Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy

Title: Nearly 10 years after Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier says: Privacyâs still screwed
Author: Iain Thomson
Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2025 15:44:13 +0000
Link: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/02/15/interview_bruce_schneier/
'In 50 years, I think we'll view these business practices like we view
sweatshops today'
InterviewÂ It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and privacy
expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to
Collect Your Data and Control Your World - an examination of how government
agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his predictions feel
eerily accurate.âŠ

Yes, it is difficult to be optimistic about privacy in this day and age.
=(

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-17 02:55:15 UTC

Post by Retrograde
Title: Nearly 10 years after Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier says: Privacy’s still screwed
Author: Iain Thomson
Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2025 15:44:13 +0000
Link: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/02/15/interview_bruce_schneier/
'In 50 years, I think we'll view these business practices like we view
sweatshops today'
Interview It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and privacy
expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to
Collect Your Data and Control Your World - an examination of how government
agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his predictions feel
eerily accurate.…

Yes, it is difficult to be optimistic about privacy in this day and
age. =(

Legislation has always been slow. The industry has always taken
advantage of that. We just need to say no---if we knew how to.
Optimistically, we'll get there, but, of course, by then the industry
will most likely have found another niche somewhere else.

2025-02-17 10:40:38 UTC

Yes, it is difficult to be optimistic about privacy in this day and
age. =(

I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With industry I
always have the choice of not using it, and they depend on customers, so
in the end, that protects me.

The government on the other hand, is based ultimately on violence and is
an inherently unethical and revolting institution, and so are the people
working for it promoting its power. This is what scares me the most.

Dave Yeo

2025-02-17 17:26:08 UTC

Post by Retrograde
Privacy’s still screwed
Author: Iain Thomson
Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2025 15:44:13 +0000
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/02/15/interview_bruce_schneier/
'In 50 years, I think we'll view these business practices like we view
sweatshops today'
Interview It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and
privacy
expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to
Collect Your Data and Control Your World - an examination of how government
agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his
predictions feel
eerily accurate.…

Yes, it is difficult to be optimistic about privacy in this day and
age. =(

I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With industry I
always have the choice of not using it, and they depend on customers, so
in the end, that protects me.

It's got pretty hard to avoid some of these businesses. Google,
Facebook, Microsoft are examples of companies that are very hard to avoid.

Post by D
The government on the other hand, is based ultimately on violence and is
an inherently unethical and revolting institution, and so are the people
working for it promoting its power. This is what scares me the most.

What scares me is companies using the power of government to advance
their agendas. Reading about how Musk leverages the Chinese courts to
silence criticism and how it looks like the same thing is coming here
Dave.

2025-02-17 21:42:30 UTC

Privacyâs still screwed
Author: Iain Thomson
Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2025 15:44:13 +0000
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/02/15/interview_bruce_schneier/
'In 50 years, I think we'll view these business practices like we view
sweatshops today'
Interview It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and
privacy
expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to
Collect Your Data and Control Your World - an examination of how government
agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his
predictions feel
eerily accurate.âŠ

Yes, it is difficult to be optimistic about privacy in this day and
age. =(

I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With industry I
always have the choice of not using it, and they depend on customers, so
in the end, that protects me.

It's got pretty hard to avoid some of these businesses. Google, Facebook,
Microsoft are examples of companies that are very hard to avoid.

? Facebook is super easy to avoid. Just don't use it. They make nothing of
value.

If you have a job at a global mega-corp I agree, M$ and Google are
difficult to avoid. =(

In private you can do just fine to avoid them as well. There is
libreoffice which takes care of all your office needs, and there's
graphene os, dumbphones and kaios which eliminates the need for an android
phone.

What scares me is companies using the power of government to advance their
agendas. Reading about how Musk leverages the Chinese courts to silence
criticism and how it looks like the same thing is coming here
Dave.

I agree... this unholy combination is the worst of all! It is difficult to
say where the government starts and where the company ends. They merge
into one demon from hell.

Scott Dorsey

2025-02-17 22:23:08 UTC

This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text,

It's got pretty hard to avoid some of these businesses. Google, Facebook,
Microsoft are examples of companies that are very hard to avoid.

? Facebook is super easy to avoid. Just don't use it. They make nothing of
value.

It doesn't work that way. First of all, even if you don't use it, people
are putting your personal information up on it when they are talking to
their friends about you.

Secondly, if you are running a business, you may need to have a facebook
presence for advertising just because that is the first place that many
people look for some services. You can avoid using it but not without
losing a lot of customers.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

2025-02-18 09:20:36 UTC

This message is in MIME format. The first part should be readable text,

It's got pretty hard to avoid some of these businesses. Google, Facebook,
Microsoft are examples of companies that are very hard to avoid.

? Facebook is super easy to avoid. Just don't use it. They make nothing of
value.

It doesn't work that way. First of all, even if you don't use it, people
are putting your personal information up on it when they are talking to
their friends about you.

This I addressed in another post.

Post by Scott Dorsey
Secondly, if you are running a business, you may need to have a facebook
presence for advertising just because that is the first place that many
people look for some services. You can avoid using it but not without
losing a lot of customers.

Or not. I've asked marketing to prove their claims for decades in the
global IT corporation space, and zero times have they been able to do it.
A lot of "I have to be on X" (pun intended!) is just FOMO.

If you're a small local shop, and do a good job, your customers will do
your marketing job for you. Actually not having a FB page, could be more
powerful than having one, since it adds a bit of mystique, artisanship and
secrecy.

Computer Nerd Kev

2025-02-18 21:32:56 UTC

It's got pretty hard to avoid some of these businesses. Google, Facebook,
Microsoft are examples of companies that are very hard to avoid.

? Facebook is super easy to avoid. Just don't use it. They make nothing of
value.

Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.

Post by D
If you have a job at a global mega-corp I agree, M$ and Google are
difficult to avoid. =(
In private you can do just fine to avoid them as well.

No, Google can track you via their Captchas, which I guess even
many NoScript users allow by default because the three page reloads
to let them through when a website requires it is a real pain in
the neck.

Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

Eli the Bearded

2025-02-18 23:47:11 UTC

Post by Computer Nerd Kev
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.

Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)

Post by Computer Nerd Kev
Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.

Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018. Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg. I started using it recently, but haven't moved my old projects
there, at least yet.

Elijah
------
doesn't use public repositories for much anyway

2025-02-19 08:42:56 UTC

Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)

That's an absurd argument. In no world, in no universe can you reasonably
expect people to not talk about you, think about you, write about you, if
they so choose.

Publishing photos and videos of you, without your consent, on the other
hand, is illegal, and can be punished severely. I have on several
occasions asked web sites to remove information about me, sometimes they
do it, sometimes they don't. I found a workaround by de-registering myself
from the country I live in, and this removed my data from a hueg nr of
linked systems.

Then I can just live as a non-registered person, and that works quite
alright to be honest.

You are a good man!

Post by Eli the Bearded
Elijah
------
doesn't use public repositories for much anyway

Computer Nerd Kev

2025-02-19 22:23:53 UTC

Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)

What I don't tell, they can't post, and the same with what they
don't photograph. Although I guess that does leave a bit of an
information vacuum there which some nutcase could exploit to make
up missing personal info/photos on me if they so desired.

Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.

For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.

Post by Eli the Bearded
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.

I don't know about Codeberg, but there have been lots of
alternatives all along. Tons of projects switched from SourceForge
to GitHub. Many projects have their own websites too, so why not
self-host? GitHub do offer a lot of extra features for free, but
that's dealing with the devil IMHO. Especially as the more tied in
to GitHub-specific systems a project gets, the less practical it is
to move away if M$ get more greedy later on.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 01:22:07 UTC

***@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) writes:

[...]

Post by Eli the Bearded
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.

We have no idea what the future of Github will be, so it's time to stop
investing on it. I think we really need to produce software (and entire
systems) that we can use on a peer-to-peer basis. Instead of Github or
Codeberg, I think we need to create a web of Forgejo, Gitea et cetera.

Similarly, NNTP servers and IRC servers instead of Discord et cetera. I
think the best things we've done have been decentralized. I know that
this grass roots things never look as shiny as the commercial ones, but
I'm certain that they're much better in the relevant aspects.

2025-02-20 14:55:39 UTC

Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)

Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.

For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.

You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot point.
;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop and
sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.

Post by Eli the Bearded
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.

I have heard about gitea. It seems as if it allows you to setup graphical
git hosting yourself. I personally use a fossil repository accessible only
over ssh. I don't use any of the wiki/ticket/chat functionality included
in it.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 20:59:10 UTC

Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)

Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.

For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.

You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot
point. ;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop
and sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.

I think most little scripts should be documented (with a manual) and put
online. It will make it easier for others to use and it will certainly
encourage others to improve it and share the improvement. So you could
see your little script turn into a nice polished program simply because
someone saw the idea and knew what to do to make it a lot better. Could
be a good source of joy.

One time I wrote a function---just a function---and added to some
archive online. This was a pretty niche programming language. Years
later, I looked it up---I was still called the author of the function,
but the code was completely rewritten, with much more expertise
knowledge. I thought it was ironic that my name was still there. We
value the pioneer perhaps too much.

Post by Eli the Bearded
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.

I have heard about gitea. It seems as if it allows you to setup
graphical git hosting yourself. I personally use a fossil repository
accessible only over ssh. I don't use any of the wiki/ticket/chat
functionality included in it.

There's Forgejo, too. It looks very good. Like in Github, you can
disable all such modules---wiki, ticket system et cetera.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 21:01:53 UTC

Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)

Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.

For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.

You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot
point. ;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop
and sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.

I think most little scripts should be documented (with a manual) and put
online. It will make it easier for others to use and it will certainly
encourage others to improve it and share the improvement. So you could
see your little script turn into a nice polished program simply because
someone saw the idea and knew what to do to make it a lot better. Could
be a good source of joy.
One time I wrote a function---just a function---and added to some
archive online. This was a pretty niche programming language. Years
later, I looked it up---I was still called the author of the function,
but the code was completely rewritten, with much more expertise
knowledge. I thought it was ironic that my name was still there. We
value the pioneer perhaps too much.

Post by Eli the Bearded
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.

I have heard about gitea. It seems as if it allows you to setup
graphical git hosting yourself. I personally use a fossil repository
accessible only over ssh. I don't use any of the wiki/ticket/chat
functionality included in it.

There's Forgejo, too. It looks very good. Like in Github, you can
disable all such modules---wiki, ticket system et cetera.

Sorry---you'd have to switch to git. I don't think Gitea or Forgejo
work with fossil. But fossil has its own web server, so you'd be fine
with it, too.

2025-02-20 21:51:12 UTC

Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)

Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.

For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.

You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot
point. ;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop
and sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.

I think most little scripts should be documented (with a manual) and put
online. It will make it easier for others to use and it will certainly
encourage others to improve it and share the improvement. So you could
see your little script turn into a nice polished program simply because
someone saw the idea and knew what to do to make it a lot better. Could
be a good source of joy.
One time I wrote a function---just a function---and added to some
archive online. This was a pretty niche programming language. Years
later, I looked it up---I was still called the author of the function,
but the code was completely rewritten, with much more expertise
knowledge. I thought it was ironic that my name was still there. We
value the pioneer perhaps too much.

Post by Eli the Bearded
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.

I have heard about gitea. It seems as if it allows you to setup
graphical git hosting yourself. I personally use a fossil repository
accessible only over ssh. I don't use any of the wiki/ticket/chat
functionality included in it.

There's Forgejo, too. It looks very good. Like in Github, you can
disable all such modules---wiki, ticket system et cetera.

Sorry---you'd have to switch to git. I don't think Gitea or Forgejo
work with fossil. But fossil has its own web server, so you'd be fine
with it, too.

This is the truth. I'm a contrarian kind of guy, so when the world goes
git, I go fossil. ;) Jokes aside, I like the concept of one binary and how
it works for my own personal use case.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-21 01:01:32 UTC

Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)

Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.

For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.

You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot
point. ;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop
and sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.

I think most little scripts should be documented (with a manual) and put
online. It will make it easier for others to use and it will certainly
encourage others to improve it and share the improvement. So you could
see your little script turn into a nice polished program simply because
someone saw the idea and knew what to do to make it a lot better. Could
be a good source of joy.
One time I wrote a function---just a function---and added to some
archive online. This was a pretty niche programming language. Years
later, I looked it up---I was still called the author of the function,
but the code was completely rewritten, with much more expertise
knowledge. I thought it was ironic that my name was still there. We
value the pioneer perhaps too much.

Post by Eli the Bearded
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.

I have heard about gitea. It seems as if it allows you to setup
graphical git hosting yourself. I personally use a fossil repository
accessible only over ssh. I don't use any of the wiki/ticket/chat
functionality included in it.

There's Forgejo, too. It looks very good. Like in Github, you can
disable all such modules---wiki, ticket system et cetera.

Sorry---you'd have to switch to git. I don't think Gitea or Forgejo
work with fossil. But fossil has its own web server, so you'd be fine
with it, too.

This is the truth. I'm a contrarian kind of guy, so when the world
goes git, I go fossil. ;) Jokes aside, I like the concept of one
binary and how it works for my own personal use case.

I went fossil when I had to teach a class. I thought git was more
complicated than fossil. But it turns out that fossil was seen as
crazily complicated by nearly all students (anyway). I think fossil is
just fine, though I confess I prefer the file system over a database.

2025-02-21 09:29:14 UTC

Post by D
This is the truth. I'm a contrarian kind of guy, so when the world
goes git, I go fossil. ;) Jokes aside, I like the concept of one
binary and how it works for my own personal use case.

This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was crazy
complicated compared with git?

I have taught classes with git (basics) and at the end of the day, regardless of
if you use git or fossil, it just requires a few simple commands to get started
at the basic level (we were not discussing rebasing and huge software projects).

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-24 01:55:00 UTC

Post by D
This is the truth. I'm a contrarian kind of guy, so when the world
goes git, I go fossil. ;) Jokes aside, I like the concept of one
binary and how it works for my own personal use case.

This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was crazy
complicated compared with git?

Not compared to git. They did not get to see git. They just hated
fossil to the point of almost giving up on the whole course altogether.
Very likely they knew that other courses would give them the same
credits and they could try it afresh on the next semester.

I don't have much information. The command line seemed an awful
experience to them. I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a
teacher idiosyncrasy.

This experience gave me the following feeling---they ask for real-world,
pratical experience, but they're not up to an introduction to the tools
used in the real-world.

Post by D
I have taught classes with git (basics) and at the end of the day,
regardless of if you use git or fossil, it just requires a few simple
commands to get started at the basic level (we were not discussing
rebasing and huge software projects).

I think it boils down to a lot more because these are compouter users
that even ``environment variable'' is a never-seen concept. I watched
them opening a c:\> prompt on their Windows system, slowlying typing up
their very long path to their project, say, and then doing it again on
the next class---paths with spaces and other complicated symbols.

Rich

2025-02-24 05:19:26 UTC

Post by D
This is the truth. I'm a contrarian kind of guy, so when the world
goes git, I go fossil. ;) Jokes aside, I like the concept of one
binary and how it works for my own personal use case.

This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was crazy
complicated compared with git?

