I write English / Escribo en Español.

Vidya / videojuegos. Internet. Cats / Gatos. Pizza. Nap / Siesta.

This user’s posts under CC-BY-NC-SA license. Ask me if you need a different permission.

  • 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 26th, 2023

help-circle




  • Security is not a state but a scale, and is gauged against everything else.

    From the perspective of a privacy / security zealot, a smartphone is SOL as soon as they lave the factory, as not only not even OTA updates keep them safe (and you can argue that with some manufacturers such as Samsung, OTA does is the primary risk vector!) but they can eg.: ship with unfixable vulns at the hardware level that would lead to ditch the whole thing anyway.

    So long as there isn’t something like a state-funded program for citizens to renew their phones every ~2 years for fully open ones, I’d not worry much. After all, the other option would be not using a phone because current ones are a PITA and just as vulnerable from the other end.











  • While I like it conceptually, the two times I tried to install it I felt it was far too opinionated for me to get it to work correctly, like other software “bundles” of its kind that want to take control of the entire process of setting up ports, networking, storage, certificates etc…, instead of just hanging down from stuff that I have already prepared for it (like my own domain with my own cert).

    Like, as a piece of software it’s something I’d absolutely use… if someone else sets everything up for me.


  • Here’s two things:

    1. You can not steal an idea. (aka “just because you had an idea doesn’t mean it’s yours”)
    2. You can not steal profits that were never had or intended to be had in the first place (aka: piracy vs “abandonware”)

    Considering that:

    It’s open source, but you can’t redistribute binaries of it you can only compile it for your own personal needs and you can’t commercially use it for free

    Then it’s not Open Source. So, which is it?

    OK, in that case, let’s say I reimplement Fraunhoffer’s FDK-AAC. It’s open source, but you can’t redistribute binaries of it, you can only compile it for your own personal needs and you can’t commercially use it for free.

    The only midly-relevant question here becomes: did you use their source code to implement yours, or did you use public knowledge of the algorith etc (up to and including “white boarding”) to reimplement it? If the former, if the software is actually Open Source at best I could see a case for misrepresentation, but not for theft, because the source code is made available openly, you are not breaking that (that’s what “steal” is).

    Second, if your implementation is better than theirs, including eg.: because of having a better license, then the rules of the market apply: the better product wins (that’s the same argument corps would use to try and break you if the case went the other way around, so it’s only fair you can also use that; at least, law’s supposed to be blind to order-of-parties). You are also not stealing profits because, besides the fact that potential profits by definition can not be stolen, you are also aiming at a different market eg.: people who wouldn’t have bought Fraunhoffer’s in the first place because of the license etc. If you are selling cheese sandwiches, you can not sue “stolen profits” from someone who is selling bacon sandwiches just because their clients asked you for bacon sandwiches and you said no.




  • And this is why the trick is learning and focusing the technologies that stick at a “lower level” of the stack, and that have been battle-tested by years or even decades so it’s understood that they won’t just “go away”. Like eg.: learning C or Fortran instead of learning ${niche_language_of_year_20xx}. For the docker bracket for example the near equivalent would be hmmm I’d say (s)chroot.

    Then again from here to around 5 years docker will the the schroot of its tech bracket.