* Posts by 桜沢墨

31 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Aug 2022

Guess the most common password. Hint: We just told you

桜沢墨

Re: How to avoid getting hacked...

Er, that LEAKS your passwords.

桜沢墨

How to avoid getting hacked...

Don't use a password manager that knows what your passwords are? I wouldn't touch a proprietary password manager like Nordpass with a 20 foot pole.

Maybe they got their data from somewhere else but seriously, don't proprietary software for some of the most sensitive material on your computer.

GitHub's Copilot flies into its first open source copyright lawsuit

桜沢墨

With copyright, less is more

While the kneejerk reaction might be to find something in copyright laws to hit microsoft with, you have to remember that this could have consequences that are larger than copilot. If microsoft actually gets hit with something and we have a new precedent or law for copyright, it could end up backfiring on the little guy later. While trying to 'regulate' microsoft, you end up putting down more regulation that gets in the way of everyone else.

It almost seems this way for all of copyright, really. While it might be nice that people can't 'steal' your ideas from you, you've ended up causing a torrent of problems.

Feel Luckey, punk? Oculus designer builds VR murder headset

桜沢墨

Re: That idot is a national embarassment

I don't know about the man's VR business ventures, but calling them a 'dark turn for the world' is very silly. VR not taking off isn't a disaster. In fact, we've been warned by facebook that it's probably better it doesn't take off. If it got more popular, then the metaverse might actually work, throwing us further into our tech dystopia. Making a vr headset that kills you, like in SAO, will NOT throw us further in. It's clearly a joke, and if it actually does get produced and sold (we're in the realm of fiction now), assuming that the headset is even real, then who's fault is it if you actually buy it and use it.

桜沢墨

Re: The metaverse - it's literally mind-blowing!

To be fair the high ups in the tech world ARE a bunch of creepy psychopaths. A lot of them have been willing to crush the right to privacy to improve business. As for this man, he's just playing a joke.

桜沢墨

Re: UP or DOWN?

looking up. Aincrad is a castle floating in the sky. The 100th floor is the highest one.

桜沢墨

Re: In the interests of quality control

He says in his blog post that he "doesn't have the balls to test it"

Why I love my Chromebook: Reason 1, it's a Linux desktop

桜沢墨

Re: Linux isn't the point at all

My bad, typed this one out quickly since I had to go somewhere. There are a lot of reasons to use linux distros and such, but my biggest concern about using chromeos is the tracking that google will impose on you, so I leapt to saying that linux, which could have been referring to the kernel or the whole system we call linux, is just for privacy. I still say that I chromebooks because I don't like chromeos, and if you want a cheap laptop, there are better options. That should have been the main topic of my comment, instead of what I said.

桜沢墨

Re: Linux has problems for code development

Not sure why you're complaining about having an up to date system, but the other issue is either a VScode issue (of which there are many), or it's an issue with whatever window manager that you're using, which I find unlikely. Either way, it doesn't sound like you spent time to actually figure out the issue, or a fix for it without just reverting back. Considering the fact that I'm a heavy linux user who mods his system all the time and I very rarely come across problems, I will assume that you didn't spend very long to actually try and solve your issue, and instead assumed that because your kernel is linux then it somehow caused an issue. If that's what you did, then yes, a linux distro isn't meant for you, because you might have to actually look up the issue or try to fix it yourself.

桜沢墨

Linux isn't the point at all

The only reason that people use linux is because it allows them to run an operating system that isn't tracking them, that lets them install what they want, remove what they want, and have (almost) no proprietary software. Running linux means nothing if all of those rights aren't respected. Even chromiumos users are still leaking a huge amount of data to google. The operating system also breaks POSIX, meaning that without having to enable special compatibility, you can't even run and develop linux programs. Something that even windows can do. Google would also have you believe that linux is a mode on their operating system apparently, based off that article sent about "running linux." And the hardware itself? Cheap hardware is available elsewhere, and there are still tons of used thinkpads that not only are more repairable, will last longer, and let you run something other than windows, and can even have a librebooted bios. Not to mention the things won't even break in the first place unless they get struck by lightning.

