Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement • Hacker News Board

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#261

Post by yesenadam » Mon, Apr 18, 2022, 6:47 AM UTC

rnd0 wrote: post #190

dangom wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stallman has a vision that you and I should be typing our comments and playing our games from machines that are under our control, i.e., whereby we can inspect and modify all of the code that is running on them. That is not the case, and all Stallman is saying, is that this is bad for us. The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground. I don't think Stallman woul…

>The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. From there since Free Software has only lost ground. Are you joking? This was before my time, but there once was a time when you would not only have to pay for development tools, but pay for them seperately. Want a compiler? $500, please. Want something like Bison? Fork a few hundred. Want an assembler? Another few hundred. etc. There have been setbacks, and it does…

Yes, and no limited-time demo version to try things out - you bought a copy-protected disk in a box in shrink-wrapped plastic from a shop. I remember when Turbo Pascal came out - at below $100 and not copy-protected it seemed revolutionary, virtually free, like they were giving it away, it was so much cheaper than the usual $500 price tag.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#262

Post by AtlasBarfed » Mon, Apr 18, 2022, 6:47 AM UTC

The sad part of RMS being called a fanatic and unrealistic, is that the things he predicted about jailed hardware, software restrictions, and the like have steadily become more and more true.

App stores, the m1 macs, etc. And all under the guise of "security".

Meanwhile we experienced the mother of all "county password inspector" hacks last month.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#263

Post by charcircuit » Mon, Apr 18, 2022, 6:48 AM UTC

Morgawr wrote: post #249

charcircuit wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be simple to develop stealth code to hide your cheats. >advocating for security by obscurity There is nothing wrong with this as long as you understand what you are doing. The goal of anticheat is to prevent cheat makers from being able to make cheats for your game for as long as possible. Increasing the time and skill needed to reverse engineer your anticheat increases the time it takes for someone to develop a…

Still, I'm not an expert and this might be entirely unfeasible but I can totally imagine some kind of trusted execution environment that cross checks specific instructions at the API level when the client communicates with the server using some kind of trusted operation (backed by cryptography). There are already VMs that are used to run trusted instructions on a target (read: client) machine and regardless of you kn…

A cheat would just look at the detection code and be sure it doesn't violate what the anticheat is checking for.

>Having it open increases the amount of people who have eyes on the code and contribute to the code and finds exploits to patch, etc.

If your detection is to collect the names of the open windows on a computer to check for a cheat's name and then send the anticheat server the hash of the binary that opened that window how is making that information public making the anticheat stronger. The more eyes that look at that code the more cheaters who know to name their cheat windows as "Notepad." To avoid being found. If you find an exploit there is no patch.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#264

Post by yesenadam » Mon, Apr 18, 2022, 6:54 AM UTC

waplot wrote: post #235

till this day, i still don't know what RMS's agenda is. can someone enlighten me?

Have a look around on the GNU site. He's a great, inspiring writer.

e.g. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/essays-and-articles.html

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#265

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 18, 2022, 6:58 AM UTC

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #262

The sad part of RMS being called a fanatic and unrealistic, is that the things he predicted about jailed hardware, software restrictions, and the like have steadily become more and more true. App stores, the m1 macs, etc. And all under the guise of "security". Meanwhile we experienced the mother of all "county password inspector" hacks last month.

[deleted]

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#266

Post by syntheweave » Mon, Apr 18, 2022, 7:01 AM UTC

Stallman has basically served his purpose at this point. The path forward is not further awareness-building of Free Software, because everyone is in the orbit of GPL-licensed software now. It is a problem of creating economic incentives for a commons in computing technologies.

Recall that the thing that kicked off the need for Free Software in the first place was the 1970's move to an enclosure of software under IP law to enable the existence of a "software industry" built on shrink-wrapped products. This move often comes in tandem with hostility towards users and non-repairability, but the underlying key point is that of ownership vs stewardship.

What has made the OSS/free world work historically is a dependency on a few key organizations like the FSF or Red Hat that finagled some marginal and often self-interested incentives for the creation and maintenance of the software. Much of it had huge gaps in function or documentation that gave open source an elitist image, of the "we use it internally but we can't tell you how to set it up" sort.

