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Prepare for That Stupid World
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 19 Dec '25

19 Dec '25

PREPARE FOR THAT STUPID WORLD by Ploum on 2025-12-19 https://ploum.net/2025-12-19-prepare-for-that-world.html You probably heard about the Wall Street Journal story where they had a snack-vending machine run by a chatbot created by Anthropic. At first glance, it is funny and it looks like journalists doing their job criticising the AI industry. If you are curious, the video is there (requires JS). We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars.(www.wsj.com) https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-machine-agent-b7e84… But what appears to be journalism is, in fact, pure advertising. For both WSJ and Anthropic. Look at how WSJ journalists are presented as "world class", how no-subtle the Anthropic guy is when telling them they are the best and how the journalist blush at it. If you are taking the story at face value, you are failing for the trap which is simple: "AI is not really good but funny, we must improve it." The first thing that blew my mind was how stupid the whole idea is. Think for one second. One full second. Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine? The video states it clearly: the vending machine must be stocked by humans. Customers must order and take their snack by themselves. The AI has no value at all. Automated snack vending machine is a solved problem since nearly a century. Why do you want to make your vending machine more expensive, more error-prone, more fragile and less efficient for your customers? What this video is really doing is normalising the fact that "even if it is completely stupid, AI will be everywhere, get used to it!" The Anthropic guy himself doesn’t seem to believe his own lies, to the point of making me uncomfortable. Toward the ends, he even tries to warn us: "Claude AI could run your business but you don’t want to come one day and see you have been locked out." At which the journalist adds, "Or has ordered 100 PlayStations." And then he gives up: "Well, the best you can do is probably prepare for that world." Still from the video where Anthropic’s employee says "probably prepare for that world" https://ploum.net/files/prepareworld.png None of the world class journalists seemed to care. They are probably too badly paid for that. I was astonished to see how proud they were, having spent literally hours chatting with a bot just to get a free coke, even queuing for the privilege of having a free coke. A coke that cost a few minutes of minimum-wage work. So the whole thing is advertising a world where chatbots will be everywhere and where world-class workers will do long queue just to get a free soda. And the best advice about it is that you should probably prepare for that world.

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How We Lost Communication to Entertainment
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 15 Dec '25

15 Dec '25

HOW WE LOST COMMUNICATION TO ENTERTAINMENT by Ploum on 2025-12-15 https://ploum.net/2025-12-15-communication-entertainment.html > All our communication channels are morphed into content distribution networks. We are more and more entertained but less and less connected. A few days ago, I did a controversial blog post about Pixelfed hurting the Fediverse. I defended the theory that, in a communication network, you hurt the trust in the whole network if you create clients that arbitrarily drop messages, something that Pixelfed is doing deliberately. It gathered a lot of reactions. Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on? (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html When I originally wrote this post, nearly one year ago, I thought that either I was missing something or Dansup, Pixelfed’s creator, was missing it. We could not both be right. But as the reactions piled in on the Fediverse, I realised that such irreconcilable opinions do not arise only from ignorance or oversight. It usually means that both parties have vastly different assumptions about the world. They don’t live in the same world. Two incompatible universes ========================== I started to see a pattern in the two kinds of reactions to my blog post. There were people like me, often above 40, who like sending emails and browsing old-fashioned websites. We think of ActivityPub as a "communication protocol" between humans. As such, anything that implies losing messages without feedback is the worst thing that could happen. Not losing messages is the top priority of a communication protocol. And then there are people like Dansup, who believe that ActivityPub is a content consumption protocol. It’s there for entertainment. You create as many accounts as the kinds of media you want to consume. Dansup himself is communicating through a Mastodon account, not a Pixelfed one. Many Pixelfed users also have a Mastodon account, and they never questioned that. They actually want multiple accounts for different use cases. On the Fediverse threads, nearly all the people defending the Pixelfed philosophy posted from Mastodon accounts. They usually boasted about having both a Mastodon and a Pixelfed account. A multiplicity of accounts ========================== To me, the very goal of interoperability is not to force you into creating multiple accounts. Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. This was done, on purpose, for purely unethical reasons in order to keep users captive. That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore. It looks like a natural law: you need an account on a platform to communicate with someone on that platform. That also explains why most politicians want to "regulate" Facebook or X. They think it is impossible not to be on those platforms. They believe those platforms are "public spaces" while they truly are "private spaces trying to destroy all other public spaces in order to get a monopoly." People flock to the Fediverse with this philosophy of "one platform, one account", which makes no sense if you truly want to create a federated communication protocol like email or XMPP. But Manuel Moreale cracked it for me: the Fediverse is not a communication network. ActivityPub is not a communication protocol. The spec says it: ActivityPub is a protocol to build a "social platform" whose goal is "to deliver content." > The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralised social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delivering notifications and content. (official W3C definition of ActivityPub) On open protocols (manuelmoreale.com) https://manuelmoreale.com/thoughts/on-open-protocols No more communication ===================== But aren’t social networks also communication networks? That’s what I thought. That’s how they historically were marketed. That’s what we all believed during the "Arab Spring." But that was a lie. Communication networks are not profitable. Social networks are entertainment platforms, media consumption protocols. Historically, they disguised themselves as communication platforms to attract users and keep them captive. The point was never to avoid missing a message sent from a fellow human being. The point was always to fill your time with "content." We dreamed of decentralised social networks as "email 2.0." They truly are "television 2.0." They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car. But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights. It was never about the social! The lost messages ================= My own interpretation is that social media users don’t mind losing messages because they were raised on algorithmic platforms that did that all the time. They don’t see the point in trusting a platform because they never experienced a trusted means of communication. Facebook m’a rendu injoignable (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/facebook-ma-rendu-injoignable/index.html Now that I write it, it may also explain why instant messaging became the dominant communication medium: because if you don’t receive an immediate answer, you don’t even trust the recipient to have received your messages. In fact, even if the message was received, you don’t even trust the recipient's attention span to remember the message. Multiple studies have confirmed that we don’t remember the vast majority of what we see while doomscrolling. While the "view" was registered to increase statistics, we don’t have the slightest memory of most of that content, even after only a few seconds. It thus makes sense not to consider social media as a means of communication at all. There’s no need for a reliable communication protocol if we assume that human brains are not reliable enough to handle asynchronous messages. A Society That Lost Focus (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2024-03-18-lost-focus.html It’s not Dansup who is missing something. It is me who is unadapted to the current society. I understand now that Pixelfed was only following some design decisions and protocol abuses fathered by Mastodon. Pixelfed was my own "gotcha" moment because I never understood Instagram in the first place, and, in my eyes, Pixelfed was no better. But if you take that route, Mastodon is no better than Twitter. Many reactions pointed, justly, that other Fediverse tools such as PeerTube, WriteFreely, or Mobilizon were just not displaying messages at all. I didn’t consider it a big problem because they never pretended to do it in the first place. Nobody uses those tools to follow others. There’s no expectation. Those platforms are "publish only." But this is still a big flaw in the Fediverse! Someone could, using autocompletion, send a message pinging your PeerTube address and you will never see it. Try autocomplete "@ploum" from your Mastodon account and guess which suggestion is the only one that will send me a valid notification! On a more positive note, I should give credit to Dansup for announcing that Pixelfed will soon allow people to optionally "not drop" text messages. How we lost email ================= I cling to asynchronous reliable communications, but those are disappearing. I use email a lot because I see it as a true means of communication: reliable, asynchronous, decentralised, standardised, manageable offline with my own tools. But many people, even barely younger than me, tell me that email is "too formal" or "for old people" or "even worse than social network feeds." And they are probably right. I like it because I’ve learned to use it. I apply a strong inbox 0 methodology. If I don’t reply or act on your email, it is because I decided not to. I’m actively keeping my inbox clean by sharing only disposable email addresses that I disable once they start to be spammed. Why you are probably not at inbox 0 (but should be) (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/why-you-are-not-at-inbox-0/index.html But for most people, their email inbox is simply one more feed full of bad advertising. They have 4 or 5 digit unread count. They scroll through their inbox like they do through their social media feeds. Boringness of communications ============================ The main problem with reliable communication protocols? It is a mostly solved problem. Build simple websites, read RSS feeds, write emails. Use IRC and XMPP if you truly want real-time communication. Those are working and working great. And because of that, they are boring. Communications protocols are boring. They don’t give you that well- studied random hit of dopamine. They don’t make you addicted. On Social Media (gem.sdf.org) gemini://gem.sdf.org/beej/blog/2025-01-10-socialmedia.gmi Experiential Pica (www.lesswrong.com) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9ZodFr54FtpLThHZh/experiential-pica They don’t make you addicted which means they are not hugely profitable and thus are not advertised. They are not new. They are not as shiny as a new app or a new random chatbot. The problem with communication protocols was never the protocol part. It’s the communication part. A few sad humans never wanted to communicate in the first place and managed to become billionaires by convincing the rest of mankind that being entertained is better than communicating with other humans. As long as I’m not alone ======================== We believe that a communication network must reach a critical mass to be really useful. People stay on Facebook to "stay in touch with the majority." I don’t believe that lie anymore. I’m falling back to good old mailing lists. I’m reading the Web and Gemini while offline through Offpunk. I also handle my emails asynchronously while offline. Offpunk, an offline-first command-line browser (offpunk.net) https://offpunk.net/ There Is No Content on Gemini (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2022-10-05-there-is-no-content-on-gemini.html I may be part of an endangered species. It doesn’t matter. I made peace with the fact that I will never get in touch with everyone. As long as there are people posting on their gemlogs or blogs with RSS feeds, as long as there are people willing to read my emails without automatically summarising them, there will be a place for those who want to simply communicate. A protected reserve. You are welcome to join! https://ploum.net/files/framagroupes.jpg Illustration of a message board piled with messages by David Revoy (CC By 4.0) https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/viewer/framasoft__2023-05-20_Framalistes_by… Illustration of animal meeting at an intersection with messages by David Revoy (CC By 4.0) https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/viewer/framasoft__2023-05-20_Framagroupes_b…

