Comment Re:Wrong market - High Quality Stereo Audio (Score 1) 14
Have I reinvented the Game Boy? Yes. With good reason.
Sounds more like the Nokia N-Gage really
Have I reinvented the Game Boy? Yes. With good reason.
Sounds more like the Nokia N-Gage really
NATO are free to do a code review on the Linux code and decide whether or not to use it.
Russia are free to do a code review on the Linux code and decide whether or not to use it.
Any other potential state actors evaluating the use of Linux are free to do a code review on the Linux code and decide whether or not to use it.
Linux is not an arm of NATO nor of any NATO-member government. It is an international collaborative FOSS project. Code should be examined on a case by case basis to determine if it presents a security risk on its own terms as a piece of software - regardless of the source. There is no indication here that anyone thought the relevant patch introduced any kind of security vulnerability.
All that's going on here is that a maintainer decided to reject a patch apparently based on the nationality of the person and company involved. Which is inappropriate for a project like Linux (and reeks of xenophobia)
As do several other nations and their intelligence services.
I haven't seen evidence that any nation has done this, though nothing is gained by tempting them.
You really need me to point you to cases where organizations like the NSA have tried to influence industry standard software or inject backdoors for their own gain?
The patch & code is open, and it's for hardware that's almost exclusively used in Russia.
I looked at the company making hardware in question and they are effectively contractors for the Russian government.
So what? Plenty of other hardware companies hold contracts to the US government, UK government, Israeli government, etc etc
This could easily be construed as helping the Russian government, therefore accepting their patches is a political action in itself and possibly a violation of sanctions.
By that standard, any acceptance of any code from anyone tangentially related to a government contract somewhere would be 'a political action in itself'. The Linux Kernel is an international open source project - whilst some components of it might be overseen by various organizations, it would be a stretch to claim that accepting good code into the kernel codebase, for free, would be a sanctions violation (or a sanctions violation worth caring about anyway)
Also, if like you say, "several other nations and their intelligence services" are poisoning the Linux kernel then this would be a prime target for them.
What? I was meaning that there are incentives for multiple countries to inject remotely injectable bugs - if that was the criteria, then no code from any company based in any major military power would be acceptable. There's intel processors in US military systems, for example, and the US is regularly involved in conflicts, yet I don't see intel code being rejected on the grounds that it has US government connections, or on the grounds that intel could be being used to some back door into the kernel through publicly visible and openly reviewed patches
In both cases, accepting the patches would place Linux in the middle of a war between nations,
No, it would be Linux taking a neutral stance to background political difference between nations.
If you don't want Linux to be political then the best idea is to avoid political situations entirely, as they are doing now. This is temporary, so the patches will eventually get into the kernel when they are resubmitted during peace time.
If the standard here were applied universally, then almost no code would ever be accepted into the kernel, because large swathes of it come from companies that have ties somewhere to governments, and those governments are often involved in conflicts (hot or cold) somewhere in the world, or have a government doing something someone disagrees with, or whatever.
At the moment, the Russian state/FSB has a large incentive to introduce remotely exploitable bugs into software that NATO nations largely depend on. You may not think so but this is a very serious security matter. This isn't permanent.
As do several other nations and their intelligence services.
The patch & code is open, and it's for hardware that's almost exclusively used in Russia.
The refusal isn't technical, it isn't security based, it's clearly political, and that's inappropriate for the kernel. The maintainer here should be overridden
There's a difference between "unsupported on platform X" and "refuses to run on platform X".
A deliberate decision has been made to block people on unsupported platforms running software that otherwise would almost certainly run just fine. That's where it becomes obnoxious
The earth is perfectly capable of supporting orders of magnitude more humans than there currently are. We're just currently very bad at mechanisms for effective resource allocation (even the best methods we have and use are still terribly poor) so we have great disparity in living conditions, resource utilization efficiency etc.
Necessity is the mother of invention. We're at the most populous moment in human history, but also the most efficient, the overall wealthiest, safest, healthiest... and as the population grows we'll get even better at doing things.
