

cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
i don’t usually cross-post my comments but I think this one from a cross-post of this meme in programmerhumor is worth sharing here:
The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).
The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:
I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey
(there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog…)
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They have to know who the message needs to go to, granted. But they don’t have to know who the message comes from, hence why the sealed sender technique works. The recipient verifies the message via the keys that are exchanged if they have been communicating with that correspondent before or else it is a new message request.
So I don’t see how they can build social graphs if they don’t know who the sender if all messages are, they can only plot recipients which is not enough.
You need to identify yourself to receive your messages, and you send and receive messages from the same IP address, and there are typically not many if any other Signal users sharing the same IP address. So, the cryptography of “sealed sender” is just for show - the metadata privacy remains dependent on them keeping their promise not to correlate your receiving identity with the identities of the people you’re sending to. If you assume that they’ll keep that promise, then the sealed sender cryptography provides no benefit; if they don’t keep the promise, sealed sender doesn’t really help. They outsource the keeping of their promises to Amazon, btw (a major intelligence contractor).
Just in case sealed sender was actually making it inconvenient for the server to know who is talking to who… Signal silently falls back to “unsealed sender” messages if server returns 401 when trying to send “sealed sender” messages, which the server actually does sometimes. As the current lead dev of Signal-for-Android explains: “Sealed sender is not a guarantee, but rather a best-effort sort of thing” so “I don’t think notifying the user of a unsealed send fallback is necessary”.
Given the above, don’t you think the fact that they’ve actually gone to the trouble of building sealed sender at all, which causes many people to espouse the belief you just did (that their cryptographic design renders them incapable of learning the social graph, not to mention learning which edges in the graph are most active, and when) puts them rather squarely in doth protest too much territory? 🤔
there is a thread about the moderation of this thread here.
Thanks for editing, but I deleted your comment anyway because it was still just recommending something that is not open source.
fyi there is a thread here discussing the moderation of this thread.
i bet you’re going to love to hate this wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monochrome_painting 😂
because it’s stupid.
you were bamboozled
presumably you find value in some things that some other people think are stupid too; it’s OK
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The good news is that (sometime last year, long after you posted this) futo finally agreed to stop calling their license “open source”; unfortunately there are still some vocal fans of theirs arguing in various forums that it is.
Futo is not open source, as they (now, finally) even admit themselves: https://www.futo.org/about/futo-statement-on-opensource/
See also https://opensource.org/osd and https://opensource.org/authority and compare it to Futo’s licenses; there are (at least) three reasons it doesn’t qualify, can you spot them all? (rhetorical question; don’t @ me)
I am locking this thread to avoid needing to remove misinformation and advocacy from Futo fans who think they should be allowed to redefine a term which there has been consensus about the definition of since before they were born.
even if it’s from its own repository, it is still on F-droid
There is nothing to stop anyone from running their own f-droid repo and distributing non-free software through it, which is what futo is doing.
seems open source enough
This is the definition. Compare it with Futo’s license; it fails to meet both the Open Source Definition and Free Software Definition in several ways. After insisting they could redefine the term for a while (despite the definition’s wide acceptance) and inspiring some of their very vocal fans to promulgate their dishonest argument on their behalf, Futo themselves finally came around and agreed to stop calling their software open source.
you just can’t understand what open-source means
FYI, nearly everyone (including Futo themselves), except for some Futo fans like yourself who haven’t gotten the memo, agrees that this is the definition of “open source” (and Futo’s license obviously does not qualify).
Other comments in this thread suggesting that Futo keyboard is open source have been deleted as offtopic.
usaid.gov
is serving a redirect to www.usaid.gov
which currently does not resolve.
It looks huge on a Mercator Projection map even though it isn’t that large.
In the Mercator projection it appears to have about the same area as Africa, while in reality it is about a 14th of it. But, I wouldn’t say that “isn’t that large”: if Greenland was independent it would be (and Denmark is, because of it) the 12th largest country in the world.
I used that link to look up the source. It wasn’t here so I posted it here. I do the same with archive links.
Do you post MBFC links on articles from outlets they classify as “unbiased” too, or just the “biased” ones?
As others have pointed out many times before, the entirely flawed premise behind MBFC is that centrism correlates with credibility and/or factualness.
I didn’t report this and don’t have a problem with it.
cool 👍
In general, the fact that they don’t disclose the country they operate out of is problematic
Who doesn’t disclose where People Dispatch operates out of? MBFC? Yeah, they don’t, because they’re lazy hacks who’s job it is to impugn the reputation of anyone doing any journalism that isn’t in service of the status quo.
since we can’t know if they’re operating from a place where telling the truth is illegal.
A couple minutes of research shows that (although their contributors are all over the world) their legal entity People’s Dispatch Ltd. is registered in New York. So, the way things are headed, I guess actually you might be on to something here soon 😬
Edit: I should also say that it’s important they’ve never failed a fact check. I don’t really care about them having editorial bias as long as we know what it is.
The notion that any outlet could have no bias in what they decide is and isn’t worthy of reporting on, especially the people MBFC says are unbiased, is ridiculous. And it’s usually not difficult to see what an outlet’s bias is without relying on a 3rd party using their own bias to classify someone else’s.
Wow, a lot of people emotionally disagree with that quote. You can tell because 30+ down voted and you maybe see 1 of them commenting to take a stance.
Cowards who are afraid of reality deserve no respect.
Maybe… it got all those downvotes because it was a ridiculous thing to post in reply to an article which is simply reporting facts without any bias whatsoever, and posting that comment here in this context appears to be an attempt at discrediting Petro (who is, in fact… a leftist 😱 …watch out) in response to his standing up to to Trump?
And maybe all those other people downvoting it didn’t bother replying because I had already posted my reply (which adequately pointed out the absurdity of it) right after the comment was posted? 🤔