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Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on?
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 04 Dec '25

04 Dec '25

IS PIXELFED SAWING OFF THE BRANCH THAT THE FEDIVERSE IS SITTING ON? by Ploum on 2025-12-04 https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html > In January 2025, I became aware that there was a real problem with Pixelfed, the "Instagram inspired Fediverse client". The problem is threatening the whole Fediverse. As Pixelfed received a lot of media attention, I choose to wait. In March 2025, I decided that the situation was quieter and wrote an email to Dansup, Pixelfed’s maintainer, with an early draft of this post. Dan’s promptly replied, in a friendly tone. But didn’t want to acknowledge the problem which I’ve confirmed many times with Pixelfed users. I want to bring the debate on the public place. If I’m wrong, I will at least understand why. If Dan is wrong on this very specific issue, we will at least open the debate. This post will be shared to my Fediverse audience through my @ploum@mamot.fr Mastodon account. But Pixelfed users will not see it. Even if they follow me, even if many people they follow boost it. Instead, they will see a picture of my broken keyboard that I posted a week ago. The latest post of Ploum according to Pixelfed. https://ploum.net/files/pixelfedploum.png Ploum’s real Fediverse timeline (mamot.fr) https://mamot.fr/@ploum That’s because, despite its name, Pixelfed is NOT a true Fediverse application. It does NOT respect the ActivityPub protocol. Any Pixelfed user following my @ploum@mamot.fr will only see a very small fraction of what I post. They may not see anything from me for months. But why? Simple! The Pixelfed app has unilaterally decided not to display most Fediverse posts for the arbitrary reason that they do not contain a picture. This is done on purpose and by design. Pixelfed is designed to mimic Instagram. Displaying text without pictures was deliberately removed from the code (it was possible in previous versions) in order to make the interface prettier. This is unlike a previous problem where Pixelfed would allow unauthorised users to read private posts from unknowing fediverse users, which was promptly fixed. Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances (fokus.cool) https://fokus.cool/2025/03/25/pixelfed-vulnerability.html In this case, we are dealing with a conscious design decision by the developers. Being pretty is more important than transmitting messages. Technically, this means that a Pixelfed user P will think that he follows someone but will miss most of the content. On the opposite, the sender, for example a Mastodon user M, will believe that P has received his message because M follows him. This is a grave abuse of the protocol: messages are silently dropped. It stands against everything the Fediverse is trying to do: allow users to communicate. My experience with open protocols allows me to say that it is a critical problem and that it cannot be tolerated. Would you settle for a mail provider which silently drop all emails you receive if they contain the letter "P"? The principle behind a communication protocol is to create trust that messages are transmitted. Those messages could, of course, be filtered by the users but those filters should be manually triggered and always removable. If a message is not delivered, the sender should be notified. In 2025, I’ve read several articles about people trying the Fediverse but leaving it because "there’s not enough content despites following lot of people". Due to the Pixelfed buzz in January, I’m now wondering: "how many of those people were using Pixelfed and effectively missing most of the Fediverse content?" The importance of respecting the protocol ========================================= I cannot stress enough how important that problem is. If Pixelfed becomes a significant actor, its position will gravely undermine the ActivityPub protocol to the point of making it meaningless. Imagine a new client, TextFed, that will never display posts with pictures. That makes as much sense as the opposite. Lots of people, like me, find pictures disturbing and some people cannot see pictures at all. So TextFed makes as much sense as Pixelfed. Once you have TextFed, you realise that TextFed and PixelFed users can follow each other, they can comment on post from Mastodon users, they can exchange private messages but they will never be able to see post from each other. For any normal users, there’s no real way to understand that they miss some messages. And even if you do, it is very hard to find that the cause is the absence of pictures in them make them "not pretty enough" to Pixelfed developers. Worse of all : some Mastodon posts do contain a picture but are not displayed in Pixelfed. That’s because the picture is from a link preview and was not manually uploaded. Try to explain that to your friends that reluctantly followed you on the Fediverse. Have a look at any Mastodon account and try to guess which posts will we showed to the Pixelfed followers! That’s not something any normal human is supposed to understand. For Pixelfed users, there’s no way to see they are missing on some content. For Mastodon users, there’s no way to see that some of their audience is missing on some content. With the trust in the protocol broken, people will revert to create Mastodon accounts to follow Mastodon, Pixelfed accounts to follow Pixelfed and Textfed to follow Textfed. Even if it is not 100% needed, that’s the first intuition. It’s already happening around me: I’ve witnessed multiple people with a Mastodon account creating a Pixelfed account to follow Pixelfed users. They do this naturally because they were used to do that with Twitter and Instagram. Congratulations, you have successfully broken ActivityPub and, as a result, the whole Fediverse. What Meta was not able to do with Threads, the Fediverse did it to itself. Because it was prettier. How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html Pixelfed will be forced to comply anyway ======================================== Now, imagine for a moment that Pixelfed takes off (which is something I wish for and would be healthy for the Fediverse) and that interactions are strong between Mastodon users and Pixelfed users (also something I wish for). I let you imagine how many bug reports developers will receive about "some posts are not appearing in my followers timeline" or "not appearing in my timeline". This will result in a heavy pressure for Pixelfed devs to implement text-only messages. They will, at some point, be forced to comply, having eroded trust in the Fediverse for nothing. Once a major actor in a decentralised network starts to mess with the protocol, there are only two possible output: either that actor lose steam or that actor becomes dominant enough to impose its own vision of the protocol. In fact, there’s a third option: the whole protocol becomes irrelevant because nobody trust it anymore. What if Pixelfed becomes dominant? ================================== But imagine that Pixelfed is now so important that they can stick to their guns and refuse to display text messages. Well, there’s a simple answer: every other fediverse software will now add an image with every post. Mastodon will probably gain a configurable "default picture to attach to every post so your posts are displayed in Pixelfed". And now, without having formerly formalised it, the ActivityPub protocol requires every message to have a picture. That’s how protocol works. It already happened: that’s how all mail clients started to implement the winmail.dat bug. The Winmail.dat Syndrome (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/winmail-dat-syndrome/index.html Sysadmins handling storage and bandwidth for the Fediverse thank you in advance. We are not there yet ==================== Fortunately, we are not there yet. Pixelfed is still brand new. It still can go back to displaying every message an end user expect to see when following another Fediverse user. I stress out that it should be by default, not a hidden setting. Nearly all Pixelfed users I’ve asked were unaware of that problem. They thought that if they follow someone on the Fediverse, they should, by default, see all their public posts. There’s no negotiation. No warning on the Pixelfed website will be enough. In a federated communication system, filters should be opt-in. If fact, that’s what older versions of Pixelfed were doing. But, while text messages MUST be displayed by default (MUST as in RFC), they can still me displayed as less important. For example, one could imagine having them smaller or whatever you find pretty as long as it is clear that the message is there. I trust Pixelfed devs to be creative here. The Fediverse is growing. The Fediverse is working well. The Fediverse is a tool that we urgently ned in those trying times. Let’s not saw off the branch on which we stand when we need it the most. Illustration by David Revoy, CC-By-SA https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/viewer/misc__2024-09-09_My-Neighboor-Mastod…

