Notices by Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club), page 5
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Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Nov-2018 17:23:16 EST 
Hattie Cat
@bob @publicvoit Not just newspapers. I finally abandoned a mag I'd subscribed to for decades when I realized it was just publishing press releases or PR for companies which advertised with it. Him that pays the piper calls the tune.
It's gotten worse, though, with "cash for coverage" - articles that appear to be editorial content but are actually shill pieces. The Evening Standard is going for this in a big way. Saudis now a significant controlling stake in the Independent. etc. -
Free Software Foundation (fsf@status.fsf.org)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Nov-2018 13:12:38 EST 
Free Software Foundation
Apple's "secure boot" in the 2018 macbook pro is more aptly called restricted boot. It prevents GNU/Linux from accessing the laptop's ssd drive. We've been warning about these kinds of restrictions since Microsoft
initially adopted them: https://u.fsf.org/2po -
Oneesan succubus (lain@pleroma.soykaf.com)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Nov-2018 15:28:46 EST 
Oneesan succubus
@shpuld When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”
These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users' sake, but for society as a whole because they promote social solidarity—that is, sharing and cooperation. They become even more important as our culture and life activities are increasingly digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images, and words, free software becomes increasingly essential for freedom in general.
Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software; the public schools of some regions of India and Spain now teach all students to use the free GNU/Linux operating system. Most of these users, however, have never heard of the ethical reasons for which we developed this system and built the free software community, because nowadays this system and community are more often spoken of as “open source”, attributing them to a different philosophy in which these freedoms are hardly mentioned.
The free software movement has campaigned for computer users' freedom since 1983. In 1984 we launched the development of the free operating system GNU, so that we could avoid the nonfree operating systems that deny freedom to their users. During the 1980s, we developed most of the essential components of the system and designed the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) to release them under—a license designed specifically to protect freedom for all users of a program.
Not all of the users and developers of free software agreed with the goals of the free software movement. In 1998, a part of the free software community splintered off and began campaigning in the name of “open source.” The term was originally proposed to avoid a possible misunderstanding of the term “free software,” but it soon became associated with philosophical views quite different from those of the free software movement.
Some of the supporters of open source considered the term a “marketing campaign for free software,” which would appeal to business executives by highlighting the software's practical benefits, while not raising issues of right and wrong that they might not like to hear. Other supporters flatly rejected the free software movement's ethical and social values. Whichever their views, when campaigning for open source, they neither cited nor advocated those values. The term “open source” quickly became associated with ideas and arguments based only on practical values, such as making or having powerful, reliable software. Most of the supporters of open source have come to it since then, and they make the same association.
The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand. Most discussion of “open source” pays no attention to right and wrong, only to popularity and success; here's a typical example.
For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software.
“Free software.” “Open source.” If it's the same software (or nearly so), does it matter which name you use? Yes, because different words convey different ideas. While a free program by any other name would give you the same freedom today, establishing freedom in a lasting way depends above all on teaching people to value freedom. If you want to help do this, it is essential to speak of “free software.”
We in the free software movement don't think of the open source camp as an enemy; the enemy is proprietary (nonfree) software. But we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being mislabeled as open source supporters. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 11-Nov-2018 17:24:44 EST
Hattie Cat
@indi My concern is where performance concerns override concerns about correct program behavior (or more accurately, preventing incorrect behavior), even when they're not really concerns at all practically speaking. In this era where the hardware is more than capable of giving required performance for most people's needs.
Wouldn't surprise you to learn that I'm an advocate of microkernels - taking the performance hit for improved security and robustness over a monolithic kernel. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 11-Nov-2018 17:15:54 EST
Hattie Cat
@indi Yes, I heard about the memory tagging extensions, and they sound encouraging.
I suspect we have different ideas about what is acceptable performance but obviously it depends on the application domain (or else a lot of software wouldn't be written in slow interpreted or bytecode interpreted languages). Also, about the extent of sanity checking. Out of curiosity, what industry do you write software for? -
Amolith (amolith@fosstodon.org)'s status on Saturday, 10-Nov-2018 02:09:24 EST 
Amolith
I'm doing a little poll here to prove a point to a friend.
