Notices by Louis (louis@emacs.ch)

@emanuele @Unatributed I'm wondering if you deliberately spreading misinformation about Mozilla?

Drew Devault saw it coming already in 2020:
https://drewdevault.com/2020/10/22/Firefox-the-embarassment-of-FOSS.html

Firefox is not 100% open source, it contains binary blobs for years.

Also: Mozilla doesn't rely on any donations for quite a while. They are funded by Google et al to implement their search per default and sell advertisement in form of pre-installed bookmarks and search bar recommendations.

> The majority of Mozilla Corporation’s revenue is from royalties earned through Firefox web browser search partnerships and distribution deals around the world.

Also: they state it very clearly on their website that they harvest your search behaviour.

From their own website:

> Firefox sends Mozilla what you **type into the search bar and Mozilla may share that data with its partners**.

> We also share aggregated data about the sponsored content you see and click with our third-party ad platform Kevel so advertisers can see how many people click on their articles.

Not sure how all that publicly available information aligns with your statements.

#firefox #mozilla

The #Emacs project is looking for contributors to the Windows build:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2024-07/msg01152.html

If you use Windows and care for Emacs being available on that platform, this may be a great opportunity to get involved.

What it looks like in the air when a closed-source security company breaks a software update.

This is a 12 hour timelapse of Delta, American Airlines, and United flights.

#crowdstrike

Doing SQL for over two decades. I used Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL/MariaDB and in the last 6+ years PostgreSQL.

I can say with confidence, PostgreSQL is for almost all cases *the best* option, by far.

At this point I'd say that there is no justification to pay exorbitant license fees for Oracle or SQL Server for any new project. Except for very few niche use cases, PostgreSQL offers more features, *and* better performance, even compared to Oracle.

If you _must_ use Oracle/SQL Server for a legacy project, consider hiring a professional to migrate your project. It'll pay off next time when Microsoft or Oracle start to count your CPU cores.

#sql #postgresql #SQLServer #oracle #mysql

It breaks my heart 💔 to see the way the Fediverse is discussing the issues arising from some FOSS projects like #Hyprland, #NixOS, and now the #Ladybird project. The divisiveness and lack of empathy in these discussions is truly sickening.

Our enemies are not individuals who spend their entire free time to contribute to FOSS and make mistakes along the way, but corporations and unhinged capitalism that take away our freedoms.

Let's resist the urge to condemn entire projects based on the actions or decisions of individual contributors. It's counterproductive. The beauty of this space is that we have the opportunity to engage in factual, nuanced, and compassionate discussions about these challenges. There's room for diverse perspectives and healthy debate here.

Isn't that what should set us apart from the toxicity and polarization found on platforms like X/Twitter? We're better than that.

The world is not binary. Just because someone isn't pro-something doesn't mean they're anti-something. And not being interested in a particular topic, how important it might be, doesn't make someone subject to be "purged". Life is complex and multifaceted, and we all have our own priorities and experiences that shape our views.

"Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her." (John 8:7) This verse serves as a guiding principle for me, and I believe it should be a cornerstone of any progressive community.

#FOSS #Fediverse

First, Mozilla started to collect your search data in Firefox, promised to "not sharing anything with 3rd parties". Ok.

Mozilla, moments later, just aquired the advertising firm "Anonym"[1], which is now technically not a 3rd party anymore.

#Mozilla is now becoming an advertising company, using your search data (no matter which search engine you use) to feed their pockets.

Face it: Firefox, built mostly by volunteers, is now owned by an advertising company. Sure has nothing to do with their yearly CEOs salary raises?

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-the-bar-for-privacy-preserving-digital-advertising/

#mozilla #firefox

Hm, fastmail app seems to be down? @fastmail

The Mastodon developers started to implement telemetry for everything you search for: Posts, Accounts, Tags

https://github.com/glitch-soc/mastodon/commit/acc77c3836974473e7c6a423cbd1138479ae197a

I'm not so sure if I like what I see in this commit. But we all knew it would be coming eventually.

So important that we build Mastodon-compatible server alternatives.

#mastoadmin #mastodonsocial

See you next year in Zurich, you crazy #Lisp nerds 🙂

#els2024

In our public primary school every pupil gets an iPad starting 3rd grade, with a +Microsoft 365 account+ so they can "get used to the applications that are prevalent in business". Good job, getting 8 years old kids hooked on Office products, paid by the public.

All iPads are replaced every 3 years because "they degrade in performance" to make sure "pupils have always a device with peak performance". Good job, getting 8 year old kids used to "e-waste is nothing we need to care about".

I can only shake my head in disbelief, to say the least.

GNV - the Smallweb Index - now supports the Spartan protocol.

Over 100.000 Gopher and Gemini pages, and now already +8000 Spartan pages indexed.

https://gopher.emacs.ch

#gopher #gemini #spartan #smallweb

GNV - the Gopher Web search engine - just got an update.

https://gopher.emacs.ch

- Now includes Gemini
- Shows context snippet of the content where search query was found

The crawler is still working through more than 60'000 found links, this will require a few more hours to finish.

I've removed the Gopher image and binary proxy out of the following consideration:

- It's a potential attack vector to external Gopher servers

- GNV shall not replace functionality of Gopher, but encourage its use by using a proper client

- I want to focus on providing features increasing discovery of Gopher/Gemini content and how it is interconnected with each other (inspired discussion by @screwtape - aka "How to link Gopher phlogs with each other")

Those who follow me know that GNV is written in Common Lisp. A great learning exercise for me. It's incredibly suited for this task because I could modify the code for numerous edge cases _while_ the crawler is running, without starting from scratch every time an exception is thrown.

Sure, when the project is finished and the problem is modeled out properly, one could say: that would be easy to write in lang X.Y.Z! Sure, but it's not the end product where Common Lisp shines, it's the journey.

With that, have a good night y'all.

@defanor Thank you for the bug report! I did not properly escape the NOT operator, that's fixed now 🙂

Don't understand why people are so angry about Apple turning off PWAs in iOS.

iDevices are proprietary, closed ecosystems. Apple decides what runs on it and any tech-savvy user buying Apple hardware knew that from the beginning.

"How outrageous they do that!". No, it's not. It's the nature of proprietary software and hardware. But you can change that any time. Vote with your pocket.

#Apple #PWA

@sam Perhaps it is time for a hard fork?

Kudos to @sam for quickly building an anti-spam tool to help us get this spam wave under control. 😘

He did what the Mastodon Corporation, which receives tens of thousands of dollars in donations, did not manage/want to build in years.

https://citadel.samw.dev

#MastoAdmin

@yeti Given the meaning: "Historically, citadels were also used for the control and defense of a city's inhabitants during attacks or sieges." I find that name very fitting.

@downey @sheogorath A single feature would bring a lot of relief:

"Automatically suspend federation from instances which allow unapproved registrations." Check. Done. Problem solved.

@selea I don't think so. Fact is: almost all spam waves come either from mastodon.social or other instances that allow unapproved registrations.

@downey @sheogorath

@selea Who said "nuke everything"? I'm sure you are aware that there are multiple levels of Federation. Such a feature wouldn't necessarily mean to suspend half of the Fediverse. It means that I have options based on the settings of a remote instance.

To be more specific: "Don't accept more than X DMs per Y hours from instances which allow unapproved registrations" with the option to see those instances trying to send DMs and individually add them to an exception list. Same as the Moderation tools already there for the "Trending" section.

@downey @sheogorath