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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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    1. If X was not available to pirate, would you pay for it?
    2. If you would not have paid for X, does pirating X cause any actual loss to its owner? If you would not have paid for it either way (even if that were the only option) and you haven’t caused them a loss of revenue by pirating it, did you impact the creator at all?

    The counter to this is always that just because someone wouldn’t pay doesn’t mean the creator’s work has no value. To that I would yes that is completely true. The creator’s work has value, but maybe not monetary value. You can’t always conflate value to money (ex. FOSS, canonical sci-fi lore, protest symbols, etc).

    There is also a morality component used against my argument that would say I’m ignoring the intent, consent, and ownership the creator has. Its usually worded that I’m using outcome-based morality and that the ends always justifies the means by that logic. But I pay for X, not for access to use X. If the creator can opt without my consent to remove X from me, I’m not longer obligated to follow that moral constraint. Morality is a two-way street.


  • The controversy stems from a few things:

    1. Surveillance Creep Fedora devs have suggested a Windows-style telemetry system. It was proposed as being anonymous and opt-in only, but the fear from the community was that it would slowly change over time (much in the same vein as how Windows telemetry system has done over the years).

    2. Conflict of Interest Red Hat was purchased by IBM which led to the perceived conflict of interest it may then have. RHEL went closed source after this which has been a red flag to many people in the Fedora community.

    3. Flatpak Fedora maintains its own flatpak builds (a lot of which don’t work as they are outdated). Without clearly knowing what you are doing, there is a good chance you’ll be installing outdated Fedora versions as it runs side-by-side with the non-Fedora.

    4. Wayland This I don’t see as an issue, but many users do. The community does mention sometimes that Fedora prioritizes bleeding-edge new over stability. If you combine that with #3 though, I don’t put much weight in it.









  • I had a similar setup to this awhile back. You have to port the number to your VoIP provider of choice and then decide on what client you are going to run (no need for SIM card). I was wanting voice service and only needed limited SMS, so I went with linphone (and played around with zoiper too). If you are needing good SMS support, then JMP is probably the best. It supports both SMS and MMS. You won’t get E911 access I believe, but as data only its a good solution.

    Free wifi is all over the place and if you wire up a mobile hotspot in your car (yes it somewhat defeats the purpose), you can get some pretty decent coverage.



  • I think the idea of an IP address (IPv6 or not) providing anyone a semblance of privacy is wishful thinking in this age. Google ad revenue in the EU is estimated to be lower because the power in GPDR areas isn’t in PII obfuscation, its in the consent model. Positive opt-in to Legitimate Vendor Interest makes tracking difficult, not whether your IP is generic. You have to remember companies like Google are still able to monetize off of users in mobile CG-NAT environments in the US/EU. Given the roughly 150 other metrics Google (or any publisher/SSP would have access to), removing one doesn’t really stem the tide.

    What’s also interesting is how IPs become anonymized. For IPv4, the industry standard I kid you not is to take the 4th octet and mark it zero. That’s it. It just assumes carriers use /24 CIDRs like someone’s home network might. The funny part is what if that was 50.50.0.0/22? A publisher could in practice replace one user’s IP with another user’s IP which means that they still would be passing PII unanonymized which could violate GDPR.

    IPv6 uses the same basic system. 2001:db8:85a3:8d3:1319:8a2e:370:7348 becomes 2001:db8:85a3::. You just truncate at the 64th bit. Rolling through available host bits doesn’t really matter then. IPv6/IPv4 really aren’t ever used for Google user syncing.




  • I think its easier and shorter to say what is the same between the two than different, but some things that are different:

    1. Filesystem (ex. Linux treats everything as a file, more flexibility in organization, more compatibility for differing systems, etc)
    2. Security Model (NTFS vs UNIX, selinux, ACLs, etc)
    3. File Execution (File extensions don’t really matter in Linux - based on file permission not extension, ELF vs PE, etc)
    4. Kernel (Monolithic vs Hybrid kernel systems - Windows hands off to HAL vs the Linux kernel doing core functions)
    5. System Calls (Windows use Win32/NT APIs, Linux uses POSIX-compliant)

    Performance is dependent on use case, but in general:

    1. Linux uses fewer system resources
    2. Linux has faster boot time
    3. Linux has better CPU/disk throughput
    4. Windows has better gaming driver support
    5. Linux has higher stability/control (hence why its the defacto server OS)

    If we stripped all ms’s junk out and made windows open source, would we still prefer linux?

    In what context? For gaming maybe, but that’s one single use. There is more to computers than video games, at least for the majority of Linux users. I wouldn’t trust Windows on any server I run.