• 0 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: February 15th, 2021

help-circle
  • You share public keys when registering the passkey on a third party service, but for the portability of the keys to other password managers (what the article is about) the private ones do need to be transferred (that’s the whole point of making them portable).

    I think the phishing concerns are about attackers using this new portability feature to get a user (via phishing / social engineering) to export/move their passkeys to the attacker’s store. The point is that portability shouldn’t be so user-friendly / transparent that it becomes exploitable.

    That said, I don’t know if this new protocol makes things THAT easy to port (probably not?).


  • I’m ok with not considering it “public good” when something has a license that sets conditions and it’s under Copyright of a particular private person/entity. But if you do need to ask consent to a private party for the use of something in a derivative work then I don’t think it makes sense to call it a public good.


  • Yeah, it protects Jimmy from having to unconditionally contribute to society & its many organizations.

    It allows Jimmy to set conditions and control who can use it and who cannot. For example, he can ally with one particular big corpo (or even start building one himself) so they can hold that thing hostage and require agreements/fees for the use of that thing for a long long time.

    So now, instead of all people, including big (and small) corpos, having free access to the idea, only the friends of Jimmy will.

    The reality is that if it wasn’t for Jimmy, it’s likely that Tommy would have invented it himself anyway at some point (and even improved on it!). But now Tommy can’t work on the thing, cos Jimmy doesn’t wanna be his friend.

    So not only does it protect Jimmy from having to contribute to society without conditions, it also protects society from improving over what Jimmy decided to allow (some) people access to. No competition against Jimmy allowed! :D

    Even without patents, if the invention is useful I doubt the inventor will have problems making money. It would be one hell of a thing to have in their portfolio / CV. Many corpos are likely to want Jimmy in their workforce. Of course, he might not become filthy rich… but did Jimmy really deserve to be that much more richer than Tommy?


  • There are many games that had that mechanic before Arceus.

    In particular, Craftopia (which is from the same developers of Palworld) had capsule devices that you can throw to enemies in a “virtual space” while characters “engage in combat” before Arceus was a thing.

    Just because they wrote a patent does not make it enforceable… patents don’t really mean anything until they are actually tested in court so they are just tools to try and scare people away whenever a company wants to bully with the prospect of a lawsuit.

    I feel that Palworld is likely to win this, this actually is a bad move from Nintendo and a win for Palworld, imho… now they will get more publicity, perhaps another spike in sales, and they are finally given the opportunity to prove how they are in the right, so they can shut up all the naysayers who complained about it being a Pokemon clone.


  • Yeah, it definitely is more appealing from a marketing perspective.

    I do understand why some projects might wanna use the term, it’s to their advantage to be associated with “open source” even if the source code itself has a proprietary license.

    The problem is that then it makes it harder / more confusing to check for actually openly licensed code, since then it’s not clear what term to use. Already “free software” can be confused with “free as in free beer”.


  • That discussion concluded essentially the same thing I said: that both the OSI and the FSF have essentially the same conditions.

    Don’t police perfectly innocent and common use of language please.

    Using “open source” for all kinds of source, regardless of how restrictive it’s license is, is definitely not a common use of the term. People aren’t gonna start using “open source” like that just because a few people find it convenient and wanna police the term to force it to include software with source available, just because for their marketing it makes it sound more appealing.



  • According to the definition from the Open Source Initiative, “open source” also requires free redistribution. See the first point (emphasis mine).

    1. Free Redistribution

    The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

    It also requires freedom to distribute modifications:

    1. Derived Works

    The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

    CC-BY-NC-ND is not “open source” (both due to the NC and the ND), it’s more of a “source available” type of license (when applied to source code). The difference between “free software” and “open source” is more ideological than anything else, they both define the same freedoms, just with different ideological objectives / goals.






  • My worry is that the other 20% might actually come from other forms of partnerships and integrations not unlike what they probably had in mind with this, and that dropping Google might actually make them more dependent on seeking this kind of initiatives, not less.

    I don’t know how many people you actually need to maintain a browser. But if it’s actually possible to do it without any kind of money from any of those sources in a way that can be sustained, then it would make more sense to make a fork (or alternative, like Ladybird) and just use that.

    Like I said, I think it’s too late for Mozilla to shift course, I don’t expect they’ll ever do that. At least not until they are forced by a competing project if it happens to become successful (or a similar huge wake up call that leaves them no alternative).





  • Which is why you should only care about the personal opinion of those people when it actually relates to that reliability.

    I don’t care whether Linus Torvalds likes disrespecting whichever company or people he might want to give the middle finger to, or throw rants in the mailing list or mastodon to attack any particular individual, so long as he continues doing a good job maintaining the kernel and accepting contributions from those same people when they provide quality code, regardless of whatever feelings he might have about whatever opinions they might hold.

    You rely on the performance of the software, the clarity of the docs, the efficiency of their bug tracking… but the opinions of the people running those things don’t matter so long as they keep being reliable.


  • I have contributed to other projects without really needing to get involved in their community in any personal/parasocial level, though.

    I just make a pull request and when the code was good it was accepted, when not it got rejected. Sometimes I’ve had to make changes before it getting merged, but I had no need to engage in discussions on discord or anything like that. I’ve been in some mailing lists to keep track on some projects, but never really engaged deeply, specially if it goes off-topic.

    If I find that a good code contribution is rejected for whatever toxic reason, then the consequence of that is the code would stop being as good as it could have (because of the contributions being rejected/slowed down), so it’s then that forking might be in order. Of course the code matters.


  • To his point: if not “discuss”, what is the correct approach against fascism? war and murder? dismiss it, try to “cancel it” without giving any arguments so it can continue to fester on its own and keep growing in opposition?

    To me, fascism is a stupid position that doesn’t make much sense, to the point that it falls on itself the moment you “discuss” it.

    I would have expected that it would be the fascists the ones unable/unwilling to discuss their position, since it’s the least rational one. So it’s certainly very jarring whenever I hear people jumping to defend against fascism while at the same time stopping in their tracks when it comes to discussing it. Even if those unable to reason might not be convinced by our arguments, anyone with reason would. Rejecting discussion does a disservice, because it does put off those willing to listen and strengthens those who didn’t really wanted an argument anyway.

    Stating “genocide is bad” should NOT be a statement of faith. Faith is the shakiest of the grounds, if we are unable to articulate the specific reasons that make genocide be bad, then we are condemned to see it repeat itself. So, I’d argue it’s for the sake of the victims in Auschwitz that antifascism should not be turned into a religion, but into a solid and rational position.