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About Freedom and Power
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 08 Apr '24

08 Apr '24

ABOUT FREEDOM AND POWER by Ploum on 2024-04-08 https://ploum.net/2024-04-08-freedom-power.html Freedom is the right to do whatever you want. Power is the right to force others to do what you want. Power is, by definition, being able to restrict others’ freedoms. Copyleft is a tool that gives you freedom but no power. Permissive licenses give freedom and power, allowing already powerful people to restrict the freedoms of others. That’s why powerful people (and those dreaming of being powerful) don’t like copyleft. When you are accustomed to the privilege of power, freedom of others sounds like oppression. Don’t listen to the powerful people. They will tell you that you need to protect powers just in case you become powerful yourself. They will tell you that you need to be against taxation just in case you become rich yourself. That you are a "temporary embarrassed millionaire". Similarly, they’ve told you to use MIT/BSD license because you could later become a "billionaire proprietary software tycoon" with your lines of code. That’s, of course, a lie. They already are the barons. They want to use your own lines of code to restrict your own freedoms. We should not admire powerful people but fight them. You may dream of power but all you need is freedom. We need to protect freedom, not power. We need to respect humans, not bosses nor commercial interests. Offer a little freedom : use copyleft licenses !

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A Society That Lost Focus
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 18 Mar '24

