The main reason they faced this backslash was that they put a quite rude message in the app and worded it like "accept these terms or else". I don't care enough about this to try to understand why they made the announcement in this way, to be honest. They should have done it like every other company does: send an email saying "your use of the app after XX/XX/XXXX implies your acceptance of these new terms. To find out what they are, read this 10,000 word legalese in which we don't tell you what exactly changed" and call it a day. I have zero doubt this is how they'll do it in three months, by the way. People won't even notice that email. "Social" companies have ruined people's abilities to understand what's going on and filter out the noise. They destroyed email's usefulness by sending dozens of notification emails every day so as to bury anything important, you can no longer trust somebody will read an email. They did the same with phone notifications: they put so much crap that any time you grab somebody's phone you see they have 20, 30 useless notifications they don't bother acknowledging anymore, with the main culprits being YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other crap. So yeah, next time just send a notification or an email and nobody will notice. Don't do it through a scary message in the app, you idiots!

I see now the mixup is in the title of the page itself.

Amazing how a company claiming to be specialized in data protection regulation (the company behind gdpr-info.eu) can mix two entirely different concepts.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#Current_legal_frameworks) the Right to be Forgotten was included in an early draft of what eventually became the GDPR, but it is not in the final version

That's not the same thing. The right to be forgotten is not the right for personal data to be removed. The right to be forgotten, as referred to when talking about courts vs Google, is simply the "right" to have search results omit certain "inconvenient" results. That is NOT part of the GDPR and in fact only a couple of countries have it (IIRC, Spain, France, and TIL Germany also). Notice that it says nothing about the data itself, only to how it is indexed and returned in search results. The right to have our own data REMOVED from DBs is different and involves having our own data deleted from a company's DB. For example your former mobile phone service provider has no business knowing your email address and sending you promotional emails if you no longer have a contract with them, so you have the right to force them to remove your email address.

Well, is not like there haven't been a few guys trying to achieve that... Last attempt was around 80 years ago, it caused quite a fuss

I agree with the sentiment that a decade ago the Internet was a safer, nicer, and much less hostile place, especially for newcomers. Being a dad now, i can see how the ads work for kids, it is scary how manipulative they are.

Reg. NoScript: its use is WAY less annoying than one might expect, people does not browse 1000 sites every day, we tend to browse a few most of the time, and a different one every now and then (example: 80% of my browsing is Innoreader, Ars, and Slashdot, and only Innoreader won't work without javascript). This means that at most, you spend a few days getting it right, then it just gets out of the way.

Unfortunately, the reality is that you need to know how it works and why is it there, otherwise sites break and you don't know why, and that makes it unusable for most people. I have uMatrix installed, but also keep a Chrome instance for those sites which break and take more than a few clicks to get to work, like government sites, or sites which receive payments and do many redirects behind the scenes. The consequences of a site not working are not always just unreachable content, sometimes you might end up paying twice for the same product only because the first time the cookie was not allowed but the processing still went through :)

Damn you made me remember the old KMail from KDE3. I used it as my main email client at the time.

It's KDE4 replacement was never worthy of the same name. I tried many times to use it, only to uninstall it ten minutes later.

It's a shame you posted this as an AC, because most people won't see it by default.

I fully agree with the 5 points you mentioned, and I write this as somebody who has written his share of hundred-lines-long shell scripts. Point 5 is the first thing I thought when I read the description of the problem: "why the hell are you trying to parse an MSI just to show an icon, while in Linux? what is the benefit of doing it?".

Another idea is: did this code pass a code review? I know this is open source and people works in what they like, when they feel like it, but for a project as big as gnome, I would expect code reviews to be a part of the process. Somebody should have seen the commit which "solved" the problem and said something like "this is not acceptable, let's put this minor feature in the backlog and solve it once it is possible to do it in a sane way".

This is a bug which should dissapoint every developer in the project, because it feels amateurish, it doesn't feel like something that should happen in one of the biggest, most successful open source software projects.

I agree with the first statement, but only because no modern OS uses /etc/passwd alone.

Regarding local accounts, there is no technical reason for them to exist in production environments, but when you are outsourcing your datacenter management to another company which hires incompetent/inexperienced sysadmins and surrounds them with outdated procedures, you better bet there will be local accounts, because doing something else needs to go thru 50 layers of "security" procedures seemingly designed to keep the company in the '80s.

Source: the company I work for :)

I understand the concern, but if your phone gets stolen, the thief will only have one of the pieces, right? they'd still need the actual password for the account

Yeah, the problem being nobody knows what IRC is, and most people (especially those who don't use email at work) never checks email, even if their phones require an email address to function as intended (like Android).

Somebody should make an app which looks like whatsapp but works over standard email. The overhead of the standard email headers could make it quite inefficient, but at least we wouldn't have to worry about who uses which service.

If only the F-Droid apps were better... I tend to look there first when I need something (just as I look for portable apps on Windows), but in general the apps are far worse than their functionally equivalent Play Store counterparts

He says it was from Ansible, and having worked with it, I fail to see why in hell would you run 'rm -rf' from it when there are modules for that.

yes, until you start doing "sudo x" instead of "x" for everything... At least for me, being root means to be in a "full alert" state of mind.

Also, this supposedly was done by Ansible, why in hell was he issuing "rm -rf" commands from there? that is what the 'file' module is for

Agree 100% with your comments.
I used to be an Opera fan until the lack of good filtering options led me to Firefox (Opera had "site preferences", which was useful, but at some point it started being insufficient, besides the Opera I loved is dead)

If Privoxy ends up being the only option (we used to have Proxomitron, brilliant stuff), there is really no reason for me to stay with FF, would probably go for Chromium or Vivaldi once it is ready.

Regarding file formats: I may be mistaken, but most of the issues I see are with old formats from the pre-internet era and more primitive/obscure OSes. Sure, we all have read stories of old disks which are now unreadable because the hardware doesn't exist anymore, but that is *hardware*. For files, I see VLC can open nearly every video and audio format in existence, and certainly any photo viewer worth using can open more image formats than what I have seen.

Most of us know what we have in our hard drives. I know I only have a couple word documents that may not be supported in the future, all the rest are open formats, not tied to a single software suite. So, as long as the internet exists, I'll be able to download some linux distro like Slackware (I mention it because it includes everything I may need to open my files in a single dvd, no online repositories needed) and use whatever software comes with it to open my files. I actually keep an ISO handy, so as long as VirtualBox exists I can load the ISO there and have a "2015-compatible" SO for as long as I may want to. Damn, if tomorrow we all leave x86 to some other thing and VirtualBox dissapears, I'll probably be able to open a VM and run VB on it :)

Cloud stuff is probably a huge headache waiting to happen. I'd make sure I have a copy of anything stored in the cloud, and in a format I can open locally. Still, if tomorrow MS dissapears, I'm 99% sure we will have a chance to download Office 365 files in an open format before the shutdown