Notices by Luis Villa (luis_in_brief@social.coop)

I know @wikimediafoundation isn’t ignoring Trump but it’s utterly surreal to read a post published today, ostensibly about how the Foundation is addressing the “most important” public policy threats facing the movement, leads with a discussion of SXSW.

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/05/02/dont-blink-protecting-the-wikimedia-model-its-people-and-its-values-in-march-2025/

America needs more holidays where we set fire to things (fireworks don’t count). Extra credit for burning symbolic bad things like (checks notes) customs boats.

Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:su7q6jngaiyjueenbbabq43s/post/3lmpwwjvxdc2c

@ntnsndr @luis_in_brief @ntnsndr Clearly @b0rk needs to do a jj zine so that I can just skip straight to that from (checks ancient, crumbling notes) `svn`

👴🏽

There’s a better timeline where a vigorous GNU decided to tap into new hacking energy by doing en-masse ports of various GNU stuff to Rust. In that better timeline, GNU has new blood, has a good reason to refresh and review (and perhaps even innovate) on old internals, and of course is more secure.

Sad that’s not the GNU we have though :( In the meantime…
From: @derdreschi85
https://mastodon.social/@derdreschi85/114135090853367933

@ntnsndr I really want to find time to play with it, for exactly this reason.

The big challenge: can it teach me git so I can not actually lose my progress every time I stop…

@somereatardedwood @bignose @libreoffice @TheASF it’s unfortunate but this is the case. Elsewhere in this thread I’ve posted at least three situations where a security researcher did proper bug filing against OOo, and then no release was done until after the security researcher had done the correct thing (waited, waited, and only then with reluctance published the vulnerability). And given that Libreoffice is doing regular security releases from a similar codebase, there’s almost certainly more.

@bignose @libreoffice @TheASF No, ASF has the domain and the Google/SEO juice, so they have the primary responsibility.

And to be clear they’re not actually maintaining it, since it regularly has security vulnerabilities that go unpatched for months at a time.

@bignose @libreoffice @TheASF Eg, the OpenOffice website could say “please don’t download this, we just do it for fun and as a result this often has security vulnerabilities. If you want an free office suite that is maintained to a high level of professionalism and security, please go to libreoffice.org”. But instead it not only encourages downloads, it misleads a banner stating “380M downloads”, giving the impression that it is an active (and presumably secure) project.

We voted.
https://social.coop/@beckett/114100708862424657

It’s really really embarrassing that @TheASF still distributes OpenOffice, leaving people like this schoolteacher (name omitted to spare them spam) to think it’s a maintained or viable alternative.

My casual count suggests LibreOffice has done 40+ releases since OOo last did a release.

@janneke @b0rk I think bork is asking a different question: why would info have been better? it’s been a loooooong time since I was a power user of either, but I remember finding info very frustrating. And I was a regular emacs user at the time so I should have known most of the shortcuts! So I’m not clear why it would have been amazing if there were info for git.

@bruces my OG cyber tool was lost (or stolen?) by movers 15 years ago. Still bitter.

Banged this out over tea this morning. TLDR: the FSF/OSI four freedoms are myopic in their focus on software developers, and we should complement them by asking what freedoms non-developers value.
https://lu.is/2025/02/freedoms-for-who-revisited-briefly/

Landed in Brussels for 2+ days of policy work before FOSDEM. Already exhausted; that’s a good sign, right? 😬

I remember when Google embedding unit conversions in search was a cute little convenience. And, uh, actually useful and accurate. This is just so embarrassing for a once-great tool.

@onepict My main reason for not protesting Dorsey is that he’s mostly small fry. I would not do him the honor of protesting him and pretending he matters that much.

@onepict I’m deeply curious what the hell they were thinking.

@skinnylatte I’m in the south side of the Mission, so just a mile and a half to the SOMA Costco. Easy cargo bike ride. (I don’t really Prime all that much anyway, though I suppose that’s famous last words 😂)

@skinnylatte Yeah I’ve been wondering if it is finally time to do a Costco membership to replace Prime.

@skinnylatte Also it turns out that when you don’t hire pharmacists it is hard to sell pharmaceuticals; sun rises in East; etc.

Signed, guy who finally switched to Amazon Pharmacy for everything that’s not burningly time sensitive because waiting for hours in a Walgreens aisle is unappealing