This is actually true. Essentially a big drug manufacturer took down a scientist through a serious harassment campaign and blew him the fuck up when he finally snapped. In no large part to this coordinated glowup, published literature in the US agrees with the chemical manufacturer while it’s been banned in the EU for 20 years. The EPA might disagree with me that it’s true; the EPA and others funded in no small part by Syngenta refuse to look at things by Dr Hayes because he lost his cool a few times. Unfortunately Alex Jones further eroded the credibility of Dr Hayes but, imo, only because Syngenta actively deplatformed his research. Also Jones said some crazy shit about it.

The Security Online article only cites Margitelli’s post on the matter. My assumption has been the article used the post as its single source. On one hand, watching MS fuck shit up for years, I want to believe Margitelli. On the other hand, researchers using weird tools and uninterested in reality are why curl is now a CNA.

I’m personally frustrated with Margitelli’s post because it’s all about abandoning responsible disclosure globally rather than naming and shaming (Canonical? Red Hat? Both? Others? If it affects all GNU/Linux I’d expect every single distro maintainer to be named and shamed). Responsible disclosure is our best solution to make sure innocent bystanders don’t get caught in the crossfire. When specific entities don’t abide by responsible disclosure we lambast those specific entities not the entire process built to keep users safe.

Nice! That second one is just a repost of your first.

I wonder where the sources for this are? The hidden Margaritelli Twitter post?

Canonical and Red Hat have not only confirmed the vulnerability’s high severity but are also actively working on assessing its impact and developing patches.

The Twitter account has been privated and there are no news stories about it. Other communities where this has been shared are reasonably suspicious.

It could also be manipulated by someone who reports the dark patterns are inaccurate. If it were run by a single org or person, it could get sold to a company interested in gaming the ratings or used to bash things the owner doesn’t like. I’m not entirely sure what your point is. Every way to set this up is subject to bad actors. There are some checks and balances present in the website. Why are they inadequate and why should we not trust this site? Are you, perhaps, an industry dark pattern plant trying to get us to avoid something that could deter dark pattern usage?

That’s a huge misrepresentation of what Mitnick did and how the government mischarged him. He did a bunch of dumb stuff that was illegal. He was overcharged in very bad ways supporting ridiculous lies from the companies he broke into.

In another post you’re actively looking at purchasing GPS systems. The satellites you’re sending info to are not available to dissect and I highly doubt the firmware of the devices you’re looking at is publicly available much less libre. Your trolling is not internally consistent so it’s clear you don’t have any clue what you’re on about. Good luck with that.

The claim is that audio and video are E2EE. I’m not sure how you’re unable to disprove that using the linked code, audit report, and COTS debugging tools. Can you expand on that? I see a lot of FUD without anything more than “they’re not libre” which, again, doesn’t do a great job of selling your point.

Interesting. I was able to access the linked whitepaper and repositories without trouble and the 3rd party stuff too. Do you have local config preventing you from downloading the source code to review?

While I can respect your distaste for non-libre software, you’ll need to back up the malware claim. There are real security concerns out there in common non-libre; labeling things that are not libre as malware solely because they are not libre muddies the waters and makes your message much less palatable.

This is complicated to unravel and has lots of similarities to the Tri-State Crematory Scandal.

Who owns a dead body? Does the state? Does the family? Take religion out of the picture for a few minutes as well so we can properly separate church and state. Someone dies without (available at that moment) relatives or a will defining what happens with the body. Alternatively someone dies and has not actually paid for the stuff stipulated in their will and does not have the resources to do so. What should happen? Something possibly like, in order,

• The family owns the body
• The facility where the person died owns the dead body
• The state owns the body if those fall through

Dead bodies can’t just sit around. They can cause serious health and environmental problems if not properly disposed of, so something has to be done. Remember, we’ve set aside religion, so a dead body is literally just a resource. It can be turned into cremains, it can be buried, or it can be sold for various uses. What should the state regulate here? What’s wrong with the state turning a dead body into some money? How much responsibility do families have in respecting last wishes? How much time and effort should the state put into investigating those? Do dead bodies really matter? How much land are we willing to turn over to cemeteries today? In ten years? In one hundred years?

Now if you bore with me this long and agree that dead bodies can be sold, I also strongly feel like there should be compensation to these families with interest for that shit. If you steal my resources and don’t tell me, the state already requires repayment. That’s what should happen here. It gets murkier once you add religion back in because you can’t really undo a lot of these things.

Dallas County is doing something wrong. But it’s way more complicated underneath the hood than normal Texas government shenanigans.

