SourceHut is great. politically and ethically, it is the type of platforms (and code) we need for a resilient, decentralized, autonomous future! <3

searx

“former CIA agents” ha ha ha :))

… nothin’ like a good war!

#FreeAssangeNOW!

A bunch of war criminals torturing to death the guy (and the organization) who published truthful, verifiable information about their war crimes. If he goes, many others will go!

Fight on! now to the High Court (prob equally corrupt as the rest of the rotten UK institutions enabling that https://challengepower.info/the_actors/start) for an appeal…

for more on the topic, one could only highly recommend the excellent book of late Philippe Aigrain (a great researcher and activist in the field):

https://archive.org/details/sharing_201408

Sharing: culture and the economy in the Internet age

by: Aigrain, Philippe

Publication date: 2012

Usage: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0Creative Commons Licensebyncnd

Topics: Free Culture, Intellectual Property, Computer file sharing, Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.), Intellectual property, Information society

Publisher: Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press

1/ Any monopoly hinders free flow of information/knowledge/culture.

2/ current copyright regime is used massively to the profit of the intermediaries who exploit the authors (70y after death? srsly? how is that even a thing?!)

3/ current copyright regime is used to control and censor flows of information, like the automated censorshop (“robocop-yright”) of Youtube and others. powerful actors can use copyright from their portfolio to censor anything critical, parodic, or just new works remixing or reusing “their” works

4/ the regime of exceptions to copyright, that is supposed to represent the balance of that pact struck between authors, their intermediaries, the public and the legislator has been skewed, and consistently reduced over they years and through the use of technology. think of the right to lend a book or a physical record in the era of DRM. you cannot lend a game or a DRMed file anymore. etc.

5/ current networks exploiting works “legally” are the ones who rip the artists the most: spotify gives fractions of fractions of cents to the artists for every listen, while giving away billions to the intermediaries, and pocketing huge profits…

6/ all the propaganda about “piracy kills authors” is bullshit. same stuff was heard about (including but not limited to): electric piano, music on the radio, cassette tape recorders, VHS tapes, p2p networks, etc… peer reviewed studies all show on the contrary that people who share the most are actually active participants in culture who buy more cultural goods than the average, who act as prescriptors and recommend concerts, works, etc… to others…

The whole point of copyright law today is thus:

• to allow intermediaries to exploit artists
• to give them control over what is gonna be listened/viewed in order to maximize their returns on investments and minimize their risk-taking (thus empoverishing culture altogether
• to guilt-trip passionate people, the public into NOT participating into culture (sharing is caring!) but instead becoming docile “consumers” of it
• to help powerful actors censor free speech to comfort their power.

The only thing that would seem acceptable and was actually the norm in early 20th century is: a copyright that is solely belonging to the author (not transferable) / for a period of 5 years (eventually renewable once upon explic demand, for a minor fee, by the author… in which line of work are you paid for what you did 10 years ago anyways?) / with a generous regime of exceptions including private use not-for-profit, libraries, lending, remixes, etc.

Are we sure this is not a super-clever disguised advertisement campaign by NextCloud?

Sorry for the simplistic grid of analysis here:

DDG is a US company, and under the Patriot and FISA (and other) Acts, it makes it fair game for the US institutions to request access to any of its data regarding any of its user, without any sort of judicial process.

So in short if your concern is privacy (not even if you have any political activity that wouldnt be 100% aligned with the foreign policy of the US!) and are a NON-US person, then it’s better to avoid connecting to the servers of any US company. Is it easy to do? hell no! we’re probably talking about 90% of the web as of now… (think: AWS, Cloudflare, Google, etc.)

(+ i think DDG is hosted on AWS, and Amazon is a premium partner of US intelligence anyways…)

like with the use of encrypted means of communications, if the question starts by “but why do people do xyz…” with an undertone of “i very well understand one should not do xyz!”, we’re on a typical case of techno-elitism.

what is valid for the 0.1% of educated/“smart”/privileged users who understand the F* is going on may not be valid for the remaining 99.9% who just do something because someone from the aforementioned group -usually with a vested interest- told them they should do it…

“smart” systems functioning only through shared deep knowledge of their innards, used by people who do not understand them lead to massive schemes of exploitation, to a bunch of “smart” bros getting richer at the expense of everybody else…

i strongly believe it’s the responsibility of the “smart” tech bros -who are historically responsible for making them exist and turn mainstream- to explain to people who don’t understand these things that they should stay away from them, that there is more for them to lose than to win.

not sure this project shares the objectives i described:

"Privacy

We respect your privacy. That is the whole point of this project. The only minor data we collect about visitors is what our infrastructure providers collect. These include:

GitHub
Azure DevOps
Application Insights
DigitalOcean
Cloudflare

"

curl https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json | jq ‘.prefixes[].ip_prefix’ | paste -sd “,” - | sed ‘s/"//g’

seems indeed interesting… the rest of the page mentions some obscure/proprietary technology…

so a few questions remain:

how would one use these list of IP addresses using free/libre software?

also can we trust Amazon themselves to declare all their IPs?

How do you do the same for Google? Cloudflare?

That’s the bread and butter of industrial scenarists: make the viewer emotionally involved with the characters… then split the elements of each aspect of the story of each character accross episodes, so one episode never resolves everything at once, just one or two elements, and keeps you going with some new one…

That way you use people’s emotion to keep them implicated, and not drop… That’s not how i like to chose what i want to get involved with. I want to be in control, i don’t like to be manipulated in general…

(also if they need these cheap tricks to keep me hooked, it means their series is probably not that great in the first place…)

Isn’t “I made money and here is how you can make money too” (one of) the base(s) of any ponzi scheme?

after, once:

1/ I know it’s over and i can evaluate the time it takes 2/ it has been recommended enough by people i trust, and i checked that the whole is worth watching, not just the few first episodes being great then taking you to an emotional blackmail into watching the mediocre rest that is just milking you…

that way i dont let myself be emotionally manipulated by endless series of cliff-hangers engineered to make people hooked. my time and emotions are not that cheap.

In practice that’s very few series i watch, but ones that were recommended enough that i know i won’t be disappointed; The Wire, Breaking Bad and very very few other exceptions…

why?

mutt in ssh…? but really if you want something “privacy-respecting” you may consider dropping android altogether. (hint: pinephone and other true-(GNU)-linux phones! yay!)