So basically Steam is fine, has been for 20 years, and has competitors waiting to step in and take over the market if Gaben and co ever succumb to the temptation to cash in for a quick boost to corporate profits for a few years at the expense of ruining the business forever after, as impatient shareholders might demand if it were a public company, which it isn't.
It's true though, it could fall apart at any moment. So could anything. I expect piracy will be the big winner when it happens.
Canada’s total trade balance with the world came in at a surplus of $367 million in February compared with a deficit of $595 million in January.
That is the most interesting of these various data points and ought to be the headline, not buried right at the bottom. Stats Canada is as much to blame as the journalists, who have demonstrated conclusively that they can never be expected to understand anything involving numbers.
But anyway it's good to see Canada's balance of trade looking a little more healthy than it did for most of the past 15 years.
Google and Apple have been very successful at convincing everyone, including banks, to see the idea of users having control over their own phone-like computers as dangerous.
Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
It sounds more like "mostly searxng" which is free to use but has a one-time setup cost of a couple of hours if you're going to host your own instance of it and want to fiddle with the settings. There are also public instances you can use but I found that their quality and reliability vary too much.
I've been using it for a few years. Not sure how it compares to kagi but it does way better than google. Never did I suspect that anyone would pay $10/month for access to it.
In response to Joe Biden and the White House enabling ActivityPub federation via Threads, a number of people asked: "Why didn't the White House just self-host their own Mastodon server?"...
The US government has made a habit of providing lemonade to the people of our fair city. Maybe selling it at Walmart is not the best conceivable option for such a large and important undertaking. You'd think the government could get its act together sufficiently to run its own lemonade stand. Maybe the Department of Information could hand out their weekly flyers there too.
Some people don't like going in to Walmart, some resent their every visit being recorded on the store surveillance cameras, and some people are banned from Walmart. So it might be better, democratically speaking, for the government to run its own lemonade stand.
Technical and Organizational Hurdles
Given the massive complexity and funding challenges of running a lemonade stand, we can assume that it would take several years to set up and that it would cost of several billion dollars. There may be requirements for new banking regulations, new government departments, NASA will probably want to get involved, and there will need to be user training and onboarding programs to make sure everyone is well prepared for serving and receiving lemonade.
Policy
Without the convenience of relying on Walmart to provide its reassuringly friendly and reliable security enforcement, we'll need new procedures to deal with the kinds of hate speech, CSAM, terrorism, sedition, treason, weapons smuggling, drug trafficking, and moral hazard that are very likely to occur at any lemonade stand.
It will take a large team of lawyers to come up with reasonable ways to run a lemonade stand without violating the 8th amendment.
It's Still Worth Trying
Sure is a lot of work, so we'd better get started.
Too many people are acting as if this type of attack is somehow peculiar to open source projects. Very similar methods can be — and by now probably have been — used against closed-source non-free software. The level of defence against it probably varies even more in the rest of the software world, outside that part of it which is free software. How many of the vulnerabilities that have been discovered in Cisco routers were deliberately planted by outside adversaries? I don't suppose there's any way to know for sure. The main thing the open source nature of the project did here was make it easier to detect and impossible to cover up afterwards.
Do you think that the fediverse has something to gain with the enshitfication of discord? Are there voice chat programs in the fediverse that can benefit from it?
Looks like a contender for the obfuscated sh script contest. I have a feeling that next time I see something I don't understand in a Makefile I'll be looking at it more closely than I would've last week.
When I post photos and discussion of them, I often get suggestions that I should be on some other instance. I don't understand this. The big strength of a federated network, as I understand it, that it doesn't really matter that much what instance I'm on - people from anywhere can follow me.
My current instance (which I support) doesn't seem to mind me posting photos, and most of my followers are on non-photo-centric instances. What would be the point of moving?
Believing that it "doesn't really matter" which instance you're on does seem likely to be the point of disagreement you'll have with some people. It really depends on the instance. Some do have strong local communities, organized around one thing or another. People who are part of one might be thinking you'd enjoy the same.
There's room for many more. As the federate.social about page says — "Experiment. We've been conditioned to accept whatever big platforms deign is in their best interest. We need a place to design other ways of imagining how to engage together online."
I enjoy the feeling that there are a wide variety of experiments going on in various parts of the vast new spaces that federation has opened up, and that probably neither of us know anything about most of them.
Hey, I've been hearing a LOT about the xz backdoor. Crazy story, but rather than reading 10 different articles about it from 3 days ago when the story was quite new, does anybody know a high quality write-up that has all the juicy details and facts? I really like in-depth guides that cover every aspect of the story....
I'm watching some folks reverse engineer the xz backdoor, sharing some preliminary analysis with permission. The hooked RSA_public_decrypt verifies a signature on the server's host key by a fixed Ed448 key, and then passes a payload to system(). It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable.