Boeing execs said they held nothing back. The union members took that to be threatening. I genuinely wonder how much profit was actually reserved and how much executive comp is still available to drop into the pool. To me, “holding nothing back” means the company genuinely cannot to fund anything else without going into the red. Holding nothing back means fat was cut, executive pay was reduced, and shareholders understand their dividends are gone because the people that make them money need to get some too. Holding nothing back means some rainy day assets are sold and corporate, non-union members experience some austerity (granted you have to remain competitive so as to not lose your value creators so you can’t cut everything or they’d leave; executives are almost never value creators so they can have austerity measures). Holding nothing back means jobs could be cut if more hardship appears.

Something tells me Boeing was holding stuff back with that offer. It could be all the deferred stock executives have or the lack of shareholder expectation management. Not sure! We’ll never know.

The most frustrating thing about this article is that it completely ignores that good movies targeted at kids still have to be good. Personal complaints aside, the new Mario movie was reasonably good for adults and great for kids. Pixar keeps churning out things that are fantastic on many levels. Bluey is an amazing show that can resonate with kids and parents. I don’t for a minute buy the elitist bullshit of “well you’re not a kid so you can’t comment.” Muppet Treasure Island holds the fuck up as an adult so this writer can fuck right off.

The reason to use mono over dotnet is political. This is stirring up some really old shit; I expect a continuation of that shit now. Mono is currently MIT as is dotnet core. Who knows what direction each project will go now? MS has a history of fucking with licenses and Wine uses copyleft setups.

Microsoft has had dotnet-core for awhile. If you are running production dotnet loads (eg a C# app), you’ve probably been using those Linux containers for awhile. This doesn’t surprise me; they usually aren’t interested in maintaining an open version of software they have more restrictive licenses for. Enterprises will continue to use dotnet-core and Microsoft will probably do something to shoot mono in the foot in a few years.

Let’s assume you’re arguing in good faith here so we can understand why land deeds and URLs are completely different.

Deeds are managed by a central authority. There is an agreed-upon way(s) to view and search those deeds. There is a single authority to update or remove deeds. The items the deed refers to also are controlled by a single authority and changing them has a single process.

URLs are registered (loosely) with a central authority but the similarities end there. I can impersonate a URL on a network (even up to large chunks of the internet if I’m able to confuse DNS in a large enough attack). So just because you’ve bought the domain referenced in the blockchain and set up some name servers doesn’t mean any consumer of the blockchain or even the internet is guaranteed to hit your instance of the domain. All a URL is is a reference to something so let’s assume for a minute we can have a global reference. What’s behind it? Again, completely uncontrolled. For now it could be your NFT; what happens if I am your hosting provider and destroy your instance? Move your hardware? What’s to prevent you, the owner of the assumed global reference, to change what that uniform resource locator is actually locating?

Land deeds and URLs are not analogous. Land and the content served at a URL are not analogous. Let’s look at NFTs quickly to see if we can actually do something about this!

Since we have a single-write, read-only database, why not store the full thing in the DB? Well, first you have to agree on a representation. It has to be unchanging so we can’t use a URL. It can’t ever duplicate so realistically hashing is out (unless our hash provides a bijection which is just a fancy way of saying use the fucking object itself). Assuming we’re only talking about digital artifacts (attempting to digitize a physical asset is a form of hashing meaning we get collisions so you can’t prove ownership), we’re now in an arms race for you to register all of your assets and their serialization methods before I brute force everything. Oh and this needs to live everywhere so it can be public so you need peta-many petabyte drives. But wait! Now we’re burning the sun in power just to show you have ownership of 10 and I have ownership of 01. Fuck me that’s dumb.

That’s not how that works.

There is literally no way to opt out of Google’s data collection if you are going to use their products. Using another frontend shifts the data profile but it still exists and provides value to them. It’s reasonable to say it’s a bad thing. It’s unreasonable to say there are no other ways. I grew up in a public library and I can still get most of the information I need from a public library without Google products (things I can’t get usually come through inter-library loan or direct connections with subject matter experts at, say, a maker space). This seems to be less of “I’m against invasive corporations” and more of a “I don’t like the solutions available to avoid invasive corporations.”

If you care about that you don’t use YouTube at all or support creators that do. Even using 3rd party apps or services feeds into that. This feels like a serious non sequitur on any thread about any Google product.

I pay for YouTube Family. I consume a lot of YouTube and I want to support the creators I watch. At its current price point, YouTube Family is reasonable. Several households in my family get ad-free YouTube for what is a reasonably low price point for each household.

If the price goes up much (eg if I were paying the single price of $11 per household), the creators I really enjoy continue to get pushed out or change content because of shitty ad rules, or they pull the whole “must be in the same household” bullshit I would drop it in a heartbeat just like I’ve dropped most streaming providers. Streaming has become cable and YouTube has been shooting itself in the foot by forcibly changing content for advertisers. I come to the platform for content, not advertisers.

Thanks for citing for me. This is exactly what I was referring to!