cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 61 Posts
  • 324 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: January 17th, 2022
  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•Open source maintenance feeEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    Fuck this project, but… their source code can be free and open source even if they distribute binaries which aren’t. (Which they can do if they own the copyright, and/or if it is under a permissive non-copyleft FOSS license.)

    And if the source code is actually FOSS, and many people actually want to use it, someone else will distribute FOSS binaries without this stupid EULA. So, this BS is still much better than a non-FOSS license like FUTO’s.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•Open source maintenance feeEnglish
    61·
    6 hours ago

    I immediately knew this was going to be from Microsoft users, and yeah… of course, it is.

    Binaries distributed under this EULA do not meet the free software definition or open source definition.

    However, unlike most attempts to dilute the concept of open source, since the EULA is explicitly scoped to binaries and says it is meant to be applied to projects with source code that is released under an OSI-approved license, I think the source code of projects using this do still meet the open source definition (as long as the code is actually under such a license). Anyone/everyone should still be free to fork any project using this, and to distribute free binaries which are not under this EULA.

    This EULA obviously cannot be applied to projects using a copyleft license, unless all contributors to it have dual-licensed their contributions to allow (at least) the entity that is distributing non-free binaries under this EULA to do so.

    I think it is extremely short-sighted to tell non-paying “consumers” of an open source project that their bug reports are not welcome. People who pay for support obviously get to heavily influence which bugs get priority, but to tell non-paying users that they shouldn’t even report bugs is implicitly communicating that 2nd and 3rd party collaboration on fixing bugs is not expected or desired.

    A lot of Microsoft-oriented developers still don’t understand the free software movement, and have been trying to twist it into something they can comprehend since it started four decades ago. This is the latest iteration of that; at least this time they aren’t suggesting that people license their source code under non-free licenses.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoPolitical Memes@lemmy.world•Brain DrainEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    1525 the economic powers of the world were India and china https://www.businessinsider.com/mckinsey-worlds-economic-center-of-gravity-2012-6

    that is a fascinating map; i noticed that despite making projections about 2025 the date of that post is actually 2012; Business Insider attributes it to McKinsey, but via ZeroHedge (who charges for access to their archives).

    I wanted more context so I spent a few minutes searching; in case anyone else is curious it comes from a report called “Urban world: Cities and the rise of the consuming class” by McKinsey Global Institute.

    Here is their summary of it, and here is the 92 page PDF of the full report.

    here is MGI's 'economic center of gravity' methodology

    The center of gravity analysis is based on country-level historical estimates from Angus Maddison for the period AD 1 until 2007, and country-level growth rates from Cityscope 2.0 until 2025. We then allocated each country’s GDP value to the approximate center of landmass of the respective country. The same center of each country was used throughout the entire time frame. To calculate the global center of gravity, landmass radian coordinates were transformed into Cartesian coordinates with a tool from the UK Ordnance Survey that uses ED50/ UTM data and projection (see www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/gps). We then transformed these coordinates into respective momentums and averaged these to a true economic center of gravity for each year, located within the sphere of the earth. To illustrate the shift of gravity, we lengthened the vectors from the center of the earth to the center of gravity so that they lie on the earth’s surface. Although the concept of “surfacing” might create problems for interpreting data, both the resulting direction and the magnitude of the surfaced shifts were directionally consistent with the internal shifts, too. The four periods with the fastest shift, 2000–10, 1940–50, and 2010–25, maintain the same rank order, while the 1500–1820 period ranks 11th on surface but eighth on the “true” center of gravity.

    here is what they say about ~500 years ago

    Until 1500, Asia was the center of gravity of the world economy, accounting for roughly two-thirds of global GDP. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, urbanization and industrialization vaulted Europe and the United States to prominence. We are now observing a decisive shift in the balance back toward Asia—at a speed and on a scale never before witnessed. China’s economic transformation resulting from urbanization and industrialization is happening at 100 times the scale of the first country in the world to urbanize—the United Kingdom—and at ten times the speed (Exhibit E2).

    but wait, where did they get that GDP data from?

    They actually cite Angus Maddison’s Monitoring the World Economy 1820–1992 which doesn’t sound like something that goes to AD 1. It looks like Maddison also published The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (currently only a limited preview on archive.org) in 2001, which this reproduces Appendix B of - which seems like probably their source:

    World GDP, 20 Countries and Regional Totals, 1-2001 AD

    screenshot of "Table 8b. World GDP, 20 Countries and Regional Totals, 1-2001 AD" from "HS–8: The World Economy, 1–2001 AD"

    I’m not sure how Geary–Khamis dollars (“a hypothetical unit of currency that has the same purchasing power parity that the U.S. dollar had in the United States at a given point in time”) are supposed to work for time periods prior to the existence of the United States, but i think I’ve spent enough time on this rabbit hole for now :)

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Is Tuta a good alternative to gmail?English
    7·
    3 days ago

    StartPage/StartMail is owned by an adtech company who’s website boasts that they “develop & grow our suite of privacy-focused products, and deliver high-intent customers to our advertising partners” 🤔

    They have a whitepaper which actually does a good job explaining how end-to-end encryption in a web browser (as Tuta, Protonmail, and others do) can be circumvented by a malicious server:

    The malleability of the JavaScript runtime environment means that auditing the future security of a piece of JavaScript code is impossible: The server providing the JavaScript could easily place a backdoor in the code, or the code could be modified at runtime through another script. This requires users to place the same measure of trust in the server providing the JavaScript as they would need to do with server-side handling of cryptography.

    However (i am not making this up!) they hilariously use this analysis to justify having implemented server-side OpenPGP instead 🤡

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•the perfect browserEnglish
    12·
    7 days ago

    The three currently-maintained engines which (at their feature intersection) effectively define what “the web” is today are Mozilla’s Gecko, Apple’s WebKit, and Google’s Blink.

    The latter two are both descended from KHTML, which came from the Konquerer browser which was first released as part of KDE 2.0 in 2000, and thus both are LGPL licensed.

    After having their own proprietary engine for over two decades, Microsoft stopped developing it and switched to Google’s fork of Apple’s fork of KDE’s free software web engine.

    Probably Windows will replace its kernel with Linux eventually too, for better or worse :)

    How else are Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi and co getting away with building proprietary layers on top of a copyleft dependency?

    They’re allowed to because the LGPL (unlike the normal GPL) is a weak copyleft license.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Firefox alternatives?English
    101·
    17 days ago

    https://digdeeper.club/articles/browsers.xhtml has a somewhat comprehensive analysis of a dozen of the browsers you might consider, illuminating depressing (and sometimes surprising) privacy problems with literally all of them.

    In the end it absurdly recommends something which forked from Firefox a very long time ago, which is obviously not a reasonable choice from a security standpoint. I don’t have a good recommendation, but I definitely don’t agree with that article’s conclusion: privacy features are pointless if your browser is trivially vulnerable to exploits for a plethora of old bugs, which will inevitably be the case for a volunteer-run project that diverged from Firefox a long time ago and thus cannot benefit from Mozilla’s security fixes in each new release.

    However, despite its ridiculous conclusion, that page’s analysis could still be helpful when you’re deciding which of the terrible options to pick.

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