Not compared to git. They did not get to see git. They just hated
fossil to the point of almost giving up on the whole course altogether.
Very likely they knew that other courses would give them the same
credits and they could try it afresh on the next semester.
I don't have much information. The command line seemed an awful
experience to them. I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a
teacher idiosyncrasy.

For some (most? all?) they likely had only ever used a "touch/feely"
interface (i.e., phone) and so, yes, they were very ill equiped to even
comprehend a command line, much less be productive in one.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
This experience gave me the following feeling---they ask for real-world,
pratical experience, but they're not up to an introduction to the tools
used in the real-world.

They likely have never been out of their smartphone protected bubble.

Which is (almost) the same they would do using a GUI or their phone.
Wherever the file manager defaults, they then meticiously "step" their
way over to where they want to be. The concept of saving a 'bookmark'
(of sorts) to "go directly there" is likely foreign to them. In fact,
they sound like the types who open the google search page, then type a
URL into the google search box, to go to that URL.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-24 16:28:58 UTC

Post by D
This is the truth. I'm a contrarian kind of guy, so when the world
goes git, I go fossil. ;) Jokes aside, I like the concept of one
binary and how it works for my own personal use case.

This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was crazy
complicated compared with git?

Not compared to git. They did not get to see git. They just hated
fossil to the point of almost giving up on the whole course altogether.
Very likely they knew that other courses would give them the same
credits and they could try it afresh on the next semester.
I don't have much information. The command line seemed an awful
experience to them. I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a
teacher idiosyncrasy.

For some (most? all?) they likely had only ever used a "touch/feely"
interface (i.e., phone) and so, yes, they were very ill equiped to even
comprehend a command line, much less be productive in one.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
This experience gave me the following feeling---they ask for real-world,
pratical experience, but they're not up to an introduction to the tools
used in the real-world.

They likely have never been out of their smartphone protected bubble.

I think you comprehend me pretty well. :)

2025-02-24 09:55:41 UTC

Post by D
This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was crazy
complicated compared with git?

Ahh, got it! Yes, sadly this happens to me as well. At the slightest hint of
difficulty or effort, about 20% of the class riots, complains to the school that
the teacher is evil, that the difficulty level should be lowered etc. They do
not realize, that the only ones they are cheating by doing that are themselves.
The sad thing is that business owners (including myself) have noted a dramatic
drop in skill from graduates over the past 3-4 years. One reason is that the
government has changed the funding of the schools, rewarding schools that pass
all students. So of course, the schools pass all students, since it means more
money for them (they are paid by the government upon graduation) and you get the
situation where awful students graduate, and now, where companies no longer hire
them.

Usually in order to buck the trend somewhat, I make my first course more
difficult in order to get rid of the unmotivated ones. If I don't have the first
course of the semester, the following 1-2 are pure hell, since the bad ones
remain and complain about everything, but after 1-2 semesters they usually quit.
It is just sad that I could not make them realize this after 3 weeks, and
instead they waste 1-2 semesters. But such is life.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
I don't have much information. The command line seemed an awful
experience to them. I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a
teacher idiosyncrasy.
This experience gave me the following feeling---they ask for real-world,
pratical experience, but they're not up to an introduction to the tools
used in the real-world.

True. But from time to time it is fun to see when they really "get" the
terminal. It's such an eye opening experience for them, and they, themselves
become completely amazed at what they can do with a computer all of a sudden!
One guy told me he had no idea and it was amazing the day he understood the
terminal concept. He went on to become a rock star! Those students are what
makes it worth it for me.

Haha, yes... I think I have to tell them about ls, cd, pwd etc. about 30-40
times before they finally start to remember what it is. ;)

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-24 16:34:22 UTC

Post by D
This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was crazy
complicated compared with git?

Ahh, got it! Yes, sadly this happens to me as well. At the slightest hint of
difficulty or effort, about 20% of the class riots, complains to the school that
the teacher is evil, that the difficulty level should be lowered etc. They do
not realize, that the only ones they are cheating by doing that are themselves.
The sad thing is that business owners (including myself) have noted a dramatic
drop in skill from graduates over the past 3-4 years. One reason is that the
government has changed the funding of the schools, rewarding schools that pass
all students. So of course, the schools pass all students, since it means more
money for them (they are paid by the government upon graduation) and you get the
situation where awful students graduate, and now, where companies no longer hire
them.
Usually in order to buck the trend somewhat, I make my first course more
difficult in order to get rid of the unmotivated ones. If I don't have the first
course of the semester, the following 1-2 are pure hell, since the bad ones
remain and complain about everything, but after 1-2 semesters they usually quit.
It is just sad that I could not make them realize this after 3 weeks, and
instead they waste 1-2 semesters. But such is life.

Such is life. :)

Haha, yes... I think I have to tell them about ls, cd, pwd etc. about 30-40
times before they finally start to remember what it is. ;)

Oh, yes, memory is another thing I notice. Not only students, but
teachers, too; I'm known as having a superb memory or something. Truth
is, though, it's their memory that is not doing very well.

2025-02-24 22:15:27 UTC

Post by D
This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was crazy
complicated compared with git?

Ahh, got it! Yes, sadly this happens to me as well. At the slightest hint of
difficulty or effort, about 20% of the class riots, complains to the school that
the teacher is evil, that the difficulty level should be lowered etc. They do
not realize, that the only ones they are cheating by doing that are themselves.
The sad thing is that business owners (including myself) have noted a dramatic
drop in skill from graduates over the past 3-4 years. One reason is that the
government has changed the funding of the schools, rewarding schools that pass
all students. So of course, the schools pass all students, since it means more
money for them (they are paid by the government upon graduation) and you get the
situation where awful students graduate, and now, where companies no longer hire
them.
Usually in order to buck the trend somewhat, I make my first course more
difficult in order to get rid of the unmotivated ones. If I don't have the first
course of the semester, the following 1-2 are pure hell, since the bad ones
remain and complain about everything, but after 1-2 semesters they usually quit.
It is just sad that I could not make them realize this after 3 weeks, and
instead they waste 1-2 semesters. But such is life.

Such is life. :)

Haha, yes... I think I have to tell them about ls, cd, pwd etc. about 30-40
times before they finally start to remember what it is. ;)

Oh, yes, memory is another thing I notice. Not only students, but
teachers, too; I'm known as having a superb memory or something. Truth
is, though, it's their memory that is not doing very well.

I think smartphones and google are a huge part of the problem. I do not
have a smartphone, so I have to remember things like codes, shopping
lists, directions, and I am convinced it helps my memory somewhat.

The young ones, just google everything, so they don't exercise their
memory.

For instance, one of the students the other day was amazed at how I could
live without google maps, and wondered how I do it.

My answer, I check where I want to go, before I leave home. Most of the
time I remember it. If I don't know exactly where to go, I ask someone in
the street, or ask a hotel. The hotels are nice, because often they give
you a map. For long trips I might print out the map on a piece of paper.
This has the advantage of having zero value, so I never have to worry
about dropping it, forgetting it or someone stealing it.

The students were chocked! ;)

Rich

2025-02-24 17:54:47 UTC

This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was
crazy complicated compared with git?

The result of 20+ years of "everyone gets a participation trophy, and
no winners are declared" parenting.....

They do not realize, that the only ones they are cheating by doing
that are themselves.

They lack the wisdom that comes with age to recognize this fact. Some
of them will wise up early enough to be able to succeed. The rest will
be set for "table waitress with master's degree" careers.

The sad thing is that business owners (including myself) have noted a
dramatic drop in skill from graduates over the past 3-4 years. One
reason is that the government has changed the funding of the schools,
rewarding schools that pass all students. So of course, the schools
pass all students, since it means more money for them (they are paid
by the government upon graduation) and you get the situation where
awful students graduate, and now, where companies no longer hire
them.

Pass them all along has been more the norm here in the US for a quite
long time, as it is easier to just push them up (then out) than it is
to actually try to devote the time to find out how to educate them.
The result is huge numbers of table waitresses with master's degrees.

Usually in order to buck the trend somewhat, I make my first course
more difficult in order to get rid of the unmotivated ones. If I
don't have the first course of the semester, the following 1-2 are
pure hell, since the bad ones remain and complain about everything,
but after 1-2 semesters they usually quit. It is just sad that I
could not make them realize this after 3 weeks, and instead they
waste 1-2 semesters. But such is life.

Provided you can withstand the heat, this is the best option. Clear
out the ones unfit as early as possible. I still remember the carnage
of the freshman Engineering courses when I went through. Began with
120+ students per lecture. End of each of both semeters could see the
shrinkage. Start of second year and more than half were no longer
anywhere to be seen in the courses. Sadly, I can only imagine what
kind of complaints would be going to the dean's office now 40 years
later for such carniage in the first year.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
This experience gave me the following feeling---they ask for
real-world, pratical experience, but they're not up to an
introduction to the tools used in the real-world.

True. But from time to time it is fun to see when they really "get"
the terminal. It's such an eye opening experience for them, and
they, themselves become completely amazed at what they can do with a
computer all of a sudden! One guy told me he had no idea and it was
amazing the day he understood the terminal concept. He went on to
become a rock star! Those students are what makes it worth it for
me.

And he was someone who *should* have been in that course. Many of the
others were likely only present because they had been told the degree
was a magic paper towards a big salary (while omitting that they have
to know what the F they are doing for the magic paper to gain them the
big salary).

2025-02-24 22:41:17 UTC

This is very interesting! What was it that the student thought was
crazy complicated compared with git?

The result of 20+ years of "everyone gets a participation trophy, and
no winners are declared" parenting.....

This is the truth! You are a philosopher king! In sweden, they stopped
scoring goals in football for children. When I was a child, and you were
bad at foot ball, you sat on the bench. Then you found another sport that
you actually had some aptitude for. Much better system if you ask me, and
also an experience that teaches valuable life lessons early!

They do not realize, that the only ones they are cheating by doing
that are themselves.

They lack the wisdom that comes with age to recognize this fact. Some
of them will wise up early enough to be able to succeed. The rest will
be set for "table waitress with master's degree" careers.

True!

Again, this is the truth!

Provided you can withstand the heat, this is the best option. Clear

Amen! I started to study engineering, and I could not stand the heat. I
discovered that physics and math was extremely boring. I could push
through by sheer force of will, but after 1 years I realized... why?
Wouldn't it be better to study something I actually enjoyed?

So I switched to IT and philosophy, and lo and behold! Since I was
interested in it, it didn't even feel like it was hard. I just sailed
through!

I feel sorry for the ones who suffered through 2.5 years of math to get 1
year of computer science at the end.

Post by Rich
out the ones unfit as early as possible. I still remember the carnage
of the freshman Engineering courses when I went through. Began with
120+ students per lecture. End of each of both semeters could see the
shrinkage. Start of second year and more than half were no longer
anywhere to be seen in the courses. Sadly, I can only imagine what
kind of complaints would be going to the dean's office now 40 years
later for such carniage in the first year.

Severe complaints! The cruel irony is... do a good job at a school, and
you'll be kicked out for failing too many students. This has happened to
me.

My revenge was when the school told me... you know, there is something
very strange with your program. I said... what?

The students who graduate from your program, all have jobs in IT, and
their salaries are all way above the average starting salary.

But your program is the program where 40% drop out.

In our other programs, 100% graudate. But only 50% work in IT, and they
have very low salaries.

I cannot understand how they could not see cause an effect.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
This experience gave me the following feeling---they ask for
real-world, pratical experience, but they're not up to an
introduction to the tools used in the real-world.

True. But from time to time it is fun to see when they really "get"
the terminal. It's such an eye opening experience for them, and
they, themselves become completely amazed at what they can do with a
computer all of a sudden! One guy told me he had no idea and it was
amazing the day he understood the terminal concept. He went on to
become a rock star! Those students are what makes it worth it for
me.

Haha... yes, reminds me of one of my teachers at a school, and on the
first day they had an open question session. One arabian gentleman
asked...

"Hey you... what's the salary? Will I be rich when I'm done?"

The teacher: I'm X, you can call me X, that's perfectly fine."

He: "What ever... what's the money?"

The teacker: Sigh.... "if you are good, you earn well, if you are bad,
find another program."

The student looked dissatisfied with the answer. ;)

2025-02-20 21:50:18 UTC

Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)

Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.

For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.

You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot
point. ;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop
and sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.

You have a point! Sigh... so much one wants to do, so little time. =( Let
met tell you about my little scripts. I have my old backup script
utilizing rsync and replicating over tor, so it can go through firewalls,
and uses a hidden service for a permanent global address, so it is not
dependent on DNS or domain names. I once had delusions of grandeur and
thought about rewriting a small part of tor to remove all hops since I do
not need anonymity for that use case.

I have my calendar sync scripts. They pull in ics from corporate calendar
and converts it to remind format.

Then I have a slightly rewritten leafnode that pulls down usenet articles
and stores them in Maildir format so I can read and write offline news in
my favourite email client alpine.

I also have some custom rss2email scripts, and a script that allows me to
take any url in an email, and fetch the page and email it to me.

Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;)

Post by Salvador Mirzo
One time I wrote a function---just a function---and added to some
archive online. This was a pretty niche programming language. Years
later, I looked it up---I was still called the author of the function,
but the code was completely rewritten, with much more expertise
knowledge. I thought it was ironic that my name was still there. We
value the pioneer perhaps too much.

This is very inspirational! Thank you!

Post by Eli the Bearded
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.

I have heard about gitea. It seems as if it allows you to setup
graphical git hosting yourself. I personally use a fossil repository
accessible only over ssh. I don't use any of the wiki/ticket/chat
functionality included in it.

There's Forgejo, too. It looks very good. Like in Github, you can
disable all such modules---wiki, ticket system et cetera.

Thank you. Will check out, haven't heard about it!

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-21 01:21:52 UTC

Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)

Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.

For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.

You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot
point. ;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop
and sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.

You have a point! Sigh... so much one wants to do, so little time. =(
Let met tell you about my little scripts. I have my old backup script
utilizing rsync and replicating over tor, so it can go through
firewalls, and uses a hidden service for a permanent global address,
so it is not dependent on DNS or domain names. I once had delusions of
grandeur and thought about rewriting a small part of tor to remove all
hops since I do not need anonymity for that use case.
I have my calendar sync scripts. They pull in ics from corporate
calendar and converts it to remind format.
Then I have a slightly rewritten leafnode that pulls down usenet
articles and stores them in Maildir format so I can read and write
offline news in my favourite email client alpine.
I also have some custom rss2email scripts, and a script that allows me
to take any url in an email, and fetch the page and email it to me.
Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;)

LOL! It turns out I'm *highly* interested in your leafnode. Please,
can you put a package somewhere and let me look at it, try it out et
cetera? I've been thinking about doing something like that myself. I
can probably just live with your changes.

I think I once packaged noffle (and not leafnode) for myself, but I
think I stopped using noffle for a news server, too. I think I use
leafnode now, but I use it only as a local news server. I'd like to
have an NNTP server that's simple to use, easily hosts local news server
and also easily peers with a USENET server for just a non-huge list of
groups. I actually would like to write this server myself.