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Don’t Do Snake Oil Writing
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 26 Nov '25

26 Nov '25

DON’T DO SNAKE OIL WRITING by Ploum on 2025-11-26 https://ploum.net/2025-11-26-snake-oil-writing.html In computer security, it is often said that the fact you don’t see any vulnerability in the code you write is no proof that your code is secure. It is proof that you are blind to all the mistakes you made in your shitty code. The less competent you are, the more confident you will be and the more vulnerable code you will write. And people will exploit vulnerabilities of your code. Even if you honestly believe in your aptitude, you will end up writing "snake-oil" security systems. Schneier on Security (www.schneier.com) https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/1999/0215.html#snakeoil But I’m not a cryptographer. I’m a writer. When you use an LLM to generate text, the fact that you find the output good doesn’t mean that it is good. It only means that you are blind to the shit you’ve generated. The simple idea that you think you could get people read your bland generated text and not notice is the proof that you are totally incompetent at writing. You should not trust yourself with that the same way I would never trust myself to check if LLM-generated source code is secure. Did you really expect nobody to notice that your text was generated? Seriously? People will notice how stupid your writing is. Some, like myself, will be offended. Other will simply walk away with a bad feeling. One sure is certain: nobody will think it is interesting. Nobody will care about what you wrote. People will simply stop reading you. People will stop sharing you, stop discussing about your writing. Because you are doing snake-oil writing. Fortunately, the cure is very simple. Even if you think that what you produce is bad, be honest, straight. People will notice that you want to improve. Some will even offer advice. You will learn. You will make mistakes, which is an essential part of learning. If you acknowledge those mistakes, people will appreciate your work even more. Writing secure code is not about magical genius thinking from behind a Guy Fawkes mask. It is about tediously learning patterns of vulnerabilities, about humility that you can’t catch everything alone. Writing text is not about doing beautiful sentences. It is thinking about the information you really want to transmit. Some really good writers make awful sentences. But they are still good because each sentence gives you something, because you feel information and emotions flowing from the writer to you. If you are tempted to use an LLM to generate a text, don’t publish the output of the LLM. Publish the prompt! That’s where your information is. It is what people want to hear. You were tricked into doubting your own ability to write and to use a very costly text generator instead of trusting yourself. This impairs your ability to learn, to improve while insulting all the people that may read you. Like a cocaine addict, you are destroying yourself and destroying your reputation by screaming like a maniac. But you feel good because your brain is altered to believe that "you are better and more productive". Stop the slop while you can. If you are holding an MBA and using LLM to generate marketing content, it may be too late. If that’s the case, follow Bill Hicks advice and, please, kill yourself! Picture by Jeff Nelson https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Snake_oil_ink_stamp.jpg

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How I felt in love with calendar.txt
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 03 Sep '25

03 Sep '25

HOW I FELT IN LOVE WITH CALENDAR.TXT by Ploum on 2025-09-03 https://ploum.net/2025-09-03-calendar-txt.html The more I learn about Unix tools, the more I realise we are reinventing everyday Rube Goldberg’s wheels and that Unix tools are, often, elegantly enough. Months ago, I discovered calendar.txt. A simple file with all your dates which was so simple and stupid that I wondered 1) why I didn’t think about it myself and, 2) how it could be useful. Calendar.txt (terokarvinen.com) https://terokarvinen.com/2021/calendar-txt/ I downloaded the file and tried it. Without thinking much about it, I realised that I could add the following line to my offpunk startup: > !grep `date -I` calendar.txt --color And, just like that, I suddenly have important things for my day everytime I start Offpunk. In my "do_the_internet.sh", I added the following: > grep `date -I`calendar.txt --color -A 7 Which allows me to have an overview of the next seven days. But what about editing? This is the alias I added to my shell to automatically edit today’s date: > alias calendar="vim +/`date -I` ~/inbox/calendar.txt" It feels so easy, so elegant, so simple. All those aliases came naturally, without having to spend more than a few seconds in the man page of "date". No need to fiddle with a heavy web interface. I can grep through my calendar. I can edit it with vim. I can share it, save it and synchronise it without changing anything else, without creating any account. Looking for a date, even far in the future, is as simple as typing "/YEAR-MONTH-DAY" in vim. Recurring events ================ The icing on the cake became apparent when I received my teaching schedule for the next semester. I had to add a recurring event every Tuesday minus some special cases where the university is closed. Not a big deal. I do it each year, fiddling with the web interface of my calendar to find the good options to make the event recurrent then removing those special cases without accidentally removing the whole series. It takes at most 10 minutes, 15 if I miss something. Ten minutes of my life that I hate, forced to use a mouse and click on menus which are changing every 6 months because, you know, "yeah, redesign". But, with my calendar.txt, it takes exactly 15 seconds. > /Tue To find the first Tuesday. > i To write the course number and classroom number, escape then > n.n.n.n.n.n.nn.n.n.n.nn.n.n.n.n. I’m far from being a Vim expert but this occurred naturally, without really thinking about the tool. I was only focused on the date being correct. It was quick and pleasant. Shared events and collaboration =============================== I read my email in Neomutt. When I’m invited to an event, I must open a browser to access the email through my webmail and click the "Yes" button in order to have it added to my calendar. Events I didn’t respond show in my calendar, even if I don’t want them. It took me some settings-digging not to display events I refused. Which is kinda dumb but so are the majority of our tools those days. With calendar.txt, I manually enter the details from the invitation, which is not perfect but takes less time than opening a browser, login into a webmail and clicking a button while waiting at each step the loading of countless of JavaScript libraries. Invitations are rare enough that I don’t mind entering the details by hand. But I’m thinking about doing a small bash script that would read an ICS file and add it to calendar.txt. It looks quite easy to do. I also thought about doing the reverse : a small script that would create an ICS and send it by email to any address added to an event. But it would be hard to track down which events were already sent and which ones are new. Let’s stick to the web interface when I need to create a shared event. Calendar.txt should remain simple and for my personal use. The point of Unix tools is to allow you to create the tools you need for yourself, not create a startup with a shiny name/logo that will attract investors hoping to make billions in a couple of years by enshitifying the life of captive users. And when you work with a team, you are stuck anyway with the worst possible tool that satisfies the need of the dumbest member of the team. Usually the manager. With Unix tools, each solution is personal and different from the others. Other source of inspiration : Jouraling with neovim/coreutils and dateutils (tangled.sh) https://tangled.sh/@oppi.li/journal Simplifying calendaring ======================= Another unexpected advantage of the system is that you don’t need to guess the end date of events anymore. All I need to know is that I have a meeting at 10 and a lunch at 12. I don’t need to estimate the duration of the meeting which is, anyway, usually only a rough estimation and not an important information. But you can’t create an event in modern calendar without giving a precise end. Calendar.txt is simple, calendar.txt is good. I can add events without thinking about it, without calendaring being a chore. Sandra explains how she realised that using an online calendar was a chore when she started to use a paper agenda. When calendar was a verb (idiomdrottning.org) gemini://idiomdrottning.org/calendaring Going back to a paper calendar is probably something I will end up doing but, in the meantime, calendar.txt is a breeze. Trusting my calendar ==================== Most importantly, I now trust my calendar. I’ve been burned by this before: I had created my whole journey to a foreign country on my online calendar only to discover upon landing that my calendar had decided to be "smart" and to change all events because I was not in the same time zone. Since then, I actually write the time of an event in the title of the event, even if it looks redundant. This also helps with events being moved by accident while scrolling on a smartphone or in a browser. Which is rare but happened enough to make me anxious. I had the realisation that I don’t trust any calendar application because, for events with a very precise time (like a train), I always fall back on checking the confirmation email or PDFs. It’s not the case anymore with calendar.txt. I trust the file. I trust the tool. There are not many tools you can trust. Mobile calendar.txt =================== I don’t need notifications about events on my smartphone. If a notification tells me about an event I forgot, it would be too late anyway. And if my phone is on silent, like always, the notification is useless anyway. We killed notifications with too much notification, something I addressed here : Une vie sans notifications (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2025-09-02-mudita.html I do want to consult/edit my calendar on my phone. Getting the file on my phone is easy as having it synchronised with my computer through any mean. It’s a simple txt file. Using it is another story. Looking at my phone, I realise how far we have fallen: Android doesn’t allow me to do a simple shortcut to that calendar.txt file which would open on the current day. There’s probably a way but I can’t think of one. Probably because I don’t understand that system. After all, I’m not supposed to even try understanding it. Android is not Unix. Android, like other proprietary Operating System, is a cage you need to fight against if you don’t want to surrender your choices, your data, your soul. Unix is freedom: hard to conquer but impossible to let go as soon as you tasted it.