How many of you current #Android users use #FDroid? If you're not on Android any more, did you use F-Droid when you were?
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Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 11-Nov-2018 08:10:03 EST
Hattie Cat
@amolith Increment your count by 1 -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 11-Nov-2018 07:55:49 EST
Hattie Cat
I was referring to sanity checks selected at compile time that by the program's own documentation add only a small runtime overhead. In other words, negligible. It depends on the sanity check, of course - I'm not saying leave _all_ debugging code in.
(Anecdote - I've recently started using pycontracts and leaving the checks enabled. In one case I found that with checks in a heavily executed inner loop were causing significant slowdown, so once I'd debugged that bit, I disabled checking on the inner loop and checked the final result.)
Software is developed to a given quality level. The higher the level of quality or assurance demanded, the greater the effort and cost. Commercial development doesn't typically seek to remove all software defects - one typically sets a target number of bugs depending on the quality level required and the size of the program. Given that it is it's unrealistic to remove all defects without high cost and a real environment might subject a program to input it never received in test (especially when dealing with ratty data and poorly specified interfaces with third-party components), it doesn't seem sensible to me remove some "sanity checks" from production code, particularly when the runtime overhead is acceptable. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Sunday, 11-Nov-2018 07:54:49 EST
Hattie Cat
Hattie Cat deleted notice {{tag:shitposter.club,2018-11-11:noticeId=12723566:objectType=comment}}. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 10-Nov-2018 21:05:04 EST
Hattie Cat
Looking at compile options for various things. Stuff like "sanity check - detect buffer overflows. Used for debugging. Slight overhead. Disable for production". IMO it's "disable for production" idiocy despite the minuscule perf. penalty that's responsible for a lot of breakage.
Brings to mind again C.A.R. Hoare's remarks about having lifejackets on in harbor but removing them on the open sea. Real world systems can have data that doesn't conform to the programmer's assumptions and break things, as shown by fuzzing. Leave the sanity checks in FFS. A little humility on the part of some programmers also wouldn't go amiss. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Saturday, 10-Nov-2018 06:49:54 EST
Hattie Cat
Trying to sort out a stripped-down, more secure kernel and system to boot on an RPi. Can get a custom kernel to boot, now to try to make a minimal root partition to which I can add just the stuff I need for whatever purpose. I can understand freedesktop.org wanting to make things more usable for desktops but for servers it just seems like adding needless complexity - NetworkManager, dbus, udev, systemd. Perhaps unfair and unwarranted, but I tend to regard anything produced by them or Red Hat's "engineering" as suspect... -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Thursday, 08-Nov-2018 17:32:01 EST
Hattie Cat
@bob @eladhen Sounds a bit like the interface to the Hagunemnon space ship in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Black buttons labelled in black on a black background. If pressed, a small black light lights up black to let you know you've done it. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Thursday, 08-Nov-2018 17:25:09 EST
Hattie Cat
@bob @mrguilt This may be relevant https://shitposter.club/url/2624532 -
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅ (bob@soc.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 08-Nov-2018 13:23:32 EST 
Bob Mottram 🔧 ☕ ✅
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNCAcfna2W4
I think it's worth being careful about this kind of stuff and especially appearing too certain about knowing exactly what the future holds.
The biased/fake news line can easily be used by reactionaries to then go on a purge against anything which is outside of a narrow window of normativity.
Any of us old enough know that all news is biased and that it's really just a question of being what was once known as "media savvy". You may notice that right wingers are quick to write off things like academic media studies precisely for this reason, because critical analysis of stories works against their interests. -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Nov-2018 17:37:07 EST
Hattie Cat
Ruh roh - major vulnerability in use of SMT ("hyperthreads") with Intel CPUs, and suspected AMD may be vulnerable too. (Why we should never allow a monoculture to develop.) OpenBSD set to disable HT in upcoming releases. Better to disable HT in the BIOS. https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-cpus-impacted-by-new-portsmash-side-channel-vulnerability/ -
Hattie Cat (hattiecat@shitposter.club)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Nov-2018 17:16:39 EST
Hattie Cat
@bob @yukiame Not to emulate but I admire and respect RMS and Theo de Raat.
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