• 15 Posts
  • 83 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 19th, 2024

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  • I read it as a jokey community and maybe you took it too seriously. Regardless that’s a kinda silly comment to leave. That’s a community for, ironically or seriously, hating Linux, so obviously it’s not in the spirit of the community to leave a serious comment defending Linux.

    I see a lot of Windows hate on Lemmy. If someone made a post here complaining about how much they hate Windows, and a Windows fan replied explaining why Windows is so great, I would say it’s kinda heavy-handed but not totally ridiculous for a mod to ban them, since a Linux community is probably not for this person.


  • Well, fundamentally capitalism involves the deprivation of the means of subsistence and production from one class so that they are forced to sell their labour-power to the capitalist class in order to obtain the means of subsistence. You could define that as “mistreatment” or not I guess, but whether or not you do, personal treatment by your capitalist does not change the form capitalism takes. Workers’ power comes from combining. Capitalists are already combined—they work together to keep wages low and prices high. Unionising only levels the playing field in that regard.

    I’m not saying that you should always focus on unionisation in every situation—sometimes there is more important political work to be done. But if you have nothing else to do, it’s often the most accessible starting point.






  • Not really, open source projects don’t necessarily have to be open to all contributors and I was aware of this already. They have to be open to anyone doing what they want with the code, by definition, which is good, but they don’t have to allow everyone to contribute to upstream. I’m not sure if there’s any particular defence against this being used in a discriminatory manner, but I do think this effect is significantly mitigated by the decentralised nature of open source and the fact that it’s not too uncommon for forks to become preferred over the original, the fact that open source projects rise and fall in popularity, etc.

    I wonder if there’s some way to manage an open source project so that it’s not subject to particular national laws in this way.





  • If there’s anything sensitive I’m communicating with someone digitally, I make sure that the person in question has basic tech security skills and knowledge about privacy, including telling them to stop using Windows. Including taking the time to teach them basic stuff (like full disk encryption, VPN and Tor usage, explaining E2EE, etc) myself. If you have a high threat model but are talking to non-techy people, you should be taking the time out of your day to do this.

    If you’re thinking “wow I can’t be bothered to do all that”, your messaging is probably not sensitive enough for this to be a significant concern. Not that “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”, but just “the amount of time you put into security and privacy should be proportionate to your threat model and the cost of compromise”.