smokeypanda (u/smokeypanda)

smokeypanda commented on The Liberty Phone puri.sm/posts/introducing... · Posted by u/Hackbraten

This is the actual amount stuff costs when not using babies to assemble.

I’m cool with it

smokeypanda · 2 years ago

I'm sure economies of scale would bring down the price somewhat if the majority of the industry's manufacturing was done in developed countries.

smokeypanda commented on Nyxt: The Hacker's Browser nyxt.atlas.engineer/... · Posted by u/sathishmanohar

bee_rider · 3 years ago

I’ve always assumed the major browsers had all sorts of security stuff going on behind the scenes, and using a small alternative like this (or suckless surf) was just asking for trouble. But, I don’t have any real knowledge about security stuff.

How misinformed is my take? Are these kinds of browsers OK? I’d like something light, if possible.

smokeypanda · 3 years ago

Lightweight web browsers don't have as large of an attack surface, particularly if they eschew JS, cookies, etc or you disable them. Nyxt is alpha software, so YMMV until it's more feature complete, and independently audited to correctly implement WebKit and WebExtensions. Run Tor Browser without JS in a VM for security+privacy.

smokeypanda commented on The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999) catb.org/~esr/writings/ca... · Posted by u/wallflower

ghaff · 3 years ago

The main criticism (IMO) isn't really the work itself but how it's handed down as wisdom. It wasn't really cathedral==proprietary and bazaar==open source. In fact it was about cathedral vs. bazaar in open source software and that story is more complicated and comes down to "It depends." There are certainly open source projects that have more of a cathedral aspect whether because of benevolent dictator model or, more recently, a strong commercially-oriented foundation. But there are also areas that look more like a bazaar which have some advantages with respect to innovation but can be... messy.

smokeypanda · 3 years ago

ESR is on record stating that the original focus of 'cathederal' was on GCC and Emacs, the terminology was applicable to proprietary software and top-down corporate cultures.

smokeypanda commented on Judge decides against Internet Archive file770.com/judge-decides... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

OJFord · 3 years ago

I have no idea what Roe v Wade is about (I'm not American or in the US), but I like GP read the parent comment to theirs as meaning 'these jokers overturned it, that is bad, we cannot rely on them'. Re-reading after seeing your own comment, it is ambiguous really, you could read it either way, but you're probably right (having the context of what it's about) and GP just mistook the meaning as I did.

> If anything has proven this [that 'we need to react better to laws as they are being drafted, not wait out their inevitable harm to society'] lately is the Roe v. Wade overturn, we really need to stop relying on courts to "save" us and instead fight for better laws [...]

smokeypanda · 3 years ago

Your first reading was correct. The ambiguity is whether the comment was referring 'we'(author is part of referenced group), or 'them'(author is describing disgruntled group), possessing the viewpoint that the overturning was bad.

smokeypanda commented on Shane Pitman, leader of the warez group Razor 1911: life after prison (2005) defacto2.net/f/ab3914... · Posted by u/grubbs

cruntly · 3 years ago

He ruined the lives of many hard-working software developers who relied on selling their code to feed their families.

This was back when programming was a highly skilled and difficult job that only a few could do, so cracking was even more harshly targeting people.

smokeypanda · 3 years ago

That's a rather presumptive over-simplification of what effect software cracking had and has on employed programmers' livelihoods. It's not a direct 1 to 1 relationship between a cracked installation and lost sale, nor does piracy prevention guarantee market relevance. I don't condone consuming pirated software when OSS alternatives exist, but that's not out of sympathy to tech megacorps.

http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html

smokeypanda commented on Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering? · Posted by u/schience

robust-cactus · 3 years ago

Interesting fact - valve no longer works this way because it didn't work.

smokeypanda · 3 years ago

Do any sources state that Valve transitioned to a traditional hierarchy? There's been reports of cliques and internal opaqueness going back a decade, but the only concrete difference I've heard versus pre-2012 is a shift towards microtransactions and hardware design.

smokeypanda commented on Play Counter Strike 1.6, with full multiplayer, in the browser play-cs.com/en/servers... · Posted by u/philosopher1234

d3vmax · 3 years ago

Play 2008 COD Modern Warfare, great online maps and play. People are still running servers / mods.

Current games control severs, pre 2010 games gave users control.

smokeypanda · 3 years ago

There's also the iw4x project that brings community servers and patches to the 2009 Modern Warfare 2. The game mechanics, asinine matchmaking algorithm, map design, and monetization model of 2019+ Call of Dutys don't spark joy for those who grew up on 90's/00's PC multiplayer games.

smokeypanda commented on What’s going on with Google and Facebook hiring freezes? blog.interviewing.io/what... · Posted by u/leeny

cloverich · 3 years ago

FWIW i first learned of it from a libertarian angle, which equated business cycle with economy wide (mal) investment which was, in practice, usually driven by the fed or some comparable government program. Whether consistent or not it holds at least some truth and was an interesting angle to start learning about economics.

smokeypanda · 3 years ago

Libertarianism and Austrian economics has a perception of outright rejecting empiricism and other rational thought, so I'd like to add a clarification. Libertarian theory doesn't deny naturally occurring downturns in economies, but that the severity and length of them are lessened without state mismanagement. Potentially, to the point that nation-spanning busts would be a thing of the past.

smokeypanda commented on How Bungie identified a mass sender of fake DMCA notices torrentfreak.com/digital-... · Posted by u/perihelions

woojoo666 · 3 years ago

A side note that I found particularly interesting

> On March 22, the Reynolds account logged out of Google and less than a second later, the Wiland account logged in, suggesting the same person was behind both accounts.

I've always wondered how often timing analysis is used in practice by surveillence big tech. I suspect that as people become more privacy aware, and start using VPNs, pseudonames, multiple accounts, etc, that big tech will start using timing analysis more and more to correlate traffic and identify users. Like if your friend sends you a Reddit link on WhatsApp, and you immediately open it in your browser, that Reddit session is now linked to you.

Another more complex example: let's say Google has already identified your Reddit account. You open a Reddit discussion, and deep in the discussion it links to a Youtube video, and you open it in your browser. Now even if you weren't logged into Youtube, Google could guess that it's you based on the timing of when your Reddit account opened the discussion, and when the linked Youtube video was accessed. And not just that video, but now every Youtube video watched in the same browsing session, is now linked back to you (assuming you have first-party cookies enabled, which is basically required if you ever want to log into anything).

Seems a bit paranoid, but I actually suspect this happened to me a few months ago. I was using a FOSS reddit client and clicked a youtube link buried deep in a reddit thread, and opened it in Newpipe (a FOSS youtube client). I wasn't logged in, and was using a VPN, and yet the next day on my Youtube feed I started getting recommendations based on that video (and those recommendations were very different from my usual ones). Scary stuff.

smokeypanda · 3 years ago

I don't have an expert understanding of how cookies or VPNs function, but these are the two categories of causes that I came up with. Both seem more likely than Google having timing data from a third-party service.

Within the first category, possibilities include that the phone logged into your Google account while using the VPN, that there was a Google tracking cookie on your phone and that phone wasn't always connected to the VPN so it related 2 ip addresses, and that your other device on same network shared a VPN session with your phone.

The 2nd category I'm including for posterity even if it's unlikely based off your stated usage of FOSS on your phone. That your phone isn't a degoogled OS or other device with Google integration. Smart devices with microphones aren't supposed to collect voice data when not explicitly activated, but it is a potentiality.