Twitter's most valuable users are ghosting the platform

桜沢墨

Tell you what

The water is fine outside of social media! It's not so much the "layout" or how twitter spams you, or whatever. It's that it's designed to get you hooked to something that you will ultimately gain nothing from. Even worse, they have the ability to control what you see, so that they can push your mind in whatever direction they want, just like FB, just like Instagram, just like Reddit, just like Tik Tok...

桜沢墨

Re: It’s toxic and it got nasty during the pandemic

I don't think twitter was ever "nice in the early days," it just gave you a certain amount of time to get attached to the platform until it started to throw all the garbage at you.

桜沢墨

There's an open sourced twitter proxy called nitter that makes rss feeds for accounts and maybe topics. You could just plug the accounts you follow into your reader and when you refresh it you can see all the new posts they've made.

Lash#Cat9: A radical new Linux UI for keyboard warriors

桜沢墨

Looking further into it, I may have been mistaken in the 'integration with window managers' part. If so, my mistake. If by integrate you just meant sends a signal to the server to tile a window or something, then afaik, that should be fine.

桜沢墨

Interesting project, needs a good demonstration

As someone who isn't really afraid to get tangled in software that I know will be useful, even if it takes time to learn, I can't reject this project like many others do. I learned how to use vim, dwm, i3, st, and many other pieces of software that take time or effort to get used to, or to configure. All of that effort wasn't wasted; I still use dwm, vim, and st, and I am more productive when using my computer because of it. I understand that it's hard to explain something that would be better explained visually, but the main reason that more people won't check this out is because they aren't given a good reason to. If your project is very useful, then bring up some examples of tasks that you do that others usually struggle with, or mention how you can do what people already do, but faster or more clearly. If that isn't well explained then it will be hard to get people to use your project.

That said, the only complaint I would say is that I don't think it should integrate with window managers. From what I've seen, the window manager features are things that people who would be using this project would already have, like the tiling from tiling window managers. From the video I saw, the only other thing that I would suggest is that you add or allow the adding of hotkeys, if they aren't already there. It would speed things up a lot.

That's all from me, I hope I had some good feedback to offer. Happy programming!

桜沢墨

This is a ridiculous response to an article that talks about a full piece of software. Instead of talking about multiplexing, or the shortcuts that it introduces, or talking about integration with the window manager, which is what I would really argue against, you go on a long rant about a feature that you can almost certainly turn off. It's foolish to think that the way features will be offered in this application will somehow end up like outlook! If you have qualms with the program, then mention that you don't like feature A, but would like to see more of B, or just don't say anything at all because unless for some reason auto completion isn't toggleable, then there's no real reason to get mad over it like this.

Mask gizmo wirelessly transmits data on wearer's health

桜沢墨

1984

Verbal activity? Are you insane? You won't have much to report because if you actually consent to wearing a tracking device that spies on your temperature, breathing patterns, and how humid your breath is, then you're not the kind of person that people want to be around. Say nothing about the second to last quote where they say something very vague about human behavior tied to mask wearing.

Amid losses, Uber driven to become advertising network

桜沢墨

Re: Is nowhere safe?

I bet if you put on the glasses from "they live," and took a look at a grammarly ad, it would have some plain text saying "Install our keylogger so we can harvest information."

India to lead drive for global crypto regulations to bust money laundering

桜沢墨

Regulate it?

They talk as if it's so easy to regulate something that is meant to be uncontrollable by a single party. How do they plan to regulate coins like monero that don't allow you to see how much money goes to someone, who that someone is, and who is giving the money in the first place?

How GitHub Copilot could steer Microsoft into a copyright storm

桜沢墨

Wouldn't copyright be the issue?

