultimately, if you want something to be big and to last, you have to prune it, transplant it, and continuously work on it. There’s no direct money to be made there though

And it helps a shit ton to have people around long-term. It can take years to learn a big stack, but having someone go “wait, if we do this we need to rexamine how we delete photos” is how you avoid fuck ups like this

My digital friends are way more willing to accommodate my bullshit

Ditto. I’m not going to put in the time to clean up a project working fine for me just to have it ignored or complained about. It’s all expectation, very little reward

And even if I did get volunteers, I’m not coordinating people on my personal projects. Sounds like a great way to take all the joy out of it…

Open source is just broken right now, it runs by draining the passion out of people

They may choose a job nearby to avoid having to deal with shitty transports every day.

It’s more just the option - a short commute is amazing. It makes an enormous difference in work and life satisfaction. They have the mixed zoning so you could find a cheap apartment or a three story house with a big yard without paying for it with 2 hours of your life every day

Their public transportation is great too… Even with a car, it’s just so much faster and more convenient most of the time. You just hop on and off with very little waiting. It’s cheap too, it was like 25 Euros a month for unlimited metro and bus rides, and even in the center of the city on a weekend it’s less crowded than DC is in the middle of a weekday

But I think the French culture is about enjoying life as much as possible.

This is just a tangent, but I don’t think that’s quite right… They actually say “c’est la vie” like they’re trying to convince themselves they can accept things

They have plenty of problems, there were two or three murders within my walking distance in a couple months… Not like it was an unsafe area, people just flipped out on family members and co-workers. One just (mostly) decapitated someone with a katana in an office over a fine or something. They’re constantly fighting over politics and culture, they share public spaces but you’ll see tons of people sitting alone carefully not interacting with each other - they’re very closed off in a lot of ways. Work-life balance is really what they’ve got going for them. That certainly leaves a lot more time for family and hobbies (which is huge), but I wouldn’t describe them as happy exactly… Some definitely do make the most of it, but a lot of people don’t

It’s more that they draw a very hard line between “acceptable” and “not acceptable”, but it’s a constant fight. They take their time eating good food and enjoy their outdoor time, but a lot of them are isolated and/or bitter. They’re going through the same stuff we are, but they’ve had more to lose

But that’s just my take away, and it’s not like I saw much of the county

That sounds like a mix of public transportation sucking and people needing to travel too far to me

Driving sucks… But compared to not having a reliable way to get around? It’s total freedom

But better yet is being able to have a nice walk where you need to go, and frequent/plentiful options to go further. You just have to mix everything up and cut down on the parking lots. Low cost housing with full homes tucked here and there, smaller grocery and hardware stores every few blocks, gyms and parks a few blocks away - and all centered around a main street with offices and lower cost housing a few blocks away, so the main street can have a bus running by every 5 minutes

My time working in Paris for a bit really blew my mind - only one guy at my office wasn’t walking distance to work. I passed several grocery stores and bakeries on my 20 minute walk back if I wanted to grab something, there was a big park a couple blocks up if I wanted a scenic walk back.

And if I was feeling lazy, you could just start walking until you saw a bus coming up behind you - there was a bus stop like every quarter mile just going up and down that main street

Almost as good as all that is the fact that if you did have to drive, there was so much less traffic. You could park on side streets, but those spots were limited and needed specific permits. They had parking garages at the edge of the suburb area near the highway entrance and near the metro station, so while you could drive up to wherever to load/unload, it discouraged it and kept the cars mostly on the bigger roads in between areas.

Granted, it’s only amazing when the pieces all fit together like that - a lot of the designed communities in the US are nowhere close to as good because they don’t commit far with. I later moved to a designed community in the States which had most of the same aspects, but I never walked to the grocery store. It was across the street from the town center and a 10 minute walk, but it involved crossing 2 much higher speed/busy roads and walking across a huge parking lot. It was just a little island in a world still built for cars

But when it works, it’s amazing

True, it’s probably overkill. But even if you don’t log, they could theoretically start live monitoring the VPN with a court order… With a setup like this, there’s no front door or backdoor, just an ephemeral image you have to restart to modify. You’d have to write in access methods and rebuild to get in… The government can’t just walk in and demand you stop what you’re doing and build something for them

It does add security, even if you might not need that level of security

I mean, if you set up your os on an encrypted ram disk, then set it to restart when the server rack door was unlocked/opened and didn’t leave a backdoor for yourself to remote in, you could have a situation where you entirely lack the capability to give them access to anything before that moment. A skilled hacker might be able to get in through an exploit or do something crazy with cryogenics to read the memory at the time of shutdown, but a quick restart would overwrite most of what’s in memory and scrub that

Legally, there’s not much better defense than “I’m sorry your honor, I can’t provide access to the running system in the same way I can’t un-shatter a smashed mug”. If someone shows up with a warrant, you could explain that it’ll wipe itself if they open or unplug it, and it might’ve done so already. Then you guide them to it, hand over the key to the server cabinet, and let them decide to open the cabinet and destroy evidence so they can take it with them. Or they can take you at your word, and give up.

Court orders can’t break physics, and as a VPN your reasoning for setting up the system like this is to make your service more appealing to customers - the purpose is not to aid in a crime or destroy evidence, it’s just the normal course of business.

