All legacy technical posts will remain available so that searching for help related to the browser is still available, but henceforth and until the reddit admins appropriately reply to our concerns, the only new submissions allowed will be ones that contain the cuddly fuzzy little animals from which the subreddit indirectly received its name:
The red panda! Also known as fire foxes.
If you are looking for technical posts, we now have an official community on Kbin. Keep in mind that Lemmy also federates with Kbin. We continue to be around on Matrix as well.
To be clear, they don’t mean kbin.social, but another server that runs the Kbin software. Lemmy users wanting to join should search for this: fedia.io/m/firefox
That first article, though I have read it through a translation app, is truly insane. The judge's quoted statement is just terrifying:
« L’ensemble des membres de ce groupe se montraient particulièrement méfiants, ne communiquaient entre eux que par des applications cryptées, en particulier Signal, et procédaient au cryptage de leurs supports informatiques […]. »
Translated via DeepL:
"All the members of this group were particularly suspicious, communicating with each other only via encrypted applications, in particular Signal, and encrypting their computer media [...]".
Clandestine behavior, he says. Is the judge seriously thinking along the lines of “if you've got nothing to hide…” and associating ‘clandestine behavior’ to being a criminal? That's scary.
I do all of those things too because why wouldn't I?
Is there anything as to the outcome of the arrests? Also what was the reason in the first place for the police to be interested in these people?
I think that's perhaps the worst, but the incompetence shown by the government and the judge is honestly just scary.
Translated with DeepL as well for consistency.
As for the notions of how Tor and Tails work, although they are at the heart of the accusations of "clandestinity", they seem quite vague.
An agent from the DGSI, for example, will write, seemingly confusing the two: "Thor [sic] allows you to connect to the Internet and use reputed communication and data encryption tools. All data is stored in the computer's RAM memory and is therefore deleted when the machine is switched off". Could it be that this person is referring to Tails?
As for the examining magistrate, he cites seal minutes relating to Tails keys, which do not work on cell phones, as evidence of knowledge of "complex techniques for reconfiguring your phone to make it anonymous". He adds, as does PNAT, that Tor enables "anonymous Internet browsing using public wifi" - as if he thought public wifi was necessary for its use.
If anyone demands I implement some feature into one of my open source projects that I either don't have time for or don't want to do, my response is one of the following:
I'll get to it when I can (if I actually care to do it)
You are welcome to implement it yourself and submit a PR
You are welcome to fork the project and do it yourself or convince someone else to do it
But thankfully, my projects don't have a very wide audience, so requests/demands are rare.
But you have to implement [Insert Niche Feature That Adds No Benefit For The Average User] because I need it and can’t be bothered to implement it myself! /s
As I understood it, one of the foundations of open source development is scratching your own itches, then putting what you made up for grabs in case it scratches someone else’s. There shouldn’t be any expectation of support on your part beyond an email or two. The code’s out there if they want to scratch the itch a different way. It’s kind of a homesteader ethic.
That’s basically right. But it’s quite a difference what you have to do to scratch your itch, and what you need to do for it to be useful for others.
If you do it for yourself, there are no tests or documentation or even a GUI. It’s quick and dirty, all configuration is hardcoded. If you need a different config, you’ll just change the code.
All that doesn’t really fly if you expect someone else to use the project.
On the other side, especially if it’s too polished, idiots will perceive the project as being a commercial one and demand that you do what they want.
If you don’t know the stories, maybe read up on the maintainer of core-js or Marcel Bokhorst. These two people complained about how tough it is to make good open source software. Both talked specifically about their toxic audience. So in turn the audience ridiculed them and they even received death threats.
I suppose the thing is, I personally wouldn’t care much if anyone else used it or not, my itch has been scratched. If someone else finds it of use, great! If they need changes, they’ve got the code and can get crackin’ on it themselves. Or, they can pay me to do it if we can agree on a price. Outside of that I have no expectations.
That’s definitely a healthy way of dealing with that.
But with this way, something like Linux, Distros, Firefox, Blender or LibreOffice would have never happened. There are those who want to build retail-level open source software, mostly out of idealism, and then you are stuck between a non-monetizable rock and a toxic hard place.
But I totally agree with you, unless you are super idealistic, your way of handling it is probably the most healthy one and the one that will cause you the least amount of trouble. And it’s also what I do, except when I sometimes do get idealistic.
Patcher for YouTube which adds AdBlock/Sponsorblock/Other various features. Also supports other apps, such as YouTube Music. This is a must if you use YouTube on your phone.
