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Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

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Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#51

Post by walteweiss »

H8crilA wrote: post #33

What's cool about RMS is that he perfectly foresaw many decades ago the world that we live in today: your car or smart fridge refusing actions because its software says so. And you cannot change the bloody software! I cringe every time I see encrypted firmware running in trusted execution environment, DRM, DLCs for fucking physical products, websites or apps that scam you into signing up or giving up some other freed…

This very morning, my wife performed reset of cache/cookies from our family’s perfectly fine iPad 3 (yeah, the one from 2012, 11 years old). The iPad is our kitchen TV, it shows either some content from VLC (works perfectly fine, kudos to the devs) or some YouTube from Safari (the AppStore’s app support is long gone, web app still works quite well, even considering it was updated recently). Today I spent my morning trying to login our kitchen account. Didn’t work. The account is perfectly fine, but Google refuses to login, as — I’m pretty sure — we use our obsolete software. Well, we do, we do. But even YouTube itself works relatively fine, and as many of you may understand, the iPad is great and much beyond what we need for kitchen, it has a loud speaker and great display, we don’t need anything else for that use-case. On top of that that’s separate device is nothing to worry about, as you may imagine controlling the iPad with dirty fingers, all the oils of the kitchen, etc. Not a place for a modern iPad that we also have, imo.

For me that’s a great example. I personally know many old (even obsolete iPads) lying here and there collecting dust, as their software (and hardware) vendor decided they are all in for nature and ecology (sarcasm), so let millions of perfectly capable devices would be thrown away as a trash.

Eyeing some Android tablet for that, the one I can flash with Lineage OS and be happy with. Maybe Google’s Pixel C or even Nexus 7.

Meanwhile we continue using the iPad unlogginned till it stop working.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#52

Post by dale_glass »

H8crilA wrote: post #33

What's cool about RMS is that he perfectly foresaw many decades ago the world that we live in today: your car or smart fridge refusing actions because its software says so. And you cannot change the bloody software! I cringe every time I see encrypted firmware running in trusted execution environment, DRM, DLCs for fucking physical products, websites or apps that scam you into signing up or giving up some other freed…

The pity is that while he was remarkably prescient, he seems to have stopped adapting decades ago.

GNU seems to have little interest in keeping up with modern developments, and seems to be content with maintaining the old command line tools for the most part. Meanwhile, they're becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of an useful software stack, and people are rewriting them in more modern fashions, eg, Rust. Pretty much none of that is done under the GPL.

The FSF is clearly not reaching the people it needs to reach. Where's their Youtube channel, or their Twitter? As far as I know, they have neither. I barely hear anything about the FSF on Linux sites. Their reach elsewhere has to be essentially nonexistent.

And with the FSF it appears that RMS has no viable successor. That doesn't bode well either.

The sad outcome is that we keep rehashing things like Right to Read -- a fine thing from 1997, but what has happened since?

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#54

Post by ozr »

isoprophlex wrote: post #41
microtonal wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, old.reddit.com usually doesn't have all these shenanigans, so I just set up a redirect.

Nice, any tips on doing that for an entire home network? Or do you have to do it per device somehow

I use a a chrome extension for it. Otherwise when I hit their wall on another device or browser, I just skip it. Reddit seems fine with killing themselves off, I'm not going to any great length to mitigate their mistakes.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#55

Post by Xelynega »

Gigachad wrote: post #36
elromulous wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean he doesn't drive/fly/ride in/on any cars/buses/trains/aircraft? Because the same applies to those.

Stallman and the FSF has fairly arbitrary views on this stuff. Non free firmware running on microcontrollers is fine because it's part of the hardware. But if there is a firmware blob that gets copied over by the OS on boot, then it's not ok for unclear reasons. Results in a lot of stuff getting rejected for FSF certification despite being just as open practically as the certified stuff. A car probably just isn't see…

I think you have this a bit backwards.

To my knowledge the FSF doesn't consider firmware blobs with no way to flash "part of certification" because it would be inoractical to do so. By definition "software you can't change" isn't "free"(as in speech, not beer), so I don't think it's an ideological line.

So they either have to consider any device with unmodifiable software to be non-free(basically removing entire device classes), or be realistic and draw the line somewhere. "Can you modify the software on the device from the rest of the gnu software" is a line that matches up with their ideals fairly well IMO.

Basically, Richard Stallman is well aware that cars are bundles of non-free software(see: https://jalopnik.com/richard-stallman-weighs-in-on-the-check...). He has voiced opinions that software controlling the brakes in your car should be FSF and not binary blobs that come pre-installed with no visibility.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#56

Post by kstenerud »

isoprophlex wrote: post #41
microtonal wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, old.reddit.com usually doesn't have all these shenanigans, so I just set up a redirect.

Nice, any tips on doing that for an entire home network? Or do you have to do it per device somehow

There are browser plugins to redirect to old.reddit.com.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#57

Post by aegis4244 »

walteweiss wrote: post #51
H8crilA wrote: post #33

What's cool about RMS is that he perfectly foresaw many decades ago the world that we live in today: your car or smart fridge refusing actions because its software says so. And you cannot change the bloody software! I cringe every time I see encrypted firmware running in trusted execution environment, DRM, DLCs for fucking physical products, websites or apps that scam you into signing up or giving up some other freed…

This very morning, my wife performed reset of cache/cookies from our family’s perfectly fine iPad 3 (yeah, the one from 2012, 11 years old). The iPad is our kitchen TV, it shows either some content from VLC (works perfectly fine, kudos to the devs) or some YouTube from Safari (the AppStore’s app support is long gone, web app still works quite well, even considering it was updated recently). Today I spent my morning t…

Have you thought about the pinetab ?

https://www.pine64.org/pinetab/

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#59

Post by watersb »

walteweiss wrote: post #51
H8crilA wrote: post #33

What's cool about RMS is that he perfectly foresaw many decades ago the world that we live in today: your car or smart fridge refusing actions because its software says so. And you cannot change the bloody software! I cringe every time I see encrypted firmware running in trusted execution environment, DRM, DLCs for fucking physical products, websites or apps that scam you into signing up or giving up some other freed…

This very morning, my wife performed reset of cache/cookies from our family’s perfectly fine iPad 3 (yeah, the one from 2012, 11 years old). The iPad is our kitchen TV, it shows either some content from VLC (works perfectly fine, kudos to the devs) or some YouTube from Safari (the AppStore’s app support is long gone, web app still works quite well, even considering it was updated recently). Today I spent my morning t…

I still use my iPad 4 every day.

The YouTube iOS app stopped working a while ago, I suppose the backend API changed.

But YouTube still works via Safari on the iPad 4.

I generally keep JavaScript turned off in Safari on that old tablet; I think it's a RAM limitation but it could simply be that the JavaScript version is too old. Many sites just don't work. But with JavaScript enabled, YouTube still does fine.

Re: Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer in the GNU 40 Hacker Meeting talk [video]

#60

Post by HYTjfZKV96gUpz »

globular-toast wrote: post #48
_cenw wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought the advocacy was fundamentally correct, but way too distanced from achievable and realistic compromises within a system that wants profit over everything. The only real path would've been through legislation, and now we're back to setting your expectations to realistic.

I mean, he succeeded in at least giving everyone the choice. I happily run entirely free software on my computers. But yes, it needs legislation to switch off copyright for software and make computing a human right.

> I happily run entirely free software on my computers

You do? No graphics card? No (good) games? No firmware? And if so, how much of a premium did you pay for the lack of scale from your hardware vendor alone?

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