You're right. Meet Excelcia, the Slashdot monitoring and control AI.

That's a funny way of explaining that they neglected to implement proper security measures and backup measures for decades.

The security measures I can forgive. Or, rather, I can extend them the benefit of the doubt. There are so many vectors and ins, I'm willing to issue a mulligan on that.

But the backup... what is the difference between a ransomware attack and a hard drive failure? Only the predicate intent. The result is identical.

So while I have room for tolerance for a security failure, I have no tolerance for the aftermath. Anyone can get hit by it, but being harmed by it for more than a day, that's on them. Anything more than a day's down time to re-image every hard drive and firmware back to known good, is just simply incompetence.

Tero said: How did this article even get published?

It's a great article. There are a lot of apps, use cases, and workflows that can be duplicated in Linux, but which aren't obvious or well advertised. An article like this encourages people to share those workflows they have had problems duplicating and then others who have duplicated them or found other solutions can share them. Great idea. The lowest quality (or one of) part of this article was your comment.

couchslug said: Maintaining the low quality of Slashdot is a mysterious choice by its owners whose replacement by AI would be an upgrade.

...and here we have a tie for the other lowest quality part of this article. Great name, by the way. Matches your attitude. If you want to make a complaint, then offer a solution with it. If you hate Slashdot in general so much, why are you here? We have all watched the site slowly suffer from not having any energy input into the system, but maybe dragging it down further isn't the answer. Can you even see the irony of bitterly complaining about the lack of effort the owners are putting in?

Both of you, add some energy to the system, or vote with your feet. Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Depends what you mean by video editor.

For transcoding, de and re-muxing, filtering, cropping, resizing, de-interlace, and some splicing with the equivalent audio capabilities (basically for format bashing with enough splicing ability to piece together pieces of movies, for example, spread over multiple discs) you have avidemux.

You have other tools like MKVToolNix, Mediainfo and MakeMKV for direct Matroska editing, meta-data vewing, and DVD/Blu-Ray ripping respectively too.

For video authoring with splices, fades, effects, animations, titles, with good timeline support, you have openshot.

Bah,

Made a typo in the quoting but I'm sure you can figure it out.

Would you actually be cheering if he was using Linux and had gotten away with his ransomware spree?

I would be cheering regardless of the end-use of the computer if the method used to apprehend the suspect was not frighteningly draconian. Yes.

It's not a win for anybody.

Indeed, invasion of privacy is not a remedy for crime.

These are the same arguments that legislators and law enforcement are using the world over to erode privacy. To institute "age verification" (which is really just tracking by another name) and to brand everything you do. This is the pre-internet equivalent to tattooing a serial number on everyone and then recording that number at every checkpoint and building access in order to track people. Good thing no one ever did that.

Oh.... wait....

There are many American vs "Rest of the English Speaking World" spellings that don't matter. This one does, as they are two very different things with completely different etymologies and histories.

A check is an action you perform to investigate, and perhaps a mark you make to indicate an investigation or task is completed.
A cheque is a financial instrument used to transfer funds.

If the British can set aside their hatred of all things French long enough to use the correct loan word, then even Americans can get it right.

...don't exist outside Apple.

Your argument fails at the subject line. Age verification is neither necessary, nor is it the actual predicate cause for almost all regulations requiring it. Age verification laws are more about instituting KYC reporting and tracking you than actually verifying your age.

Think about it. How can you verify your age and maintain your anonymity? You can't. How can jurisdictions make laws requiring you to give up your anonymity while justifying it another way? Age verification.

There is no good reason for it anywhere. The actual answer whenever you think age verification is the solution is parenting.

... "Canada declined to interfere with Darwisnism", with the story going on to lament the fact that unfortunately by the time of Stocton's fatal stupidity he'd already passed on his genes.

To call it a "missed opportunity" is a little extreme.