But more recently, we've see the rise of the Patreon developer, who can command some pretty big bucks by being a visible leader in a popular open project. You don't actually need a huge number of those to substantially propel projects forward, since if they do the job well, the drive-by contributors are much more effective, and more user issues get addressed. That is an example of how stewardship is starting to take over software. It is not an evenly distributed phenomenon, and brings certain inequities of its own, but there's some potential to devise better standard arrangements of this sort.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#267

Post by ivan_gammel » Mon, Apr 18, 2022, 7:12 AM UTC

umbcorp wrote: post #194

ivan_gammel wrote: post #56

It won’t be major exaggeration to say that FSF and Stallman are irrelevant in 2022 and not much different from any other radical left group, struggling even to make sense for majority of people. The idea of completely free software where user could control the source code is an obsolete ideal. Not because it’s unviable economically, but because the size and complexity of modern software is far beyond the ability of i…

Ubuntu, debian, armbian etc all have pipelines, build processes to create an image file where the users can install. The processes where one can compile/build/package are already there (signing the image might require more steps with access to keys). Documentation and the tooling for such processes can be improved and made more user friendly. With the evolving supply chain attacks, US Government advised companies to…

You cannot really expect that every user will have sufficient expertise to understand how an operating system works. Today not even technical users can do it without investing considerable effort.

Security only explains why _some_ people should be able to understand how software works, and this is a different story. You do not need to make software open source or free for that, there can exist entire spectrum of various licenses and accesses. This is what I mean by delegating the work to institutions: you let someone you trust to audit the code for you. This can be a dedicated team in your company, a 3rd party expert or a government agency, the important part is only those people really need access to the code, because only they can understand it.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#268

Post by tannhaeuser » Mon, Apr 18, 2022, 7:16 AM UTC

Missing a reflection about how abundance of F/OSS has pushed us towards SaaS as one of the few places left to make a living from pure software dev, and the oligopolies arising out of it. What about Linux (Android) being used as the prime spyware vector, and Linux being used for cloud lock-in (k8s et al)?

Also missing a discussion about the role of open standards as opposed to open implementations, such as POSIX/LSB, picture and A/V formats for personal storage and streaming, standards for messaging, and the absence of a GNU/Browser despite the presence of so-called web standards.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#269

Post by smackeyacky » Mon, Apr 18, 2022, 7:16 AM UTC

xiphias2 wrote: post #59

,, Macintoshes are moving towards being jails, like the iMonsters. It's getting harder for users to install even their own programs to run them.'' I feel this all the time, especially on my iPad Pro: I'm buying much more idevices than before, because I don't like the direction Windows has taken, and Apple gets always the newest TSMC slots (I buy the newest products from TSMC, they just happen to be made together with…

It amazes me that the very first personal computer I had was effectively useless without being able to write your own software. It wasn"t an Apple ][ but they encouraged software development, it was a huge part of 8 bit culture.

40 years later, trying to get something running on a modern Mac is painful, and they gatekeep it with Xcode and a variety of user hostile features. They have become what they despised in that 1984 commercial.

It makes me just a little angry. No wonder people are so nostalgic for 8 bit stuff.

Re: Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

#270

Post by belorn » Mon, Apr 18, 2022, 7:19 AM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #228

Mikeb85 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild to me that game developers have determined it's easier to write malwate to prevent cheating than just make server side code robust enough to not validate code that could be a cheat...

There are some cheats like wallhacks, trigger bot, fake lag, backtrack, etc that aren't really possible to catch with just server side checks.

I am not sure what you mean there. Wallhacks is the ability to see through walls. The server could simply not give out the information about what behind a wall and the wallhack exploit would stop working. It would also very likely introduce pop-in and latency issue as soon the client peeks behind the wall and now need updated information from the server.

Fake lag is in a similar situation. The server could simply hold the true state of all positioning and ignore what the clients think is their position. This might work fine in a very low latency situation, but as latency increase it would make playing the game feel sluggish. It would also make aiming difficult, since the key press for fire would have to travel to the server in order for it to occur, and by then the location of players could have shifted.

Trigger bots however is mostly impossible to stop server side. Any action that is identical to human actions can only really be detected through statistics and heuristics.