We can make some headway by pushing govs to adopt OSS. The Italians have a law “public money → public code”. The whole public sector including public schools should be switching to open source. And part of that would compel contributions of some form. Whether it’s code contributions or payment for support. People should be demanding that their tax revenue is not wasted on software that does not enrich the commons. With profit-driven corporations it’s always a game where a number of variables have to be just right for the company. But the public sector is very much overlooked.

I recently looked at a Danish university and was disgusted with what I saw. They used MS Office and Google docs, and students were pushed to use those tools. They used Matlab not GNU Octave, because that’s what they saw industry using. Schools should be leading industry, not following it.

I’ve not been tracking them because I tend to only collect dirt on the greatest of evils. What comes to mind:

• default search engine: Google (this is what that Google money is for officially)
• Mozilla gave the boot to a lot of plugins and imposed some kind of control-freakish trust mechanism. Plugins/extensions were evicted from the plugin repository and they made it hard for plugin creators to distribute their plugins. I lost several very useful plugins when Mozilla took this controlling protectionist stance.
• MAFF ditched. Mozilla abandoned a good format for archiving websites. I had a lot of content saved in *.maff files which Mozilla dropped direct support for and at the same time they blocked MAFF plugins.
• Without Firefox, Google would be easily targeted with anti-trust actions. Google props up Mozilla just enough to be able to claim they have “competition”. Google can be most dominant when it has a crippled competitor under its influence.
• Google killed the free world JPEG XL format. When a browser as dominant as Chrome withholds support JPEG XL, there is then no reason for web devs to use that format. Google did this because JPEG XL competes with a proprietary Google format. Firefox does not support it out of the box either, likely because of Google’s influence. Firefox users can enable it by going through some config hoops, so if Chrome alone did not kill it, that certainly would.

I vaguely recall a slew of Mozilla actions that were anti-thetical to privacy and user interests which caused me to move them from “a decent browser” to a “lesser of evils”. Hopefully others have better records of Mozilla’s history.

update May 2024

• Mozilla uses data abuser Cloudflare for their exclusive access-restricted blog
• Mozilla has decided to add more tracking to their browser to collect people’s search activity.

This is why I’m so disgusted every time someone says “republicans and democrats are basically the same”, which I most often hear from Europeans.

from the article:

Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display Your non-personal data for its business purposes.

Holy shit. I wonder if HP is feeding customers’ data to an #AI machine to exploit in some way. It doesn’t even seem to be limited to what people print. HP’s software package is probably not just a printer driver. But even if it is, a driver runs in the kernel space, so IIUC there’s no limit to what data it can mine.

That’s a great move. Instead of trying to regulate the baddies just offer a more honest, transparent consumer-respecting option from a public service that respects people’s privacy (CFPB does not block Tor, unlike #CreditKarma and #LendingTree).

I would love it even more if they would also enable people to deselect banks they want to avoid, such as the shit banks on this list:

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/usa_banks.md

Glad to see CFPB might be growing their balls back after Trump neutered them. When Trump was in power the CFPB took no action on complaints of unlawful conduct and seemed quite inactive.. as if to just be managing their own office (like the EPA).

I don’t want to be an enabler of the drivel, so without posting the full URL to that article that’s reachable in the open free world, I will just say that medium.com links should never be publicly shared outside of Cloudflare’s walled garden. I realise aussie.zone is also in Cloudflare’s walled garden, but please be aware that it’s federated and reaches audiences who are excluded by Cloudflare.

The medium.com portion of the URL should be replaced by scribe.rip to make a medium article reachable to everyone. Though I must say this particular article doesn’t need any more reach than it has.

Anyone who just wants the answer: see @souperk@reddthat.com’s comment in this thread.

Hence why we need a public option.

You’re referring to anonymity, not privacy.

Anonymity is part of privacy; not a dichotomy.

Indeed as someone who straddles two places of living I can attest to that. When living in a relatively flat city I’m cycling everywhere (on e-bike until it was stolen, then on cheap muscle bike thereafter). My other place of living is extremely hilly. Used a muscle bike and quickly said “fuck this, I’m done”. Just like the article said about hills on the trails. And since I cannot justify the cost of an e-bike in that particular place/situation, I do not cycle at all when living there. But if an e-bike had been cost effective I would be getting more exercise in that area.

First of all Cloudflare does not disclose to excluded communities why they are excluded. This non-transparency keeps the marginalized in the dark about both the technical criteria for exclusion and also the business reason for exclusion.