All the technical details that are widely known (and some that aren't yet) seem to be in that thread, including the original report from Andres Freund. For rumours about who might be behind it and high-level speculation about what it all means, you'd have to look elsewhere.
JK Rowling has challenged Scotland's new hate crime law in a series of social media posts - inviting police to arrest her if they believe she has committed an offence....
I don't know whether their law against "stirring up hatred" is any good or not, but either way it takes a very special kind of person to respond to it by playing the game of stirring up as much hatred as possible without getting arrested.
I don't know about "credit" but Canada does get lots of international recognition for its fossil fuels exports. If we replace the carbon tax with new carbon subsidies I imagine we can garner even more such attention pretty quickly.
Calling 1048576 bytes an "American megabyte" might be technically wrong, but it's still slightly less goofy-looking than the more conventional "MiB" notation. I wish you good luck in making it the new standard.
The best sandwich in the world was the ham and cheese one I had yesterday. It was a couple days old, but I put it in the toaster oven for a few minutes, and since it was after all the best sandwich in the world, it was still pretty good. Sorry world, I ate it.
The surprise is that apparently 28 percent of "experienced programmers" don't have an ad blocker. I'm not sure how they got the data, but I wonder if their methods are up to the task of sorting out any possible inverse correlation between blocking ads and being willing to respond to polls.
Oh, I guess that really was the whole thing then. I'm sympathetic to the premise that BC might be doing better than Ontario recently in housing policy, but it's unclear how much cherry-picking was involved in finding that one data point. Considering how far prices had risen out West it's going take more than that to convince me that they're "beating it back."
Yeah that was sort of my point. To say anything meaningful about it you have to look at the longer-term context, not just the latest single housing starts number.
So long as people who care about where their instance is hosted and don't like the big hosting providers can easily find services hosted elsewhere, I don't think it matters too much. But perhaps you can go ahead and start working on plans to some day decentralize web hosting in general and I'm sure lots of people will join in once the worst of the problems at the application layer are solved.
Why'd mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed, and friends disappear in the last frame? They'll remain distinguishable even after fedi takes over the universe. It's the others that will be obsolete.
I also am no graphic designer, but: maybe just remove those central lines if you scale it down so much that they're a problem. It'll still be recognizable and true to the spirit of the thing.
In the months since I deleted my Reddit accounts and joined Lemmy, the lack of user base growth has made it clear that we need some users to stay on Reddit as a means of shepherding more users over on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, Reddit simply got what it wanted: less users who make a fuss about how it manages its platform...
My last post there (pointing the way to lemmy) still stands, un-shadowbanned and slightly upvoted since last I saw it. But it's marked NSFW, as I guess the whole sub was set to at the time, which may be why it doesn't show up in search.
It's possible that Meta/Threads will interoperate with the Fediverse to expand people's access to each other in purely cooperative ways, for everyone's benefit.
But history tells us that it's vastly, vastly, vastly more likely that the Meta will, borg-like, follow Big Tech's normal pattern of "embrace, extend, extinguish" -- because there's no history of giant platforms doing anything else.
So we all need to prepare, right now, for what we do about it -- and not wait until it happens.
The other possibility is that Threads' attempt to integrate with fedi will continue to be the complete failure that it has been so far, and will be of no interest to most people on either side of the divide.
But you might want to be prepared to move to a different instance just in case.
If you have questions about how it all works then https://joinfediverse.wiki is not a bad place to start. But otherwise just look around, relax, and maybe follow a few people to get a feel for the place before you go spending billions of dollars reinventing anything. I'm sure you'll get the hang of it with a little practice.
Because they're not answering my support queries, and I've been having connectivity issues since the last two versions or so. Most of the time they've been pretty good, but if their desktop client can't sync to their servers it's of no use to me. Is anyone else having this problem?...
"Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre will introduce a non-confidence motion Wednesday designed to topple the government and trigger a federal election — a parliamentary manoeuvre that's likely to fail."
Yes, that's a perfectly good explanation for why they need to block wikipedia, deviantart, archiveofourown, github, bandcamp, lemmy.ml, and mastodon.social: they're all just fronts in the Capitalist Information War
Not only did I not stick to ML orthodoxy while I was there (I'm more of a peacenik anarchist at heart), I wrote some fairly rude things when I found out how insane some of the tankies on lemmy can be. I hadn't expected such people to exist in reality, I had thought it was just a caricature invented by enemies of communism or something. Nonetheless they did not ban me or complain at all when I said that sort of thing.
Eventually I left because their list of blocked instances got too long for my taste.
Much as I enjoy arguments with strangers on the Internet, you've reminded me of my resolution to avoid the most silly ones. If you think I'm a sinophobe your judgement is very poor.
Ah well, sorry about that; I felt I didn't express myself well in that last one but I stand by the part where I don't think we disagree on anything too substantial basically. Thanks for the reply, see you around.
