Giving permission by saying yes to a “would you mind” question is the hill I die on. Usually I say “I would not mind” but if I’m feeling frisky I’ll say no and watch their brain melt.

Not all FOSS projects need to be profitable to survive. IOW if a project cannot survive without being profitable and it cannot be profitable long-term, then it cannot survive long-term.

How is that different from mutual TLS authentication?

Edit: It seems like OPAQUE just initiates mutual TLS authentication after the TLS session has already been negotiated with PKI. So it basically just allows websites to design their own login page instead of the one designed by the web browser.

I just replied to the other person’s comment.

I don’t. Could you elaborate?

While Linux itself isn’t proprietary, it supports loading proprietary firmware/microcode blobs and running on proprietary hardware. Thus, part of the Linux hardware/software stack is proprietary.

I’m surprised that other people are surprised that for-profit companies constantly try to increase their profits; such companies only contribute to FOSS when that’s more profitable than the alternative. The Linux kernel, AMDGPU, Steam, etc only exist because some part of the software/hardware stack is proprietary (which becomes a more attractive product as the FOSS portion of the stack improves).

I’m definitely not justifying the “rug-pulling”, but people need to stop supporting projects with no potential for long-term profitability unless those projects can survive without any support from for-profit companies. Anything else is destined to fail.

Maybe I’m Jia Tan 😉

It’s a nightmare to search for anything about GUID Partition Tables (GPT) now.

My biggest concern is that everyone will eventually be forced by societal and institutional expectations; for now people can easily choose not to wear them, but if/when your employer requires it for work or if/when the only way to talk to your friends is by using it, then you won’t have much of a choice.

For example, Zoom has very shady ties with the Chinese government (and several reports say that they’ve used it to surveil and censor people), yet many schools and workplaces required it (and many still do now). You could refuse to install/use it, but then you’d lose your job or fail your classes. It’s a similar story for TikTok, Discord, and Facebook before that.

Free (As in beer and speech!)

Do you live in a utopia where you get as much beer as you want without having to pay for it, or do you live in a dystopia where you have to pay to be able to speak your mind and only in limited quantities?

The data block would be modified but the signature of that block can’t be recomputed without the key used to sign it

Isn’t that also true of an encrypted checksum, though? For some plaintext block q there is a checksum r, but the attacker can only see and modify the encrypted q (Q) and encrypted r (R). How any change to Q would modify q (and R to r) can’t be known without knowing the encryption key, but the attacker would need to know that in order to keep q and r consistent.

I’m not a cryptographer (so maybe this is wrong), but my understanding is that although it’s possible to modify the cipher text, how those changes modify the plaintext are very difficult (or impossible) to predict. That can still be an attack vector if the attacker knows the structure of the plaintext (or just want to break something), but since the checksum is also encrypted, the chances that both the original file and checksum could be kept consistent after cipher text modification is basically zero.

Reminds me of lolcode:

HAI 1.2
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"?
    AWSUM THX
        VISIBLE FILE
    O NOES
        INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
KTHXBYE

Isn’t there a way for individual users to completely hide an instance from their feed? Because I would just do that if it bothers you.

I’m not saying that some posts/instances aren’t unethical, objectively incorrect, and/or dangerous, but widespread censorship is a slippery slope. If you want what you’re able to see to be heavily controlled, there are probably other instances with that purpose. An instance that describes itself as general-purpose and for everyone probably isn’t the place for that, though.

Edit: To be clear, I don’t have a problem with an instance blocking another instance. My problem is with an instance blocking another instance while implying that they aren’t.