Let me share with you an upload script to https://0x0.st. This is a no
nonsense temporary file uploader. It works well as a paste bin, too.
The script below takes a series of files from the command line and
uploads each one to 0x0.st. If you specify no file, then it will read
from the standard in. The webserver at 0x0.st will print a URL for each
file uploaded, which is the address where you file is then stored.

--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
#!/bin/sh
args="$@"; test $# -lt 1 && args='-'

for f in $args; do
curl --silent --show-error -X POST -F "file=@$f" https://0x0.st
done
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---

The next script uses upload to invoke scrot, which is a screen shot
taker. It will take the URL printed by upload and store it in X's
primary selection area, which you can paste anywhere with your mouse or
with a keyboard shortcut. (This is done by xsel.)

--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
#!/bin/sh
usage()
{
printf 'usage: %s [options]\n' $(basename "$0")
}
test "$1" = '-h' && usage && exit 0
scrot --border -F- "$@" | upload | tr -d '\n' | xsel
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---

So if you call this script as /screenshot/ then all you need to do is to
invoke it and wait a moment then press the mouse middle button to paste
the URL somewhere. The bug in it is that you don't know when /upload/
finishes. It would be nice if somehow we could get a sign somewhere
that the URL is already in X's primary selection.

For the upload script, I would also like to write a GNU EMACS procedure
that takes a region of text and feeds upload's standard input. That's a
nice way to share a bit of code or output or something. I'm sure these
things exist already somewhere. But it's nice to do them and perhaps
it's easier to do then to actually find where they are and then learn to
use them.

2025-02-21 16:06:39 UTC

Post by D
Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;)

Of course!

Please grab a copy here:
https://send.vis.ee/download/749384a5de2f4f33/#6ZgrL_j_qwmhqBNuXenoJA

It is very rough, not documented, but in the package you have the leafnode
source. My mod is in the file validatefqdn.c and if memory serves, I just
inverted a test for the fqdn from false to true, and that got rid of the check
for a fqdn. Before the mod leafnode would complain about the domain name and now
I think anything goes.

Also note that in order to run it in "server mode" you need to put the .socket
and .service files in /etc/systemd/system and start them.

In addition, there's my python script nntp2imap.py which takes care of copying
the downloaded news posts to my local Maildir directory "News" and names the
files and puts them in the right directories.

I found leafnode to be very simple to compile, and easy to get going.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
I think I once packaged noffle (and not leafnode) for myself, but I
think I stopped using noffle for a news server, too. I think I use
leafnode now, but I use it only as a local news server. I'd like to
have an NNTP server that's simple to use, easily hosts local news server
and also easily peers with a USENET server for just a non-huge list of
groups. I actually would like to write this server myself.

Why did you not use noffle in the end? Never heard of it before, but seems to be
similar perhaps to leafnode.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
Let me share with you an upload script to https://0x0.st. This is a no
nonsense temporary file uploader. It works well as a paste bin, too.
The script below takes a series of files from the command line and
uploads each one to 0x0.st. If you specify no file, then it will read
from the standard in. The webserver at 0x0.st will print a URL for each
file uploaded, which is the address where you file is then stored.

Ahh... got it. Thank you very much!

Post by Salvador Mirzo
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
#!/bin/sh
for f in $args; do
done
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
The next script uses upload to invoke scrot, which is a screen shot
taker. It will take the URL printed by upload and store it in X's
primary selection area, which you can paste anywhere with your mouse or
with a keyboard shortcut. (This is done by xsel.)
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
#!/bin/sh
usage()
{
printf 'usage: %s [options]\n' $(basename "$0")
}
test "$1" = '-h' && usage && exit 0
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
So if you call this script as /screenshot/ then all you need to do is to
invoke it and wait a moment then press the mouse middle button to paste
the URL somewhere. The bug in it is that you don't know when /upload/
finishes. It would be nice if somehow we could get a sign somewhere
that the URL is already in X's primary selection.
For the upload script, I would also like to write a GNU EMACS procedure
that takes a region of text and feeds upload's standard input. That's a
nice way to share a bit of code or output or something. I'm sure these
things exist already somewhere. But it's nice to do them and perhaps
it's easier to do then to actually find where they are and then learn to
use them.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-24 02:28:14 UTC

Post by D
Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;)

Of course!
https://send.vis.ee/download/749384a5de2f4f33/#6ZgrL_j_qwmhqBNuXenoJA

Thanks! Got the package and unpacked it fine. By the way, fdm is
already pulling my mail and I know it's able to download NNTP articles
too, so chances are it can do what leafnode has been doing for you.
I'll keep you posted. Thanks very much for providing the package.

Why did you not use noffle in the end? Never heard of it before, but seems to be
similar perhaps to leafnode.

When I used noffle I didn't know leafnode. :) I got to know leafnode
because I started asking people for something more my way than noffle.
I complained that I preferred articles written on the file system than
stored in a database, so someone pointed out leafnode. Let me see which
I'm still running. It's leafnode-2.0.0.alpha20140727b. So I must have
really stopped noffle. But I did not package leafnode with my
customizations---that I did to noffle only.

And by now I am willing to write a new one from scratch, so I intend to
make leafnode obsolete as well.

2025-02-24 10:12:29 UTC

Post by D
Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;)

Of course!
https://send.vis.ee/download/749384a5de2f4f33/#6ZgrL_j_qwmhqBNuXenoJA

Really?? I had no idea! Maybe I can scrap my leafnode setup then and move
to fdm? I think fdm (well I guess, I haven't actually checked) might be
more minimal even than leafnode, so thank you for the pointer! I will
definitely have to check out the fdm manual today! =)

Why did you not use noffle in the end? Never heard of it before, but seems to be
similar perhaps to leafnode.

Ahh got it. Yes, I do not want to have a database for text based articles
only for my personal use.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
And by now I am willing to write a new one from scratch, so I intend to
make leafnode obsolete as well.

Best of luck! =) Sounds like a nice project!

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-24 17:08:05 UTC

Post by D
Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;)

Of course!
https://send.vis.ee/download/749384a5de2f4f33/#6ZgrL_j_qwmhqBNuXenoJA

Really?? I had no idea! Maybe I can scrap my leafnode setup then and
move to fdm? I think fdm (well I guess, I haven't actually checked)
might be more minimal even than leafnode, so thank you for the
pointer! I will definitely have to check out the fdm manual today! =)

Precisely---fdm is minimal. The reason I am not yet setting it up for
news is because fdm all by itself is not enough. You need to reply to
articles and fdm will not send articles out for you. It will only
download'em, so you can read them. (I assume this. I haven't tried
it.)

So for fdm to work with Gnus, say, (which is what I use), Gnus will need
to somehow know to which NNTP server to post my follow-ups. If I use
Gnus in its traditional sense, then this work is already done. If I
change to fdm, Gnus will likely see all messages as mail. So it's not a
complete solution. It's a hacker thing. It always takes various
modules and need to work together to work. It's the price we pay.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
And by now I am willing to write a new one from scratch, so I intend to
make leafnode obsolete as well.

Best of luck! =) Sounds like a nice project!

It is. :) It's the most fun I've ever had with programming. I think
Common Lisp is a big part of it. I tried Racket before Common Lisp.
Common Lisp is so much my way than Racket is.

2025-02-24 22:32:17 UTC

Post by D
Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;)

Of course!
https://send.vis.ee/download/749384a5de2f4f33/#6ZgrL_j_qwmhqBNuXenoJA

Really?? I had no idea! Maybe I can scrap my leafnode setup then and
move to fdm? I think fdm (well I guess, I haven't actually checked)
might be more minimal even than leafnode, so thank you for the
pointer! I will definitely have to check out the fdm manual today! =)

Sounds perfect for my needs. Alpine, my email client, has built in news
functionality. The thing is that you can activate it by turning on "rich
headers" and if you do that a Newgrp: field pops up. If you fill in the
newsgroup there, alpine then magically takes care of posting it to the
group.

So if fdm can download the files in a nice spool folder format, I might
even be able to apply my small python script to copy the news posting into
Maildir folders, and there I can read, and alpine then posts.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
So for fdm to work with Gnus, say, (which is what I use), Gnus will need
to somehow know to which NNTP server to post my follow-ups. If I use
Gnus in its traditional sense, then this work is already done. If I
change to fdm, Gnus will likely see all messages as mail. So it's not a
complete solution. It's a hacker thing. It always takes various
modules and need to work together to work. It's the price we pay.

True!

Post by Salvador Mirzo
And by now I am willing to write a new one from scratch, so I intend to
make leafnode obsolete as well.

Best of luck! =) Sounds like a nice project!

It is. :) It's the most fun I've ever had with programming. I think
Common Lisp is a big part of it. I tried Racket before Common Lisp.
Common Lisp is so much my way than Racket is.

Go is the next on my list. What is it that makes you like lisp so much? I
have never considered it, so I am curious. Doesn't it wear out the () keys
on your keyboard? ;)

2025-02-19 08:40:24 UTC

It's got pretty hard to avoid some of these businesses. Google, Facebook,
Microsoft are examples of companies that are very hard to avoid.

? Facebook is super easy to avoid. Just don't use it. They make nothing of
value.

Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.

I use privacy badger to block all FB scripts on sites.

Post by D
If you have a job at a global mega-corp I agree, M$ and Google are
difficult to avoid. =(
In private you can do just fine to avoid them as well.

Oh, I simply don't use web sites where I get captchas. Then of course, we
must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I'd rather block 99%,
than not being able to block at all.

This is a great mystery to me! I have no clue how so many open source
users can be so clueless! =( They also loooooove slck and discord. That's
revolting! IRC works percectly fine, and if you need blinken lights, you
can just add some of the numerous web IRC programs out there, or at least
use matrix or xmpp.

Then there is codeberg, sourcehut, gitlab even, but ohhhh no, they loooove
M$. Add to that visual code or what ever it is, which is M$ poison to
infiltrate linux laptops.

I think the reason must be that many open source users are young and naive
and do not remembre how M$ tried to close down linux decades ago.

When I teach, I make it a point to bring up these things. Sadly the
students then go on to work, and get stuck in github and various
proprietary tools. But such is life! We must continue to fight the good
fight. =)

Computer Nerd Kev

2025-02-19 22:29:33 UTC

Post by Computer Nerd Kev
No, Google can track you via their Captchas, which I guess even
many NoScript users allow by default because the three page reloads
to let them through when a website requires it is a real pain in
the neck.

Oh, I simply don't use web sites where I get captchas.

Yikes! No online shopping then? I'm always getting them, from the
shopping sites, PayPal, or Credit Card payment processors.
Alibaba/Aliexpress at least self-host theirs - but half the time
they decide I'm a robot and won't let me through at all!

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

2025-02-20 14:56:53 UTC

Oh, I simply don't use web sites where I get captchas.

Hmm... this is very strange. I do shop online, and almost never get it.
Ok, I can think of one exception in amazon.com. I manage to avoid them 99%
of the time, but for some used books I cannot find locally, I have to bite
the bullet and go through amazon.com.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 00:45:29 UTC

D <***@example.net> writes:

[...]

Lol---well said. (I call Discord a Christmas Tree. And Slack is no
different.) Quite right. And USENET, which is way more appropriate for
technical discussion than IRC.

Post by D
I think the reason must be that many open source users are young and
naive and do not remembre how M$ tried to close down linux decades
ago.

That's very likely part of the reason.

Post by D
When I teach, I make it a point to bring up these things. Sadly the
students then go on to work, and get stuck in github and various
proprietary tools. But such is life! We must continue to fight the
good fight. =)

Teaching can only go so far.

2025-02-20 15:01:56 UTC

Lol---well said. (I call Discord a Christmas Tree. And Slack is no
different.) Quite right. And USENET, which is way more appropriate for
technical discussion than IRC.

It is strange that usenet has disappeared from the common mind. I find it
excellent! Especially since google disconnected it got even better!

There is a challenge though. In todays reincarnation, I find the nr of posts
more than manageable. But if I think of a scenario where the nr of posts would
increase tenfold, there would be no chance of catching up, except using the
narrowest of the narrow sorting based on author and subject line.

Today, I can casually browse and glance at most posts, but with 10x the nr of
posts, that would not be feasible.

I think there is a limit where the usenet model breaks down for most users who
are not into cli clients.

Post by D
I think the reason must be that many open source users are young and
naive and do not remembre how M$ tried to close down linux decades
ago.

That's very likely part of the reason.

Teaching can only go so far.

In every class of about 35, there's always 4-9 or so that "get it" and become
completely obsessed with the terminal, self-hosting, they buy numerous raspberry
pis, they stay awake until 5 in the morning tinkering.

Those guys go on the become rock stars!

The rest go to the office at 09 and leave at 17, and that's about it.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 21:22:42 UTC

Lol---well said. (I call Discord a Christmas Tree. And Slack is no
different.) Quite right. And USENET, which is way more appropriate for
technical discussion than IRC.

It is strange that usenet has disappeared from the common mind. I find it
excellent! Especially since google disconnected it got even better!

That's right! Thanks, Google Inc., for leaving us alone. :)

Post by D
There is a challenge though. In todays reincarnation, I find the nr of posts
more than manageable. But if I think of a scenario where the nr of posts would
increase tenfold, there would be no chance of catching up, except using the
narrowest of the narrow sorting based on author and subject line.
Today, I can casually browse and glance at most posts, but with 10x the nr of
posts, that would not be feasible.

I ticked your article just to show you something red. It wasn't red
before. Yes, I also only show three letters for each author because I
usually don't care to know who I'm talking to, but since identity does
help to understand what the person is saying, three letters is enough.

Post by D
I think there is a limit where the usenet model breaks down for most users who
are not into cli clients.

Yeah. It's not going to work for regular people. However, there's
something that I think it should work for regular people---low volume
NNTP servers.

But it turns out that even mailing lists don't work for regular people
because e-mail doesn't work for regular people. Even Discord or Slack
doesn't quite work for regular people. Perhaps nothing works for
regular people. They do not find ways to tame information on their
computer screens. Regular people don't want to use desktops anymore;
they want to use their phones.

NNTP, the USENET, e-mail, these are systems that only the people thristy
for knowledge really use---that 17% of your class of 35.

Post by D
I think the reason must be that many open source users are young and
naive and do not remembre how M$ tried to close down linux decades
ago.

That's very likely part of the reason.

Teaching can only go so far.

In every class of about 35, there's always 4-9 or so that "get it" and become
completely obsessed with the terminal, self-hosting, they buy numerous raspberry
pis, they stay awake until 5 in the morning tinkering.
Those guys go on the become rock stars!
The rest go to the office at 09 and leave at 17, and that's about it.

And I think that's fine for us because these about 6 people of every
class of 35 is enough to pack the USENET. But most of them are not
here. That's what's sad. They should be here. They would enjoy being
here. But I think somehow they're not. This suggests a certain
inertia. But what I find more likely is that you're overestimating.
Perhaps it's more like 0.35 rock stars in every class of about 35.

I take it seriously that they could be right---that somehow we should
all be on Discord. But, no, intelligence always wins and the fact is
that the tools we're using here (for communication) is absolutely
better[1] than the more recent commercial alternatives.

[1] Better for fact, knowledge seekers.

2025-02-20 22:02:40 UTC

Post by D
It is strange that usenet has disappeared from the common mind. I find it
excellent! Especially since google disconnected it got even better!