Installer for modded Spotify. Includes AdBlock, unlimited skips, and the ability to play any track on demand, using a free Spotify account. (The installer itself includes an ad that plays when downloading the patched APK, but this can be disabled in the settings of xManager)
Storage utility/manager that's actually good, unlike 99.99% of cleaner apps on the play store. Pro version is free on GitHub, make sure to support the developer if you like the app.
What I still can’t figure out (in my very shallow dive into the repo) is if it’s a meta search engine like Searx-ng or if it does its own crawling and builds its own search index.
I run Searx-ng and love it, but I’d be interested in a true self-hosted search (though I’d need to devote a lot of resources to build and run such an index).
Anyone know?
Update: Looks like it crawls and maintains its own index. From the credits/thanks at the bottom of the readme (emphases mine):
The commoncrawl organization for crawling the web and making the dataset readily available. Even though we have our own crawler now, commoncrawl has been a huge help in the early stages of development.
#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.
Home Assistant invested quite a bit into the technology to create a FOSS voice assistant over the past year. It still needs quite a bit of work, but the foundation is there; it supports wake words (“Hey …”), speech-to-text to hear your command, interpretation and command processing, and text-to-speech to return results.
The downsides are that it’s still quite technical to set up primarily due to the lack of commercially available hardware, and the command library is fairly small at this point.
With some of this foundational work out of the way, I expect Home Assistant to move forward quickly to improve, and other projects can work off the same pieces if they desire to as well.
should have clarified, I'm not looking for a home assistant, I'm looking for a voice assistant on my phone. either way super exited to see where they take this
I don’t see how being home-assistant excludes it from working on your phone. The only difference is that your phone acts as the “satellite” rather than a stationary device.
Probably for the best. They’d been spinning their wheels while sucking most of the oxygen out of the room for several years now. Time for somebody else to give it a go
When I can I try to bring up the idea of “pro bono” developer work with employed developers I know.
Outside of FAANG it garners confused looks because it’s so alien. But the argument never gets any logical pushback because the industry is culturally sick on this issue:
“ Do you use and rely on open source software?
If so some percentage of what your employer gains from that should be provided back, not out of some morality but to keep afloat the open source software ecosystem you and your employer are benefiting from.
What’s more, you and employer will gain more expertise in said software and can even ensure it is more reliable for your purposes.
All employers of developers using open source ought to dedicate a certain number of developer-days per month to open source maintenance and proudly make this number public.
I’ve looked into this in the past and settled on Kobo. You can disable the telemetry and never use the the Rakuten account part and have a very good ereader… And you can install the open source KOReader software.
+1 on this. Kobos actually use Linux under the hood. And although the default UI is proprietary, it's super easy to install KOReader.
You don't even need to hack into it some custom firmware, just a sideloader, which normally doesn't break even if you actually updated the base firmware.
Here the official tutorial on how to do it: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Installation-on-Kobo-devices
Kobo readers are really neat, I’ve been using them for over a decade and I don’t remember ever using a Rakuten account or even going online with them for anything but software updates or connecting to my local library system (which Kindle can’t do). I use Calibre on the desktop to manage, convert and load my reader and that’s it.
Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.
The general public isn't interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.
Say what you want about that, I'm not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn't the world we live in right now.
The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.
Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don't know what is the correct approach. All I know is I've heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.
Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.
Sad truth. I'm super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I'm also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.
UI/UX has always been a massive problem in F/OSS. The biggest issue is that you need one person, or a team, with a coherent design vision, actual UI/UX understanding, and who will make sure that not every random pull request related to UX is accepted and ensure those contributions align with the design vision.
Yeah makes sense. I wish there was a FOSS UX design philosophy that had caught on. For app design, the Unix philosophy has driven development even to this day, although not as popular now as it once was.
We sort of have bits of it, with the GTK framework and KDE styling. But those ecosystems don't extend outwards enough, and still allow far too much leeway to the UX design to ensure nice looks/function.
Maybe the nature of the widely distributed development makes it overall impossible. The goal of FOSS makes that kind of universal look and feel largely impossible. Heck, even Microsoft can't get that to happen in their own OS. There are many applications/utilities that look pretty much the same now as they did on Windows XP or even earlier.
The general attitude of function over form in our community also makes it hard, and I get that. Especially with limited dev resources as you pointed out. Would you rather have better functionality, or a prettier interface? Tough choice sometimes.
