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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • One notable software business professional interviewed by RBC thought that the West’s decision would “adversely affect the life of the developer community, mutual trust within it, and therefore the quality of the product.”

    It was Russia and other autocracies etc. that diminished the trust by actually financing developers for multiple years to first earn trust and finally introduce backdoors into open source software, as demonstrated by the XZ utils backdoor.

    In open source projects, maintainers need to have some initial trust into each contributor, and let this trust naturally grow with time and contributions. They cannot perform intensive background checks on everyone before accepting a patch.

    While it is easier to uncover backdoors in open source software, there is no good way to defend and prevent against this kind of attack in this type of development process. All open source projects can do is trying to take away some trust from people within higher risk groups. This of course might lead to discrimination.





  • Which other trustworthy search engines are there? And I don’t mean some different frontend or a meta search engine like ddg, sp, kagi, searx(ng), etc… that mostly just use googles, bings or even yandex and beidu results?

    Ages ago I configured and hosted yacy for myself, but that was a different time… Are there any real alternatives? With mayor internet companies like cloudflare, social media sites and many others restricting the access to the net and information, searching becomes more and more impossible if you aren’t a huge corporation…


  • Together with secure boot and your own signing keys, it could be a good way to en/decrypt the a dm-verity secured read-only rootfs. But for the home partition I would probably still want to enter my own decryption key, maybe via systemd-homed. From there you can update the kernel/initramfs and read-only rootfs image and sign them for the next boot.

    This is complicated to set up. Otherwise maybe use TPM as a 2FA, so you still have to enter a pin?



  • The only way I ever used passkeys is with bitwarden, and there you are sharing them between all bitwarden clients.

    From my very limited experience, pass key allows to login faster and more reliable compared to letting bitwarden enter passwords and 2fa keys into the forms, but I still have the password and 2fa key stored in bitwarden as a backup in case passkey breaks.

    To me, hardware tokens or passkeys are not there to replace passwords, but to offer a faster and more convenient login alternative. I do not want to rely on specific hardware (hardware token, mobile phone, etc.), because those can get stolen or lost.






  • cmhe@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhy is UI design backsliding?
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    2 months ago

    Yes they are, UX designers are not asked to make more efficient or usable designs, they are asked to make designs that “look good” in marketing, support ad integration, hook people into others services provided by that same company, make it more difficult to incorporate with workflows that include third-party applications, etc.

    This is deliberate UX design, which is part of the enshittification process.


  • cmhe@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhy is UI design backsliding?
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    2 months ago

    People spend lots of money to buy big screens, only for apps/websites to use a fraction of it.

    I cannot control how every application or website I have to use looks, but where I can, I try to find solutions.

    When I am occasionally on reddit, I use old.reddit. I use addons for youtube, to remove unecessary stuff, or open videos directly in mpv.

    I use reader mode to make many sites easier to navigate.

    Mastodon and Lemmy have a much better design than Twitter or new Reddit.

    On the one windows machine I still have, I use the classic shell, to replace the start menu with something more usable.

    I use Libreoffice, and many other Software with sane functional UI.

    I don’t want to use old software, because the older software gets, the more hostile the environment becomes for it.

    A lot of UI decisions on the Internet seem driven by the need to create empty spaces to put advertising into, and with adblocker it looks just bad.





  • cmhe@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlRecommend me a scripting language
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    3 months ago

    What about Lua/Luajit?

    In most scripting languages you have the interpreter binary and the (standard) libraries as separate files. But creating self-extracting executables, that clean up after themselves can easily be done by wrapping them in a shell script.

    IMO, if low dependencies and small size is really important, you could also just write your script in a low level compiled language (C, Rust, Zig, …), link it statically (e.g. with musl) and execute that.


  • E2E is just one part of the puzzle, you got to have a open source P2P or federated architecture as well, otherwise you have to trust a nebulous company or person intrinsically. People change and companies can be bought, but you will be stuck with their platform in order to contact your acquaintances, and changing that means loosing your contacts.

    That is why the DMA is important. But you will be even better off just directly choosing a chat platform, where the users are in control.


  • Yeah, the whole article is a bit fishy:

    In addition to generating clean electricity, the new ITO-silver window coating creates a cooling effect by allowing only the visible part of the light spectrum to pass inside. Other parts of the spectrum are reflected outside.

    So how would a room actively cool down, when you let only the visible light spectrum inside? Sure it might not get as hot as if you let all light inside, but it will also not get colder.