Why I personally have been excluded is irrelevant trivia. The full extent of CF’s exclusion is unknown but it’s evident that at a minimum these groups of people are excluded:

• public libraries
• Tor users
• VPN users
• CGNAT users (often poor people in impoverished regions whose ISPs have fewer IPv4 addresses to allocate than the number of users)
• people who use scripts to access web resources (and interactive users who merely appear to be bots by using non-graphical FOSS tools, blind people IIRC as they are not loading images)
• all people with a moral objection to exposing ~20—30% of their web traffic (metadata & payloads both) to one single centralized tech giant in a country without privacy safeguards.

I personally experience exclusion by all of the above except CGNAT.

Sure, but then republicans are well into the territory of “I don’t like the facts”. They need to be told to work on trying to un-sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (from 1948?) before they can make what they consider “progress” in their minds.

from the article:

"I never thought we would be going down the socialist road," Gillette told BI. "I spent 35 years in the Army fighting communism, fighting terrorism. Now we're slipping. The left is pushing us toward the socialist program."

LOL.. I read that as: “help! We’re slipping past the 1940s because of the commies and socialists!”

Sign-up still requires a phone number… -.-"

Thanks for the warning -- that was my first question. It is my top reason (among many other reasons) for avoiding Signal.

Checkout Matrix/Element or Session,

All 3 of the sites you linked are Cloudflare sites (thus antithetical to privacy). Yes, I know you can use some of that tech without touching CF, but when they run CF websites it reveals hypocrisy & not understanding the goals of their audience.

Think about it from a manager’s position. If they pay something for nothing extra (donate), they won’t last long at the company. They are attracted to 2 benefits:

• shedding liability for problems by outsourcing
• special pampered treatment (again via outsourcing)

Corps love commercial software because managers whose neck is on the line can point the finger away from themselves if something goes wrong with it (or so they think… which is what matters in the end anyway). They tend to consider FOSS when there is a fall guy. So e.g. they hire RedHat. But as I think the article mentions, that money doesn’t trickle down from there.

We used a FOSS compiler through a separate contract. The company paid a high price for pampering by the compiler supplier. And the support was magnificent. We got the “pro” version (which for the most part was just a newer release than the version in the commons & perhaps a few extras that were just more of a luxury). But it was really about the support. Anyone on the team could file a ticket with the compiler supplier. Not just for bugs and enhancements, but if something was unclear, or if we needed to know how to do something. They always responded well, gave tips, advice, and workarounds, and if there was a bug they fixed it and we got the fix quickly. They never dropped the ball. Our bugs and enhancement requests would then make it into the core product that benefited the commons. It was a good arrangement.

Then you consider our most heavily used FOSS tool apart from the compiler: emacs. We had an internal team who compiled it and injected our internal mods to customize it for the org. Not sure if any of our customizations would have value outside the org or if that team did PRs.

In short, it’s not enough to just maintain the code and hope for donations. You need to offer a support package that gives 1st class treatment to corps who would pay a premium for it. I’m not sure if the emacs project offers anything comparable to the compiler we used, but I could see the folks I worked for signing up for something like that.

Anonymity is part of privacy.

Specifically, anonymity is confidentiality of identity. Confidentiality is part of privacy, which is a broad concept. So when a tool or mechanism works against anonymity, it works against privacy. It may not work against a privacy aspect that you care about, but it’s privacy nonetheless.

As far as Cloudflair… they are a CDN. relax. Nothing is locked there

Nonsense. Cloudflare (a proxy not a CDN) is exclusive. People like myself are in the excluded group. If Cloudflare gives you no problems personally, then you are in the included group. It’s designed so those excluded are invisible to the included group. You can only see the barriers to entry if you are actually excluded.

First and foremost, #HP is not an option for anyone who boycotts #Israel. And even neglecting that, HP is still the least ethical of all ink suppliers.

from the article:

Prices range from $6.99 per month for a plan that includes an HP Envy printer (the current model is the 6020e) and 20 printed pages. The priciest plan includes an HP OfficeJet Pro rental and 700 printed pages for $35.99 per month.

So the 20 page deal probably reflects the consumption of most households that print. That means the cost ranges from $7—35¢ per page. You must print 20 pages to reach 35¢ pp. A library would likely charge ~5—10¢ pp flat. Print shops tend to be cheaper than libraries.

