Posts by Mockup1974

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

Re: Counterpoint

Don't forget to adjust for your marginal tax rate. For example, if you're lucky enough to earn £100k your marginal tax rate is 62% so you need to ask for x/(1-62%) more to RTO :)

The bell tolls for TikTok as lifelines to avoid January 19 US ban vanish

The US should make a law to force Apple to allow "sideloading" on iPhones, and voila, you don't the App Store anymore.

Haiku Beta 5 / In tests it's (Fire)foxier / It pleases us well

Compared to some other "legacy OS" like RISC OS, ArcaOS or the various AmigaOS systems, this seems to be the most mature and usable alternative OS: https://eylenburg.github.io/os_comparison.htm

Supreme Court to hear TikTok's appeal against law that would force it to shut, or sell

I'm happy with a TikTok ban as long as they also ban Youtube, Instagram and so on. Otherwise it's just hypocritical.

Alpine Linux 3.21: Lean, mean, and LoongArch-ready

Is LoongArch actually becoming relevant? Can you even get it outside of China?

Re: *BIG* pro point

As long as Flatpaks work you can still get those apps to run

Binance accused of tax evasion by India's finance department

What's really needed is some proper and trustworthy decentralized exchanges. The likes of Bisq (Bitcoin) and Haveno (Monero), but more user-friendly. Ultimately you can't trust the centralized exchanges (CEX) not to run away with your money (like FTX) or randomly freeze your funds because sending them your passport and bank account statements isn't enough to "prove" that you're not a money-laundering criminal.

Also, I'm convinced that the popularity of CEX just fuel the whole "numbers go up" crowd of Bitcoin Maxis and memecoin idiots. It's a shame that crypto has shifted from "electronic peer-to-peer cash", based on revolutionary tech for the time, to brainless get-rich-quick greed.

Who had Pat Gelsinger retires from Intel on their bingo card?

AMD bros, we finally won...

FLTK hits 1.4, arrives speaking Wayland and with better HiDPI support

With GNOME, KDE Plasma, LXQt and soon COSMIC, do we we *really* still need all those Gtk3 desktops like Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, Budgie, Unity, Pantheon and so on? Whatever advantages they may have (Liam will mention Xfce's excellent vertical taskbar) those can surely by implemented in the aforementioned four desktops. (Well, maybe not in GNOME because they're stubborn.)

Bluesky too opaque about user figures for Euro watchdogs

I don't get the appeal of Bluesky

Neither does it have the relatively good free speech of X nor the decentralised and self-hostable tech of Mastodon.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GNU Image Manipulation Program 3.0 nearly here

Re: But

This is why we need JPEG XL support in web browsers.

Better lossless compression than PNG, AVIF and WEBP; better lossy compression than JPG, AVIF and WEBP; lossless conversion from existing PNGs and JPGs and back again as well.

Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?

Pointless

>One approach binds the key to a specific piece of hardware

No thank you, I don't want that.

>The second class of passkey implementation allows the credentials to be copied among multiple devices, typically using some sort of password manager

I'm already using a password manager to store my passwords and TOTP seeds. How will a passkey be useful?

Trump's pick to run the FCC has told us what he plans: TikTok ban, space broadband, and Section 230 reform

My opinion, which you all surely care for

Protect free speech: good

No net neutrality: bad

China, rural Internet in the US: dont care

Re: DEI changes

Removing DEI just means people have to be treated equally, rather than giving preferential treatment to certain groups because someone decided they are more "diverse" than others.

Mozilla's Firefox browser turns 20. Does it still matter?

The real dilemma is that Opera and Edge changed their engines from their own, homegrown ones, to Blink (Chrome's engine).

QNX 8 goes freeware – for non-commercial use

I really, really miss BlackBerry 10 (based on QNX and with a wonderful mobile UI)

Why we're still waiting for Canonical's immutable Ubuntu Core Desktop

At the same time, there's also a new immutable Arch-based distro called "KDE Linux" planned that might complement or replace KDE Neon.

And then there's Fedora Kinoite/Silverblue and OpenSUSE Kalpa/Aeon. It's exciting to see so many immutable distros. The big downside is the lack of Flatpak apps especially when it comes to system components. Snap is obviously better suited for this, e.g. if you want to run Virt-Manager this could be packaged as a Snap but not as a Flatpak.

Mozilla Foundation crumbles as third of staff cast off

Not really bad news if it means they actually focus on the products (Firefox, Thunderbird et al.) and not the "advocacy". The latter had some good research (like into car privacy) but a lot of it was just leftist, not tech-related "activism". Hopefully that's the part that goes away for good.

Bitwarden switches password manager and SDK to GPL3 after FOSS-iness drama

Current list of ways to circumvent the GPL:

- Tivoization (solved by GPL 3)

- Apps that are run on a server (solved by AGPL)

- Apps that cannot be compiled without a proprietary SDK (another example would be the OnlyOffice Android app)

- Separate contract that punishes you if you share the source code (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, where they can end your support contract and future updates)

- maybe you could count AI to some degree, such as Copilot spitting out GPL'd code

Vivaldi gives its browser a buffing, adds a dashboard

All I wanted was a continuation of Opera 12. But I think Floorp actually comes closer to that... configurable but not bloated.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

>Any mass-market proprietary software project this old is likely to contain lots of parts from other companies, if only so that it could interoperate. Cleaning up a codebase for release is a huge and difficult task, and if you're about to give the code away, that probably means it's not worth anything to you any more. So why spend good money on paying your staff for the time it takes to clean it up?