That's right! Thanks, Google Inc., for leaving us alone. :)

I already find it unwieldy. But I don't think we have to follow every
thread. You can follow that subthread you got yourself involved. Using
Gnus, there are two things that I do. Articles that I'd like to
follow-up are ticket---so appear in red for me. Articles that were
replies to my own posted articles get the highest score and so they
appear in bold.
https://0x0.st/8Tsq.png
I ticked your article just to show you something red. It wasn't red
before. Yes, I also only show three letters for each author because I
usually don't care to know who I'm talking to, but since identity does
help to understand what the person is saying, three letters is enough.

For the moment all works for me with a flat layout based on time of arrival. But
should the nr of posts increase, I think I shall have to switch back to thread
layout and actually explore scoring like you do to get some nice automation into
my reading.

For the longest time inertia kept me from using colors in alpine, and finally,
when I had a slow day in the office I did take some time to customize it, and lo
and behold, it did save me a couple of minutes daily by making some things
easier to spot, so count that up in a year, and it was a very nice time saving
initiative!

Post by D
I think there is a limit where the usenet model breaks down for most users who
are not into cli clients.

Yeah. It's not going to work for regular people. However, there's
something that I think it should work for regular people---low volume
NNTP servers.

Leafnode I think would be quite a nice piece of software for small, local nntp
servers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leafnode

I use part of its functionality to pull in usenet into my mail client.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
But it turns out that even mailing lists don't work for regular people
because e-mail doesn't work for regular people. Even Discord or Slack
doesn't quite work for regular people. Perhaps nothing works for
regular people. They do not find ways to tame information on their
computer screens. Regular people don't want to use desktops anymore;
they want to use their phones.

This is the truth! I am worried that people are turning more into digital
consumers than digital producers. used in such a way, digital technology can
become a drain on the soul.

Computers were supposed to be creative tools! I get the feeling that for many,
they have instead become devices of slavery. It is a very sad development. I
love text only interfaces, I love reading. I don't own a smart phone and I feel
very sad when I'm on a bus or in a subway car and see 99% of people staring in
silence into their phones. It seems like quite a dystopia for me. =(

Post by Salvador Mirzo
NNTP, the USENET, e-mail, these are systems that only the people thristy
for knowledge really use---that 17% of your class of 35.

I wonder if they will discover it? I was happy when I offered a 1 hour free and
voluntary session with the topic of learning the basics of vim, and 11 out of 35
said it was interesting! =D

This makes me feel hope!

Post by D
In every class of about 35, there's always 4-9 or so that "get it" and become
completely obsessed with the terminal, self-hosting, they buy numerous raspberry
pis, they stay awake until 5 in the morning tinkering.
Those guys go on the become rock stars!
The rest go to the office at 09 and leave at 17, and that's about it.

And I think that's fine for us because these about 6 people of every
class of 35 is enough to pack the USENET. But most of them are not

This is the truth! Hmm, maybe I should add an hour or two next semester on the
topic of retro-computing? ;)

Post by Salvador Mirzo
here. That's what's sad. They should be here. They would enjoy being
here. But I think somehow they're not. This suggests a certain
inertia. But what I find more likely is that you're overestimating.
Perhaps it's more like 0.35 rock stars in every class of about 35.
I take it seriously that they could be right---that somehow we should
all be on Discord. But, no, intelligence always wins and the fact is
that the tools we're using here (for communication) is absolutely
better[1] than the more recent commercial alternatives.

Well, I do sometimes chat on my business partners mattermost, but only if live
audio/video and email is not an option. Fortunately for me, that turns out to be
about once or twice a year. ;)

But the young whipper snappers do chat happily away from time to time, and I am
happy that they are just not dragging me into it.

Only today was one of my younger partners telling the class that my emails are
quite something to behold. Long and packed with all the information the person
needs to perform the task. At first he found it draining and stressful, but then
he learned that I do not demand instant replies when I email (then I call or
write in the email that it is urgent) and after a while he learned to appreciate
that all information he might need is in the email.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
[1] Better for fact, knowledge seekers.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-21 01:44:32 UTC

D <***@example.net> writes:

[...]

Post by Salvador Mirzo
Yeah. It's not going to work for regular people. However, there's
something that I think it should work for regular people---low volume
NNTP servers.

Leafnode I think would be quite a nice piece of software for small, local nntp
servers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leafnode
I use part of its functionality to pull in usenet into my mail client.

I need to look into leafnode again. Now I don't think leafnode can peer
with a USENET server, right? I think we should have a server that does.
I'm willing to write it.

My desire is to have an NNTP server that can host your local groups
there, easily. And your friends who will connect to see your local
groups should also see some USENET groups along with them. So the NNTP
server should also be able to peer with a USENET server. Doesn't need
to be a powerful server like INN2 does. All in one.

I would be surprised if INN2 doesn't do all of this, but I think we
should have other alternatives with newer ideas too. For instance, I
think these smaller servers should be mostly closed (with passwords or
cryptographic keys or certificates) because they're meant for a group of
friends who know each other. Each user should be able to create local
groups and new accounts, forming a small community. (A good community
is one in which every member has roughly the same powers as every other
member.) This small community should have access to the USENET (by
using their very community server). That's roughly the idea. The
server should be hackable; perhaps hackable in real time; so a dynamic
language seems the right fit for it.

This is the truth! I am worried that people are turning more into digital
consumers than digital producers. used in such a way, digital technology can
become a drain on the soul.
Computers were supposed to be creative tools! I get the feeling that for many,
they have instead become devices of slavery. It is a very sad development. I
love text only interfaces, I love reading. I don't own a smart phone and I feel
very sad when I'm on a bus or in a subway car and see 99% of people staring in
silence into their phones. It seems like quite a dystopia for me. =(

It's sad indeed. On the bright side, we seem to be immune to that. At
least *we* are not in such a pit. :) Better than nothing. :)

Post by Salvador Mirzo
NNTP, the USENET, e-mail, these are systems that only the people thristy
for knowledge really use---that 17% of your class of 35.

I wonder if they will discover it? I was happy when I offered a 1 hour free and
voluntary session with the topic of learning the basics of vim, and 11 out of 35
said it was interesting! =D

They find it interesting. But it seems to stop there.

Post by D
This makes me feel hope!

Honestly, I've only had this hope when I was a teenager myself.

And I think that's fine for us because these about 6 people of every
class of 35 is enough to pack the USENET. But most of them are not

This is the truth! Hmm, maybe I should add an hour or two next semester on the
topic of retro-computing? ;)

Lol. Why not? :)

Well, I do sometimes chat on my business partners mattermost, but only if live
audio/video and email is not an option. Fortunately for me, that turns out to be
about once or twice a year. ;)
But the young whipper snappers do chat happily away from time to time, and I am
happy that they are just not dragging me into it.
Only today was one of my younger partners telling the class that my emails are
quite something to behold. Long and packed with all the information the person
needs to perform the task. At first he found it draining and stressful, but then
he learned that I do not demand instant replies when I email (then I call or
write in the email that it is urgent) and after a while he learned to appreciate
that all information he might need is in the email.

Yeah---young people don't quite get e-mail. They never read about
e-mail. Perhaps one thing that's against them (and it was not against
us) is that they have a lot of options today. We didn't have this many
options. We started out on a simpler world. So we were able to stay at
the top of the game over the years. And so we mastered it. Now we're
experienced and we handle the complexities of the world with the help of
our experience. They don't have these tools available. They could get
here quickly, but they're lost. Instructions we give them don't
suffice: perhaps because people must discover things for themselves.
That's perhaps why education only works for those who actually don't
need one.

2025-02-21 09:43:20 UTC

Post by Salvador Mirzo
Yeah. It's not going to work for regular people. However, there's
something that I think it should work for regular people---low volume
NNTP servers.

Leafnode I think would be quite a nice piece of software for small, local nntp
servers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leafnode
I use part of its functionality to pull in usenet into my mail client.

I need to look into leafnode again. Now I don't think leafnode can peer
with a USENET server, right? I think we should have a server that does.
I'm willing to write it.

I think you are right. It doesn't peer, but it does pull selected groups
and latest posts from a "real" nntp server.

However!

It saves all messages in a local spool folder, and since nntp is a nice
and simple retro-protocols, it is trivial to understand the format. So
what you could do, between 2 leafnode servers, is to just reverse engineer
the format and "copy" the spool directory between the two leafnode
installations and all the messages will pop up on the other leafnode as
well.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
My desire is to have an NNTP server that can host your local groups
there, easily. And your friends who will connect to see your local
groups should also see some USENET groups along with them. So the NNTP
server should also be able to peer with a USENET server. Doesn't need
to be a powerful server like INN2 does. All in one.

I think this should be doable.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
I would be surprised if INN2 doesn't do all of this, but I think we
should have other alternatives with newer ideas too. For instance, I

The reason I did not go the INN2 route was that I wanted some small and
simple, for pulling messages one way only. Leafnode at first had some
restrictions such as needing a valid DNS name which was a pain, so I
simply deleted its checks, and now the server can be named anything I
want, which is fine, since I'm not peering. This can of course be added
back if you want it.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
think these smaller servers should be mostly closed (with passwords or
cryptographic keys or certificates) because they're meant for a group of
friends who know each other. Each user should be able to create local
groups and new accounts, forming a small community. (A good community
is one in which every member has roughly the same powers as every other
member.) This small community should have access to the USENET (by
using their very community server). That's roughly the idea. The
server should be hackable; perhaps hackable in real time; so a dynamic
language seems the right fit for it.

A "hack" around it is to just run it with stunnel or over a vpn. That way
it is "private" and you don't need to add something to the software itself
in terms of passwords.

This is the truth! I am worried that people are turning more into digital
consumers than digital producers. used in such a way, digital technology can
become a drain on the soul.
Computers were supposed to be creative tools! I get the feeling that for many,
they have instead become devices of slavery. It is a very sad development. I
love text only interfaces, I love reading. I don't own a smart phone and I feel
very sad when I'm on a bus or in a subway car and see 99% of people staring in
silence into their phones. It seems like quite a dystopia for me. =(

It's sad indeed. On the bright side, we seem to be immune to that. At
least *we* are not in such a pit. :) Better than nothing. :)

True! =)

Post by D
Only today was one of my younger partners telling the class that my emails are
quite something to behold. Long and packed with all the information the person
needs to perform the task. At first he found it draining and stressful, but then
he learned that I do not demand instant replies when I email (then I call or
write in the email that it is urgent) and after a while he learned to appreciate
that all information he might need is in the email.

I think is perhaps somewhat of a downward trend. I feel awe when talking to the
older generations who had to learn the hardware, program in assembler and so on.

In my generation, hardware and assembler were solved problems, so the
programming was done in higher level languages.

Todays generation don't even see the hardware, they all use cloud servers and
python.

So the original foundation gets further and further away. Only a small set of hw
wizards still care and know about that layer of the stack.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-24 02:04:43 UTC

Post by Salvador Mirzo
Yeah. It's not going to work for regular people. However, there's
something that I think it should work for regular people---low volume
NNTP servers.

Leafnode I think would be quite a nice piece of software for small, local nntp
servers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leafnode
I use part of its functionality to pull in usenet into my mail client.

I need to look into leafnode again. Now I don't think leafnode can peer
with a USENET server, right? I think we should have a server that does.
I'm willing to write it.

I think you are right. It doesn't peer, but it does pull selected
groups and latest posts from a "real" nntp server.
However!
It saves all messages in a local spool folder, and since nntp is a
nice and simple retro-protocols, it is trivial to understand the
format. So what you could do, between 2 leafnode servers, is to just
reverse engineer the format and "copy" the spool directory between the
two leafnode installations and all the messages will pop up on the
other leafnode as well.

Okay, but the question was to just to confirm my mostly-forgotten
recollections of Leafnode. I wouldn't mind working on it to make it
peer via NNTP itself. But I would much rather write a completely new in
a non-C language.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
I would be surprised if INN2 doesn't do all of this, but I think we
should have other alternatives with newer ideas too. For instance, I

The reason I did not go the INN2 route was that I wanted some small
and simple, for pulling messages one way only. Leafnode at first had
some restrictions such as needing a valid DNS name which was a pain,
so I simply deleted its checks, and now the server can be named
anything I want, which is fine, since I'm not peering. This can of
course be added back if you want it.

I never used INN2, but I do suspect that it's made for a serious USENET
server and that it's more complex that it needs to be for the idea of a
network of small NNTP servers.

Post by D
Only today was one of my younger partners telling the class that my
emails are quite something to behold. Long and packed with all the
information the person needs to perform the task. At first he found
it draining and stressful, but then he learned that I do not demand
instant replies when I email (then I call or write in the email that
it is urgent) and after a while he learned to appreciate that all
information he might need is in the email.

I think is perhaps somewhat of a downward trend. I feel awe when
talking to the older generations who had to learn the hardware,
program in assembler and so on.

I feel the same. Like you, I feel great learning from the older
generations. In fact, I often think that they were privileged for being
able to be there first. I identified this easily enough to develop a
passion for studying the history of computer science, which makes me
look very old now because I use a lot of very old tools, which are
awesome tools despite their age. I got a web post by Joel Spolsky the
phrase that ``software doesn't get dusty''.

Post by D
In my generation, hardware and assembler were solved problems, so the
programming was done in higher level languages.
Todays generation don't even see the hardware, they all use cloud
servers and python.
So the original foundation gets further and further away. Only a small
set of hw wizards still care and know about that layer of the stack.

That's quite right. I went through the same. The whole thing was
pretty much already done. I believe I am not very fond of directly
interacting with hardware myself. For example, I usually like to have a
very clean office---no wires (if I could), not a lot of gadgets around.

Nevertheless, I feel obsessed by computers and I try to get close to the
hardware by more abstract means. For instance, I've been reading about
the 6502 and it seems like such a simple CPU that it makes up for a very
great computer architecture first introduction, unlike x86, say.

2025-02-24 10:01:24 UTC

Post by D
It saves all messages in a local spool folder, and since nntp is a
nice and simple retro-protocols, it is trivial to understand the
format. So what you could do, between 2 leafnode servers, is to just
reverse engineer the format and "copy" the spool directory between the
two leafnode installations and all the messages will pop up on the
other leafnode as well.

I wonder if there are any good C to Go converters out there? Would be
interesting to see how much effort it would take to convert leafnode from c to
go? Maybe then, it would be an easier code base to work with?

Post by Salvador Mirzo
I would be surprised if INN2 doesn't do all of this, but I think we
should have other alternatives with newer ideas too. For instance, I

The reason I did not go the INN2 route was that I wanted some small
and simple, for pulling messages one way only. Leafnode at first had
some restrictions such as needing a valid DNS name which was a pain,
so I simply deleted its checks, and now the server can be named
anything I want, which is fine, since I'm not peering. This can of
course be added back if you want it.

I never used INN2, but I do suspect that it's made for a serious USENET
server and that it's more complex that it needs to be for the idea of a
network of small NNTP servers.

Yes, I think it is way more complex than leafnode.

Post by D
I think is perhaps somewhat of a downward trend. I feel awe when
talking to the older generations who had to learn the hardware,
program in assembler and so on.