The 700 page deal amounts to $36—5¢ pp. So you have to print exactly 700 pages to get a good price. Everyone who does not print exactly 700 pages every month for a span of 2 years will get screwed.

One of the most perturbing aspects of the subscription plan is that it requires subscribers to keep their printers connected to the Internet.

Bingo. It’s not a “smart” printer, it’s a dependent printer.

If a gov were to take that kit and create a public option which is then compatible with all web services deployed by that gov, I would applaud that for sure. Would be much better than govs being subservient to tech imposed by tech giants, constraining citizens to the will of a US corporation, and allowing the private sector control so Google can cancel things not profitable for Google (like JPEG XL). The public sector should serve the public people, not the private sector corps of other countries.

#PayPal is one of the most evil:

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/paypal.md

I got burnt personally by them but even if I hadn’t they are among the least ethical options. There are some vendors selling products I would like to buy but they accept paypal exclusively, so I walk.. and go without. Recently I have encountered some small brick and mortar shops/cafes that use “Zettle”. #Zettle is paypal. So if I see Zettle and they don’t take cash, I walk out. They share data with over 600 corporations so I will not allow Paypal to serve as a payment processor of my credit or debit card. Paypal are rotten to the core scumbags. They have some sneaky tricks for keeping people’s money under the guise of AML/KYC/anti-fraud, even though they are not a bank and escape those regulations anyway. It’s no surprise Elon Musk and Peter Thiel were involved with the founding of that company.

The thesis of the article works to fix anti-ebike attitudes. It makes some good points but it wasn’t intended to influence people on what suits them personally.

The shame of it is that a lot of people just read headlines. I sure as hell don’t have time to read every article I encounter. So those who just read the headline will walk away a bit misinformed. OTOH, the click bait actually works to get more people to read the article. It forced me to read it. So it’s hard to say if it does more damage or more benefit overall.

For me it’s moot.. I suggest boycotting #Paypal:

https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/paypal.md

Sharing customer info with 600+ companies is well beyond reasonable. And the way they freeze accounts arbitrarily.. just bizarre that people still use them.

I would love to see this backfire. If they ban min. incomes whilst being a human rights signatory, it means the state must buy food, shelter, and clothes, which means that portion of commerce would be outside of their “capitalist utopia” as the state would decide where to buy Bob’s shoes, or perhaps even make Bob a pair of shoes. It can (and should) backfire spectacularly for them.

Mozilla is not in danger so long as they continue to serve Google. You cut 83% of Mozilla’s revenue and I guarantee you there will be problems.

Like the default search engine is not an example of Google’s control, it’s Mozilla’s revenue model.

It’s both, of course. Mozilla’s revenue enables Google control. If Mozilla changes the default search to one that is not in Google’s interest, they will lose their revenue.

The remainder sounds like personal gripes that you’re misconstruing as evidence of nefarious intent.

It’s both. I’m a user so I notice when Mozilla makes an anti-user move. Businesses serve their customers. Mozilla’s customer is Google, not me. So Mozilla serves Google, not the users. W.r.t evidence, I gave no evidence. I did not say “this is evidence”. If you want to challenge a claim because you can’t find the evidence on your own, you can ask for the evidence.

And as I said, I did not keep track of all Mozilla’s anti-user shenanigans over the years. So you’re not looking at a complete list of issues. It’s disingenuous to treat it as if it were.

There’s also plenty of evidence to the contrary, total cookie protection to name but one.

I did not mention anything about cookies, so which of my points do you think cookie protection counters what I’ve said?

Additionally, beurocratic processes produce terrible software.

Nonsense.

First of all, capitalism produces terrible software when you’re the product rather than the customer. It’s often shit even when you are a paying customer. The best quality software is produced outside of capitalistic structures.

I’ve worked on both gov and commercial environments. The gov process was superior for quality. On a commercial gig I was actually told not to fix bugs as they were spotted because it was important for the customer to discover the bug & report it so the supplier could charge them extra for the bug fix. The whole commercial work environment was rife with chasing profit (of course) which means cutting corners to cut expenses. If a developer produces something high quality in a fortune 500 company, they get back-roomed for “gold plating” (which means they’ve invested more in quality than necessary for the consumers). That doesn’t happen on gov projects.