The unfortunate truth. It'd be great to get the code for e.g. the Presto (Opera) and EdgeHTML browser engines or OS/2 or AmigaOS, but it won't happen because of third-party code.

Anonymous Sudan isn't any more: Two alleged operators named, charged

>Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer

Interesting how they have almost the same name. Are they brothers with uncreative parents or are there only a dozen Arabic names and it's just a coincidence?

Thunderbird for Android is go – at least the beta is

Still no support for HTML signatures

>b-but you have to use plain text

It doesn't matter what the nerds say. In the business world, people have to use their corporate signatures with images and links. A plain text signature won't be enough.

Xfce 4.20 creeps toward Wayland support while Mint 22.1 polishes desktop routine

>The next version of Xfce, the oldest FOSS Unix desktop environment around

Actually that would be CDE, which has been FOSS for over a decade now and is ironically the desktop that early Xfce copied (as can be seen in the linked screenshots).

Epic judge orders Google to let rivals set up app stores

Re: "permit third-party Android app stores to access the Google Play Store's catalog"

Developers can opt out but I hope few do.

GNOME 47 brings back some customization options, but let's not go crazy

KDE is far superior to Gnome for an average user. This is mostly due to Gnome's poor design choices (lack of taskbar, useless top panel taking space, pop-ups locks to the parent window (cannot peek behind) etc.), consuming the user's productivity. This would not be an issue, if it wasn't for Gnome currently being the primary DE representing Linux for average users through Ubuntu and Fedora, and effectively pushing the users back to Windows/MacOS and consuming development resources from the actual competitive alternatives, such as KDE.

Looking at the Linux environment from an outside perspective as an ordinary user, trying to leave Windows/MacOS and break their dominance, the fragmentation and lack of leadership in the Linux desktop environment is the advantage of Windows/MacOS. KDE is currently the only reasonable option to effectively penetrate into larger user segments of the desktop market, and Gnome is holding it back. I hope the Ubuntu team one day decides to make KDE the front runner, and together with Valve and other sponsors, can finally focus their resources and iron out the last major gaps that would bring an end to the Windows/MacOS market share.

Apple quietly removed 60 more VPNs from Russian app store, researchers claim

Is the official Wireguard app still available? Or RethinkDNS? It might be slightly less convenient but it will work with all commercial VPN providers.

Telegram will now hand over IP addresses, phone numbers of suspects to cops

Telegram better roll out E2EE* and stop requiring phone numbers to sign up, if they don't want to be forced to collaborate with the glowies.

*it might be kind of useless for privacy for the big public chat groups that Telegram is known for, but at least Telegram itself would be able to say they don't have any data

Microsoft unveils Office LTSC 2024 for users that remain stubbornly offline

Re: OnlyOffice

OnlyOffice has a better UI than LibreOffice, but compatibility is still meh. About 90% of my Excel charts display correctly in LibreOffice and maybe 75% in OnlyOffice. (Note: anything less than 99.9% means it can't be used in a work environment, unless everyone uses the same Office suite)

Let me guess, printing to PDF is also blocked?

Tor insists its network is safe after German cops convict CSAM dark-web admin

Seems like back in 2022 when it happened, that guy WAS using the up to date version of Ricochet. So while this bug has been fixed, who knows what other bugs still may exist.

However, I think had he simply used a trustworthy VPN (like Mullvad or IVPN) before connecting to Tor, this might have given him one more layer of protection.

No major AI model is safe, but some do better than others

Nice comparison table, good to know that I need to avoid "Anthropic" for all non-kindergarten prompts.

If HDMI screen rips aren't good enough for you pirates, DeCENC is another way to beat web video DRM

>We kind of got over this with MP3s, didn't we? Didn't the music industry eventually wake up and realise that people just want their music and don't want obstacles and they were still making billions even if people had MP3 files with no DRM on them? Even iTunes ended up going that way. Are we going back to the old ways again?

Exactly. And with the new tech illiterate Zoomer generation, they prefer paying for music streaming because pirating is "too hard" and they just want to install an app. I'm sure the same would work for video streaming, too. No need to keep the DRM really, because either you want it for free and will pirate or you want the convenience of using an app on your TV/PC/phone and are happy to pay. DRM doesn't make a real difference either way.

Firefox 130 lands with a yawn, but 131 beta teases a long-awaited feature

Vertical tabs, nice! Now I'm justing waiting for tab grouping, proper JPEG XL support, and a better homepage experience on Android.

Firefox on desktop has two zoom modes: (1) a simple zooming into the page (achieved by the pinching motion on the touchpad if you're on a laptop), which will lead to horizontal scrollbars and is comparable to zooming in a picture, and (2) increasing the size of all elements and reflowing the content to still fit without needing to scroll horizontally (achieved by Ctrl + Mousewheel or Ctrl + "+/-").