Yes, as more humans exist, we will need to change what was the natural world more to provide for us, but such is the way of these things. Our evolutionary niche is changing our environment to suit us - so let's do that
On Mac how ever "open [something]" opens [something] in the appropriated app. And as `.' is a directory, obviously Finder is the correct app.
open "myTextFile.txt" would most likely open Textedit.app - or GVim if you have that one set as default text editor.
"start", as in "start
That doesn't make it wrong. States have sovereign privilege to do what is best for them, rather than care about interests of others. And they have a duty to their citizens to do what is best for them at the expense of others.
Yes and no - there are treaties that states (including the US) sign that limit their ability to act in that way, but such treaties usually exclude "national security" interests - which is why the US relies on national security excuses to implement what boils down to protectionism (and is pushing that protectionism on allies).
The only real problems are on the ground: Airports and maintenance facilities are not designed with these things in mind (MAJOR infrastructure expenses for airlines and airports).
That's going to be why these never ended up being a thing. A trend over the history of commercial jetliners has been to optimize for maintenance - engines used to be built into the wings, which was a maintenance nightmare, and later tail engines were also painful to maintain with their height (and partial enclosure in the structure of the plane). Likewise, the number of engines for long haul flights has gone from 3 or 4 to 2, partly because of reduced maintenance and partly for increased fuel efficiency
Tube cabins are also a decent compromise for cabin space vs structural considerations, especially under pressure, and loading cargo into the underside of the aircraft from a truck is quite handy.
We see a lot of interesting designs for specialist and military applications where cost is less of a concern, as soon as they hit upon an efficient formula that the commercial segment finds useful it will spread to airliners by sheer economics
Google (in its GMail persona) and stormfront are not near-peers. Gab and other fediverse servers were near-peers (Gab was on the larger end of servers in the network). That's why I chose to use Microsoft/Yahoo/Google in my analogy - they are in the same ballpark in terms of users and visibility as each other.
However to directly address the analogy - Google blocking stormfront or 4chan associated emails simply for being associated with stormfront or 4chan is also an issue for the infrastructure of email. An email provider shouldn't be unilaterally deciding that its users cannot receive emails from a given sender regardless of the users' wishes. I don't know about stormfront specifically but as far as I'm aware GMail doesn't irrevocably blackhole or bounce 4chan related email.
I'll note this is all different to spam blocking however - spam is unsolicited email. Solicited email shouldn't be blocked by providers (except by accident). The Activitypub (Mastodon) protocol is such that cross-server traffic for a feed is always solicited - subscription to a feed is based on a voluntary act by the one receiving the messages, and can be stopped by that same recipient. Blocking an attempt to send an unsolicited message to a user is far more acceptable than blocking legitimate, solicited messages
Copyright needs to be abolished or at least severely abolished.
Oops, proofreading fail. This should read
Copyright needs to be abolished or at least severely reduced.
If you mean the Brendan Shanks WWDC archive, YouTube cited copyright takedowns.
If it was indeed over trademark rather than copyright, then DMCA takedowns were falsely issued, which is A Problem.
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.”
This will inevitably lead to fragmentation.
It already did.
When Gab switched to a Mastodon software base, it was briefly integrated with the rest of the fediverse, until a number of major server operators and client apps actively blocked the Gab servers. Eventually the Mastodon connectivity was so little used that Gab stopped maintaining it.
For a decentralized platform seeking to become a standard, this kind of behaviour is poison. It is like a Google refusing to accept email sourced from Microsoft-hosted domains because they don't like some political position Microsoft held, or Microsoft patching Outlook to refuse to connect to Yahoo mail accounts because Yahoo didn't align with Microsoft. It undermines the point of an open, distributed architecture.
I have accounts on a couple of fediverse servers, but outside the current Twitter exodus it seems like a dead end - it is an ecosystem that has proven it cannot be trusted as infrastructure
"No matter where you go, there you are..." -- Buckaroo Banzai
