This is so stupid. you don’t pay so you’re not allowed to make the project better by contributing?? I think this person has a very poor understanding of what open source and libre software are. also, open source has not been refered to as a cancer, the GPL has, because of it’s copyleft. I have the impression this person does not really know what they are talking about.

Honestly I’m disappointed. The reasons exposed here are much too weak.

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I don’t see how using a proprietary license will help your dilema. If I install proprietary software in my car, I have 0 idea what it is doing, I can have no assurance that it is not doing telemetry and sending all the collected license plates to a centralized system. You want a way for users to control their own copy of the software whilst you retain the ability to control other’s copies of the software. That’s impossible. Either the users control the software or the software controls the users, there’s no other way.

You are afraid that if you license your software under a libre license, a government will fork the project and add centralized telemetry which to their version which they will install on their own fleet of vehicles. As you said, “The argument generally goes that people should be willing to give up some privacy if it means helping police identify stolen vehicles, AMBER alerts”. The fact is, ALPR monitoring systems are already existent and in use, so people have decided to trade some of their privacy for security, trusting that their government will stick to a balance of privacy/security that is worth the trade.

THE ROOT ISSUE is that, since the software is absolutely proprietary, people have no idea which amount of their privacy is being traded for security so they have no way of holding their governments accountable, they cannot revolt if their governments overstep boundaries because they cannot know/prove if the government did step over the boundaries.

Because the system is a black box, the government can lie and say “we need this and that authorization, we need to use this dangerous tool, we need backdoors, we need to break encryption ect… to guarantee your security”. Once people have been coerced into giving up their power, the government uses that power however it wants because the system is secret.

If you license your project under the AGPL, the code is required to be available so people can ensure that their government is not abusing the power they have lent, and that the balance struck between privacy/security is worth it.

Maybe the author has a specific use case, but this seems completely silly. If you want to choose which OS to boot remotely, why not ssh in the machine and change Grub’s boot order for next boot with grub-reboot? Make the default boot be a minimal OS exposing ssh. You could even have the ssh server in initramfs with dropbeard / tinyssh, no need to fully boot an OS.

“”“starts”“”

justdeleteme.xyz is a lifehack

dnsmasq with a blocklist, like /etc/hosts except you can use wildcards on whole domains. Then you just make your router’s default dns to point to the computer running dnsmasq. https://landchad.net/dnsmasq/

Why do programming language developpers even feel the need to reinvent package management every time? Like, just use the system’s package manager?

Perhaps an addition to your guide: Although I have not tried it myself, I hear it is quite easy to run local open-source AI models. By instructing the AI to reformulate your texts whilst adopting a certain personality, one should be able to efficiently protect against stylometry. This can even work with realtime chat.

That’s why internet anonimity is so important for free speech.

I believe pdfs can load remote images, which pings a server. There are other reasons, I haven’t got sufficient knowledge. Some pdf readers will offer a sandboxed mode improving security. I think zathura has this for instance.

Tip: if you are going to store data on “the cloud” aka someone else’s computer, encrypt it locally before sending the data! There are existing solutions to do this in a cloud-optimized way (that is, not sending in an archive which has to be fully reuploaded for any tiny change) such as cryptomator. I think rclone also has an encryption feature but haven’t checked.

Goes to show how much of a joke copyright is. These laws are bought by and made to protect the interests of corporations. disgusting. rip aaron schwarz, your ideas live on.

“By using a VPN, aren’t you essentially transferring your accountability to the VPN provider?”. This is true if you aren’t paying for your VPN in an anonimous way, which is why 99% of the “VPN fOr PRiVacY” are scams.

Wants to run a ‘debloated OS’ and asking about Windows 11 installation advice. Wut?? Litteraly no reason to be running Windows nowadays. You can game on GNU/Linux just fine and if you really need something Windows specific you can always run it through Wine (with Bottles for instance) or in a Windows VM (if you have a gaming PC then you 100% have a powerfull enough computer for virtualisation).

tor is an onion proxy software, and tor-browser is a custom version of firefox which uses tor to connect to the web. Usually when people say tor they mean the tor browser but you can actually have any browser use tor (although it’s less safe). You should look into something that can control a headless browser like puppeteer and have the headless browser use the tor SOCKS interface. I don’t actually know if that’s possible, never tried that, but I think that’s where you should be looking.

what you are saying is plain wrong or not explained well. Using tor with javascript enabled you are getting the javascript anonymously, however in the process of running that javascript there is a risk of deanonymisation (for instance, that javascript code could be doing fingerprinting and other bad stuff).

ahahahhhAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARG

Every time a windows/mac user switches to libre software, Saint iGNUcius (aka GNU/god) smiles. Keep it up.