Notices by Federated Republic of Sean (freakazoid@retro.social), page 2

Battlestar Galactica is retrocomputing fiction. Alien supervirus wipes out all modern tech. Really ingenius justification for the retro/naval aesthetic.

Also plausible minus the alien part. Cyber-warriors get enough ahead of defensive tech that we just need to unplug it and start over. Not one super-virus but a constant barrage of them.

I realized that having converted my machines over to ZFS and having regular snapshots and backups (which are now ludicrously easy) has changed how I think about storage. I no longer think of my laptop's storage as temporary; it's just a local replica of a few datasets that also acts as a writeback cache.

The biggest risk to any open source project is not getting enough users to develop a sustainable community. If the project allows secondary objectives to keep users away and compromise its primary mission, it's far more likely it will be unable to reach critical mass.

We have built a globe-spanning brain capable of transmitting the knowledge of the world's best thinkers and institutions to the whole human population, but 99.9% of what goes across it is garbage.

@vertigo @daremo Wow! I had no idda. "The assembler was fully integrated into the BASIC interpreter and shared variables with it, which could be included between the [ and ] characters, saved via *SAVE and *LOAD, and called via the CALL or USR commands. This allowed developers to write not just assembly language code, but also BASIC code to emit assembly language, making it possible to use code-generation techniques and even write simple compilers in BASIC.'

If you're using a VPN, make sure they don't have a presence in Russia. NordVPN and ExpressVPN are on the list. PIA appears not to be. TorGuard pulled out of Russia when they got the order.

https://torrentfreak.com/russia-orders-major-vpn-providers-to-block-banned-sites-or-face-blocking-themselves-190328/

As far as I'm concerned, people who promote anti-vax stances are murderers. The human race has passed the point of development where ignorance is excusable.

The Google Chrome icon is now apparently the symbol for the World Wide Web.

Welcome back to 1998.

If you think you need a CAPTCHA, there's a 90% chance you don't.

If you do need a CAPTCHA, there's a 90% chance that whatever you're doing is making the world a worse place.

Google Drawings can import from no other tool, and it can't export any editable format (unless you consider SVG editable). Compare to Dia, which can import and export dozens of editable vector formats.

Google is recreating the bad old days of Microsoft Office where everyone was emailing around files that you couldn't read or edit unless you also had a copy of the same software.

@mike Which is weird since you can find most podcasts by typing "<title> podcast" into your favorite search engine.

All other decentralized things would benefit greatly from some kind of searchable recommendation sharing thingy ala del.icio.us.

Storage has been getting cheaper at a much faster rate than bandwidth, which makes now a better time than ever to self-host.

Actually, it makes now a better time than ever for *sneakernet*. Which has the added bonus that, unlike self-hosting, it's pretty intuitive for most people.

Are there good (as in easy to use for the average no-techie) apps for cataloging external storage?

@jjg It might be useful to at least start with an inventory if you don't already have one. Pick some things that are "close enough" to shippable state and just ship them, and pick a couple of other things to put on indefinite hold?

Starting over from scratch seems like a sure way to get back into the same position.

@natecull The problem was that literally the only reason they were freaking out was because it was the government talking about doing it. They never had any problem with private industry doing it for private ends.

@jjg I'm a big fan of Mailman, though it's more of an email discussion list handler than a newsletter engine. For newsletters, there's always /etc/aliases.

Just requiring properly configured DNS blocks a lot of spam, not because spammers can't be bothered to set up DNS, but because a lot of spam is sent through compromised hosts, which aren't likely to have DNS set up.

DRM on USB-C is just an extension of attempts to change the business model of consumer electronics from ownership to rental. Planned obsolescence and locked down operating systems wasn't enough. Now they want to lock down the accessory ecosystem as well. And it all comes straight out of the consumer's pocket, because more power for vendors means less power for you.

I almost want to create a YouTube account just so I can thumbs-down videos that show up in search results for things that are easily described with text. Maybe all of us should do that.

@lapingvino @micahflee @tuxicoman Signal uses Curve25519, which was developed by Dan Bernstein, who does not work for the US government.

The notion that home-grown crypto is going to be safer than widely analyzed crypto from well-known cryptographers is utter nonsense.

@dajbelshaw They're flailing around and trying to maintain growth after G+ failed and Apple started turning on tracking protection by default, while having completely lost the ability to innovate (to the extent that Google has ever really had it). The expiration of the consent decree preventing them from mixing data from DoubleClick with data from their other properties gives them a little bit of wiggle room but not enough IMO.