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20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 4)
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 23 Jul '25

23 Jul '25

20 YEARS OF LINUX ON THE DESKTOP (PART 4) by Ploum on 2025-07-23 https://ploum.net/2025-07-23-linux_desktop4.html > Previously in "20 years of Linux on the Deskop": After contributing to the launch of Ubuntu as the "perfect Linux desktop", Ploum realises that Ubuntu is drifting away from both Debian and GNOME. In the meantime, mobile computing threatens to make the desktop irrelevant. 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 1) https://ploum.net/2024-10-20-20years-linux-desktop-part1.html 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 2) https://ploum.net/2024-12-16-linux_desktop2.html 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 3) https://ploum.net/2025-03-08-linux_desktop3.html The big desktop schism ====================== The fragmentation of the Ubuntu/GNOME communities became all too apparent when, in 2010, Mark Shuttleworth announced during the Ubuntu- summit that Ubuntu would drop GNOME in favour of its own in-house and secretly developed desktop: Unity. I was in the audience. I remember shaking my head in disbelief while Mark was talking on stage, just a few metres from me. Working at the time in the automotive industry, I had heard rumours that Canonical was secretly talking with BMW to put Ubuntu in their cars and that there was a need for a new touchscreen interface in Ubuntu. Mark hoped to make an interface that would be the same on computers and touchscreens. Hence the name: "Unity". It made sense but I was not happy. The GNOME community was, at the time, in great agitation about the future. Some thought that GNOME was looking boring. That there was no clear sense of direction except minor improvements. In 2006, the German Linux Company SUSE had signed a patent agreement with Microsoft covering patents related to many Windows 95 concepts like the taskbar, the tray, the startmenu. SUSE was the biggest contributor to KDE and the agreement was covering the project. But Red Hat and GNOME refused to sign that agreement, meaning that Microsoft suing the GNOME project was now plausible. Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened (liam- on-linux.dreamwidth.org) https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/85359.html How Microsoft shattered Gnome's unity with Windows 95 (www.theregister.com) https://www.theregister.com/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fa… An experiment of an alternative desktop breaking all Windows 95 concepts was done in JavaScript: GNOME-shell. A JavaScript desktop? Seriously? Yeah, it was cool for screenshots but it was slow and barely usable. It was an experiment, nothing else. But there’s a rule in the software world: nobody will ever end an experiment. An experiment will always grow until it becomes too big to cancel and becomes its own project. Providing the GNOME desktop to millions of users, Mark Shuttleworth was rightly concerned about the future of GNOME. Instead of trying to fix GNOME, he decided to abandon it. That was the end of Ubuntu as Debian+GNOME. What concerned me was that Ubuntu was using more and more closed products. Products that were either proprietary, developed behind closed doors or, at the very least, were totally controlled by Canonical people. In 2006, I had submitted a Summer of Code project to build a GTK interface to Ubuntu’s new bug tracker: Launchpad. Launchpad was an in- house project which looked like it was based on the Python CMS Plone and I had some experience with it. During that summer, I realised that Launchpad was, in fact, proprietary and had no API. To my surprise, there was no way I could get the source code of Launchpad. Naively, I had thought that everything Ubuntu was doing would be free software. Asking the dev team, I was promised Launchpad would become free "later". I could not understand why Canonical people were not building it in the open. I still managed to build "Conseil" by doing web scraping but it broke with every single change done internally by the Launchpad team. As a side note, the name "Conseil" was inspired by the book "20.000 leagues under the sea", by Jules Vernes, a book I had downloaded from the Gutenberg project and that I was reading on my Nokia 770. The device was my first e-reader and I’ve read tenths of public domain books on it. This was made possible thanks to the power of opensource: FBreader, a very good epub reading software, had been easily ported to the N770 and was easily installable. I tried to maintain Conseil for a few months before giving up. It was my first realisation that Canonical was not 100% open source. Even technically free software was developed behind closed doors or, at the very least, with tight control over the community. This included Launchpad, Bzr, Upstart, Unity and later Mir. The worse offender would later be Snap. To Mark Shuttleworth’s credit, it should be noted that, most of the time, they were really trying to fix core issues with Linux’s ecosystem. In retrospective, it looks easy to see those moves as "bad". But, in reality, Canonical had a strong vision and keeping control was easier than to do everything in the open. Bzr was launched before git existed (by a few days). Upstard was created before Systemd. Those decisions made sense at the time. Half an hour with Mark 'SABDFL' Shuttleworth • The Register (www.theregister.com) https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/11/mark_shuttleworth_ubuntu_interview/ Even the move to Unity would later prove to be very strategical as, in 2012, GNOME would suddenly depend on Systemd, which was explicitly developed as a competitor to Upstart. Ubuntu would concede defeat in 2015 by replacing Upstart with Systemd and in 2018 by reinstating GNOME as the default desktop. But those were not a given in 2010. systemd, 10 years later: a historical and technical retrospective (blog.darknedgy.net) https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2020/05/02/0/ What if Ubuntu were right, a discussion with Jonathan Riddel about KDE (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/what-if-ubuntu-were-right/index.html But even with the benefit of doubt, Canonical would sometimes cross huge red lines, like that time where Unity came bundled with some Amazon advertisement, tracking you on your own desktop. This was, of course, not really well received. The end of Maemo: when incompetence is not enough, be malevolent ================================================================ At the same time in the nascent mobile world, Nokia was not the only one suffering from the growing Apple/Google duopoly. Microsoft was going nowhere with its own mobile operating system, WindowsCE and running like a headless chicken. The director of the "Business division" of Microsoft, a guy named Stephen Elop, signed a contract with Nokia to develop some Microsoft Office feature on Symbian. This looked like an anecdotical side business until, a few months after that contract, in September 2010, Elop leaves Microsoft to become… CEO of Nokia. This was important news to me because, at 2010’s GUADEC (GNOME’s annual conference) in Then Hague, I had met a small tribe of free software hackers called Lanedo. After a few nice conversations, I was excited to be offered a position in the team. In my mind at the time, I would work on GNOME technologies full-time while being less and less active in the Ubuntu world! I had chosen my side: I would be a GNOME guy. I was myself more and more invested in GNOME, selling GNOME t-shirts at FOSDEM and developing "Getting Things GNOME!", a software that would later become quite popular. First release of GTG in 2009 https://ploum.net/206-getting-things-gnome-01-just-5-minutes-more/index.html Joining Lanedo without managing to land a job at Canonical (despite several tries) was the confirmation that my love affair with Ubuntu had to be ended. The quest for the best non-Ubuntu distribution https://ploum.net/best-gnome3-distribution/index.html In 2010, Lanedo biggest customer was, by far, Nokia. I had been hired to work on Maemo (or maybe Meego? This was unclear). We were not thrilled to see an ex-Microsoft executive take the reins of Nokia. As we feared, one of Elop’s first actions as CEO of Nokia was to kill Maemo in an infamous "burning platform" memo. Elop is a Microsoft man and hates anything that looks like free software. In fact, like a good manager, he hates everything technical. It is all the fault of the developers which are not "bringing their innovation to the market fast enough". Sadly, nobody highlighted the paradox that "bringing to the market" had never been the job of the developers. Elop’s impact on the Nokia company is huge and nearly immediate: the stock is in free fall. One Nokia developer posted on Twitter: "Developers are blamed because they did what management asked them to do". But, sometimes, management even undid the work of the developers. The Meego team at Nokia was planning a party for the release of their first mass-produced phone, the N8. While popping Champaign during the public announcement of the N8 release, the whole team learned that the phone had eventually been shipped with… Symbian. Nobody had informed the team. Elop had been CEO for less than a week and Nokia was in total chaos. But Stephen Elop is your typical "successful CEO". "Successful" like in inheriting one of the biggest and most successful mobile phone makers and, in a couple of years, turning it into ashes. You can’t invent such "success". > During Elop's tenure, Nokia's stock price dropped 62%, their mobile phone market share was halved, their smartphone market share fell from 33% to 3%, and the company suffered a cumulative €4.9 billion loss (source: Stephen Elop on Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop It should be noted that, against all odds, the Meego powered Nokia N9, which succeeded to the N8, was a success and was giving true hope of Meego competing with Android/iOS. N9 was considered a "flagship" and it showed. At Lanedo, we had discussed having an N9 bought by the company for each employee so we could "eat our own dog food" (something which was done at Collabora). But Elop announcement was clearly underderstood as the killing of Meego/Maemo and Symbian to leave room to… Windows Phone! The Nokia N9 was available in multiple colours (picture by Bytearray render on Wikimedia) https://ploum.net/files/nokia_n9.jpg Well, Elop promised that, despite moving to Windows Phone, Nokia would release one Meego phone every year. I don’t remember if anyone bought that lie. We could not really believe that all those years of work would be killed just when the success of the N9 proved that we did it right. But that was it. The N9 was the first and the last of its kind. Ironically, the very first Windows Phone, the Lumia 800, will basically be the N9 with Windows Phone replacing Meego. And it would receive worse reviews that the N9. At that moment, one question is on everybody's lips: is Stephen Elop such a bad CEO or is he destroying Nokia on purpose? Is it typical management incompetence or malevolence? Or both? The answer comes when Microsoft, Elop’s previous employer, bought Nokia for a fraction of the price it would have paid if Elop hasn’t been CEO. It’s hard to argue that this was not premeditated: Elop managed to discredit and kill every software-related project Nokia had ever done. That way, Nokia could be sold as a pure hardware maker to Microsoft, without being encumbered by a software culture which was too distant from Microsoft. And Elop goes back to his old employer as a richer man, receiving a huge bonus for having tanked a company. But remember dear MBA students, he’s a "very successful manager", you should aspire to become like him. Les voies du capitalisme sont impénétrables. As foolish as it sounds, this is what the situation was: the biggest historical phone maker in the world merged with the biggest historical software maker. Vic Gundotra, head of the Google+ social network, posted: "Two turkeys don’t make an eagle." But one thing was clear: Microsoft was entering the mobile computing market because everything else was suddenly irrelevant. Every business eyes were pointed towards mobile computing where, ironically, Debian+GNOME had been a precursor. Just when it looked like Ubuntu managed to make Linux relevant on the desktop, nobody cared about the desktop anymore. How could Mark Shuttleworth makes Ubuntu relevant in that new world? (to be continued) > Subscribe by email or by rss to get the next episodes of "20 years of Linux on the Desktop". > > I’m currently turning this story into a book. I’m looking for an agent or a publisher interested to work with me on this book and on an English translation of "Bikepunk", my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist typewritten novel which sold out in three weeks in France and Belgium.

