Posts by unlocked

Google makes end-to-end encrypted Gmail easy for all – even Outlook users

Though the article doesn't make this clear, the feature is for business customers. Google offers companies the ability to manage their own encryption keys, in which case the encryption truly is end-to-end and emails are decrypted in the client.

Dash to Panel maintainer quits after donations drive becomes dash to disaster

If you don't want to pay then you can have a small reminder in the corner that someone made the software you're using and would like some of your money. Seems like a fair price to me.

Or you can draw a line in the sand and say that if someone else isn't willing to spend a significant amount of their own time and effort for your benefit without even asking for anything in return, you don't want to use their stuff.

Completely fine either way, but I suspect the one you'll be hurting most with that second option is yourself.

Pokémon GO was an intelligence tool, claims Belarus military official

Even if it is not currently used as a surveillance tool, it's still probably a good idea for militaries and governments to not install smartphone apps from adversarial countries.

Except in the case of Belarus and Russia, where I personally think they should all install as many foreign apps as they can.

DEF CON badge disagreement gets physical as firmware dev removed from event stage

Bad choices all around

As bad as DEF CON's behavior seems to have been here, it's hard to feel too sympathetic to Entropic when they are quoted as saying

"The specifics of what [DEF CON] requested in January were extremely difficult / almost impossible"

and then decided to take the contract anyways.

The graying open source community needs fresh blood

Open Source isn't conferences

I don't think the problem here is a lack of talented young people interested in open source, but rather a lack of being able to find them. A lot of young people hang out online, and interact with other young people who also hang out online. Rather than hoping new maintainers will randomly show up at conferences, the older generation needs to seek out the younger generation where they are. I'm sure there are a bunch of youngsters who would love to learn from older developers and take over big projects, but just have no idea that there's a need.

US standards agency reports back on just how good age verification software is

Stop trying to "protect children"

"and can be an important part of efforts to protect children online."

i.e. from porn, which for some reason they try to pretend minors never had access to before the internet and that any enforcement measures could actually stop minors from viewing it. "Adults only" should only ever be a content warning to push away viewers who don't want to see it.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

Re: I see a serious issue with the idea

There is also a `incomingPayment` property which acts as a receipt. Of course, an extension could spoof the response to fetching that, but an extension could also just modify the script in the first place. If your payment system relies on trusting the browser, people can bypass it.

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

Not just the UK sadly. "The children" are used as a justification for stripping away rights in the US as well, and I'm sure many other countries. If politicians want to protect children so much, they should focus on passing bills to reduce child poverty.

OpenELA flips Red Hat the bird with public release of Enterprise Linux source

They can afford it because it's being funded by companies who have separate products that will benefit from the open version of enterprise Linux.

There's a reason Microsoft hasn't killed .NET or TypeScript despite both being open source and having no direct revenue, and that reason isn't altruism.

China rallies support for Kylin Linux in war on Windows

Re: Real Issue

Importantly, those people in California are not, by and large, working for the Chinese government. Highly skilled Chinese people running to the US and other western countries is a real issue China faces and will need to figure out (their insistence on absolute control probably won't help them here). It's certainly possible they'll surge ahead and so we absolutely can't rest on our laurels, but the Chinese government also has a history of getting in their own way when it comes to tech and that doesn't appear to have stopped yet.

Court erred in Neo4j source license ruling, says Software Freedom Conservancy

Re: Mangle a license, get confusion

They can't revoke licenses on existing code, but as the owners of the code, they are not bound by any licenses, and can freely ignore the copyleft part of AGPLv3 and distribute future code changes under a different, incompatible license. Licenses grant permission to use a creative work to people who wouldn't ordinarily have it; owners don't need any permission to use their own creative work.