The same way that most companies wipe their emails after 30 days - yes, it potentially destroys incriminating paper trails, but that’s just a side effect of the security policy you’ve had all along

Granted, there’s probably some sketchy sealed laws they could use to force you to backdoor your own system moving forward, but you can fight that as it’s undue hardship. It requires a non-negligible amount of work and would make your product less competitive

They might win in the end if they keep pushing, and even might be able to order you to “keep up the canary paper” (meaning keep claiming not even you have access to the running system), but more likely they’d get a warrant for your customer financial records and try to find an easier path to find what they want elsewhere

Glad to help, and it goes the other way too - teaching others the concept spreads the ability to notice it

Seeing as you saw fuckery afoot before you were primed to see it, I doubt I need to sell you on the importance of spreading the concept

That’s called a dark pattern, and Google has been gaining a reputation for using them. I totally believe it

Ultimately this. I believe the 20% came from a lower court opinion, but search sucks these last few months so I can’t find exactly what I was looking for

At the end of the day 20% different isn’t the actual standard, it’s more complicated than that. But it’s what we tell fresh developers so they have a baseline - they’re almost certainly safe at that point, and more importantly they feel safe to build things with a hard line like that

Ultimately, the supreme Court decided the case on a more fundamental level (so the % didn’t come into play at all)

It’s precedent. It’s not law, but it’s not a myth either - it’s a case study we go over with new programmers so they’re not afraid of undeserved lawsuits

As a developer, honestly I think this is a good thing.

Open source isn’t always a good thing. It’s not just opening the source, it’s a very specific way to develop software.

In theory, you make something open source, and other devs walk in and out, helping the project grow and helping with admin work. People can tag in and tag out as their schedules allow, and the software will grow organically and democratically, bigger than any single user

In practice, it’s politics. Contributing is rarely on a walk-in basis - but code is your ideas given form, and no amount of power is too little to trip over.

People are protective of their baby, but also don’t want to spend their free time interviewing contributors instead of working on it. And just like mods on top boards, managing a popular open source project attracts a very specific type of person

And finally, we live in a hypercapitalist society right now. Know what happens if you open source a project and it gains traction? Someone runs off and turns it into a service, usually the owner, but not always. Services tend to become the first class citizen, and are free to take investor money and make pull requests to serve their use case at the expense of someone using it themselves.

I think it’s safe to say Linux is the greatest open source project of all time. It’s a clusterfuck that has not lived up to the imagined ideals of open source - I think it’s great and too important to entrust to any group, but it’s a hot mess. And Linus Torvold didn’t open source it for years until it reached a point of maturity.

My point with all this is that OSS is fantastic, but it’s not a virtue intrinsically. After all, almost no one makes money on OSS, but plenty make money on turning such a project into a service.

Opening your source on the other hand? Other people can take bits and pieces to learn from, and people can audit it. If you keep out corporate use, I think that’s fair - I mean, even if you copy code for your own project, you quickly move beyond the 20% difference you need to remove their copyright claim if you’re building something different

I think we need to be more pragmatic about OSS… We need to make multiple philosophies for different people and different types of software

For me it’s "oh? You really like this creator? Be careful not to binge their backlog all at once! I think you’ve had enough. Let me hide the rest of their content for you so you’re not tempted

Hey, how about this news show where the guys stand instead of sitting, and wear normal clothes? They still awkwardly read off a teleprompter and have a very shallow understanding of the topics, but come on, you should watch them again. I know their shrill, forced, voices make you cringe and exit the video as fast as you can, but let me put that up next on auto play for you again

Not really. With https luckily being the default, at most they could get the sites you were going to (I don’t think dnss is dead, but it’s been very slow to grow unfortunately).

They could probably see if you’re checking Amazon or Google, but wouldn’t be able to see what you’re looking at exactly. Theoretically they could use cameras and or triangulation to see what you’re in front of when you use the Internet, but a VPN would still show traffic so they’d know you’re looking up something.

The big thing this would do is act like a loyalty card… They give you some amount of benefit in exchange for tracking your purchases in ever higher detail. Mostly it’s just like that, except they’d also be able to see how long you are in the store, and ideally they can link it to your purchases so they can infer more about it

FWIW, I wouldn’t only consider giving them a disposable email

Not really surprising to me. Gay (and now trans) people have long been accused of grooming and/or queerifying children

The first openly gay senator is probably hyper-aware of this, and I’d guess is probably very hawkish on anything protecting children

The other aspect is congressmen don’t understand shit outside (sometimes) politics or the law. On its surface, this has a very compelling description - hold websites responsible if they let children access NSFW content.

It’s not until you ask how (interpreted by the community as providing identifiable information to “prove” your age) that the first flaw comes up - this provides a way to collect data on online use, as social media is considered potentially NSFW by the nature of user submission

Then you get to the things most people without a technical background wouldn’t see

The second flaw - companies are terrible at securing data. Get ready for every scammer under the sun to be able to find your ID numbers.

The third, this won’t work. As a young teen, I blazed past parental controls, because there’s a ton of porn out there and there’s no way to hold back someone determined to find it. If you want this to work, we need to make a child Internet of known safe content and parental controls to keep you there… But just like finding or stealing a Playboy, the fact it exists means kids are going to be stealing passwords or IDs and probably sharing them. If we instead had sites declare content ratings and locked down at the device level, they need to go through a lot of work or get a secret device - it would give parents powerful tools to actually enforce this through Apple, Google, or Microsoft accounts

And finally, this won’t work because it’s inconvenient. Make password requirements too strict, and users write them down. Make content moderation too strict, and people will find shortcuts. People will find ways around this that will likely both end up in the hands of children, but also probably make everyone less safe