> The problem is when it costs MONEY to develop

It usually does, but we've somehow made free software for most tasks, and we maintain it. In some ways we do it better as free software.

Sometimes. And sometimes, development is faster with restricted sharing and per-copy fees. If faster development was the only issue, then maybe restrictions on sharing could be ok.

But there are other things like how much everyone should be able to know about the software that increasingly runs our lives, like whether people should be able to verify the security of some software, or audit the response to a security incident. Free software makes society better in those ways.

Also, you mention maintenance. We should keep in mind that the cost of maintenance is increased when only one person is allowed do the maintenance. So high costs is an argument for wanting money, but it can also be an argument for using a lower cost path, such as allowing everyone to do the maintenance, either for free or in a competitive market.

He advocates sharing, and the GPL allows sharing.

He says to ignore laws that block sharing. That means ignoring some parts of copyright law. Some other parts of copyright law are fine. There's no contradiction.

(And if someone has a follow up question about sharing everything, no, he doesn't advocate for sharing everything. Some stuff is personal, for example. He's in favour of sharing generally useful technical information, such as the source code of software that has been given to you.)

For the Irish language course the recordings of native speakers were taken offline in 2023. The AI replacements are nonsensical.

This story is about AI generated courses, not voices, but my post was still (accidentally) on-topic: when they previously used AI to increase volume of content, they were ok with quality being thrown out the window.

The AI generated courses might be low quality, and the original (English) courses might also go downhill because the type of exercises they produce may now be restricted to the type of things that their AI is able to reorganise for other languages. E.g. it might go further in the direction of vocabulary memorisation.

Isn't it that they call it "español" in Latin America, and "castellano" in Spain?

Unfortunately, the voices are really bad.

It's a pity they don't also make available the old courses, with audio from native speakers.

FSF's Zoe Kooyman and Krzysztof Siewicz will give a presentation on Sunday 2nd of Feb:

"FSF's criteria for free machine learning applications"

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedu...

It'll be streamed. Well worth tuning in for. A recording should be online soon after.

Thanks for the details.

Sounds solvable. Not simple, but sounds like they'll be able to solve it, unless they're trying not to.

Maybe new lists could be downloaded per-domain. If I view one page on a domain, I'll probably view others in the same session. And energy use, there are probably ways to make the plug-ins more efficient - in their own code and by improving the functionality the browser makes available.

For the privacy problem of ad-blockers needing access to all of every webpage you view, this could be fixed by plug-ins being reviewed and verified. Mozilla does something like this.

So, the postponed the disabling of Manifest V2, but can the problems faced by the ad-blocker projects be fixed with some extra time?

I.e. Is this an actual solution? I presume ad-blocking is a bit of a cat-and-mouse, so auto-update filter lists sound crucial for ad-blockers to function. If Chrome blocks that, then they're not allowing useful ad-blockers.

Ad-blockers are the canary in the coal mine of the open web.

I said the same thing tomorrow but the mods deleted it. They've picked their side.

The "robot holding a shotgun" was a plot device. We can't wrap our brains around billions of IoT devices self-organising, so he told that story through the representation of various characters.

That's the Terminator series of films to me. May there be many more!

Thanks for clarifying, guruevi.

I was hoping to gather examples of data being stolen when services not using e2ee. Would be a useful thing to document so that policy makers can understand why they shouldn't ban e2ee.

If anyone has examples, I'd be very interested.

Seems like the type of story that should help policy makers understand that they shouldn't ban end-to-end encryption. The EU is talking of banning e2ee.

But can someone confirm that encryption would have prevented this?

The linked story says "The vulnerability allows hackers to gain unauthorized access to an affected MOVEit serverâ(TM)s database." So I guess the data was unencrypted on the server.

> the pointless nature of it all

A lot of things could be reduced to this, but does it really matter if you're looking at the real Proxima Centauri or a slice of Chorizo? What's the point of looking at art?

If looking at a "live" photo of Mars would get your mind racing about how far technology has come, then tune in and enjoy.

If you want to go do something else, that's fine too.

What do they mean by "it wonâ(TM)t be truly live"?

Only one picture every 50 seconds, 17 minute delay for transmission of the signal. Still "live", AFAICT. Those are just quality issues. Given the conditions, the quality is nothing to complain about.

He developed a definition for free software, the concept of copyleft, a set of licences to implement copyleft, he travelled the world for decades building support for this, he wrote code for GCC and GNU Emacs and a lot of other software projects that enabled others to make the packages we use today, he inspired campaigns against software patents, against DRM, against bad copyright laws.

And he persevered despite decades of insults and other people trying to ensure no one heard of his work.