kbal

It has been falsely claimed that the measure undertaken by MCMC is a draconian measure

While it may be unclear exactly what kind of Internet traffic laws Draco would’ve written, allowing only the major landowners to run DNS servers does seem to be in keeping with the spirit of “aiding and legitimizing the political power of the aristocracy and allowing them to consolidate their control of the land and poor” as his laws are said to have done.

I’ve used them both in the past, but prefer Xfce now. So I’m probably not too biased either way on Gnome v. KDE. I’d say they’re both extremely well-supported, popular, respectable, and safe choices. They’re quite different in style though, so odds are you might find you have a preference for one or the other. Go with whichever you like best.

Linux sucks, Windows is worse, MacOS is useless. We must conclude that those systems are not a good choice for regular users. I recommend a simple pocket calculator instead. No graphics drivers to worry about, no firmware updates, if it goes wrong you just press the reset button and it’s ready to go again in a tenth of a second, no need to do backups, you can get a pretty good one for $20, light weight, really good battery life. Much better in almost every way.

If you have time for an answer in audio form the CBC has some ideas.

Failing to respond in detail to all of the claims you believe to be your most important ones is not what is usually meant by a “straw man.”

While I don’t mind Rust (although I’m not too good at it yet) I really do find the crowd of overzealous enthusiasts claiming in the most hyperbolic terms that the necessity of its universal use is an urgent security issue quite off-putting sometimes.

I’ve yet to see any serious usage of SELinux in the real world

I too have successfully avoided it, but we must acknowledge that not everyone has been so fortunate.

Indeed the language is extremely fashionable among government types and many others. I did not really mean to suggest otherwise. If accusing me of erecting a straw man is your way of apologizing for your initial comment, I accept it.

Nah. If you’d been leaning on specific statements of any given expert — of which it is of course possible to find plenty that might in such casual rhetoric be used to support whichever conclusion you like — that would’ve been argumentum ad verecundiam, an appeal to authority. Instead you cited an imagined “vast majority” to exaggerate the universality of your opinion.

P.S. Whilst I’m indulging my argumentative side perhaps it is also worth pointing out that you totally mischaracterized my own statements and motivation. I am not primarily a C programmer, and I’ve been happy to use Rust myself when the opportunity arises. I have no personal stake in this particular fight.

Turns out there is a name for that. I had to look it up. Never seen such a striking example before.

Gender neutral pronouns are pretty huge too. Sure you can do them in English without too many problems usually, just as it’s also possible to code safely in C. It requires everyone to change their old habits, but it’s much less of a change than is involved in adopting a whole new language.

Anyway, I do like Rust better personally.

Switching everything from C to Rust because it has better memory safety is more akin to changing languages from English to Esperanto because it has gender neutral pronouns and other cool features. Maybe it’s a good idea, but it’s understandable that some people are reluctant.

Immutable IoT thin-client Snap container-based systems seems like a pretty weird kink, but who am I to judge?

They remove telemetry, such as the kind of telemetry causing the problems reported in this thread. They do not remove OCSP, safe browsing, Sync, and other things that connect to outside servers and therefore leak information about user activity. They do enable about:config so that those which are unwanted can be disabled.

Fennec F-Droid suffices to remove the telemetry.

Oh, that makes sense. Setting it to “strict” mode may be the thing I vaguely remember doing to make sure it was active in 2022.

Do you have a source for that?

New idea for a web service: Give it the url of an article decrying the sorry state of corporate social media and hyping up some zany theoretical alternative that nobody’s heard of, and it tells you whether or not the author gives any hint of having heard of the fediverse.

This has been going around all over lemmy and I still had no idea what the actual news (if any) is supposed to be. So I did a diff against the 2022 version of this Mozilla blog entry. The differences:

• Changed “Starting today, Firefox is rolling out Total Cookie Protection to all Firefox users worldwide” to “Firefox is rolling out Total Cookie Protection to more Firefox users worldwide.”

• Added mention of Android.

• Changed “recent stories” to just “stories”, since the reporting on this is no longer recent.

• The somewhat whimsical image from the 2022 version has been replaced with one that to me looks more generic and illustrates the technology less clearly, with more irrelevant detail in the alt text and no credit for the artist.

• Changed “Today’s release” to “The release”.

• 2022’s “Bringing Total Cookie Protection to all Firefox users is our next step towards creating a better internet, one where your privacy is not optional” changed to "While bringing Total Cookie Protection to more Firefox users has been one significant step in this journey, we have still kept our sights on an even safer, even better internet. And starting in 2024, all our users can look forward to Firefox blocking even more third party cookies. That’s right; we are taking big swings to adopt new cookie partitioning and clearing mechanisms so that users can browse with fewer cookies that won’t stick around as long and will result in an even better browsing experience. Just another step on our road towards creating a better internet where your privacy is not optional.

Rust is a good language. There is no reason not to use it for userspace tools if you manage dependencies with sufficient care. As with most other currently fashionable languages they make it easy to not do that.

Sorry, I was assuming everyone knew that. Should’ve said “nagware” instead.