Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Jan-2026 07:44:22 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

   • Kat Marchán 🐈

   @zkat @joepie91 one starts a movement by first committing to the values individually, no?

   I agree with both statements

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Jan-2026 07:44:20 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Kat Marchán 🐈

     @zkat @joepie91 semi-related: i acquired fragments of a Russian Shahed-136 and reverse-engineered the CRPA and navigation units. i expected to find significant traces of OSS (which is why i started the project) but the only thing i found is the bootloader on an IMXRT1052 (grabbed from some random guy's github account) which performed no critical function

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Jan-2026 07:44:21 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Kat Marchán 🐈

     @zkat @joepie91 fundamentally I see two possible choices: either we make a world where open source (in any form) is still a viable concept, by force if necessary, or we retreat to the guild system where the knowledge is gatekept to a select cadre of trusted members

     I know the latter to be effective but I'm far too invested in the concept of open knowledge to give the former up so easily

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Jan-2026 07:44:21 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Kat Marchán 🐈

     @zkat @joepie91 i don't think it's limited to OSS either; open science faces the same problem and it doesn't have an IP scarecrow to retreat behind (i don't think anybody here seriously considers patents to have the potential for a positive impact)

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Jan-2026 07:44:21 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Kat Marchán 🐈

     @zkat @joepie91 i don't only do software, i also do hardware and research, and even if i accepted that "put a license on it" is the right move for software, i don't see how this addresses the (equally if not more pressing) question of what to do about open research

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Jan-2026 07:46:50 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Kat Marchán 🐈

     @zkat @joepie91 i did this because if we're seriously talking about the military impact of our work, step 0 would be to do field studies of where it ends up and what it's doing

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Jan-2026 07:48:08 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Joshua Barretto
     • Kat Marchán 🐈

     @jsbarretto @zkat @joepie91 it was the most obvious first step

   • Embed this notice
     Joshua Barretto (jsbarretto@social.coop)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Jan-2026 07:48:10 JST Joshua Barretto

     in reply to

     • Kat Marchán 🐈

     @whitequark @zkat @joepie91 As one does

   • Embed this notice
     ✧✦Catherine✦✧ (whitequark@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 07-Jan-2026 07:51:47 JST ✧✦Catherine✦✧

     in reply to

     • Kat Marchán 🐈

     @zkat @joepie91 unbelievably*, there are Raspberry Pis in the wreckage, making i guess Broadcom and Debian complicit to some small degree. at least, i presume it's Debian, i didn't find a way to acquire the firmware on those devices and i presume i won't in the future for for natsec reasons

     * i cannot fathom what reasoning, technical or economic, was used to pick it for this type of mission