cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
StartPage/StartMail is owned by an adtech company who’s website boasts that they “develop & grow our suite of privacy-focused products, and deliver high-intent customers to our advertising partners” 🤔
They have a whitepaper which actually does a good job explaining how end-to-end encryption in a web browser (as Tuta, Protonmail, and others do) can be circumvented by a malicious server:
The malleability of the JavaScript runtime environment means that auditing the future security of a piece of JavaScript code is impossible: The server providing the JavaScript could easily place a backdoor in the code, or the code could be modified at runtime through another script. This requires users to place the same measure of trust in the server providing the JavaScript as they would need to do with server-side handling of cryptography.
However (i am not making this up!) they hilariously use this analysis to justify having implemented server-side OpenPGP instead 🤡
Could anybody in short explain, what I have to understand from “it’s tagged”?
Git is the most popular version control system, which lets developers track changes to software source code. A “tag” applies a name (or version number) to a specific point in the history.
The commit shows that there was a longer with 3.0.0 tag before and now its just 3.0.0
The link goes to a commit which is tagged GIMP_3_0_0
, and shows the change made in this commit. This commit happens to change the version
line in a file called meson.build
- this file configures Meson, which is used to build GIMP. The version is being changed from 3.0.0-RC3+git
to 3.0.0
. The string “RC3” in the previous version number is short for “release candidate 3”, and “git” here means that there were additional changes since “release candidate 3” was released.
What does that tell us? :D
So far the news and downloads pages still haven’t been updated, but the version being changed to 3.0.0
and this commit being tagged tells us that GIMP 3.0.0 is about to be released: official binaries and an announcement about it can be expected to appear very soon.
The tag means no more changes will be included in 3.0.0; if some show-stopping bug were discovered now, the version number would be incremented to 3.0.1 rather than to include a fix in 3.0.0. (Technically, a tag can be updated/replaced, but by convention it is not.)
The “VP Engineering for Ubuntu” being a NixOS user is hilarious and reminds me of the CEO of Ford saying he’s been driving a Xiaomi EV “for six months now and I don’t want to give it up”.
The fact remains this article is titled in a very clickbaity way
The link is to a youtube video, not an article, so apparently you resisted taking the bait… but aren’t letting your lack of a click prevent you from commenting :)
Tuta’s product is snake oil.
If you don’t care about their (nonstandard, incompatible, and snake oil) end-to-end encryption feature and just want a freemium email provider which (purports to) protect your privacy in other ways, the fact that their flagship feature is snake oil should still be a red flag.
Clickbait. The VP Engineering for Ubuntu made a post that he was looking into using the Rust utils for Ubuntu and has been daily driving them and encouraged others to try
It’s by no means certain this will be done.
Here is that post. It isn’t certain to happen, but he doesn’t only say that he is daily driving them. He says his goal is to make them the default in 25.10:
My immediate goal is to make uutils’ coreutils implementation the default in Ubuntu 25.10, and subsequently in our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, if the conditions are right.
yep. (see my other comment in this thread)
The three currently-maintained engines which (at their feature intersection) effectively define what “the web” is today are Mozilla’s Gecko, Apple’s WebKit, and Google’s Blink.
The latter two are both descended from KHTML, which came from the Konquerer browser which was first released as part of KDE 2.0 in 2000, and thus both are LGPL licensed.
After having their own proprietary engine for over two decades, Microsoft stopped developing it and switched to Google’s fork of Apple’s fork of KDE’s free software web engine.
Probably Windows will replace its kernel with Linux eventually too, for better or worse :)
How else are Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi and co getting away with building proprietary layers on top of a copyleft dependency?
They’re allowed to because the LGPL (unlike the normal GPL) is a weak copyleft license.
BSD tells me the team probably wants Ladybird to become not just a standalone browser but also a new competing base for others to build a browser on top of
it’s about the ladybird browser. i edited my comment to add details.
with mandatory male pronouns for users in the documentation.
(and no politics allowed!)
this issue was resolved eventually by another dev; afaik the lead dev stopped commenting on it after he closed a PR and said people who wanted to remove the docs’ implied assumption of users’ maleness were “advertising personal politics”.
edit: ok, i went and checked, here are the details:
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 is the first PR he closed in 2021 saying “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648 is the PR where it was eventually fixed, after it was publicized in july 2024
here https://xcancel.com/awesomekling/status/1808294414101467564 the day after the fix was merged, he sort-of almost apologized, while also doubling-down on his defense of his decision to reject the first PR 🤡
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_(web_browser) was later spun out of SerenityOS in to its own project
subtitles “fixed” in them without separate SRT file
can you turn them on and off? meaning, is there a text track embedded in the video file, or is the text actually rendered into each frame?
if the former, you can easily extract them into an SRT file (or another format) using ffmpeg: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/ExtractSubtitles
it was an unfortunate choice to make the video thumbnail include the headline the video refutes, without any indication that it is being refuted, given that presumably far more people will see the thumbnail than will watch the video 🤦
I haven’t read it yet but I’ve heard good things about The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It’s more about early history than modern history, though.
You can buy it here or download it from libgen.
what led you to recommend that? it appears to be closed-source abandonware (last updated in 2021) and has very negative reviews on google play.
I’d like u to read nineteen eighty four and then write an argument how the practice’s of big brother have been used to indoctrinate you.
I’d like you to read Isaac Asimov’s review of 1984, followed by Orwell’s review of Mein Kampf, and finally the Orwell’s list wikipedia article, and then to ponder what you yourself might have been indoctrinated by.
as i said, it “is about to be released”.
or, one could also say that the the 3.0.0 source code has been released, but the official binaries haven’t been yet :)
edit: i see https://flathub.org/apps/org.gimp.GIMP has 3.0.0 now, and from https://testing.gimp.org/downloads/ i see that https://download.gimp.org/gimp/v3.0/linux/GIMP-3.0.0-x86_64.AppImage is also there. presumably https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ will be updated very soon.