True. I have a retro-class on thursday and will show them some nice stuff in the
form of vim, alpine, and midnight commander. Apart from a shell (bash) those are
my main tools in the terminal.

When I was young, as a system administrator, I loved wires all around, disk
drives, NIC:s, power supplies etc. My office would look like a junk yard. But as
I grew older and moved more and more into sales, I now have younger guys who
have taken over that role, and that messiness. ;) My office now has one cable,
and that is the power cable. Since I get about 13-14 hours out of my laptop, I
don't even need a power cable during the working day, unless I have many hours
of video calls on that day.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
Nevertheless, I feel obsessed by computers and I try to get close to the
hardware by more abstract means. For instance, I've been reading about
the 6502 and it seems like such a simple CPU that it makes up for a very
great computer architecture first introduction, unlike x86, say.

I remember programming for the Z80 when I was young, on my calculator, and also,
of course, assembler on the 486. Those were the days! =)

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-24 16:46:23 UTC

I know C a lot more than I know Go---nothing. :) I've already began
some work in Common Lisp.

Post by D
I think is perhaps somewhat of a downward trend. I feel awe when
talking to the older generations who had to learn the hardware,
program in assembler and so on.

True. I have a retro-class on thursday and will show them some nice stuff in the
form of vim, alpine, and midnight commander. Apart from a shell (bash) those are
my main tools in the terminal.

Hey... GNU EMACS. :)

I remember programming for the Z80 when I was young, on my calculator, and also,
of course, assembler on the 486. Those were the days! =)

Lol. You have more experience than I do. I did own a 486 DX2 66 MHz
(that was my first), but I wrote no assembly at all---I didn't even know
there was assembly or machine code back then. I did get to know the
BIOS pretty well, though, but I had not much of an idea how it really
fit into the hardware. (I took four to five years to realize that I had
to get involved with programming to really understand the computer.)

Pretty funny, though, the first book I read was called ``HARDWARE''. It
was an x86 computer architecture book, superficial, that explained how
the parts connected or something. That book was very influential
because it showed me that, by reading it, I could actually make sense of
taking the computer apart and putting it back on. I consciously
realized---I can read and get knowledge. (Schools always recommended
reading, but they never really recommended technical reading---they
seemed to recommended only national literature.)

From that point on, I never stopped to read technical books, which gave
me a new realization of how amazingly broken schools are. And the
problem is not so much in the system itself---it's more in the people
who run that system.

Many years later, as a result, when I was in graduate school, instead of
choosing a topic to write on, I chose an adviser to work with. I
couldn't care less about any topic; I asked my adviser---what are you
working on? Let's work on that. You see? Anything is interesting so
long as the people working on it are interesting. When they are not,
no method will do.

2025-02-24 22:18:17 UTC

I know C a lot more than I know Go---nothing. :) I've already began
some work in Common Lisp.

Post by D
I think is perhaps somewhat of a downward trend. I feel awe when
talking to the older generations who had to learn the hardware,
program in assembler and so on.

True. I have a retro-class on thursday and will show them some nice stuff in the
form of vim, alpine, and midnight commander. Apart from a shell (bash) those are
my main tools in the terminal.

Hey... GNU EMACS. :)

Hah... wrong church and religion! ;) I did use emacs at university though,
but since I never worked as a programmer but only as a system
administrator, I started to gravitate towards vim or vi and after a few
years, it became second nature.

I remember programming for the Z80 when I was young, on my calculator, and also,
of course, assembler on the 486. Those were the days! =)

Lol. You have more experience than I do. I did own a 486 DX2 66 MHz
(that was my first), but I wrote no assembly at all---I didn't even know
there was assembly or machine code back then. I did get to know the
BIOS pretty well, though, but I had not much of an idea how it really
fit into the hardware. (I took four to five years to realize that I had
to get involved with programming to really understand the computer.)
Pretty funny, though, the first book I read was called ``HARDWARE''. It
was an x86 computer architecture book, superficial, that explained how
the parts connected or something. That book was very influential
because it showed me that, by reading it, I could actually make sense of
taking the computer apart and putting it back on. I consciously
realized---I can read and get knowledge. (Schools always recommended
reading, but they never really recommended technical reading---they
seemed to recommended only national literature.)
From that point on, I never stopped to read technical books, which gave
me a new realization of how amazingly broken schools are. And the
problem is not so much in the system itself---it's more in the people
who run that system.
Many years later, as a result, when I was in graduate school, instead of
choosing a topic to write on, I chose an adviser to work with. I
couldn't care less about any topic; I asked my adviser---what are you
working on? Let's work on that. You see? Anything is interesting so
long as the people working on it are interesting. When they are not,
no method will do.

True!

I don't actually read that many books on technology. My technology
exposure these days is more through blogs, usenet, and the occasional
networking event. Oh, and work of course, but that is more "organical"
exposure, and not really something I do actively.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 00:40:36 UTC

***@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) writes:

[...]

That's well pointed out. And there are alternatives such as hosting
your own Forgejo. Moving a git repository is easy. And you can even
put a link on your old git repository saying---we're here now.

tallman has been saying it for decades: people prefer convenience.

2025-02-20 14:57:40 UTC

That's well pointed out. And there are alternatives such as hosting
your own Forgejo. Moving a git repository is easy. And you can even
put a link on your old git repository saying---we're here now.
tallman has been saying it for decades: people prefer convenience.

This is the truth! It is a sad truth.

Adrian

2025-02-17 18:30:26 UTC

Post by D
I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With industry I
always have the choice of not using it, and they depend on customers,
so in the end, that protects me.

Depending on what you mean by choosing not to use it.

I don't use any of the Meta products, but they still know about me as
"friends" have uploaded pictures of me to facebook, or their contacts
lists to whatsapp.

Adrian

--
To Reply :
replace "bulleid" with "adrian" - all mail to bulleid is rejected
Sorry for the rigmarole, If I want spam, I'll go to the shops
Every time someone says "I don't believe in trolls", another one dies.

2025-02-17 21:44:45 UTC

Post by D
I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With industry I
always have the choice of not using it, and they depend on customers, so in
the end, that protects me.

Depending on what you mean by choosing not to use it.
I don't use any of the Meta products, but they still know about me as
"friends" have uploaded pictures of me to facebook, or their contacts lists
to whatsapp.
Adrian

Why would they do that? It does not sound like friends to me, since they
do not respect your wishes, nor your privacy.

I ask my friends not to tag me or upload information about me, and they
respect that.

I do give you this though, there probably are indirect traces of me in
their systems, but at least that is in clear violation of GDPR, so even
though it doesn't amount to much, it is better than nothing.

I also believe that second hand exposure is less than first hand exposure.
A small comfort as well.

Adrian

2025-02-18 00:08:18 UTC

Post by D
I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With
industry I always have the choice of not using it, and they depend
on customers, so in the end, that protects me.

Depending on what you mean by choosing not to use it.
I don't use any of the Meta products, but they still know about me as
"friends" have uploaded pictures of me to facebook, or their contacts
lists to whatsapp.
Adrian

Why would they do that? It does not sound like friends to me, since
they do not respect your wishes, nor your privacy.

Note my use of "friends" not friends. When I asked why I was told that
what I don't know can't hurt me.

As for whatsapp, as I understand it, it is all or nothing thing about
what it uploads, and some of them are people that I work with, so we
need each others phone numbers whilst working. They think I'm odd for
not using it.

Adrian

Sn!pe

2025-02-18 00:30:26 UTC

Post by D
I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With
industry I always have the choice of not using it, and they depend
on customers, so in the end, that protects me.

Depending on what you mean by choosing not to use it.
I don't use any of the Meta products, but they still know about me as
"friends" have uploaded pictures of me to facebook, or their contacts
lists to whatsapp.
Adrian

Why would they do that? It does not sound like friends to me, since
they do not respect your wishes, nor your privacy.

Note my use of "friends" not friends. When I asked why I was told that
what I don't know can't hurt me.
As for whatsapp, as I understand it, it is all or nothing thing about
what it uploads, and some of them are people that I work with, so we
need each others phone numbers whilst working. They think I'm odd for
not using it.
Adrian

I don't think you're odd at all, Adrian, I have exactly the same
concerns as you; I too shun all Meta products. I use Signal
(open source, non-proprietary) for stuff that would otherwise be
on Whatsapp and I've persuaded people who want to communicate with
me in that way to use it. Mostly it's just my family sharing videos,
etc. I can imagine that it might be different getting colleagues to
do that.

--
^Ï^. Sn!pe, PTB, FIBS My pet rock Gordon just is.

2025-02-18 09:23:59 UTC

Post by D
I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With
industry I always have the choice of not using it, and they depend
on customers, so in the end, that protects me.

Depending on what you mean by choosing not to use it.
I don't use any of the Meta products, but they still know about me as
"friends" have uploaded pictures of me to facebook, or their contacts
lists to whatsapp.
Adrian

Why would they do that? It does not sound like friends to me, since
they do not respect your wishes, nor your privacy.

Note my use of "friends" not friends. When I asked why I was told that
what I don't know can't hurt me.
As for whatsapp, as I understand it, it is all or nothing thing about
what it uploads, and some of them are people that I work with, so we
need each others phone numbers whilst working. They think I'm odd for
not using it.
Adrian

Note that signals backend is not open source. The backend software might
be, but we have no direct access to their implementation and running of
it.

That said however, I trust them way more than FB, and I think they have
high ethical standards, so I would not worry about it.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 00:52:52 UTC

D <***@example.net> writes:

[...]

Post by D
Note that signals backend is not open source. The backend software
might be, but we have no direct access to their implementation and
running of it.
That said however, I trust them way more than FB, and I think they
have high ethical standards, so I would not worry about it.

Can't Signal eventually be bought off?

Sn!pe

2025-02-20 01:09:59 UTC

Can't Signal eventually be bought off?

They claim that it's end-to-end encrypted but whatever, it has
Whatsapp's functionality without being Meta and that's good
enough for me.

--
^Ï^. Sn!pe, PTB, FIBS My pet rock Gordon just is.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 01:27:12 UTC

Can't Signal eventually be bought off?

They claim that it's end-to-end encrypted but whatever, it has
Whatsapp's functionality without being Meta and that's good
enough for me.

That's right. I know a tiny bit about Signal's history. But being
centralized, how do we know what happens after the author's death or
when he moves on to other things? Even well set up organizations can
sometimes be taken over. Steve Jobs was fired from his own company,
wasn't him?

But, yeah, I'm sure you're better off on Signal right now. Hosting on
Github was just fine some years ago. But things change.

Scott Dorsey

2025-02-20 21:51:35 UTC

Post by Salvador Mirzo
Can't Signal eventually be bought off?

They claim that it's end-to-end encrypted but whatever, it has
Whatsapp's functionality without being Meta and that's good
enough for me.

Signal does the encryption within the app, much like PGP. So if Signal were
to compromise the app, it could be sniffed.

The good news is that sniffing the data between the sender and receiver gives
you nothing useful at any point unless the app is compromised.

The bad news is that updates are constantly being pushed, and just as it is
possible to push a security update, it is possible to push an insecurity
update too.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-21 02:22:53 UTC

Post by Salvador Mirzo
Can't Signal eventually be bought off?

They claim that it's end-to-end encrypted but whatever, it has
Whatsapp's functionality without being Meta and that's good
enough for me.

Signal does the encryption within the app, much like PGP. So if Signal were
to compromise the app, it could be sniffed.

What about Whatsapp? Isn't it like that too?

2025-02-21 09:23:46 UTC

Post by Salvador Mirzo
Can't Signal eventually be bought off?

They claim that it's end-to-end encrypted but whatever, it has
Whatsapp's functionality without being Meta and that's good
enough for me.

Signal does the encryption within the app, much like PGP. So if Signal were
to compromise the app, it could be sniffed.
The good news is that sniffing the data between the sender and receiver gives
you nothing useful at any point unless the app is compromised.
The bad news is that updates are constantly being pushed, and just as it is
possible to push a security update, it is possible to push an insecurity
update too.
--scott

You get metadata such as timing of communication. Also I think a bigger
threat to safe signal use is authorities just grabbing your phone or
breaking into your unpatched 3 years old android device.

In sweden, that is how they crack a lot of private chat services, simply
by going in through the phones.

2025-02-20 15:07:40 UTC

Can't Signal eventually be bought off?

Interesting question. They are a foundation so that does put some legal
limitations on such scenarios. However! So was/is Open AI and look what
happened there.

So I assume, since it is based in the US that the answer to your question
is a "yes". But I am not a lawyer. ;)

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 21:35:39 UTC

Can't Signal eventually be bought off?

Interesting question. They are a foundation so that does put some
legal limitations on such scenarios. However! So was/is Open AI and
look what happened there.
So I assume, since it is based in the US that the answer to your
question is a "yes". But I am not a lawyer. ;)

Lol. When you want to say you're not a lawyer, you should say IANAL,
which is one of these ridiculous USENET acronyms. :) But what I really
think is that nobody should say IANAL. Lol. First, who cares? Lol.
Second, it's almost never illegal to give your opinion on anything.

But, yeah. You gave us a great example. Open AI was a non-profit
organization later turned for-profit. So, the same nonsense could
happen to Signal unless it has made any sort of unusual special
arrangements.

Companies and political parties (which are the same thing) should
formalize for-life commitments. For example, a Senate candidate, a
Republic president and so on should register in writing some principles
and promises that they actually must live up to, lest they be impeached.

Take a look at YouTube. The world has invested 15 billion videos in it
and now it needs to pay for viewing them by lack of privacy and ad
viewing. I can't recall when the world actually agreed to this deal.
Deals should be clear from the very start.

For me to use Signal, say, I'd need a for-life promise that it would
never be taken over from me. But, actually, I wouldn't use it either
way because I just prefer a decentralized system. Signal should
redesign itself in a decentralized manner so that perhaps I could host
my own server (for my own communication), say. Just like e-mail and
news are.

2025-02-20 22:31:01 UTC

Post by Salvador Mirzo
Can't Signal eventually be bought off?

Interesting question. They are a foundation so that does put some
legal limitations on such scenarios. However! So was/is Open AI and
look what happened there.
So I assume, since it is based in the US that the answer to your
question is a "yes". But I am not a lawyer. ;)

I was thinking about it, but in the end, didn't go all "acronym". ;)

Post by Salvador Mirzo
But, yeah. You gave us a great example. Open AI was a non-profit
organization later turned for-profit. So, the same nonsense could
happen to Signal unless it has made any sort of unusual special
arrangements.
Companies and political parties (which are the same thing) should
formalize for-life commitments. For example, a Senate candidate, a
Republic president and so on should register in writing some principles
and promises that they actually must live up to, lest they be impeached.

I don't see how that could ever be done? I mean there are trusts and
foundations, but I assume they can be broken or dismantled.

On the other hand... there are active companies who are several 100s of years
old, and the catholic church has been going strong for what... 1980 years or so?
So clearly it is possible to build organizations centred around an ideology,
business plan or other concept, that has been working for 100s if not 1000s of
years.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
Take a look at YouTube. The world has invested 15 billion videos in it
and now it needs to pay for viewing them by lack of privacy and ad
viewing. I can't recall when the world actually agreed to this deal.
Deals should be clear from the very start.

