Notices by Drew DeVault (sir@cmpwn.com)

Encryption is a human right

The falsehoods of anti-AGPL propaganda

https://drewdevault.com/2020/07/27/Anti-AGPL-propaganda.html

#blog

Do you want to work on free and open source software as a full-time job? People ask me all the time how to find companies who might hire you for this, and I share this command line snippet:

git log -n100000 --format="%ae" | cut -d@ -f2 | sort -u | less

This will produce a list of email domains who are committing in a given git repo, which often corresponds pretty closely with the list of companies willing to hire you to work on that project and others like it.

@joeo10 why does everyone insist on buying everything As A Service when you can just host it yourself in 15 minutes using knowledge which has been standard fare to sysadmins for 30 years

Snap, Flatpak, AppImage, etc - are all attempts to make Linux more palatable to either proprietary software, or to software with reckless runaway complexity. Personally, I want neither, and will give no quarter to "solutions" for their "problems".

Is there a federated reddit alternative yet

Modest suggestion: next time you plan on buying some luxury item (starbucks, a video game, a dinner out, etc), consider donating that amount to an open source project that you love. Not every time - you can have that frappachino tomorrow - but just this time, let's give back to FOSS.

The PeerTube content bootstrap fund:

https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-05-15-peertube-bootstrap-fund/

Please boost!

Big picture, in the next decade, I would like to see:

1. Federated free software services become the dominant platform for social media and messaging.

2. A more privacy-oriented and cryptographically-literate public, and simple, standard free software tools anyone can leverage for this purpose.

3. Open hardware, especially RISC-V, becoming the dominant approach for new hardware development.

4. Recapturing the mobile market from proprietary walled gardens, instead favoring models which put the user in control of their devices (e.g. pmOS).

5. Average (read: non-SV CEO) technologists becoming more politically engaged, including running for and winning offices, and using political will to reinforce the above and start making a difference outside of tech

Reposting some old comments on UEFI, since I got riled up about it again:

UEFI is perhaps the single most egregious pile of garbage ever concieved by humans. I don't think it's possible to overstate how awful it truly is.

Here's how BIOS works: basically, the computer loads the first 512 bytes of disk into memory and jumps to it. The OS takes over from there and does whatever it needs to, like bootstrapping stage 2 and loading the kernel from the filesystem. The spec[0] is 46 pages long and you are granted the rights to reproduce, distribute, and implement it free of charge.

Want to know how UEFI works? The spec[1] is a 2,899 page PDF which you have to pay to use in any way, including writing an implementation.

Every copy of this specification should be found and burned. The ashes should be buried deep in a dark place and the earth above salted.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20110715081320/http://www.phoenix.com/resources/specs-bbs101.pdf

[1] https://uefi.org/specifications

From GitLab:

https://paste.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/23e31a29f427066ef261b2ffa7fd9bf46530d904

- We're adding tracking
- Including third-party tracking
- There will be proprietary scripts
- The website and API will be broken for you until you agree

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyzd_a6vLWY

One of these days I'm going to wake up and find my apartment completely full of yak hair

Oh, I forgot to mention in the status update but the RISC-V port of musl libc was upstreamed this month too 🎉

Chat services unaffected by the Cloudflare outage:

✗ Discord
✗ Matrix
✓ IRC

(subpost)

Reminder that C and C++ are different languages and use of the term "C/C++" qualifies you for 20 years in the gulag

https://drewdevault.com/make-a-blog

Start a blog and write your first article, get $20. Write another 3 articles within six months and get another $20.

It's super cool how docker grows to consume all available disk space

NewPipe is a really great app, we should use it more as an example of why FOSS puts users first and proprietary software doesn't

Holy shit, Facebook is paying teenagers to install a root certificate on their phones so they can snoop on all of their internet traffic

Not a joke, this is actually a thing which is happening right now

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/