18 Mar '24

A SOCIETY THAT LOST FOCUS by Ploum on 2024-03-18 https://ploum.net/2024-03-18-lost-focus.html Our Mind, the Bottleneck ======================== In the early 90s, after tweaking my MS-DOS computer, I was able to play games. One of those game was called "Battle Chess". A Chess game were pieces were really fighting against each other. It was fun. I was, and still am, a mediocre chess player. I was mate in less than 10 or 15 turns at the easiest level. For the sake of the experiment, I turned the difficulty to the harder level and started playing. Something strange happened: I was still losing but it took a lot more turns. I was able to protect my game, even to manage a few draws. Was it a bug in the game? Even as a young teenager, I quickly understood the reason. With the setting set to "hard", the game would try a lot harder to find a good move. On my 386 processor, without the mathematical coprocessor, this would take time. Several seconds or even one minute by turn. During that time, I was thinking, anticipating. With the easiest setting, computer moves would happen immediately. I knew I had all the time I want but I was compelled to move fast. I could not take the time while the other side was immediately reacting to my moves. The world we are living in is that same chess game on the easiest setting. Everything happens immediately, all the time. White-collar work can now be summarised as trying to reply as fast as possible to every single email until calling it a day and starting again in the morning, a process which essentially prevents any deep thinking, as pointed by Cal Newport in his book "A world without email". As we don’t have the time to think anymore, we masquerade our lack of ideas with behavioural tricks. We replaced documents with PowerPoints because it allowed lack of structure and emptiness to look professional (just copy paste the data of the last PowerPoint you received in a text file and see by yourself how pitiful it is. PowerPoint communications at NASA were even diagnosed by Edward R. Tufte, author of the "The cognitive style of PowerPoint", as one of the causes that led to Space Shuttle Columbia’s disaster). The root problem is that, for the first time in human history, our brain is the bottleneck. For all history, transmitting information was slow. Brains were fasts. After sending a letter, we had days or months to think before receiving an answer. Erasmus wrote his famous "Éloge de la folie" in several days while travelling in Europe. He would never have done it in a couple of hours in a plane while the small screen in the backseat would show him advertisements. In 2012, the French writer Thierry Crouzet had one of the first recorded "online burnout". Being connected all the time with interesting strangers and interesting ideas to which he wanted to reply quickly was too much for his brain. One night, he had a strong panic attack and decided to spend six months without the Internet, an experience he told in his book "J’ai débranché". The Oversold Internet ===================== The instant feedback of permanent connectivity is clearly a bad thing. But the worse had yet to come. After the 2000s bubble popped and told us that Internet was not "magic money", the question became "how do we monetise the Internet?" A few idealistic geeks replied, "You don’t monetise it, it’s a non-commercial world." But geeks, as everyone, wanted or needed to be paid. To earn money, they handled the reins of the whole new world they were creating to marketers. That’s it: hackers sold the Internet in exchange of a salary. Until 2000, marketers played along with the idea of selling the work hackers were doing. With one small problem: they oversold it completely, diving in the geek fantasy that, soon, everybody would be on that Internet buying stuff online. In the 2000s, nobody but geeks wanted to spend their life behind a huge radiating screen. Marketers suddenly waked up to that reality with the dot-com bubble. If not everybody wanted to be on the Internet and nobody would buy anything on the Internet, there were two potential solutions: either monetising the fact that some people were already spending lots of time of the Internet or convincing more people to come on the Internet. Surviving companies such as Google decided for the easiest one: monetising what people were already giving to the Internet: their time and attention. Advertising was, of course, already part of the web (mostly through the infamous "popups") but Google innovated by inventing a whole new way of exploiting attention: trying to learn as much as possible about users to show them the advertising they are more likely to click on. The whole story is told in great details in the book "Surveillance Capitalism", by Soshanna Zuboff. Whether this "personalised advertisement" really work better than traditional one is up to debate. For Tim Hang, author of "Subtime Attention Crisis" and for Cory Doctorow, author of "How to destroy surveillance capitalism", the real impact on sales is negligible but as marketers think it works, they invest massive money in it, making the whole technology a very lucrative bubble. But the real impact is undisputed : as long as someone buys it, it is really lucrative to sell the attention and all the information you could from consumers. As a consequence, the practice has been generalised and nearly every website, every app on the Internet is trying to get both. And they are very scientific about the process. We forgot how not to spy and steal attention ============================================ It is now considered as "normal practice" to try to get the attention and the data of your users, even if it doesn’t make sense from a business perspective. Banking apps send notifications to show you their new shiny logo, good old e-commerce website ask their customers for the number of children they have or their income bracket. Even non-commercial personal blogs or some websites dedicated to privacy contain analytics software to track their users. Not tracking your users is harder than not! Every single vendor from which you shop, even a brick-and-mortar one, will bury you with their mailings. One could assume that buying a new mattress is something you do only every decade and that the prospective market for mattress vendors is those who didn’t buy a mattress in the last five years. So why did anybody think that, right after buying a mattress, I would be interested in receiving news about mattresses every single week of my life? The two consequences of all this are that our privacy is invaded as much as it is technologically possible and that our attention is scientifically captured as much as it is technologically possible. And, in