I find it very fascinating that you can find all kinds of copyrighted material
on youtube, and that is fine, and no one cares. But when the piratebay guys
built a web site that links to movies (not hosting it themselves) it was prison
+ fines for them. Different rules for google and private persons. This is very
sad.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
For me to use Signal, say, I'd need a for-life promise that it would
never be taken over from me. But, actually, I wouldn't use it either
way because I just prefer a decentralized system. Signal should
redesign itself in a decentralized manner so that perhaps I could host
my own server (for my own communication), say. Just like e-mail and
news are.

I don't use anything to chat with family since they would not be interested, but
one project I do like, and which would probably be my choice if I tried to get
my family to use it is delta chat. I like the concept behind it. I also think,
but don't remember at the moment, that it is possible to use it on iphones,
android and for me, on regular computers and they all work together.

For audio/video I use jitsi. I don't host it myself, but my companys cloud
provider sells their own version of hosted jitsi. It works really well!

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-21 02:06:46 UTC

Post by Salvador Mirzo
Can't Signal eventually be bought off?

Interesting question. They are a foundation so that does put some
legal limitations on such scenarios. However! So was/is Open AI and
look what happened there.
So I assume, since it is based in the US that the answer to your
question is a "yes". But I am not a lawyer. ;)

I was thinking about it, but in the end, didn't go all "acronym". ;)

I don't see how that could ever be done? I mean there are trusts and
foundations, but I assume they can be broken or dismantled.
On the other hand... there are active companies who are several 100s
of years old, and the catholic church has been going strong for
what... 1980 years or so? So clearly it is possible to build
organizations centred around an ideology, business plan or other
concept, that has been working for 100s if not 1000s of years.

I got carried away with the wording. A Senate candidate should keep his
promises when in office. Let's erase the ``for-life''. When you vote
for someone, you should vote because that person will do something that
they promised. The system would not let them promise soemthing they can
do; for example, a president cannot promise something that Congress must
approve, say.

When someone is running for office, they make a bunch of promises. They
should be obliged to do what they said they would. So there should be a
formal process of writing it down and then hold them accountable later.
In some cases, they'll be excused; in other cases, they'll just be
removed from office.

Campaigns should be held more accountable.

``This is the truth.'' :)

Wow---I had not heard of delta chat. I really liked the idea! Can
someone use delta chat and another just plain e-mail? That would likely
be neat. I, for one, don't like chat interfaces and prefer e-mail. I
wouldn't mind replying chat messages by e-mail, for example.

Post by D
For audio/video I use jitsi. I don't host it myself, but my companys cloud
provider sells their own version of hosted jitsi. It works really well!

Cool. I've been using Jitsi on meet.jit.si. I've used it while on
Windows. Now I've been running OpenBSD and I've noticed that Jitsi
spins up my CPU a bit more than I was expecting. I then tried Google
Meet using Chrome and it didn't spin that much. I'm gonna try Jitsi on
Chrome and see what happens (next).

2025-02-21 10:01:45 UTC

Post by D
I don't see how that could ever be done? I mean there are trusts and
foundations, but I assume they can be broken or dismantled.
On the other hand... there are active companies who are several 100s
of years old, and the catholic church has been going strong for
what... 1980 years or so? So clearly it is possible to build
organizations centred around an ideology, business plan or other
concept, that has been working for 100s if not 1000s of years.

The idea is good in theory, but in practice, I don't see it working since
politics is based so much on values, and reality is "plastic". You can do a lot
of things, the question is just how much are you going to sacrifice in order to
get it done.

But yes, in general, accountability is a good thing. I also like to see basic
requirements for politicians such as:

1. Knowledge of english if you are supposed to represent your country in
international situations.

2. An academic degree if you are in a country with free higher education. It
would give me comfort that you have enough intelligence to make it through a
university program.

3. Limiting terms to one term, and after that, being banned from any political
jobs. This is to limit political clans from forming, were politicial offices are
inherited across generations.

4. Limiting of salary and benefits. Your salary as a politician should be the
average of the country. If the country prospers, your salary increases, if the
country does not prosper, your salary goes down. By limiting the salary you also
filter out people who are looking for a cozy position, with a ridiculously high
salary for life. Instead you get people who are more interested in the job, than
in the salary.

5. Abolishing full-time politicians. In switzerland in olden days, politics was
a part time job. Every politician had a "day job" and they got leave from their
job one or two days per week to go to the parliament and do politics. The great
thing about this is that they were exposed to their colleagues every week, so if
they did a bad job in the parliament, they surely got told about it, when going
back to work. It was also good for their humility to go back to having a boss,
after 1-2 days in parliament. This should be re-instated to force politicians to
live among the people, as one of the people. Todays politicians isolate
themselves from the people and live like billionaires zipping around the planet
in private jets.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
When someone is running for office, they make a bunch of promises. They
should be obliged to do what they said they would. So there should be a
formal process of writing it down and then hold them accountable later.
In some cases, they'll be excused; in other cases, they'll just be
removed from office.
Campaigns should be held more accountable.

``This is the truth.'' :)

Amen!

Good question! I actually don't know, but since it is based on email as the
foundation, I would think it kind of natural that you would also be able to use
it for regular email.

It would actually be quite neat to have delta chat as a background service on my
computer, so that I could have one account/folder in my email client for "chats"
and the rest, like usual, for regular email. So when I need to chat, I just
switch over th my delta chat mail folder and type away, with all the benefits of
encryption.

Post by D
For audio/video I use jitsi. I don't host it myself, but my companys cloud
provider sells their own version of hosted jitsi. It works really well!

I think a lot of that might have something to do with openbsd graphic
capabilities. The file system is also not the most efficient one.

Adrian

2025-02-18 13:48:34 UTC

Post by Sn!pe
I don't think you're odd at all, Adrian, I have exactly the same
concerns as you; I too shun all Meta products. I use Signal
(open source, non-proprietary) for stuff that would otherwise be
on Whatsapp and I've persuaded people who want to communicate with
me in that way to use it. Mostly it's just my family sharing videos,
etc. I can imagine that it might be different getting colleagues to
do that.

Where whatsapp etc. is concerned, I've taken to asking two simple
questions, with the caveat that you can't answer "yes" to both.

Q1: Do you respect other peoples privacy ?

Q2: Do you use "social media" tools such as whatsapp and facebook ?

This usually results in "Yes" to Q1, and an awkward pause at Q2.

Adrian

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 00:56:05 UTC

Where whatsapp etc. is concerned, I've taken to asking two simple
questions, with the caveat that you can't answer "yes" to both.
Q1: Do you respect other peoples privacy ?
Q2: Do you use "social media" tools such as whatsapp and facebook ?
This usually results in "Yes" to Q1, and an awkward pause at Q2.

Lol.

2025-02-18 09:22:32 UTC

Post by D
I'm more scared about the government than the industry. With industry I
always have the choice of not using it, and they depend on customers, so
in the end, that protects me.

Depending on what you mean by choosing not to use it.
I don't use any of the Meta products, but they still know about me as
"friends" have uploaded pictures of me to facebook, or their contacts
lists to whatsapp.
Adrian

Why would they do that? It does not sound like friends to me, since they do
not respect your wishes, nor your privacy.

Note my use of "friends" not friends. When I asked why I was told that what
I don't know can't hurt me.

This is the truth!

As for whatsapp, as I understand it, it is all or nothing thing about what it
uploads, and some of them are people that I work with, so we need each others
phone numbers whilst working. They think I'm odd for not using it.

Are you based in the US? Uploading your information, that enables someone
to identify you, without your consent, is illegal in the EU and punishable
by up to 4% of the global revenues of the company.

Another option is to have 2 phone numbers. One for work, and one for
friends (without quotationmarks).

I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that currently
has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one most companies
get.

Adrian

2025-02-18 14:05:08 UTC

Post by D
Are you based in the US? Uploading your information, that enables
someone to identify you, without your consent, is illegal in the EU and
punishable by up to 4% of the global revenues of the company.

I'm in dear old Blighty (UK). Question is, who is the company in this
case ? I assume Meta as the upload was done by an individual for
reasons not explained.

Post by D
Another option is to have 2 phone numbers. One for work, and one for
friends (without quotationmarks).

I thought about that. The thing is that 3 years ago we seemed to manage
happily without it, but one person changing job meant that it now seems
to be essential. I've asked higher ups why we now seem to have a
defacto requirement to use WA, but no one seems to know. And I don't
see why I should buy a second phone (and ongoing costs with running it)
for what this year is likely to be 10 days use.

Post by D
I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that currently
has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one most companies
get.

I have my own domain. Companies usually get a unique email address.
Those that abuse it, or leak it, are soon found out, and may lose
business as a result.

Adrian

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 01:03:21 UTC

Post by Adrian
I thought about that. The thing is that 3 years ago we seemed to
manage happily without it, but one person changing job meant that it
now seems to be essential. I've asked higher ups why we now seem to
have a defacto requirement to use WA, but no one seems to know. And I
don't see why I should buy a second phone (and ongoing costs with
running it) for what this year is likely to be 10 days use.

I totally agree that it's absurd. But it's essentially a war and a
second phone is a weapon.

Post by D
I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that
currently has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one
most companies get.

I have my own domain. Companies usually get a unique email
address. Those that abuse it, or leak it, are soon found out, and may
lose business as a result.

And I think we have to take back this spirit of running the Internet
ourselves. Remember---we are the ones that really know how to run it,
not Whatsapp, Facebook users. So I think we all should host our own
mail again, host our own code, our own NNTP servers, our own mailing
lists...

I also feel that things are changing. To what I don't know, but
essentially when the changes become more clear, we'd be ourselves ready
with solutions and also not worried that we're helping the movement
that's hurting us. It feels great to realize that we don't put in even
a cent towards this movement.

2025-02-20 15:14:57 UTC

I totally agree that it's absurd. But it's essentially a war and a
second phone is a weapon.

Post by D
I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that
currently has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one
most companies get.

I have my own domain. Companies usually get a unique email
address. Those that abuse it, or leak it, are soon found out, and may
lose business as a result.

And I think we have to take back this spirit of running the Internet
ourselves. Remember---we are the ones that really know how to run it,
not Whatsapp, Facebook users. So I think we all should host our own
mail again, host our own code, our own NNTP servers, our own mailing
lists...
I also feel that things are changing. To what I don't know, but
essentially when the changes become more clear, we'd be ourselves ready
with solutions and also not worried that we're helping the movement
that's hurting us. It feels great to realize that we don't put in even
a cent towards this movement.

This is my idea on how to counter the laws all around the world that seek
to forbid encryption. There is safety in numbers, and completely
impossible for the authorities to arrest 10s or 100s of thousands of
people.

My dream is that people will start to use small self-hosted, end-to-end
encrypted chat services, so that the laws forbidding encryption become
meaningless.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 21:47:03 UTC

D <***@example.net> writes:

[...]

Post by D
My dream is that people will start to use small self-hosted,
end-to-end encrypted chat services, so that the laws forbidding
encryption become meaningless.

That's my idea, too. I don't think the USENET is actually a perfect
project. I think communities should not too large. So I think we
should build more NNTP servers to be used by small communities. And
then these servers should have a standard API so that an index could be
created somewhere where people can discover communities.

Imagine how many closed NNTP servers, mailing lists are out there and
nobody knows.

The web is like that. A website sends you to another one. This is
decentralization. No NNTP servers send you to another one, except those
that have peers, but then it's as if they're all the same. My idea is
to make NNTP servers more like the web.

I don't know if it works. I'm thinking out loud.

Sn!pe

2025-02-20 22:12:00 UTC

Post by D
My dream is that people will start to use small self-hosted,
end-to-end encrypted chat services, so that the laws forbidding
encryption become meaningless.

[...]

Closed NNTP newsservers are not Usenet, just local proprietary news.
They're operated by a server owner who has the power of booting users
off his server if he doesn't like their opinions. Those users have no
alternative server to use for those local groups so they've effectively
been censored, exactly like web forums with a cadre of moderators.

With Usenet there are many servers, each carrying a subset of groups
from the full group list. If a server operator TOSes a user they're at
liberty to use another service and still access their groups uncensored.

--
^Ï^. Sn!pe, PTB, FIBS My pet rock Gordon just is.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-21 02:15:01 UTC

Post by D
My dream is that people will start to use small self-hosted,
end-to-end encrypted chat services, so that the laws forbidding
encryption become meaningless.

[...]
Closed NNTP newsservers are not Usenet, just local proprietary news.
They're operated by a server owner who has the power of booting users
off his server if he doesn't like their opinions. Those users have no
alternative server to use for those local groups so they've effectively
been censored, exactly like web forums with a cadre of moderators.
With Usenet there are many servers, each carrying a subset of groups
from the full group list. If a server operator TOSes a user they're at
liberty to use another service and still access their groups uncensored.

That's right. But I think we need the closed ones too. But I also
think the closed ones are a good way to show people that there's
something out there that's the USENET. So if they every get censored on
a closed NNTP server, they could still go to a USENET server and still
have a community they can't be banned from.

2025-02-21 10:04:01 UTC

Post by D
My dream is that people will start to use small self-hosted,
end-to-end encrypted chat services, so that the laws forbidding
encryption become meaningless.

[...]
Closed NNTP newsservers are not Usenet, just local proprietary news.
They're operated by a server owner who has the power of booting users
off his server if he doesn't like their opinions. Those users have no
alternative server to use for those local groups so they've effectively
been censored, exactly like web forums with a cadre of moderators.
With Usenet there are many servers, each carrying a subset of groups
from the full group list. If a server operator TOSes a user they're at
liberty to use another service and still access their groups uncensored.

I think that more choice is better! Some will prefer small, private
communities, some the global usenet, and some will switch between the two.
=)

2025-02-21 09:21:21 UTC

Post by D
My dream is that people will start to use small self-hosted,
end-to-end encrypted chat services, so that the laws forbidding
encryption become meaningless.

That's my idea, too. I don't think the USENET is actually a perfect
project. I think communities should not too large. So I think we
should build more NNTP servers to be used by small communities. And
then these servers should have a standard API so that an index could be
created somewhere where people can discover communities.
Imagine how many closed NNTP servers, mailing lists are out there and
nobody knows.
The web is like that. A website sends you to another one. This is
decentralization. No NNTP servers send you to another one, except those
that have peers, but then it's as if they're all the same. My idea is
to make NNTP servers more like the web.
I don't know if it works. I'm thinking out loud.

That would be a nice take on NNTP. A kind of "federated" nntp model, as
opposed to todays standardize and "global" version. Federated is perhaps
not the right word for it.

I think I see your vision here... we could think of the local nntp servers
as small communities, you could opt-in to make them public, keep them
private, or just register them with a search engine if you want.

That model also would avoid all the newsgroup hierarchy stuff, you just
name your groups what ever you want, and you can decide to setup peers
with other communities you know.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-24 01:46:02 UTC

Post by D
My dream is that people will start to use small self-hosted,
end-to-end encrypted chat services, so that the laws forbidding
encryption become meaningless.