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Reducing the digital clutter of chats
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 23 May '25

23 May '25

REDUCING THE DIGITAL CLUTTER OF CHATS by Ploum on 2025-05-23 https://ploum.net/2025-05-23-chats-digital-clutter.html I hate modern chats. They presuppose we are always online, always available to chat. They force us to see and think about them each time we get our eyes on one of our devices. Unlike mailboxes, they are never empty. We can’t even easily search through old messages (unlike the chat providers themselves, which use the logs to learn more about us). Chats are the epitome of the business idiot: they make you always busy but prevent you from thinking and achieving anything. It is quite astonishing to realise that modern chat systems use 100 or 1000 times more resources (in size and computing power) than 30 years ago, that they are less convenient (no custom client, no search) and that they work against us (centralisation, surveillance, ads). But, yay, custom emojis! Do not get me wrong: chats are useful! When you need an immediate interaction or a quick on-the-go message, chats are the best. I needed to keep being able to chat while keeping the digital clutter to a minimal and preserving my own sanity. That’s how I came up with the following rules. Rule 1: One chat to rule them all ================================= One of the biggest problems of centralised chats is that you must be on many of them. I decided to make Signal my main chat and to remove others. Signal was, for me, a good compromise of respecting my privacy, being open source and without ads while still having enough traction that I could convince others to join it. Yes, Signal is centralised and has drawbacks like relying on some Google layers (which I worked around by using Molly-FOSS). I simply do not see XMPP, Matrix or SimpleX becoming popular enough in the short term. Wire and Threema had no advantages over Signal. I could not morally justify using Whatsapp nor Telegram. In 2022, as I decided to use Signal as my main chat, I deleted all accounts but Signal and Whatsapp and disabled every notification from Whatsapp, forcing myself to open it once a week to see if I had missed something important. People who really wanted to reach me quickly understood that it was better to use Signal. This worked so well that I forgot to open Whatsapp for a whole month which was enough for Whatsapp to decide that my account was not active anymore. Le suicide de mon compte WhatsApp (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/le-suicide-de-mon-compte-whatsapp/index.html Not having Whatsapp is probably the best thing which happened to me regarding chats. Suddenly, I was out of tenths or hundreds of group chats. Yes, I missed lots of stuff. But, most importantly, I stopping fearing missing them. Seriously, I never missed having Whatsapp. Not once. Thanks Meta for removing my account! While travelling in Europe, it is now standard that taxi and hotels will chat with you using Whatsapp. Not anymore for me. Guess what? It works just fine. In fact, I suspect it works even better because people are forced to either do what we agreed during our call or to call me, which requires more energy and planning. Rule 2: Mute, mute, mute! ========================= Now that Signal is becoming more popular, some group chats are migrating to it. But I’ve learned the lesson : I’m muting them. This allows me to only see the messages when I really want to look at them. Don’t hesitate to mute vocal group chats and people with whom you don’t need day-to-day interaction. I’m also leaving group chats which are not essential. Whatsapp deletion told me that nearly no group chat is truly essential. Many times, I’ve had people sending me emails about what was told on a group chat because they knew I was not there. Had I been on that group, I would probably have missed the messages but nobody would have cared. If you really want to get in touch with me, send me an email! Rule 3: No read receipts nor typing indicators ============================================== I was busy, walking in the street with my phone in hands for directions. A notification popped up with an important message. It was important but not urgent. I could not deal with the message at that moment. I wanted to take the time. One part of my brain told me not to open the message because, if I did, the sender would see a "read receipt". He would see that I had read the message but would not receive any answer. For him, that would probably translate in "he doesn’t care". I consciously avoided to open Signal until I was back home and could deal with the message. That’s when I realised how invasive the "read receipt" was. I disabled it and never regretted that move. I’m reading messages on my own watch and replying when I want to. Nobody needs to know if I’ve seen the message. It is wrong in every aspect. Signal preferences showing read receipts and typing indicator disabled https://ploum.net/files/signal_receipts.jpg Rule 4: Temporary discussions only ================================== The artist Bruno Leyval, who did the awesome cover of my novel Bikepunk, is obsessed with deletion and disappearance. He set our Signal chat so that every message is deleted after a day. At first, I didn’t see the point. Until I understood that this was not only about privacy, it also was about decluttering our mind, our memories. Since then, I’ve set every chat in Signal to delete messages after one week. Signal preferences showing disappearing messages set to one week https://ploum.net/files/signal_disappearing.jpg This might seem like nothing but this changes everything. Suddenly, chats are not a long history of clutter. Suddenly, you see chats as transient and save things you want to keep. Remember that you can’t search in chats? This means that chats are transient anyway. With most chats, your history is not saved and could be lost by simply dropping your phone on the floor. Something important should be kept in a chat? Save it! But it should probably have been an email. Embracing the transient nature of chat, making it explicit greatly reduce the clutter. Conclusion ========== I know that most of you will say that "That’s nice Ploum but I can’t do that because everybody is on XXX" where XXX is most often Whatsapp in my own circles. But this is wrong: you believe everybody is on XXX because you are yourself using XXX as your main chat. When surveying my students this year, I’ve discovered that nearly half of them was not on Whatsapp. Not for some hard reason but because they never saw the need for it. In fact, they were all spread over Messenger, Instagram, Snap, Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord. And they all believed that "everybody is where I am". In the end, the only real choice to make is between being able to get immediately in touch with a lot of people or having room for your mental space. I choose the latter, you might prefer the former. That’s fine! I still don’t like chat. I’m well aware that the centralised nature of Signal makes it a short-term solution. But I’m not looking for the best sustainable chat. I just want fewer chats in my life. If you want to get in touch, send me an email!