I think another problem is that since FOSS is not profitable, it mostly attracts people who want to make software “for themselves” - “hey I need a tool that can do X and if I make it public maybe the other people will like it”. And that’s good but that means the software isn’t “for people” it’s “for people like me”, which is programmers. So they make UI that programmers like/understand but not an average Joe. I think FSF needs to invest some money to build a welcoming UI for existing, feature-complete tools.
My personal experience is that it is really hard to make app that works perfect and looks nice. It takes three to four times more time than just making and app that works with few glitches. Additionally, that is the boring part, not many developers will do it for fun, I really admire complex open source apps (like AntennaPod) that are beautiful and glich free.
Definitely. Programmers and super users, tend to be the kind of people that want configurability and are able (and even enjoy) to figure out what they are trying to do by themselves. If they have a question or a problem, the solution is usually one search away. But that doesn't fly for the average person who wants the thing to work out of the box without having to dig into menus and settings.
Isn't that a type error? The examples given were for protocols, but your specific objection was about clients. There are many amazingly smooth clients for the aforementioned protocols. They may not be popular, you might not like them, but they definitely exist.
We should also briefly take note of the disastrous UI that Microsoft Office has.
Fair point, but I'll push back a little on your second point. RSS for instance. I really want to like it, but I just cannot get it to work smoothly.
I've tried like 8+ FOSS RSS clients, mobile, desktop, web-based. Not one of them has worked seamlessly. I get all kinds of weird problems. The RSS link doesn't work, thumbnails don't load, feed headlines are garbled, articles are badly out of order, sync doesn't work, etc.
I know that if I can't get them to work right, there's no way a random person on the street is gunna be willing to tinker and mess around with them.
You bring up a really good point about MS Office UI. Very cluttered and clunky, but so many people are used to it that it doesn't matter to them. I actually think that Only Office and Libre Office are easily good enough to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for 90% of users out there.
As someone who has written and maintained an RSS aggregator for years, I can tell you that this jankiness is in big part because of how vague and under-defined the feed formats (RDF, RSS2, Atom) are, and how "creative" various websites are in producing feeds which are just barely standard-compliant, but also just enough screwed up to cause problems when parsing them.
It was a headache after a headache trying to get all the weird corner cases handled.
Linux will never be main stream popular unless it becomes pre-loaded on major brand laptops and computers, however good the desktop enviroments and apps are. This is the thing that doesn't get much talk, but however seemless and easy to install most modern Linux distros people just aren't installing their OS' in the first place. Most people either get their OS pre-installed or ask their local Geek Squad to do it for them.
True. The problem with that, is that Microsoft pays to have windows installed. Such that it's actually cheaper to buy a system with windows and delete it than to buy one with Linux preinstalled.
One issue is that Microsoft makes so much on data collection, that they actually pay manufacturers to put Windows on there, it's one of the methods used to try to keep stock computer prices low. While this is scummy and anticompetitive, it helps the consumer and gives me a chuckle that installing Windows inherently decreased the worth of a computer.
Yeah, they could have taken the high road compared to Google and Amazon, but instead were like: Hold my beer. And don't get me started on smartphones, "smart" TV's and cars... Wonderful times we're living in!
Yeah. When a Chromebook can satisfy the needs of a lot of users, I feel some distros were ready even a decade ago.
The installation step is a huge hurdle. I don't know anyone, except techies, who has done it and even some techies haven't. You can make it pretty (and some installers are both pretty and dead simple) but getting it on a thumb drive and booting from external media are just not user-friendly steps.
Valve basically proved this with the Steam Deck. Lots of folks were introduced unknowingly to Linux via that method and realized it's pretty great.
But Valve worked and still work their asses off to get the Steam Deck UI/UX really nice. There were a lot of bumps early on, but things are really good now. Proton works amazingly well, and the look and feel of the Deck is incredible.
I have hope with Framework, System76, and other companies like that which are making computers that work well with, or exclusively are built for Linux. Hopefully they continue to grow the market.
Yes, absolutely, but sadly the Steam Deck and S76 workstations are still niche products, focusing on the gaming and SoftDev markets.
Framework is very promising and I hope they'll succeed breaking into more mainstream markets. But I'm really saddend by Canonical and that they dropped the ball with it because back in the day they made some attempts to partner with larger laptop vendors to pre-load Ubuntu and I think it also had great promise even tho Linux software was not nearly as refines as it is today. But nowadays when the software is much more capable they focus their efforts almost exclusively on business / server side applications.