That's my idea, too. I don't think the USENET is actually a perfect
project. I think communities should not too large. So I think we
should build more NNTP servers to be used by small communities. And
then these servers should have a standard API so that an index could be
created somewhere where people can discover communities.
Imagine how many closed NNTP servers, mailing lists are out there and
nobody knows.
The web is like that. A website sends you to another one. This is
decentralization. No NNTP servers send you to another one, except those
that have peers, but then it's as if they're all the same. My idea is
to make NNTP servers more like the web.
I don't know if it works. I'm thinking out loud.

That would be a nice take on NNTP. A kind of "federated" nntp model,
as opposed to todays standardize and "global" version. Federated is
perhaps not the right word for it.
I think I see your vision here... we could think of the local nntp
servers as small communities, you could opt-in to make them public,
keep them private, or just register them with a search engine if you
want.
That model also would avoid all the newsgroup hierarchy stuff, you
just name your groups what ever you want, and you can decide to setup
peers with other communities you know.

Yeah---that's the idea. But it's also future. First thing is to get a
nice prototype with the mundane work done so that we can start dreaming
up something cool like that. More to follow eventually.

2025-02-24 09:43:25 UTC

Post by D
My dream is that people will start to use small self-hosted,
end-to-end encrypted chat services, so that the laws forbidding
encryption become meaningless.

That's my idea, too. I don't think the USENET is actually a perfect
project. I think communities should not too large. So I think we
should build more NNTP servers to be used by small communities. And
then these servers should have a standard API so that an index could be
created somewhere where people can discover communities.
Imagine how many closed NNTP servers, mailing lists are out there and
nobody knows.
The web is like that. A website sends you to another one. This is
decentralization. No NNTP servers send you to another one, except those
that have peers, but then it's as if they're all the same. My idea is
to make NNTP servers more like the web.
I don't know if it works. I'm thinking out loud.

That would be a nice take on NNTP. A kind of "federated" nntp model,
as opposed to todays standardize and "global" version. Federated is
perhaps not the right word for it.
I think I see your vision here... we could think of the local nntp
servers as small communities, you could opt-in to make them public,
keep them private, or just register them with a search engine if you
want.
That model also would avoid all the newsgroup hierarchy stuff, you
just name your groups what ever you want, and you can decide to setup
peers with other communities you know.

Yeah---that's the idea. But it's also future. First thing is to get a
nice prototype with the mundane work done so that we can start dreaming
up something cool like that. More to follow eventually.

Looking forward to it!

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 00:59:09 UTC

D <***@example.net> writes:

[...]

Post by D
Another option is to have 2 phone numbers. One for work, and one for
friends (without quotationmarks).

Two phones is a good idea. Or two chips, but then you have to be
careful not to accidentally share your contacts with the app. Gotta be
careful. Two phones is safer because then you have no contacts in the
second one.

Post by D
I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that
currently has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one most
companies get.

It's also nice to host your own mail. It's not as difficult as people
have been saying lately. A few weeks of reading (YMMV) can take you
from zero to up and running.

2025-02-20 15:13:05 UTC

Post by D
Another option is to have 2 phone numbers. One for work, and one for
friends (without quotationmarks).

I have a dumbphone with 2 sim slots. It's ok, does the job and nothing
more. It's a nokia 110 4g. The good thing is that since it has two sim
slots I can have both my work and private number on the same phone.

Since it is a dumbphone, there are no apps that can leak data between the
two. =)

Post by D
I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that
currently has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one most
companies get.

It's also nice to host your own mail. It's not as difficult as people
have been saying lately. A few weeks of reading (YMMV) can take you
from zero to up and running.

I buy this from a local european cloud provider. I am very happy with
their service. I have thought about hosting myself, but I cannot justify
the time.

I do self-host my web site, and 2 SaaS products though on rented servers.
=)

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 21:41:35 UTC

D <***@example.net> writes:

[...]

Post by D
I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that
currently has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one most
companies get.

It's also nice to host your own mail. It's not as difficult as people
have been saying lately. A few weeks of reading (YMMV) can take you
from zero to up and running.

I buy this from a local european cloud provider. I am very happy with
their service. I have thought about hosting myself, but I cannot
justify the time.
I do self-host my web site, and 2 SaaS products though on rented
servers. =)

You're good.

I decided to host my everything. I'm running notqmail with some patches
on top. My phone e-mail checker is K9, which I believe is actually
Thunderbird. But it turns out that now there's the Thunderbird for
Android, too. It looks the same as K9, except that it's blue instead of
red. On the desktop, I run Gnus with an IMAP4 server local. And it's
not over---I also run fdm to fetch my mail from my own server to me
locally. So, yes, it's very complicated. And I'm not even close to
finish because I didn't talk about public-inbox and mailing lists, which
is involved with Gnus because it's where I read and write mail. It's
almost a life project.

But it's fun to do these things *if* you have the free time.

2025-02-20 22:33:04 UTC

Post by D
I use the same technique with email. I have a spam-email that
currently has around 20k spam messages in it, and this is the one most
companies get.

It's also nice to host your own mail. It's not as difficult as people
have been saying lately. A few weeks of reading (YMMV) can take you
from zero to up and running.

I buy this from a local european cloud provider. I am very happy with
their service. I have thought about hosting myself, but I cannot
justify the time.
I do self-host my web site, and 2 SaaS products though on rented
servers. =)

You're good.
I decided to host my everything. I'm running notqmail with some patches
on top. My phone e-mail checker is K9, which I believe is actually
Thunderbird. But it turns out that now there's the Thunderbird for
Android, too. It looks the same as K9, except that it's blue instead of
red. On the desktop, I run Gnus with an IMAP4 server local. And it's
not over---I also run fdm to fetch my mail from my own server to me
locally. So, yes, it's very complicated. And I'm not even close to
finish because I didn't talk about public-inbox and mailing lists, which
is involved with Gnus because it's where I read and write mail. It's
almost a life project.
But it's fun to do these things *if* you have the free time.

This is the truth! It is fun! =) My at home self hosting is limited to 2 x
2 bay NAS boxes (in two separate countries with replication between them),
1 x radxa zero with kodi on it, which pulls movies from one of the NAS
boxes, and a backup server which receives backups from my laptop and my
fathers laptop.

That's about it, when it comes to personal self-hosting.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-21 02:12:21 UTC

Post by Salvador Mirzo
I decided to host my everything. I'm running notqmail with some patches
on top. My phone e-mail checker is K9, which I believe is actually
Thunderbird. But it turns out that now there's the Thunderbird for
Android, too. It looks the same as K9, except that it's blue instead of
red. On the desktop, I run Gnus with an IMAP4 server local. And it's
not over---I also run fdm to fetch my mail from my own server to me
locally. So, yes, it's very complicated. And I'm not even close to
finish because I didn't talk about public-inbox and mailing lists, which
is involved with Gnus because it's where I read and write mail. It's
almost a life project.
But it's fun to do these things *if* you have the free time.

This is the truth! It is fun! =) My at home self hosting is limited to
2 x 2 bay NAS boxes (in two separate countries with replication
between them), 1 x radxa zero with kodi on it, which pulls movies from
one of the NAS boxes, and a backup server which receives backups from
my laptop and my fathers laptop.
That's about it, when it comes to personal self-hosting.

You know, I have not worked on backup yet. :) I've done a lot of work on
this system and I don't really have a backup, except for one project or
two that I happen to once in a while push some commits to a remote
server. But my remote server doesn't have a backup strategy either.
And my needs are pretty simple. If I can stop to just write a Makefile
that copies files to a remote server, that will keep me safe. Gotta
stop to do this.

I also have some unallocated space on my solid state drive. OpenBSD is
able to dump partitions and using these dumps for recovery. It could be
something that would be very effective, too. Gotta get some things out
of the way here first and start new projects. I'm taking my chances for
now.

2025-02-21 10:03:11 UTC

This is the truth! It is fun! =) My at home self hosting is limited to
2 x 2 bay NAS boxes (in two separate countries with replication
between them), 1 x radxa zero with kodi on it, which pulls movies from
one of the NAS boxes, and a backup server which receives backups from
my laptop and my fathers laptop.
That's about it, when it comes to personal self-hosting.

You know, I have not worked on backup yet. :) I've done a lot of work on
this system and I don't really have a backup, except for one project or
two that I happen to once in a while push some commits to a remote
server. But my remote server doesn't have a backup strategy either.
And my needs are pretty simple. If I can stop to just write a Makefile
that copies files to a remote server, that will keep me safe. Gotta
stop to do this.
I also have some unallocated space on my solid state drive. OpenBSD is
able to dump partitions and using these dumps for recovery. It could be
something that would be very effective, too. Gotta get some things out
of the way here first and start new projects. I'm taking my chances for
now.

I recommend restic, alternatively for a more home made feeling, rsync.
Both have worked really well for me, and restic seems to have matured very
well the past couple of years.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 00:51:49 UTC

Adrian <***@ku.gro.lioff> writes:

[...]

Post by Adrian
Note my use of "friends" not friends. When I asked why I was told
that what I don't know can't hurt me.

Speechless.

Post by Adrian
As for whatsapp, as I understand it, it is all or nothing thing about
what it uploads, and some of them are people that I work with, so we
need each others phone numbers whilst working. They think I'm odd for
not using it.

That makes two of us. :)

I never really asked people not to upload pictures of me, but I'm not
aware of any picture of mine that's there---but I'm sure they are there
somewhere. Now, Whatsapp I really don't use and people sometimes beg me
for installing that thing, but I never did.

Scott Dorsey

2025-02-20 21:49:10 UTC

Post by Adrian
Note my use of "friends" not friends. When I asked why I was told
that what I don't know can't hurt me.

Speechless.

This is pretty typical of Americans today, I think. If you talk about
privacy, they say they have nothing to hide and accuse you of being
suspicious.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-21 02:21:31 UTC

Post by Adrian
Note my use of "friends" not friends. When I asked why I was told
that what I don't know can't hurt me.

Speechless.

This is pretty typical of Americans today, I think. If you talk about
privacy, they say they have nothing to hide and accuse you of being
suspicious.

I've noticed that some people say this because they really don't think
much about this. It's a bit of ignorance perhaps; but not always a
hopeless ignorance. We are thinkers in these matters; most people are
not.

For instance, I've seen many intelligent people say things like---``a
site like YouTube shouldn't let every video be posted; some videos are
outrageous''. (And, indeed, YouTube doesn't let every video be posted.)
They can't quite see that freedom of expression is something that's
all-or-nothing. This is easy to see for people who think about such
matters for a long time.

2025-02-21 09:22:21 UTC

Post by Adrian
Note my use of "friends" not friends. When I asked why I was told
that what I don't know can't hurt me.

Speechless.

This is pretty typical of Americans today, I think. If you talk about
privacy, they say they have nothing to hide and accuse you of being
suspicious.
--scott

I am surprised! I thought one of the hallmarks of american culture was its
suspicion of government and authority. It seems this attitude goes against
that? =(

Scott Dorsey

2025-02-22 17:09:44 UTC

Post by Scott Dorsey
This is pretty typical of Americans today, I think. If you talk about
privacy, they say they have nothing to hide and accuse you of being
suspicious.

I am surprised! I thought one of the hallmarks of american culture was its
suspicion of government and authority. It seems this attitude goes against
that? =(

Your guess is as good as mine. I see lots of people who are very suspicious
of the government but think it's perfectly fine to give as much information
to large corporations as possible. Personally I would put far more faith
in the government than in health insurance companies or even Amazon.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

2025-02-22 23:23:22 UTC

Post by Scott Dorsey
This is pretty typical of Americans today, I think. If you talk about
privacy, they say they have nothing to hide and accuse you of being
suspicious.

I am surprised! I thought one of the hallmarks of american culture was its
suspicion of government and authority. It seems this attitude goes against
that? =(

Very strange. For me the government is always enemy nr 1, but FAANG are
not close behind. I think we have some agreement between us here, perhaps.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 00:49:17 UTC

Post by D
I also believe that second hand exposure is less than first hand
exposure. A small comfort as well.

A lot better. These ``friends'' are not people who understand what
we're talking about here. If you start explaining why they shouldn't
put your picture there and so on, it will really be a lot of work. And
you might end up losing these friends because, you know, people have
little tolerance for politics.

People wanna have fun. Eat, drink, play video games, watch TV, ... They
get fed up with political stuff---it's hard to understand and it all
seems to boil down to same thing over and over again.

But, yeah, we're all probably better off away from these ``friends''.
We just need to face our loneliness, which is healhty.

2025-02-20 15:05:47 UTC

Post by D
I also believe that second hand exposure is less than first hand
exposure. A small comfort as well.

A lot better. These ``friends'' are not people who understand what
we're talking about here. If you start explaining why they shouldn't
put your picture there and so on, it will really be a lot of work. And
you might end up losing these friends because, you know, people have
little tolerance for politics.
People wanna have fun. Eat, drink, play video games, watch TV, ... They
get fed up with political stuff---it's hard to understand and it all
seems to boil down to same thing over and over again.
But, yeah, we're all probably better off away from these ``friends''.
We just need to face our loneliness, which is healhty.

Many are the "friends" I have left behind because they could not be bothered to
contact me through phone or email. Since I am not on FB, and since their only
way of interacting is through FB and whatsapp, they simply faded out of my life,
and to be honest, weren't much friends to begin with.

The ones who remain, I call real friends, because they do bother to shoot me an
sms or an email from time to time, and likewise, I do give them a call.

So I find this to be a hueg benefit! I am also lucky because I run my own
company, so my business partners know that if they want to reach me, they have 2
options, email or phone, and all of them accept that.

Last, but not least, let us not forget that friends is not a static concept,
there are always plenty of ways to meet new friends in life if one feels the
need and has the motivation. =)

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-20 21:24:35 UTC

Post by D
I also believe that second hand exposure is less than first hand
exposure. A small comfort as well.

A lot better. These ``friends'' are not people who understand what
we're talking about here. If you start explaining why they shouldn't
put your picture there and so on, it will really be a lot of work. And
you might end up losing these friends because, you know, people have
little tolerance for politics.
People wanna have fun. Eat, drink, play video games, watch TV, ... They
get fed up with political stuff---it's hard to understand and it all
seems to boil down to same thing over and over again.
But, yeah, we're all probably better off away from these ``friends''.
We just need to face our loneliness, which is healhty.

Same here! I ``lost'' many.

Post by D
The ones who remain, I call real friends, because they do bother to shoot me an
sms or an email from time to time, and likewise, I do give them a call.

Same here and this does make me happy. So it turns out that we've sort
of optimized life a bit and increased the security level. We don't need
to waste time with non-friends and found some real ones. That's a hack. :)

Post by D
So I find this to be a hueg benefit! I am also lucky because I run my
own company, so my business partners know that if they want to reach
me, they have 2 options, email or phone, and all of them accept that.

Nice to hear you run your own business.

Post by D
Last, but not least, let us not forget that friends is not a static
concept, there are always plenty of ways to meet new friends in life
if one feels the need and has the motivation. =)

Exactly.

2025-02-20 22:05:38 UTC

Post by D
Many are the "friends" I have left behind because they could not be bothered to
contact me through phone or email. Since I am not on FB, and since their only
way of interacting is through FB and whatsapp, they simply faded out of my life,
and to be honest, weren't much friends to begin with.

Same here! I ``lost'' many.

Post by D
The ones who remain, I call real friends, because they do bother to shoot me an
sms or an email from time to time, and likewise, I do give them a call.