What I see people the most concerned about is that copilot will generate code and copyright it all, even if it was based off of open sourced code. Let's take this to a but more of an extreme. What if I want to write novels, and I publish one that I made with only a little bit of inspiration from others. Is it really fair for someone else to sue me because their book is close enough to mine? Does this mean that in order to write a book I have to check every book ever written to find out if I'm infringing on someone's 'intellectual property'? Obviously this is insane, and it also means that as a writer you would have to write books that fall just far enough from every copyrighted book. I'm wondering why the same isn't thought of software. What if I copyrighted a basic idea like a linked list? Even if someone else thinks of the idea without ever hearing about it, is it really a good system to let them take my code down, and force me to use a different data structure? I believe adobe has copyrighted some of the equations that their photo editing software uses, which is part of why people haven't been able to make a good adobe clone. Is it actually just to copyright MATH? What if I took away your 'rights' to the quadratic equation? It would be pretty horrible if I were to stop all advancements in that field of math because I declared some ideas to be exclusively mine.

This all seems to be a result of the ridiculous idea that the first person to put a license on their idea is the only person who is allowed to have it. If copyright was enforced to a greater degree then our world would be a bland, bland place. You can't seriously tell me that one murder mystery author hasn't had the exact same idea as another one.

Anyways, it's not like people will stop writing books, music, mathematical equations, and code if intellectual property didn't exist. There have been organizations writing free software for a while now, and a lot of you have whole operating systems that are built off of it, like I do. People will still pay writers if they want books and stories, pay musicians to write for them, pay them to perform, and people have been doing math for thousands of years. The world will be just fine, nay, better without constraints on the very arts that copyright law allegedly supports.

YouTube loves recommending conservative vids regardless of your beliefs

桜沢墨

Don't get political, Youtube is the real enemy

I doubt the accuracy of this study for a few vague terms (which might be better defined outside this article) and a small sample size considering that billions use youtube. A lot of reg users like to get political and might argue over this article, but no matter whether you think that youtube is veering users left or right, intentionally or not, the real issue is that people are getting veered at all. I wouldn't put it on youtube to not keep users hooked onto their platform, but I would blame the users for letting Youtube steer them wherever they want. Be smart about your use of Youtube! You know what will and won't be a waste of your time, and it's your job to hold yourself to not get sucked into watching videos for hours. Of course Youtube and Google are still evil for sucking so much data from you that they know what buttons to push to make you do what they want, but ultimately the decision to watch Youtube should still be yours.

Children should have separate sections in social media sites, says UK coroner

桜沢墨

Re: As an adult….

As someone who has used discord, I can tell you firsthand that it is not like the local playground. A closer example would be if your kid who hangs out at the local playground accidentally stumbled into the corner of the high school where the theatre kids hang out. On discord there are a ton of fetish groups, and all the people who visit those leak out into every corner of every other group. It's also easy to attached to the people there, as most social media wants you to do. I had to pull myself away from my 'digital friends' because I was spending much more time with them than with real people. With lots of impressionable kids joining the platform since it's marketed toward gamers, you have many users who aren't prepared to handle what they read, like the common venting/sad channels where people will commonly talk about how they've wanted to kill themselves, or hate themselves, or their boyfriend pressures them to have sex when they don't want to, etc. In the terms of services you have to be 13 to enter, but there are tons of users who break that rule, and even when they abide by it, there are seldom barriers to stop them from reading heavy talk mentioned before.

Artist formerly known as Kanye reveals Parler trick: Buying the far-right haven

桜沢墨

It's going to be as bad as twitter

Meaning, it's going to be as bad as the platform owners want it to be. As far as I can see, Parler isn't open sourced, preferably under agpl, so we can't actually see if the network is censoring anything more or less than twitter. While I won't discard Kanye's claim that twitter is a place of censorship, it doesn't stand very well when they choose to use a closed source platform over something like mastodon, which I believe Trump's truthsocial uses. Of course you can still manually moderate posts to only allow those with opinions you want, but it helps, and there might be a way to show who gets banned and for what reason, or for what reason a post gets taken down which could easily let users know if the network is really fair or not.