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Goodbye Offpunk, Welcome XKCDpunk!
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 31 Mar '25

31 Mar '25

GOODBYE OFFPUNK, WELCOME XKCDPUNK! by Ploum on 2025-04-01 https://ploum.net/2025-04-01-xkcdpunk.html For the last three years, I’ve been working on Offpunk, a command-line gemini and web browser. Offpunk.net https://offpunk.net While my initial goal was to browse the Geminisphere offline, the mission has slowly morphed into cleaning and unenshitiffying the modern web, offering users a minimalistic way of browsing any website with interesting content. Rendering the Web with Pictures in Your Terminal (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2022-03-24-ansi_html.html Focusing on essentials ====================== From the start, it was clear that Offpunk would focus on essentials. If a website needs JavaScript to be read, it is considered as non- essential. It worked surprisingly well. In fact, in multiple occurrence, I’ve discovered that some websites work better in Offpunk than in Firefox. I can comfortably read their content in the former, not in the latter. By default, Offpunk blocks domains deemed as nonessentials or too enshitified like twitter, X, facebook, linkedin, tiktok. (those are configurable, of course. Defaults are in offblocklist.py). Cleaning websites, blocking worst offenders. That’s good. But it is only a start. It’s time to go further, to really cut out all the crap from the web. And, honestly, besides XKCD comics, everything is crap on the modern web. > As an online technical discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison with an existing XKCD comic approaches 1. > – XKCD’s law XKCD’s law (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/xkcds-law/index.html If we know that we will end our discussion with an XKCD’s comic, why not cut all the fluff? Why don’t we go straight to the conclusion in a true minimalistic fashion? Introducing XKCDpunk ==================== That’s why I’m proud to announce that, starting with today’s release, Offpunk 2.7 will now be known as XKCDpunk 1.0. Xkcdpunk.net https://xkcdpunk.net XKCDpunk includes a new essential command "xkcd" which, as you guessed, takes an integer as a parameter and display the relevant XKCD comic in your terminal, while caching it to be able to browse it offline. Screenshot of XKCDpunk showing comic 626 https://ploum.net/files/xkcdpunk1.png Of course, this is only an early release. I need to clean a lot of code to remove everything not related to accessing xkcd.com. Every non-xkcd related domain will be added to offblocklist.py. I also need to clean every occurrence of "Offpunk" to change the name. All offpunk.net needs to be migrated to xkcd.net. Roma was not built in one day. Don’t hesitate to install an "offpunk" package, as it will still be called in most distributions. offpunk package versions - Repology (repology.org) https://repology.org/project/offpunk/versions And report bugs on the xkcdpunk’s mailinglist. xkcdpunk-users on lists.sr.ht https://lists.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk-users Goodbye Offpunk, welcome XKCDpunk!

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The candid naivety of geeks
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 28 Mar '25