Amen! Quite an efficiency hack! =D Another "security" hack I have implemented
for my father is that I have forbidden him from getting government digital ID on
his smart phone. This is very funny, because once scammers called him and told
some kind of story that ended with them asking him to confirm what ever they
wanted by opening the digital ID app (this is how most old people get scammed
where I live) and he told them that he doesn't have it, due to security
reasons...

... the scammers sighed heavily and just hung up. =D

Nice to hear you run your own business.

Yes, it is the best thing that has ever happened to me except for my wife. I am
truly blessed and am very thankful for it every single day. =)

Post by D
Last, but not least, let us not forget that friends is not a static
concept, there are always plenty of ways to meet new friends in life
if one feels the need and has the motivation. =)

Exactly.

Amen!

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-21 01:56:39 UTC

Same here! I ``lost'' many.

Post by D
The ones who remain, I call real friends, because they do bother to shoot me an
sms or an email from time to time, and likewise, I do give them a call.

Amen! Quite an efficiency hack! =D Another "security" hack I have implemented
for my father is that I have forbidden him from getting government digital ID on
his smart phone. This is very funny, because once scammers called him and told
some kind of story that ended with them asking him to confirm what ever they
wanted by opening the digital ID app (this is how most old people get scammed
where I live) and he told them that he doesn't have it, due to security
reasons...
... the scammers sighed heavily and just hung up. =D

Lol. If that's not a super inconvenience to your father, then I think
it's a great solution. Over here these scams are quite a problem too.
I also do talk to my father quite a lot about such matters. And
anything suspicious at all, he always talks to me. In fact, I've talked
to my entire family about such things. To always let one another know
about these events---to talk often among us. We learn more and so we
protect ourselves more.

The reason we can be so good at handling this computing world is because
we are pretty much obsessed about it; we spend the entire day thinking
about it; reading about it; writing about it. By talking more with our
families about these matters, they do learn more from us. Of course, we
can't expect they'll be coworkers. We need to take things very slowly
and only as much as they can handle it. Then it becomes kind of fun for
them too and then they learn a bunch.

Nice to hear you run your own business.

Yes, it is the best thing that has ever happened to me except for my wife. I am
truly blessed and am very thankful for it every single day. =)

Nice to hear that your wife is the best thing that ever happened to you.
I unfortunately can't yet say the same. I'm single, although I'd love
to have little kids running around and through the house. :) But first
I gotta find someone who I love and who loves me.

Congratulations! I think you've nailed it.

And it's interesting that I've found you here to be one of the most
upbeat ones around here. And I guess this explains something. You seem
to have a healthy life. Well done!

2025-02-21 09:51:55 UTC

Post by D
Amen! Quite an efficiency hack! =D Another "security" hack I have implemented
for my father is that I have forbidden him from getting government digital ID on
his smart phone. This is very funny, because once scammers called him and told
some kind of story that ended with them asking him to confirm what ever they
wanted by opening the digital ID app (this is how most old people get scammed
where I live) and he told them that he doesn't have it, due to security
reasons...
... the scammers sighed heavily and just hung up. =D

Lol. If that's not a super inconvenience to your father, then I think
it's a great solution. Over here these scams are quite a problem too.

At the moment, everything essential in society has to be able to be done on
paper, so it really is not a problem, and costs about 20-40 minutes per year in
extra writing on actual paper.

This scares me though! I fear the day when a smartphone is mandatory in order to
participate in society. This will be a sad day indeed. Add to that, centralbank
managed electronic currencies, that can be clawed back from you, or where you
are blocked from spending them in an instant, if you go against the government,
and we have a very dystopian situation indeed. =/

Post by Salvador Mirzo
I also do talk to my father quite a lot about such matters. And
anything suspicious at all, he always talks to me. In fact, I've talked
to my entire family about such things. To always let one another know
about these events---to talk often among us. We learn more and so we
protect ourselves more.

This is good advice! My father and I, and my wife, talk about these things, but
we never formalized it, so that we say that we should talk to each other in case
anyone does get a weird message.

I read that in order to protect against voice cloning, you should decide on a
family password as well. This we also haven't done. But I am currently working
on a small IT-security curriculum for retired people, and that class will
include an example of voice cloning to show them how it works, and what they can
expect.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
The reason we can be so good at handling this computing world is because
we are pretty much obsessed about it; we spend the entire day thinking
about it; reading about it; writing about it. By talking more with our
families about these matters, they do learn more from us. Of course, we
can't expect they'll be coworkers. We need to take things very slowly
and only as much as they can handle it. Then it becomes kind of fun for
them too and then they learn a bunch.

This is true. But this also requires some amount of simplification in order for
it not to become an energy drain. That is why I like my way of limiting
communication to phone and email. It only leaves two doors open which is easier
to defend than 3 or 4 or 5 doors open. ;)

Nice to hear you run your own business.

Yes, it is the best thing that has ever happened to me except for my wife. I am
truly blessed and am very thankful for it every single day. =)

In my experience, as long as you are living a positive life, and don't get
caught in depression, and caught by unreasonable aesthetic standards, this will
happen in time.

As for children, no such thing for me, since biologically I have an extremely
low chance of having children. On the other hand, my parents got the same
diagnosis from the doctor, and they had me, and the doctor said it was not
possible according to science, so who knows? ;)

Post by Salvador Mirzo
Congratulations! I think you've nailed it.
And it's interesting that I've found you here to be one of the most
upbeat ones around here. And I guess this explains something. You seem
to have a healthy life. Well done!

Well... I can have my days too! ;)

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-24 02:21:11 UTC

Post by D
Amen! Quite an efficiency hack! =D Another "security" hack I have
implemented for my father is that I have forbidden him from getting
government digital ID on his smart phone. This is very funny,
because once scammers called him and told some kind of story that
ended with them asking him to confirm what ever they wanted by
opening the digital ID app (this is how most old people get scammed
where I live) and he told them that he doesn't have it, due to
security reasons...
... the scammers sighed heavily and just hung up. =D

Lol. If that's not a super inconvenience to your father, then I think
it's a great solution. Over here these scams are quite a problem too.

At the moment, everything essential in society has to be able to be
done on paper, so it really is not a problem, and costs about 20-40
minutes per year in extra writing on actual paper.
This scares me though! I fear the day when a smartphone is mandatory
in order to participate in society. This will be a sad day indeed. Add
to that, centralbank managed electronic currencies, that can be clawed
back from you, or where you are blocked from spending them in an
instant, if you go against the government, and we have a very
dystopian situation indeed. =/

I would think that there are so many poor people in the world that
governments could never really ask anyone to always have a phone.
However, I think it's already real that without such tools, the
alternative way will be so painful that a person like you or I will
likely not choose not to use a phone.

I think that's already more or less true in commerce. For instance,
I've been at times confronted with the situation that without using
Whatsapp, I could not get service.

During the pandemics, for example, so many people could not find a way
out of following protocols they did not want to follow and even taking
chemical substances they did not want to take. So many people I know
did not want to do it and did it anyway because it was a hassle
otherwise.

This is good advice! My father and I, and my wife, talk about these
things, but we never formalized it, so that we say that we should talk
to each other in case anyone does get a weird message.
I read that in order to protect against voice cloning, you should
decide on a family password as well. This we also haven't done. But I
am currently working on a small IT-security curriculum for retired
people, and that class will include an example of voice cloning to
show them how it works, and what they can expect.

I haven't done something like that either. But, you know, I'm going to
propose that this week---I think it's a very good idea. I'm meeting
most of my family in two days.

This is true. But this also requires some amount of simplification in
order for it not to become an energy drain. That is why I like my way
of limiting communication to phone and email. It only leaves two doors
open which is easier to defend than 3 or 4 or 5 doors open. ;)

Quite right.

Nice to hear you run your own business.

Yes, it is the best thing that has ever happened to me except for my
wife. I am truly blessed and am very thankful for it every single
day. =)

In my experience, as long as you are living a positive life, and don't
get caught in depression, and caught by unreasonable aesthetic
standards, this will happen in time.

That's *very* good to hear as this is the most important thing to me. I
feel very much protected from all of these malaise (for lack of a better
word).

Post by D
As for children, no such thing for me, since biologically I have an
extremely low chance of having children. On the other hand, my parents
got the same diagnosis from the doctor, and they had me, and the
doctor said it was not possible according to science, so who knows? ;)

I am sorry for hearing the news, but I also feel that we should hope for
the best here. I think nobody should trust doctor's predictions. I
certainly don't know the reasons you might have low chance of having
children and let's remember this is a public forum. The subject does me
remind me of a conversation with epidemiologist Shanna Swan, which I
have been slowly rewatching again---it's a 2h conversation. The entire
conversation is very interesting. In this conversation, we can learn
that male fertility is decreasing by 1% *per year*.

Shanna Swan on male fertility (et cetera)

2025-02-24 10:10:12 UTC

Post by D
At the moment, everything essential in society has to be able to be
done on paper, so it really is not a problem, and costs about 20-40
minutes per year in extra writing on actual paper.
This scares me though! I fear the day when a smartphone is mandatory
in order to participate in society. This will be a sad day indeed. Add
to that, centralbank managed electronic currencies, that can be clawed
back from you, or where you are blocked from spending them in an
instant, if you go against the government, and we have a very
dystopian situation indeed. =/

True!

It seems that god was listening in on this and sent me this article on the same
theme:

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/feb/22/the-tyranny-of-apps-those-without-smartphones-are-unfairly-penalised-say-campaigners

I think they have a good point! One business idea I have is hosting "virtual
phones" in the cloud. So people who do not want a smartphone or who can not
afford one, can rent a small VM in the cloud for 4-8 EUR per month or so, and
use that to run their apps.

The provlem is that not all apps work on a VM, since app developers can do some
kind of magic that blocks them from running on an emulator. The governments
national ID has this, so refuses to run on an emulator.

But I think that the majority of apps might run in that configuration. So if I
need an app, I get start my VM, do what I need to do, and then shut it down.

Post by Salvador Mirzo
I think that's already more or less true in commerce. For instance,
I've been at times confronted with the situation that without using
Whatsapp, I could not get service.
During the pandemics, for example, so many people could not find a way
out of following protocols they did not want to follow and even taking
chemical substances they did not want to take. So many people I know
did not want to do it and did it anyway because it was a hassle
otherwise.

Oh that was a pain. My wife got vaccinated once against her will because of it.
I did not, and I spent many 100s of hours avoiding the unethical restrictions. I
printed my own corona vaccination qr codes for a while, until that didn't work,
I found a medical loop hole to allow me to travel without a mask, towards the
end, I copied other peoples foreign qr codes, which would get me into stores,
despite being unvaccinated, since the system in the stores only checked if the
qr was valid, and nothing else like last country of use, or matching it with id
checks.

I've actually seen the video before, when my wife was the most crazy about our
problem. In my case, it is just a chance mutation that resulted in low quality
sperm. That's all. It is not impossible, but but very, very low probability of
fertilizing eggs.

Salvador Mirzo

2025-02-24 17:04:08 UTC

True!
It seems that god was listening in on this and sent me this article on the same
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/feb/22/the-tyranny-of-apps-those-without-smartphones-are-unfairly-penalised-say-campaigners
I think they have a good point! One business idea I have is hosting "virtual
phones" in the cloud. So people who do not want a smartphone or who can not
afford one, can rent a small VM in the cloud for 4-8 EUR per month or so, and
use that to run their apps.
The provlem is that not all apps work on a VM, since app developers can do some
kind of magic that blocks them from running on an emulator. The governments
national ID has this, so refuses to run on an emulator.
But I think that the majority of apps might run in that configuration. So if I
need an app, I get start my VM, do what I need to do, and then shut it down.

I suppose commerce itself can do that. For instance, someone could walk
in a store with cash and exchange it for a temporary credit card to be
used at the machines, say.

You know what I mean? Government offices can make their systems all
based on phone apps, but then people can walk in some place to use a
phone and get their bureaucracy done. It's your idea up there, but
instead of virtual machines, real phones instead. This will likely be
done, I think.

And I think that's a good solution.

I did the same. (It's amazing the kind of parallels we can find on the
USENET.) I'm happy to hear you managed it too. I did a COVID exam
every week, getting it negative 100% of the times, for an entire
semester and archived my exams with my employeer. I was very happy with
the alternative: I would not have taken any substance at all. I would
have gone to the last resort. I saw no point in taking in an unknown
substance so try to avoid an aggressive /cold/.

I'm not a religious person in the traditional sense of the word, but
turns out I find myself one of the most religious person I've ever met
because patience, perseverance, lack of ambition and a certain mastery
of the art of listening seem pretty religious to me. For instance,
pretty much every religious person I know has at least one tattoo on
their skin. I think that's totally non-religious because a tattoo
effectively destroys (at least a bit) something natural that took a
zillion years to be prepared---to protect the person. I think that if
God speaks to us at all, it is done through the movement of nature.

Lol. I'm saying all of this to say that I would never believe that it's
really impossible for you to have kids. Life is full of adversities.
My idea is that we should work on them 'til the end---unconcerned with
the end result.

End results imply a direction, a strategy.

We try to fix the bug in the software because we want to understand what
caused the bug and how it works. Not because we want the software to be
flawless. So we don't fret if we can't figure it out, but we always
work on it. We work directionless because we don't really mind not
getting to the end result. Anywhere we go is natural enough; it's
divine enough.

2025-02-24 22:28:58 UTC

Post by D
But I think that the majority of apps might run in that configuration. So if I
need an app, I get start my VM, do what I need to do, and then shut it down.

I suppose commerce itself can do that. For instance, someone could walk
in a store with cash and exchange it for a temporary credit card to be
used at the machines, say.
You know what I mean? Government offices can make their systems all
based on phone apps, but then people can walk in some place to use a
phone and get their bureaucracy done. It's your idea up there, but
instead of virtual machines, real phones instead. This will likely be
done, I think.
And I think that's a good solution.

Ah yes... I thought of that as well, but more time consuming and expensive,
since it's 1 human to 1 human. I also thought about a similar concept for people
who want to buy things with cash online. Go to one person with a credit card,
pay him in cash, and he buys you what you need.

I think this is probably illegal in the EU, since there are laws prohibiting
anonymous cash transactions for some amounts. But maybe not.

The phone service, cash service, and perhaps a p.o. box service would all be
part of my empire anonymous Inc! ;)

Jokes aside, sometimes I think such a business might exist best as an
underground business.

It is amazing! It was the 2 worst year of my life, and destryoed my trust in
democracy. I stopped voting after that.

I did one corona test and they almost damaged my nose by showing some stuff up
into my brain. Extremely painful, and I had an irritated nose for several days
after that. That's when I decided, no more tests for me.

But I found a company that did saliva-based tests, and I called a doctor who
watched me perform the saliva based tests on the phone, and eventually she was
so tired of the process that she said, what ever... write your own certificate,
slap my name and signature on it, and just email me if you travel so I know.

So for 1 years, that's what I did. =D

But towards the end they hooked up all testing facilities to some EU
surveillance register, so then it did not work anymore, but it was towards the
end, so I didn't have the energy to get connected to it, but if it would have
continued, I would have started my own corona clinic.