On mobile, the only browser who actually reflows the text when you zoom in is Opera for Android. And it's a feature you dearly miss once you experience it. If you need to zoom with any other browser, including Firefox for Android, the text will be wider than the screen.

North Korean scammers plan wave of stealth attacks on crypto companies, FBI warns

Re: Crypto scammers

Same can be said about bank accounts

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

According to https://eylenburg.github.io/os_familytree.htm there used to be a CP/M descendant called "4690 OS" that was still being supported until recently. It's probably this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System

So I guess nowadays only FreeDOS remains as a spiritual successor to CP/M.

Linux updates with an undo function? Some distros have that

Another approach not mentioned is `rpm-ostree` by Fedora Atomic

Compared to other distros, Vanilla OS 2 'Orchid' is rewriting how Linux works

It would be really neat, but it only comes with GNOME so I'm not going to bother.

Linux Mint 22 'Wilma' still the Bedrock choice for moving off Windows

Should've just switched to Plasma and create a "Kubuntu, but done right" kind of distro. I mean Ubuntu itself already tames GNOME and makes it usable, newbies don't care about what Snap is or does, and Gtk3 will get killed one day, meaning big problems for Cinnamon/Xfce/Mate and any other sane desktops that still use server-side decorations.

Desktop hypervisors are not dead: Oracle preps major VirtualBox update

SunOS? The one that's dead for 30 years now?

Forget security – Google's reCAPTCHA v2 is exploiting users for profit

The worst is when the Google captcha makes you work with no intention of ever letting your pass - for example when you're behind a VPN.

The pictures you click keep reappearing, you can get unlimited challenges in a row, basically you can waste 10 minutes and it still won't stop. The audio captcha is more forgiving (as in: it actually allows you to enter the solution and let you pass) but sometimes it still tells you "nope, computer says no, your IP is not kosher" after you solve the audio captcha.

Brave Search and Cock.li (when signing up for a new email address) have a PoW captcha (proof of work, like Bitcoin or Monero), which basically means the computer does the work and not you. You pay for access in electricity rather than labour. I much prefer this because at least it can happen in a background tab.

HCL's back-to-office plan: Come in three days a week, or forget about holidays

Re: COVID really threw a wrench in things

>But those companies still have to pay for those big, flashy, fully managed office spaces they have under a long-term leasing agreement

Sunk cost fallacy

GNOME head honcho Holly Million steps down

Re: It's a difficult question

>I'll give them this, Gnome has definitely emerged as the winner in the race to dumb-down the Linux desktop into windows.

"Into Windows"? You probably mean "into iOS"

Singapore's banks to ditch texted one-time passwords

Well, if they're going to push for mandatory apps to access your bank account, I hope they also make it mandatory that these apps:

(1) work on degoogled Androids without Play Store or Play Integrity API

(2) work on systems that are not Android or iOS, such as mobile Linux

(3) maybe even work on desktops, because not everyone wants to have a smartphone?

Besides that, I still don't see what the problem is with existing 2FA solutions such as SMS OTP, TOTP, or Yubikeys.

Linux Mint 22 beta sprinkles Cinnamon desktop on Ubuntu

We don't more than Plasma, Gnome and Xfce.

>One of the interesting aspects is that the What's New article discusses some of the problems facing the maintainers of distros based around GNOME and Gtk tools, especially since the GNOME 46 release.

In hindsight, all this could have been avoided. Mint's Cinnamon, Ubuntu's Unity (and to a lesser degree, Ubuntu's current Gnome-based desktop), Solus's Budgie, Pop_OS's (current, Gnome-based) Cosmic desktop - all of these are fighting against Gnome, trying to make a sane desktop based on Gnome technology. All of these should have instead pivoted to Qt or even just added their manpower to KDE, fixing bugs, adding features, and shipping their distro with a customised version of Plasma that shows their idea of a desktop.

The question that needs to be asked is: "Why did you try to create a new desktop based on Gnome, when you think Gnome is doing it all wrong and will fight you every step of the way?"

Xfce and Mate, while also GTK-based, have the excuse of being older than Gnome and a fork of Gnome 2, respectively, so they have their own raison d'etre.

FreeDOS and FreeBSD prove old code never dies, just gets nifty updates

Re: A graphical installer? Of all the pointless rubbish..

It's funny they want to create a graphical installer, but don't offer the option of having a simple (e.g. Xfce) or modern (e.g. Plasma) desktop set up by the installer.

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 to receive support right up to end of Unix epoch

Wait, so will Leap 15.6 also get updates until 2037? Probably not right?

I wonder what Leap 16 will be like, based on they nebulous "ALP".

Desperately seeking ICQ? It may shut down, but Nina could resurrect it

Just use your old ICQ number as your username in Matrix and XMPP

Endless OS 6: How desktop Linux may look, one day

What's the difference to Fedora Silverblue? That's also immutable + ostree + Flatpaks + GNOME. At least Silverblue supports layering RPM packages and you can use toolbox or the superior distrobox.

In any case, Gnome is a no-go for me.