Even more frustrating that Chromebooks became a thing. It proved that consumers were ready to buy cheap notebooks with an OS that was basically just a browser and no significant computer power.
Any user-friendly Linux distro could have filled that role and done it much better IMO. That one always felt like on of Linux's biggest misses recently. I don't think it was anybody's fault either. Google had the resources, the marketing, and the vision to push those, right place right time.
FOSS is going to struggle to have good UX forever becuase you usually need one coherent vision for good UX and that's the antithesis to FOSS projects, the only exceptions being ones run exclusively by one company.
@Skooshjones@privsecfoss@foss Also, another reason why big tech catches on, every time, is not so much that the UX is glossy but that Zoom, Apple, etc, all know that #Accessibility is needed to, 1, be dominant. As people look for stuff and tools that are accessible to Disabled users, Apple and Zoom come up a lot because they knew that capturing accessible design was a great way to capture a huge portion of users and otherwise. 2. Accessible design works for everybody. Seriously, having a far cleaner UI is better for everybody, including developers when they need to change code later.
That's a fair point, I've been happy to see that issue addressed more seriously in the last few years by many apps, including color schemes for folks with diminished sight or color blindness.
It would be interesting to create an open standard for app accessibility. Maybe that already exists, idk. But devs and organizations could submit their software to be evaluated and if passed, would be able to include a certification that it meets said accessibility standards.
I saw somewhere recently (don't remember if it was on Lemmy, reddit, or elsewhere), where a couple of folks were getting into it because a FOSS contributor didn't recognize the importance of accounting for accessibility in design. They thought that projects as whole did not have a responsibility to account for those design considerations, and that anyone who wants to see those implemented have to do it themselves. While technically the truth in that this is all effectively volunteer work and developers work on what they want to work on, it's something that could be alleviated by making it a core value of FOSS development. Asking questions like:
This is a point-click-drag interaction, but how would a person do this with a keyboard only?
These two components are identified using color, but what if a user is colorblind?
There are buttons labeled with iconography only, but what if a user cannot see it and uses a screen reader to interact with everything?
It's tough because the disability community in aggregate face steeper financial hurdles for a number of reasons, and could perhaps benefit the most from freely available, accessible tech.
@omarciddo It's especially ironic because these very Disabled people would be the biggest champions of FOSS if FOSS software was designed to be accessible from the ground up, or at least more development tools made it easier to do these things but the very people that could benefit the most from FOSS are completely shunned/left to fend for themselves constantly, while still unable to use your FOSS software at all, and then people wonder why big tech continues to capture that market. @foss
You bring up a good point with utilities like Bitwarden and Proton Mail; things that look nice and have good functionality attract the average user much more easily.
Last I checked, Bitwarden doesn't have any way to hit a hotkey and insert login credentials in the current app? It also can't be unlocked with biometrics?
Those aren't "nice" features, they're baseline features that every password manager needs to have. I don't just type passwords into a browser, so a browser extension alone isn't enough. And I'm not typing my umpteen character long password fifty times a day, there needs to be biometrics.
I will always choose open source software over closed source software - but not if it means choosing mediocre software over good software.
At least with android 13, you can choose the bitwarden app as your default autofill option, and it will fill login info in apps/websites/etc. That being said, I've noticed sometimes it won't pop up immediately, but it's by far the minority of situations where it does that.
On the app page Bitwarden has the typical biometric symbols. And other FOSS alternatives also have biometric unlock. I use Keepass for example. On my desktop computer it is pretty easy to fill in passwords in my browser and on my phone it is very easy to open the database via biometrics. However, non of the clients actually have a nice and shiny GUI...
That's why I don't suggest Keepass to people vs Bitwarden, even though it's quote good, I know they're gunna be put off instantly by Keepass's ugly look.
Honestly though, all the mainstream password managers have pretty nasty looking interfaces IMO, so maybe it actually wouldn't matter lol.
Bitwarden 100% has biometric unlock (at least on Android, can't speak for other platforms); as mentioned by @pattern, you can set it up to autofill login info in apps and websites. It does sometimes take a bit of time to show up, though.
Anecdotal experience, I know, but I managed to cure my wife of her habit of storing passwords in plaintext on her computer by moving her to Bitwarden, and I've had very little in the way of tech support to deal with in that area ever since, so at least for me it passes the "good for non-tech savvy folks" test.
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