If you want a REAL solution however, I would recommend going outside. Touching grass. Everyone has much better things to do than browsing twitter or something like it. Go for a walk with your friends, or go read something at the library. Start a business or something, but don't waste your time on twitter.

Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop

桜沢墨

Re: the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build now incorporates your credit card information into Windows

Isn't cryptocurrency a FOSS federated transaction system? It's obviously not perfect, since things like proof of work are not ideal, but I can't really imagine how a federated as in one person can host their own server for transactions would work. It seems like it would have either too much centralization or too much fragmentation for it to be that useful. If that's what you meant by micropayment system anyways.

Anyways, I totally agree with you about pretty much everything else that you said. It's very sad that it's the new normal. I suppose even with people, companies are still embracing, extending, and extiguishing.

桜沢墨

The ideal linux desktop will never happen, I think we all understand that. There's no non-evil corporation that's even close to fighting with microsoft, and google, and apple, and there never will be. Since free software operating systems make it hard to be evil, it's incredibly hard to try and break compatability to force people into using your software, like apple, microsoft, and google do all the time.

I think the real reason why people are starting to use chromeos is because it doesn't require them to learn anything, and is being preinstalled in cheap computers. They don't use it because it's better, as this article would have you believe, but it just doesn't require them to think. In some ways, it might actually be better, but that's not why they use it. People have been conditioned into accepting having to install the new version of windows, and make a microsoft account, suffering through all the bugs and slowness, and buying a new computer when windows slows things down, but that's been happening for years, and until now, with chromeos being preinstalled, everybody has kept using windows, even if they would do better on a good linux OS.

The truth is that your average person is just fine with clicking large windows telling them to update, pay to use the full version, sign into their google account, run some awful antivirus, because they don't want to learn how to use anything better. If you put your average person in front a linux installation with lots of clicky buttons that works how they're used to, if anything that they want isn't already there then they won't bother to look up how to install packages on X distro, they're going to call tech support to install windows, where you download the first executable that comes up on a google search, or it's going to all be there already, like with the google and apple suite.

This is sort of why I'm opposed to people coming up with the latest clicky button applications that are supposed to make ex windows users happy because they look and work the same. Unless you have the funding to compete with google, apple, and microsoft, you're going to get nowhere. The only people who use linux or will switch to it are people who are willing to learn, and those people would probably much rather prefer using their package manager on the command line, or using the find command to look for types of files then have a gnome gui with 4 total options to toggle because it tries to emulate windows. Not totally against clicky buttons but please don't try and make linux distros closer to windows.

Many people would call this "linux elitism," but frankly, if you aren't willing to learn anything then you'd actually just do better to stick to windows, chromeos, or macos in the first place. That way you're less likely to have to learn, even if you have to deal with annoying pop ups, long updates, and slow spyware.

Side ranting, if the linux desktop means that people are using android phones and chrome os, then I would rather never see it happen, ever. It's criminal that schools across the US are requiring the use of chromebooks and google accounts for all students.

China spins up giant battery built with US-patented tech

桜沢墨

Re: Torn

I'm not sure what you mean. I thought that a patent was basically an official document saying "you cannot have this idea" under certain conditions, not that it has to be secret. A secret patent would be even more evil than a regular one. Instead of "you cannot use this idea, even if you came up with it too," it's "I hope you don't come across this unknown idea, because then we can sue you."

Is it time to retire C and C++ for Rust in new programs?

桜沢墨

I think it's a bit irresponsible to look at memory issues with programs and assume that the one solution is to use a 'memory safe' language. There are many problems that could cause these issues to show up more frequently, such as having a very complex program, or trying to get a job done quickly, meaning there are now other solutions, like not making a stupid complicated program, and not rushing to patch up other issues in the program.

I also think that the data being presented is unfair. Microsoft and Google are pretty notorious for writing bad code. The chromium browser is probably one of the top 5 most complicated programs that exists, so it's insane to say it speaks for all c,c++ code.