28 Mar '25

THE CANDID NAIVETY OF GEEKS by Ploum on 2025-03-28 https://ploum.net/2025-03-28-geeks-naivety.html I mean, come on! ================ Amazon recently announced that, from now on, everything you say to Alexa will be sent to their server. Pluralistic: Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading (15 Mar 2025) (pluralistic.net) https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/15/altering-the-deal/ What surprised me the most with this announcement is how it was met with surprise and harsh reactions. People felt betrayed. I mean, come on! Did you really think that Amazon was not listening to you before that? Did you really buy an Alexa trusting Amazon to "protect your privacy"? Recently, I came across a comment on Hacker News where the poster defended Apple as protecting privacy of its users because "They market their product as protecting our privacy". I mean, once again, come on! Did you really think that "marketing" is telling the truth? Are you a freshly debarked Thermian? (In case you missed it, this is a Galaxy Quest reference.) The whole point of marketing is to lie, lie and lie again. What is the purpose of that gadget? =================================== The whole point of the whole Amazon Alexa tech stack is to send information to Amazon. That’s the main goal of the thing. The fact that it is sometimes useful to you is a direct consequence of the thing sending information to Amazon. Just like Facebook linking you with friends is a consequence of you giving your information to Meta. Usefulness is only a byproduct of privacy invasion. Having a fine-grained setting enabling "do not send all information to Amazon please" is, at best, wishful thinking. We had the same in the browser ("do-not-track"). It didn’t work. I’ve always been convinced that the tech geeks who bought an Amazon Alexa perfectly knew what they were doing. One of my friends has a Google Echo and justify it with "Google already knows everything about our family through our phones, so I’m trading only a bit more of our privacy for convenience". I don’t agree with him but, at the very least, it’s a logical opinion. We all know that what can be done with a tool will be done eventually. And you should prepare for it. On a side note, I also postulate that the reason Amazon removed that setting is because they were already gathering too much data to justify its existence in case there’s a complaint or an investigation in the future."How did you manage to get those data while your product says it will not send data?". But, once again, any tech person knows that pushing a button in an interface is not a proof of anything in the underlying software. Please stop being naive about Apple =================================== That’s also the point with Apple: Apple is such a big company that the right hand has no idea about what the left hand is doing. Some privacy people are working at Apple and doing good job. But their work is continuously diluted through the interests of quick and cheap production, marketing, release, new features, gathering data for advertising purpose. Apple is not a privacy company and has never been: it is an opportunistic company which advertise privacy when it feels it could help sell more iPhones. But deeply inside, they absolutely don’t care and they will absolutely trade the (very little) privacy they have if it means selling more. Sometimes, geek naivety is embarrassingly stupid. Like "brand loyalty". Marketing lies to you. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the company, the bigger the lie. In tech, there’s no way for a big company to not lie because marketers have no real understanding of they are selling. Do you really think that people who chose to advertise "privacy" at Apple have any strong knowledge about "privacy"? That they could simply give you a definition of "privacy"? I know that intelligent people go to great intellectual contortions to justify buying the latest overpriced spying shiny coloured screen with an apple logo. It looks like most humans actively look to see their freedom restricted. Seirdy calls it "the domestication of users". WhatsApp and the domestication of users (seirdy.one) https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication-of-users/ And that’s why I see Apple as a cult: most tech people cannot be reasoned about it. The Cost of Being Convinced (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/the-cost-of-being-convinced/index.html You can’t find a technical solution to a lie ============================================ Bill Cole, contributor to Spamassassin, recently posted on Mastodon that the whole DNS stack to protect spammers was not working. > spammers are more consistent at making SPF, DKIM, and DMARC correct than are legitimate senders. 🆘Bill Cole 🇺🇦: "@jwz@mastodon.social The stats we collect for the…" (toad.social) https://toad.social/@grumpybozo/114213600922816869 It is, once again, a naive approach to spam. The whole stack was designed with the mindset "bad spammers will try to hide themselves". But was is happening in your inbox, really? Most spam is not "black hat spam". It is what I call "white-collar spam": perfectly legitimate company, sending you emails from legitimate address. You slept in a hotel during a business trip? Now you will receive weekly emails about our hotel for the rest of your life. And it is the same for any shop, any outlet, anything you have done. Your inbox is filled with "white-collar" junk. And they know this perfectly well. In Europe, we have a rule, the RGPD, which forbid businesses to keep your data without your express consent. I did the experiment for several months to send a legal threat to every single white-collar spam I received. Guess what: they always replied that it was a mistake, that I was now removed, that it should not have happened, that I checked the box (which was false but how could I prove it?) or even, on one occasion, that they restored a backup containing my email before I unsubscribed (I unsubscribed from that one 10 years before, which makes it very unlikely). In short, they lied. All of them. All of them are spammers and they lie pretending that "they thought you were interested". In one notable case, they told me that they had erased all my data while, still having the cookie on my laptop, I could see and use my account. Thirty days later, I was still connected and I figured that they simply managed to change my user id from "ploum" to "deleted_ploum" in the database. While answering me straight in the face that they had no information about me in their database. Corporations are lying. You must treat every corporate word as a straight lie until proved otherwise. But Ploum, if all marketing is a lie, why trusting Signal? ========================================================== If you can’t trust marketing, why do I use Signal and Protonmail? First of all, Signal is open source. And, yes, I’ve read some of the source code for some feature I was interested in. I’ve also read through some very deep audit of Signal source code. Reviewing the Cryptography Used by Signal (soatok.blog) https://soatok.blog/2025/02/18/reviewing-the-cryptography-used-by-signal/ I’m also trusting the people behind Signal. I’m trusting people who recommend Signal. I’m trusting the way Signal is built. But most importantly, Signal sole existence is to protect privacy of its users. It’s not even a corporation and, yes, this is important. Yes, they could lie in their marketing. Like Telegram did (and still does AFAIK). But this would undermine their sole reason to exist. I don’t say that Signal is perfect: I say I trust them to believe themselves what they announce. For now. What about Protonmail? ====================== For the same reasons, Protonmail can, to some extent, be trusted. Technically, they can access most of the emails of their customers (because those emails arrive unencrypted to PM’s servers). But I trust Protonmail not to sell any data because if there’s any doubt that they do it, the whole business will crumble. They have a strong commercial incentive to do everything they can to protect my data. I pay them for that. It’s not a "checkbox" they could remove, it’s their whole raison d’être. This is also why I pay for Kagi as my search engine: their business incentive is to provide me the best search results with less slop, less advertising. As soon as they start doing some kind of advertising, I will stop paying them and they know it. Or if Kagi starts becoming to AI centric for my taste, like they did for Lori: Why I Lost Faith in Kagi (d-shoot.net) https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html I don’t blindly trust companies. Paying them is not a commitment to obey them, au contraire. Every relation with a commercial entity is, by essence, temporary. I pay for a service with strings attached. If the service degrade, if my conditions are not respected, I stop paying. If I’m not convinced they can be trusted, I stop paying them. I know I can pay and still be the product. If I have any doubt, I don’t pay. I try to find an alternative and migrate to it. Email being critical to me, I always have two accounts on two different trustable providers with an easy migrating path (which boils down to changing my DNS config). Fighting the Androidification ============================= Cory Doctorow speaks a lot about enshitification. Where users are more and more exploited. But one key component of a good enshitification is what I call "Androidification". Androidification is not about degrading the user experience. It’s about closing doors, removing special use cases, being less and less transparent. It’s about taking open source software and frog boiling it to a full closed proprietary state while killing all the competition in the process. Android was, at first, an Open Source project. With each release, it became more closed, more proprietary. As I explain in my "20 years of Linux on the Desktop" essay, I believe it has always been part of the plan. Besides the Linux kernel, Google was always wary not to include any GPL or LGPL licensed library in Android. 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 3) (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2025-03-08-linux_desktop3.html It took them 15 years but they finally achieved killing the Android Open Source Project: Google will develop the Android OS fully in private, here's why (www.androidauthority.com) https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-development-aosp-3538503/ This is why I’m deeply concerned by the motivation of Canonical to switch Ubuntu’s coreutils to an MIT licensed version. Ubuntu 25.10 plans to swap GNU coreutils for Rust (go.theregister.com) https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2025/03/19/ubuntu_2510_… This is why I’m deeply concerned that Protonmail quietly removed the issue tracker from its Protonmail Bridge Github page (making the development completely opaque for what is an essential tool for technical Protonmail users). I mean, commons! ================ This whole naivety is also why I’m deeply concerned by very intelligent and smart tech people not understanding what "copyleft" is, why it is different from "open source" and why they should care. We need more of Richard Stallman, not less (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html Corporations are not your friend. They never were. They lie. The only possible relationship with them is an opportunistic one. And if you one to build commons that they cannot steal, you need strong copyleft. On Open Source and the Sustainability of the Commons (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2024-07-01-opensource_sustainability.html But firstly, my fellow geeks, you need to lose your candid naivety. I mean, come on, let’s build the commons!

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20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 3)
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 08 Mar '25