It’s also wrong to attribute bureaucratic processes strictly to government projects. You may have a shit-ton of bureaucracy in the governance outside of the project which leads to: “build a Mars rover”. How bureaucratic the processes are within the organization is independent of whether it’s a commercial project or not. Fortune 500 corps are inefficient due to their bureaucratic structures. I could not reuse code from one project to another within the same company because there were rules about one project benefiting from another internal pot of money. So a piece of code had to be rewritten from scratch on the other project which means more bugs than you would have if the audited code could have been reused.

Finally, browsers are incredibly complex

Precisely why lack of competition is problematic.

Thanks for pointing that out. I added your link to the post.

Those mught look like freedom pitfalls but are actually not. On the one hand gitlab dot com is not reaaly bad for freedom as it has at least an open core and is very freedom friendly.

You’re conflating a specific instance (the flagship one) with the software it uses, and also neglecting that it runs a non-free enterprise-licensed package, not free s/w. SaaS ≠ software. This particular instance scores poorly by FSF’s own freedom criteria.

There are FOSS-based Gitlab community repos which have no notable freedom issues, but these are not what my comment refers to. The Gitlab CE instances would not need an anti-feature tag. But Gitlab dot com does.

Cloudflare? Why are you even mentioning this?

Restricted-access docs exclude people and also violates the Free Documentation License.

Remember it stand for Free software first.

Software as a service was rightfully cautioned by RMS himself and it is well inside the purview of FSF which has published various essays on the topic.

No specific manufacturer in mind right now

MFDs are being tossed into dumpsters in high numbers. I keep pulling out HPs and Canons. The scanner functionality always works. I think the focus should be on hardware that is getting thrown away for environmental reasons. Even if the printing is toast, printers could be repurposed for all kinds of things since they are all network-attached now.

HP should be boycotted, so ideally FOSS f/w would only be developed for discontinued models so as to not incentivize procurement.

The nuclear: destruction of all traces of a post/comment is probably only useful in extreme cases like CSAM. Otherwise it’s useful for users to be able to evaluate mods to verify there are no shenanigans to establish trust. A user should be able to see the modlog and then see most removed content from a transparency PoV, one hopes.

And I think lack of transparency is an issue. I just raised an issue about that.

I’m so grateful that the Xerox 9700 pissed off RMS. Otherwise we might not have had a FOSS movement.

At the same time, bizarre that printers have still not been liberated by now.

#Apnews is Tor-hostile. I do not support excluding people so I shared a link that is open to the public and inclusive.

If AP News would have also blocked archive.org (thus public libraries) then I would not have shared the link at all — out of respect for #netneutrality (access equality).

There is !personalfinance@sopuli.xyz, which would be somewhat related to personal tax. There is also a Lemmy instance dedicated to finance. I don’t recall it off the top of my head but the instance joined Cloudflare so I immediately abandoned it.

For the record, lemmy.ml is a terrible place to discuss tax or personal finance. The admins of that instance treat personal finance questions as spam and even go over the heads of moderators to censor such discussion because of their political baggage. IMO sopuli.xyz might be a good place to create an account and create finance communities.

It’s worth noting that the FCC’s so-called “Open” Internet Advisory Committee (#OIAC) tragically gives two seats on the board to:

• Cloudflare
• Comcast

Both of whom are abusers of #netneutrality, especially Cloudflare. A well-informed Trump-free administration should be showing Cloudflare and Comcast the door ASAP.

Sure, Trump would just bring them back. But it’d at least be a good symbolic move.

Indeed, as someone else pointed out, the needed change should come from pro-netneutrality legislation. And the legislation needs to be broad enough to block Cloudflare’s broad discriminatory arbitrary attack on access equality, not just tinker with speeds at the ISP consumer level.

In that case this is a #LemmyBug report. The #Lemmy community creation form should not have rendered.

Being able to see bug reports is not required to use the software.

That doesn’t quite answer the question. Nor is it strictly true. Bug tracker info is rich in workarounds for problems that hinder the use of the software.

You’ve made the decision to block Cloudflare,

Cloudflare’s decision, not mine. Cloudflare along with projects that use it made the (often unwitting) decision to block me, among other excluded people. Could I have executed Cloudflare’s non-free javascript to use the website, which is pushed contrary to FSF criteria C0? Perhaps, I didn’t try. Though I’ve run their garbage in the past and found that it rarely works anyway because the CAPTCHA servers themselves tend to be tor-hostile.

It’s worth noting that when execution of JavaScript of any kind is imposed in order to obtain information, it’s not a document; it’s an application.

