• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • For personal use? I never do anything that would qualify as “auditing” the code. I might glance at it, but mostly out of curiosity. If I’m contributing then I’ll get to know the code as much as is needed for the thing I’m contributing, but still far from a proper audit. I think the idea that the open-source community is keeping a close eye on each other’s code is a bit of a myth. No one has the time, unless someone has the money to pay for an audit.

    I don’t know whether corporations audit the open-source code they use, but in my experience it would be pretty hard to convince the typical executive that this is something worth investing in, like cybersecurity in general. They’d rather wait until disaster strikes then pay more.






  • The focus on Microsoft is odd. I remember most people using WordPerfect for DOS and other non-WYSIWYG word processors up until around 1993. These were much better for focusing on writing. MS Word came from behind and started to take over as Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95 became standard. Word wasn’t the best word processor back then and was very buggy, but Microsoft succeeded in marketing it as a natural companion for Windows and bundling it with Excel and PowerPoint, and WordPerfect was slower to move to WYSIWYG.

    The rise of the web was also happening at that time, and this article doesn’t give it enough attention as a major influence on document format and a motivation behind markdown.












  • It would be a single point of failure for many apps in case the curators of F-Droid were dishonest or hacked. They could insert bad things into lots of packages without having to change the public source code. But it also becomes the only point where malware or backdoors could be inserted that way, instead of having to trust every single developer to build honestly off the source code, which we’d have to do if they just stuck prebuilt binaries up there. I don’t know how rational I’m being, but it makes me trust F-Droid apps more that they build each one themselves.


  • Many of our home customers’ feedback indicated a preference for the certainty provided by an annual plan. The annual plan offers assurance that you always have access to the latest version with innovations such as improvements we’ve made in compression speeds and algorithms. It also ensures you have access to critical updates and are protected against new threats and risks.

    I think they made that up. I highly doubt their customers expressed any such preference.