Call me a troll, but both his daredevil idiocy and the fact that other people were stupid enough to get on were and are self solving problems. Both solved by the predictable outcome. An outcome that, I'll add, wasn't merely predictable in hindsight. One hopes that people will ask more questions before getting on a submersible vehicle designed to protect the occupants with pencil lead.

I would be in favour of a law that makes many if not most liability waivers unenforceable. A company that invites people on board a vehicle not type certified as fit for purpose should not be able to enjoy any litigation protection. I would also be in favour of requiring a company that so takes passengers to prove it can cover its liability, through insurance or bond.

But none of this falls on Canada.

Savannah likes to advertise its thousands of projects and call itself an incubator. I have a small open source project I wanted to move off of Github a couple years ago, and the pain I went through to try and get hosting there was immeasurable. The arrogance they displayed, like they were God's gift to hosting. And the "advertising" requirements they had. Not just the project licensing, which I can understand them wanting to be GPL and which I had no problems with. But the wording in the documentation, needing it to talk up GNU. The changes I had to make in actual functionality too were not insignificant. And the sheer arrogance with which they made these demands. Not all at once in a list. One. By. One. Always in a "Ya, your reply to our last request wasn't good enough... because what about this?" way.

I kept the whole painful email exchange in a separate email folder just in case I ever get tempted to go back. I ended up going with Codeberg, which was simple, easy, and very philosophically compatible.

So it doesn't surprise me they have unpatched problems. Savannah itself is ancient and primitive. The kind of thing a couple hackers whip up in a day which suits them so doesn't need polish. They are far too interested in resting on decades-old laurels than in actually doing good work today.

How long before GNU realizes that its entire code base has been static so long that it's irrelevant and that "GNU/Linux" just isn't a think because there is very little left that hasn't been replaced.

If it's in the common part of a bathroom (ie: the sinks), where there could be any number of people, it's fair game. But...
A) If the observer is in the wrong bathroom, and/or
B) if the observer is peeking in to stalls or over urinal dividers,
then that is clearly in the wrong.

In short, the presence or lack of a recording device is irrelevant. Your choice of "bathroom" as a location is intended to invoke shock, but there is nothing different. Actively breaching areas where there is an expectation of privacy is an intrusion and can and should be punished. Observing anyone anywhere in any situation with any device where there is no inherent expectation of privacy is FAIR GAME. There is nothing new here. Anywhere I can use my eyeballs I can use a pair of recording glasses.

Why does it matter? However creepy that may be, how is sitting across from someone and looking at them stalking? I can and will look at anything I want, any time I want, and I'll enforce that right any way necessary against any aggressor. And if I can look at anything I want, as long as I am not in a jurisdiction that bans recording, then I can record anything I want.

Are you going to gouge out that same "incel"'s eyes if he even looks at that "pretty girl"? How are you going to enforce making people forget pretty girls?

How is anyone looking at anything predatory? It is the very definition of harmless. Having something that augments memory is also harmless.

In short, as long as those glasses are actually on someone's face, there is nothing harmful about using them to record anything you want.

Sooner or later we're all going to have implants that do the same thing. You might as well get it through your thick skull now that if you go out in public, you are fair game for anyone to look at, remember, or record.

It's not quite that easy, even with AI.
First you need a pull request with a plausible sounding purpose. In fact, you need a stated purpose which is both plausible and interesting.
Which means the maintainer:
1) Determines whether the purpose is interesting enough on its face to warrant attention
2) Then investigates whether the code does what the purpose says it does, which is in the broad strokes is much much easier than just investigating a random piece of code.

You don't implement code at the recommendation of AI. But you can certainly turf code on that basis. No one is saying maintainers should implement based on AI review. But it can certainly help as a rapid gatekeeper of what passes the smell test.

In short, the problems are being grossly overstated. And their remedy is far in excess of the problem, which leads me to believe this is mostly the problem being used as an excuse for project management changes being made for other reasons.

I typically like my posts to stand on their own, but in this case, after re-reading the source article, I just had to add, it's no wonder I've never heard of Ladybird Browser before today. Nor will I likely hear about it in the future again either.