Expecting free software developers to ensure that every single part of the experience is seamless for users who decide to block certain services is not reasonable.

Expecting FSF to facilitate exclusion of free software documentation and resources (the status quo) is not reasonable.

What is reasonable is FSF supporting their own principles:

• All important site functionality that's enabled for use with that package works correctly (though it need not look as nice) in free browsers, including IceCat, without running any nonfree software sent by the site. (C0)
• Does not discriminate against classes of users, or against any country. (C2)
• Permits access via Tor (we consider this an important site function). (C3)

The Library Bill of Rights (LBR) is also quite reasonable:

• V. A person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views.
• VI. Libraries which make exhibit spaces and meeting rooms available to the public they serve should make such facilities available on an equitable basis, regardless of the beliefs or affiliations of individuals or groups requesting their use.
• VII. All people, regardless of origin, age, background, or views, possess a right to privacy and confidentiality in their library use. Libraries should advocate for, educate about, and protect people’s privacy, safeguarding all library use data, including personally identifiable information.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is also reasonable:

• art.21 ¶2. Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
• art.27 ¶1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

These are good ideas. These fundamental principles & rights are a minimum low bar to set that cannot be construed as “not reasonable.”

If Cloudflare links in the #FSF #FSD are replaced with archive.org mirrors, that automatically invokes the Library Bill of Rights (as InternetArchive is an ALA member). The LBR is also consistent with FSF’s principles.

I appreciate the background & history.. and the workaround sounds quite useful until Lemmy evolves more.

If you want to contribute some code

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I would have to fork it just to get it out of MS Github and into an ethical work environment. And from there I would have to learn 2 or 3 new languages IIUC. I’m merely a user, or tester at best, trying to just get an understanding of the problems.. not even yet at the stage of digging through existing bug reports. When I wrote what you quoted, I did not even know yet if the tool was limited or if it’s malconfigured, or if a mod wasn’t making full use of the software. PenguinCoder hinted in another thread there is a thread hiding option in one of the Lemmy forks but did not elaborate. Superficially that sounds like a more appropriate mechanism for an off topic thread if it works the way it sounds.

Should users be able to see bug reports?

Just tried to see the bug reports for a gitlab·com project. This is what I get:

Also, loading images has nothing to do with not passing the Cloudflare check.

Cloudflare is anti-robot. It’s one of the things they’re not secretive about. Robots do not load images because they are scraping textual information into a DB. Not loading images is relevant to bot detection and triggers anti-bot blockades. So bot creators will sometimes code their bots to needlessly fetch images in order to appear more human.

Like, phone screens could just display black for a blind user. But they don’t.

But they should. The reason they don’t can only be attributed to no one making the effort to extend the battery life for blind users. If the option existed, why wouldn’t blind people use it?

I have a few disabilities myself, and know a couple people who are blind. They just use Firefox.

Certainly you can’t speak for blind people by finding a few who have not realized they can disable images. This does not mean more advanced blind people have not done that. My vision is fine and I still disable images in Firefox in part to not waste bandwidth. Obviously I would keep image loading disabled if I were to go blind. The only reason for a blind person to load images (apart from getting help from someone else) is the same reason bot authors do it: to avoid being treated like a bot.

Thus the item was removed from that community. What is the problem here?

You may be talking from the confines of the software’s capability. But in effect the thread was more than removed from the community. The only meaningful tie a thread has to a community is the link appearing in the timeline. The URL in fact excludes the community name. If you simply remove the timeline link there is theoretically no technical or social reason a civil sitewide-rules-compliant conversation cannot continue. And no reason it should not continue.

There is likely a code limitation here. Lemmy was designed by folks who are overly gung ho on suppression (judging from how they ran dev.lemmy.ml, the deliberately hard-coding of the slur filter, their reputation, etc). I’ve not kept track of Lenny and other forks so it’s unclear if any of them offer more graceful functionality without the overbearing interventionalism for handling off topic posts. It certainly needs to evolve more in this regard because I’ve yet to see any Lemmy et al instances that enable a mod to move a thread to a more fitting community.

Oki (formerly Okidata) is the lesser of evils. After doing a deep dive studying the ethical problems of all the printer makers, Oki was the one I found the least dirt on. But Oki has pulled out of the US market entirely; probably couldn’t survive in a competition of tricks & traps.

#YaCy is an open source crawler that you can run and feed Searx with. I recall some searx instances that run their own YaCy. YaCy can also share indexes with other YaCy instances.