I personally use a lot of suckless.org software, the majority of which is written in C, and the programs are incredibly reliable, despite being written in an "unsafe" language. Is it really so much of a language issue if these exceptions exist.

Of course I'm not against using higher level languages. Some languages are better suited for some jobs than others, and can make programs less of a pain for the devs and more stable for the users. Still, Rust is not the only language to have built in safety. Just take a look at Go. Go is fast, has garbage collection, type safety, forces the programmer to use good habits like error handling, has package and modules system for library usage, and is developed by great programmers, who even worked on unix and plan 9. For microcontrollers, there's tinygo.

It's just obnoxious seeing all these rust evangelists act as if there's no other solution to the problems that rust solves, and that rust itself doesn't have problems.

Google, YouTube ban election trolls ahead of US midterms

桜沢墨

Because Google isn't evil

This looks like an awful justification for allowing social media companies to grab a stronger hold on american politics. Doesn't anyone see the massive issue with Google, Facebook, Twitter, whoever else saying that they will remove all material that they deem 'misinformation'? All these companies have repeatedly lied about what they've done and they've crushed our right to privacy, but for some reason it's viewed as a positive thing for them to control information surrounding the election? Reg readers should know better. This just means that these companies can and will greatly affect the outcome of the next election.

Why bother with warrants when cops can buy location data for under $10k?

桜沢墨

Re: So.....if you want to avoid Fog, the NSA, GCHQ.....and all the other snoops....

This seems like way too much work to achieve privacy on a phone, and for minimal phone functionality. Remember if you make calls or text, those are unencrypted, and you don't really have a way of verifying that your phone is actually off when it's off (this seems absurd, but look into it!). You also wouldn't really be able to stay in touch with people anyways, since your number changes every couple of months. Forget all about it if you have an android version that came from the manufacturer, because you're going to be tracked no matter what settings you toggle, and you can't even change the OS because you don't have root access to your own device! If I were you, I would just not use a cell phone at all, which would be easier and even more private.

For those now wondering how they're supposed to have a private phone, look towards installing custom android roms, or using linux phones (the one I have my eye on is the pinephone). From there, look into smaller details such as MAC address randomization. Even with a custom rom or linux phone, cell towers can still triangulate your location, but to get around this, keep mobile data off whenever possible and maybe wrap it in foil to make sure no signals from the hardware itself are trying to talk to the towers. Pinephone users have this one down because they have hardware kill switches. Consider watching Luke Smith's video talking about custom roms here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PVvcJtwDm4

PanWriter: Cross-platform writing tool runs on anything and outputs to anything

桜沢墨

Something else that is nice is suckless's 'sent' tool, which you can think of as being latex but extremely simple. Even the code is simple, at around 1000 lines. I've tested it out a bit, and it makes good presentations. All you need is a text editor!

Dutch authorities arrest 29-year-old dev with suspected ties to Tornado Cash

桜沢墨

Blatant double standard from reg users

I don't understand the double standard that I see commonly on the reg with privacy and decentralization when it comes to cryptocurrency. There are lots of comments and articles giving praise to decentralized or federated software, and there is an even bigger amount of concern towards privacy, with many upset about governments trying to regulate or shut down e2ee (among other things). For some reason, whenever this concern about privacy and centralization reaches cryptocurrency, most reg users call it money laundering. Only with crypto do they claim that if someone has something to hide, then they must be up to no good. With tor and e2ee, you can get up to arguably more nefarious things, but I see very few people who are arguing strongly against them.

Many also call crypto a fool's stock market, but the truth is that those who see it as a stock market in the first place are being foolish, because the purpose of crypto was never to create a stock market, the purpose is to create open sourced, decentralized, and more recently, private currency (like monero).

I'm not sure why fans of decentralized, open source, and privacy enhancing software are so quick to say 'good. they deserved it.' when someone (who we don't know much about) gets arrested for working on a project to try and patch in privacy to a popular currency.