Fun fact: While mudita is Pali for “vicarious joy”, it’s also Spanish for “little mute girl”.

If your kids’ school laptops are surveilled, they’re surveilled by someone. Let’s call that someone Joe. Joe is a person who took a low-paying job that lets him surveil your kids. Joe likes his job, because he gets to surveil your kids. He gets to turn on the camera and look in your kids’ room. He gets to read the chat messages your kids send to their classmates.

Your kids would be better off without Joe in their lives. Joe is not a source of security. Joe is not protecting your kids; Joe is a threat to them.

“A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly ‘secure’ messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad,” Durov wrote on his own Telegram channel.

In fact, the folks running Signal — notably Moxie Marlinspike and Meredith Whittaker — have a long history of effective security & privacy activism. Whittaker was one of the organizers of the Google Walkouts, one of the more effective pieces of tech worker activism in recent history. And Moxie has bumped heads with the US intelligence community more than once, and famously with the Saudis too.

Regulating a money scam that uses art as a token isn’t regulating art, it’s regulating money scams.

Suing your former customers, now there’s a way to make people want to do business with you!

Once again, copyright maximalists fail to understand the medium they profit from, and propose to destroy it.

The display of hypertext always involves the active participation of both clients and servers. It has never been dictated solely by document authors. A given hypertext document (e.g. a web page) may involve resources drawn from many servers, including ones not under the control of the document’s author. In addition, client behavior may vary from that expected by the document’s author; in matters as minor as the selection of font size, or as major as whether to display images or execute script code. This separation of control is a fundamental feature of the medium, and gives rise to many of the medium’s strengths: for instance, the development of servers, clients, and documents may advance semi-independently, serving different interests.

Users may choose clients that they believe will better serve their needs. In many cases, users have chosen clients that take steps to mitigate the power of advertisers to control the medium: see e.g. the adoption of pop-up blocking (pioneered in Netscape plug-ins and minority browsers like iCab and Opera) and the later adoption of anti-malware technology such as Google Safe Browsing by Firefox and Opera as well as Google’s own Chrome. These choices have strengthened the medium, making it more usable and thus more popular: imagine how unpleasant the web would be today without the pop-up blocking developed 20+ years ago.

I quit software but I still grow beans!

If you’re looking for commercial games on Linux, Steam has pretty much solved this with the “Steam Play” compatibility feature, which uses a customized version of WINE to run Windows games. For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 runs perfectly. It should work anywhere Steam does.

https://sign.dropbox.com/blog/a-recent-security-incident-involving-dropbox-sign

Here’s the actual security advisory, which contains much more information than the fluff article about it.

Ubuntu on Desktop I can understand.

Not anymore. A whole extra, unneeded, proprietary, locked-in package system. Ads in the default install.

There’s Mint, Pop!, and plenty of other options that actually respect the user.

People pay for this?

Cutting someone’s brake lines has been a means of assassination for a while. What’s new here is that it could potentially be done remotely, e.g. an attacker in Bucharest targeting a victim in Seattle on behalf of a payer in Moscow.

Other way around. Unsupervised OTA updates are dangerous.

First: A car is a piece of safety-critical equipment. It has a skilled operator who has familiarized themselves with its operation. Any change to its operation, without the operator being aware that a change was made, puts the operator and other people at risk. If the operator takes the car into the shop for a documented recall, they know that something is being changed. An unsupervised OTA update can (and will) alter the behavior of safety-critical equipment without the operator’s knowledge.

Second: Any facility for OTA updates is an attack vector. If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer. Because the car is safety-critical equipment — unlike your phone, it can kill people — it is unreasonable to expose it to these attacks.

Driving is literally the most deadly thing that most people do every day. It is unreasonable to make driving even more dangerous by allowing car manufacturers — or attackers — to change the behavior of cars without the operator being fully aware that a change is being made.

This is not a matter of “it’s my property, you need my consent” that can be whitewashed with a contract provision. This is a matter of life safety.

Remember SOAP? Remember XML-RPC? Remember CORBA?

Those were not very good.

This has been going on for over 25 years now.

The kind of people who go into business building censorship software turn out to quite often be the kind of people who think feminism is a hate group, atheism is a cult, birth control is a dangerous drug, evolutionary biology is political extremism, and therapists are child-molesters. As such, it is unsurprising that this software’s behavior has quite often reflected those views.

There’s also the problem of some religious conservatives not realizing that straight people exist.

According to conservative psychologists like Paul Cameron or James Dobson, gay sex is a huge “temptation” that people must learn to resist; they worry that it would be the downfall of society if more people chose to succumb to that temptation. They might blame that temptation on Satan directly, or on LGBT+ propagandists, or liberalism; but they very much seem to believe that anyone could choose to be gay.

Sorry, no, that’s not how straight people work.

If you experience gay sex as a strong temptation, you’re just not straight. That’s okay! Quite a lot of people are straight, and are just not interested in having gay sex. If all the people who are “tempted” to have gay sex went and did so, there would still be lots of straight people left having lots of straight sex.

The odd part is that these conservative psychologists then teach this doctrine of “gay sex is a strong temptation for everyone” to an audience composed of mostly straight people.

If you threaten violence to people for calling you a fascist … you might be a fascist.

Obviously, trivially, blatantly false, because the AI safety people have been at it since long before there was anything to market. Back then, the bullshit criticism was “AI will never be able to understand language or interpret pictures; what harm could it possibly ever do?”

Fortunately, they also killed the mindbogglingly stupid idea of forcibly hiding https:// in the address bar. (It may be off by default, but you can turn it on.)

Also, TCP/IP requires that the server receive your IP address (or that of a proxy, VPN endpoint, etc.) so that it can send the response back. Opening a new browser window doesn’t change that.