08 Mar '25

20 YEARS OF LINUX ON THE DESKTOP (PART 3) by Ploum on 2025-03-08 https://ploum.net/2025-03-08-linux_desktop3.html > Previously in "20 years of Linux on the Deskop": After contributing to the launch of Ubuntu as the "perfect Linux desktop", Ploum realises that Ubuntu is drifting away from both Debian and GNOME. But something else is about to shake the world… 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 1) https://ploum.net/2024-10-20-20years-linux-desktop-part1.html 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 2) https://ploum.net/2024-12-16-linux_desktop2.html The new mobile paradigm ======================= While I was focused on Ubuntu as a desktop solution, another GNOME+Debian product had appeared and was shaking the small free software world: Maemo. It will come as a shock for the youngest but this was a time without smartphones (yes, we had electricity and, no, dinosaurs were already extinct, please keep playing Pokémon instead of interrupting me). Mobile phones were still quite new and doing exactly two things: calls and SMSes. In fact, they were sold as calling machines and the SMS frenzy, which was just a technical hack around the GSM protocol, took everybody by surprise, including operators. Were people really using awkward cramped keyboard to send themselves flood of small messages? Small pocket computers with tiny keyboard started to appear. There were using proprietary operating systems like WinCE or Symbian and browsing a mobile version of the web, called "WAP", that required specific WAP sites and that nobody used. The Blackberry was so proprietary that it had its own proprietary network. It was particularly popular amongst business people that wanted to look serious. Obama was famously addicted to his Blackberry to the point that the firm had to create a secure proprietary network only for him once he took office in the White House. But like others, Blackberries were very limited, with very limited software. Nothing like a laptop computer. N770, the precursor =================== In 2005, Nokia very quietly launched the N770 as an experiment. Unlike its competitors, it has no keyboard but a wide screen that could be used with a stylus. Inside was running a Debian system with an interface based on GNOME: Maemo. The N770, browsing Wikipedia https://ploum.net/files/old/Nokia770-fi-wiki-600x450.jpg Instead of doing all the development in-house, Nokia was toying with free software. Most of the software work was done by small European companies created by free software hackers between 2004 and 2005. Those companies, often created specifically to work with Nokia, were only a handful of people each and had very narrow expertise. Fluendo was working on the media framework GStreamer. Immendio was working on the GTK user interface layer. Collabora was focusing on messaging software. Etc. Far from the hegemony of American giant monopolists, the N770 was a mostly European attempt at innovating through a collaborative network of smaller and creative actors, everything led by the giant Nokia. During FOSDEM 2005, GNOME developer Vincent Untz lent me a N770 prototype for two days. The first night was a dream come true: I was laying in bed, chatting on IRC and reading forums. Once the N770 was publicly released, I immediately bought my own. While standing in line in the bakery one Sunday morning, I discovered that there was an unprotected wifi. I used it to post a message on the Linuxfr website telling my fellow geeks that I was waiting for my croissants and could still chat with them thanks to free software. Those days, chatting while waiting in a queue has been normalised to the point you remark someone not doing it. But, in 2005, this was brand new. So new that it started a running meme about "Ploum’s baker" on Linuxfr. Twenty years later, some people that I meet for the first time still greet me with "say hello to your baker" when they learn who I am. For the record, the baker, an already-old woman at the time of the original post, retired a couple years later and the whole building was demolished to give place to a motorbike shop. This anecdote highlights a huge flaw of the N770: without wifi, it was a dead weight. When I showed it to people, they didn’t understand what it was, they asked why I would carry it if I could not make calls with it. Not being able to use the Internet without a wifi was a huge miss but, to be fair, 3G didn’t exist yet. Another flaw was that installing new software was far from being user-friendly. Being based on Debian, Maemo was offering a Synaptic-like interface where you had to select your software in a very long list of .deb packages, including the technical libraries. Also, it was slow and prone to crash but that could be solved. Having played with the N770 in my bed and having seen the reactions of people around me when I used it, I knew that the N770 could become a worldwide hit. It was literally the future. There were only two things that Nokia needed to solve: make it a phone and make it easy to install new software. Also, if it could crash less, that would be perfect. The Nokia (un)management guide to failure ========================================= But development seemed to stall. It would take more than two years for Nokia to successively release two successors to the N770: the N800 and the N810. But, besides some better performance, none of the core issues were addressed. None of those were phones. None of those offered easy installation of software. None were widely released. In fact, it was so confidential that you could only buy them through the Nokia website of some specific countries. The items were not in traditional shops nor catalogues. When I asked my employer to get a N810, the purchasing department was unable to find a reference: it didn’t exist for them. Tired by multiple days of discussion with the purchasing administration, my boss gave me his own credit card, asked me to purchase it on the Nokia website and made a "diverse material expense" to be reimbursed. The thing was simply not available to businesses. It was like Nokia wanted Maemo to fail at all cost. While the N800 and N810 were released, a new device appeared on the market: the Apple iPhone. I said that the problem with the N770 is that you had to carry a phone with it. Steve Jobs had come to the same conclusion with the iPod. People had to carry an iPod and a phone. So he added the phone to the iPod. It should be highlighted that the success of the iPhone took everyone by surprise, including Steve Jobs himself. The original iPhone was envisioned as an iPod and nothing else. There was no app, no app store, no customisation (Steve Jobs was against it). It was nevertheless a hit because you could make calls, listen to music and Apple spent a fortune in marketing to advertise it worldwide. The marketing frenzy was crazy. Multiple people that knew I was "good with computers" asked me if I could unlock the iPhone they bought in the USA and which was not working in Europe (I could not). They spent a fortune on a device that was not working. Those having one were showing it to everyone. With the iPhone, you had music listening and a phone on one single device. In theory, you could also browse the web. Of course, there was no 3G so browsing the web was mostly done through wifi, like the N770. But, at the time, websites were done with wide screens in mind and Flash was all the rage. The iPhone was not supporting Flash and the screen was vertical, which made web browsing a lot worse than on the N770. And, unlike the N770, you could not install any application. The iPhone 1 was far from the revolution Apple want us to believe. It was just very good marketing. In retrospective, the N770 could have been a huge success had Nokia done some marketing at all. They did none. Another Linux on your mobile ============================ In 2008, Google launched its first phone which still had a physical keyboard. Instead of developing the software from scratch, Google used a Linux system initially developed as an embedded solution for cameras: Android. At the same time, Apple came to the realisation I had in 2005 that installing software was a key feature. The App Store was born. Phone, web browsing and custom applications, all on one device. Since 2005, people who had tried the N770 knew this was the answer. They simply did not expect it from Apple nor Google. When Android was first released, I thought it was what Maemo should have been. Because of the Linux kernel, I was thinking it would be a "free" operating system. I made a deep comparison with Maemo, diving into some part of the source code, and was surprised by some choices. Why Java? And why would Android avoid GStreamer in its multimedia stack? Technical explanations around that choice were not convincing. Years later, I would understand that this was not a technical choice: besides the Linux kernel itself, Google would explicitly avoid every GPL and LGPL licensed code. Android was only "free software" by accident. Gradually, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) would be reduced to a mere skeleton while Android itself became more and more restricted and proprietary. In reaction to the iPhone and to Android, Nokia launched the N900 at the end of 2009. Eventually, the N900 was a phone. It even included an app store called, for unknown marketing reasons, "OVI store". The phone was good. The software was good, with the exception of the infamous OVI store (which was bad, had a bad name, a non-existent software offering and, worse of all, was conflicting with deb packages). The N900 would probably have taken the world by storm if released 3 years earlier. It would have been a success and a huge competitor to the iPhone if released 18 months before. Is it too late? The world seems to settle with an Apple/Google duopoly. A duopoly that could have been slightly shacked by the N900 if Nokia had done at least some marketing. It should be noted that the N900 had a physical keyboard. But, at that point, nobody really cared. When failing is not enough, dig deeper ====================================== At least, there was the Maemo platform. Four years of work. Something could be done with that. That’s why, in 2010, Nokia decided to… launch Meego, a new Linux platform which replaced the Debian infrastructure by RPMs and the GNOME infrastructure by Qt. No, really. Even if it was theoretically, the continuation of Maemo (Maemo 6, codenamed Harmattan, was released as Meego 1), it felt like starting everything from scratch with a Fedora+KDE system. Instead of a strong leadership, Meego was a medley of Linux Foundation, Intel, AMD and Nokia. Design by committee with red tape everywhere. From the outside, it looked like Nokia outsourced its own management incompetence and administrative hubris. The N9 phone would be released in 2011 without keyboard but with Meego. History would repeat itself two years later when people working on Meego (without Nokia) would replace it with Tizen. Yet another committee. From being three years ahead of the competition in 2005 thanks to Free Software, Nokia managed to become two years too late in 2010 thanks to incredibly bad management and choosing to hide its products instead of advertising them. I’ve no inside knowledge of what Nokia was at this time but my experience in the industry allows me to perfectly imagine the hundreds of meetings that probably happened at that time. When business decisions look like very bad management from the outside, it is often because they are. In the whole Europe at the time, technical expertise was seen as the realm of those who were not gifted enough to become managers. As a young engineer, I thought that managers from higher levels were pretentious and incompetent idiots. After climbing the ladder and becoming a manager myself, years later, I got the confirmation that I was even underestimating the sheer stupidity of management. It is not that most managers were idiots, they were also proud of their incompetence and, as this story would demonstrate, they sometimes need to become deeply dishonest to succeed. It looks like Nokia never really trusted its own Maemo initiative because no manager really understood what it was. To add insult to injury the company bought Symbian OS in 2008, an operating system which was already historical and highly limited at that time. Nodoby could figure out why they spent cash on that and why Symbian was suddenly an internal competitor to Maemo (Symbian was running on way cheaper devices). The emotional roller coster =========================== In 2006, I was certain that free software would take over the world. It was just a matter of time. Debian and GNOME would soon be on most desktop thanks to Ubuntu and on most mobile devices thanks to Maemo. There was no way for Microsoft to compete against such power. My wildest dreams were coming true. Five years later, the outlooadministrative hubris. The N9 phone would be released in 2011 without keyboard but with Meego.k was way darker. Apple was taking the lead by being even more proprietary and closed than Microsoft. Google seemed like good guys but could we trust them? Even Ubuntu was drifting away from its own Debian and GNOME roots. The communities I loved so much were now fragmented. Where would I go next? (to be continued) > Subscribe by email or by rss to get the next episodes of "20 years of Linux on the Desktop". > > I’m currently turning this story into a book. I’m looking for an agent or a publisher interested to work with me on this book and on an English translation of "Bikepunk", my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist typewritten novel which sold out in three weeks in France and Belgium.

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