5 reasons why desktop Linux is finally growing in popularity ( www.zdnet.com )
Steam is a ticking time bomb ( www.spacebar.news )
Statistics Canada says trade surplus up in February as gold exports hit record high ( www.thestar.com )
Why don't banks like root on Android? ( lemmy.world )
Could the US Government Self-Host a Fediverse Server? ( wedistribute.org )
In response to Joe Biden and the White House enabling ActivityPub federation via Threads, a number of people asked: "Why didn't the White House just self-host their own Mastodon server?"...
Some thoughts on the xz backdoor
While the exact details of this vulnerability are still investigated...
Trudeau unveils $6B housing fund — with strings attached ( www.nelsonstar.com )
Non-Paywall Article
Your VPN provider won't go to jail for you for 5 dollars ( www.ivpn.net )
It is something to always take into consideration and not forget.
President Biden is now posting into the fediverse ( www.theverge.com )
With discord planning to show ads, how can the fediverse/lemmy benefit from another proprietary program making itself worse? (Like it was with reddit)
Do you think that the fediverse has something to gain with the enshitfication of discord? Are there voice chat programs in the fediverse that can benefit from it?
research!rsc: The xz attack shell script ( research.swtch.com )
https://hachyderm.io/@rsc/112200603337903320
Best article about XZ backdoor?
Hey, I've been hearing a LOT about the xz backdoor. Crazy story, but rather than reading 10 different articles about it from 3 days ago when the story was quite new, does anybody know a high quality write-up that has all the juicy details and facts? I really like in-depth guides that cover every aspect of the story....
JK Rowling in ‘arrest me’ challenge over Scottish hate crime law ( www.bbc.com )
JK Rowling has challenged Scotland's new hate crime law in a series of social media posts - inviting police to arrest her if they believe she has committed an offence....
Higgs champions NB shale gas development as a better climate plan than carbon pricing ( www.ctvnews.ca )
Is there any way to have SHIFT + CTRL + - create an em dash in Pop_OS? ( kbin.social )
Is there any way to have SHIFT + CTRL + - create an em dash in Pop_OS?...
"Men are bad at picking up on women's hints." What are your actual thoughts on this sentiment?
Either through memes or comments I keep seeing this sentiment pop-up from time to time. And I'm wondering what your (yes, you) consensus is on it....
oss-security - backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh server compromise ( openwall.com )
The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored.
backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh server compromise ( www.openwall.com )
YouTube is severely rate limiting Invidious instances
Today most Invidious instances are experiencing very harsh ip address rate limiting, it is becoming very very hard to watch yt videos through
KB, MB, GB, and TB are all part of the metric system. What empirical measurements should we Free™️ Americans use for computer memory?
Found this out in the wilds of Nova Scotia. Looked like Debian ( lemmy.world )
What's the best sandwich in the world?
According to you. GO!
Majority of Americans now use ad blockers ( www.theregister.com )
Asking a Linux user to recommend a printer ( tesseract.dubvee.org )
BTW, I've had my Brother laser MFP for 11 years and still on the original toner.
I often get bored of the Fediverse, but I'm doing my best to stay here.
I've been off and on with the Fediverse for sometime now. It's a relatively friendly place full of fellow nerds, but with a few caveats.......
SDL Developers Weigh Reverting Wayland Over X11 For SDL 3.0 ( www.phoronix.com )
North Korea censors Alan Titchmarsh's trousers ( news.sky.com )
There’s one government in Canada that’s actually beating back the housing crisis, and it’s not Justin Trudeau’s Liberals or Doug Ford’s Conservatives ( www.thestar.com )
Non-Paywall Article
Different digital world views ( lemmy.world )
Provider-Exclusive: “There is only the app of my provider.”...
Does Reddit shadowban mentions of Lemmy?
In the months since I deleted my Reddit accounts and joined Lemmy, the lack of user base growth has made it clear that we need some users to stay on Reddit as a means of shepherding more users over on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, Reddit simply got what it wanted: less users who make a fuss about how it manages its platform...
'Mass surveillance' fears over law change plans ( www.bbc.co.uk )
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13408103
How to follow newspapers on mastodon without being spammed?
Hi,...
Should I *GASP* create a reddit account so I can get support from Tuta(nota)?
Because they're not answering my support queries, and I've been having connectivity issues since the last two versions or so. Most of the time they've been pretty good, but if their desktop client can't sync to their servers it's of no use to me. Is anyone else having this problem?...
Poilievre wants to topple the Liberal government with a non-confidence motion on the carbon tax ( www.cbc.ca )
"Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre will introduce a non-confidence motion Wednesday designed to topple the government and trigger a federal election — a parliamentary manoeuvre that's likely to fail."
Lemmy.ml is supposedly blocked in China ( emacs.ch )
Funny if true.
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