both aspects, technology is "improving" as all the smartest minds in the world are hired to do just that. While working at Google, Tristan Harris realised how much what they were building was in order to get the focus and the attention of people. He left Google to create the "Center for Humane Technology" that tries to raise attention about the fact that… our attention is captured by monopolist technologies. The irony is palpable: Tristan Harris had a very good intuition but can’t imagine doing anything else than either "raising attention" through social networks or building technologies that would notify you that you should be focused. Let’s build yet another layer of complexity above everything else and raise attention so this layer is adopted widely enough to become the foundation of the next complexity paradigm. Worshipping Shallow Ideas ========================= Being distracted all the time prevent us from having any ideas and understanding. We need a catchy slogan. Instead of reading a three-page report, we prefer a 60 slides PowerPoint, containing mostly stock pictures and out-of-context charts. We have valorised the heroic image of the CEO that comes in a meeting and tell engineers, "I have ten minutes left before my next meeting. Tell me everything in five and I’ll take a billion dollar decisions." In retrospect, it is obvious that taking good decisions in that context is nothing more than rolling a dice. Funnily enough, it has been proved multiple times than every high-profile CEO is not better than a random decision algorithm. But, unlike algorithms, CEOs usually have charisma and assurance. They may take a very wrong decision but they can convince everybody that it’s the right one. Which is exactly the definition of a salesman job. In "Deep Work", Cal Newport tries to promote the opposite stance, the art of taking the time to think, to ponder. In "The Ideas Industry", Daniel Drezner observes that long, subtle and complex ideas are more and more replaced by simplistic slogans, the epitome being the famous TED conferences. In 18 minutes, people are sold an idea and, if the speaker is a good salesman, feel like they’ve learned something deep and new. The mere fact that you could learn something deeply enough in 18 minutes is an insult to all the academic world. Without surprise, the same academic world is seen by many as boring old people spending their time writing long articles instead of making a catchy slogan to change the world. Succumbing to Our Addictions ============================ Most monopolies were built by removing choices. You could not buy a computer without Microsoft Windows. You could not visit some websites without Internet Explorer. You can’t find a phone without Google in a shop (Google pay many billions dollars every year to be the default search engine on Apple devices). And if you manage to remove Google from your phone, you will lose the ability to run some apps, including most banking apps. Most apps even check at start if Google services are installed on the phone and refuse to start if it’s not the case. If it’s really hard not to use Google, it’s by definition a forced monopoly. Similarly, it is very hard to avoid Amazon when shopping online. There’s one exception : Facebook. There’s nothing forcing us to go to Facebook or Instagram. There’s nothing forcing us to spend time on it. It’s like we have choice. But it seems we haven’t. Why is this? Why are we playing one hour of what was supposed to be five minutes of a stupid smartphone game instead of reading a book? Why are we spending every minute awake checking our smartphone and replying to mundane chitchat, even if we are in the middle of the conversation with someone else? Why are we compelled to put our life and the lives of our children at risk just to quickly reply while driving? Because of the way the human brain is wired. Evolutionary speaking, we are craving for new experiences. Learning new experiences, good or bad, may help your chromosomes to survive more generations than others. We get that famous "dopamine rush", described in great details by Liberman and Long in "The molecule of more". Each time there’s a notification, each time there’s a red bubble in some part of the screen, the brain acts like it’s a new vital opportunity. We can’t miss it. A study showed that the sole notification sound was enough to distract a driver as much as if he was texting while driving. Yes, even without looking at your phone, you were distracted as much as if you did (which is not an excuse to look at it). The brain has learned that the phone is a random provider of "new experiences". Even in airplane mode, it was demonstrated that having the phone on your desk or in your bag degrades heavily your attention and your thinking performance. Performance went back to normal only when the phone was put in another room. Fighting to Get Our Focus Back ============================== That’s it, the only way to not have any temptation is not to have the phone at arm reach. The aforementioned French writer Thierry Crouzet told me once that it was very difficult to focus on writing when you know you only have to move the word processor window with the mouse to go to the Internet. On the web, writers’ forums are full of discussions about "distraction-less" devices. Some, including your servitor, are going back to old typewriters, a paradigm described as a true resistance by Richard Polt in the excellent book "The Typewriter Revolution". One may even wonder if the epidemic of "electro-sensitivity", feeling bad or being sick when exposed to wifi or similar wireless emissions, may simply be a psychological reaction to the overstimulation. It has been observed that the symptoms are real (people are really feeling bad and are not simulating) but that, in double-blind controlled environment, the symptoms are linked to the belief of wireless emissions (if you simulate a blinking wireless router without emitting anything, people feel bad. If you have wireless emission but tell people it’s disabled, they will feel better). In his landmark book "Digital Minimalism", Cal Newport offers a framework to rethink the way we use digital technologies. The central idea is to balance costs and benefits consciously, highlighting most hidden costs. Facebook might be free in the sense you don’t have to pay for it. But being exposed to advertising, being exposed to angry political rants, feeling compelled to answer, being exposed to picture of people you once knew and who seems to have an extraordinary (even if virtual) life is a very high cost. Simply do the math. If you have 180 friends on Facebook, which seems to be a low amount those days, if your friends take, on average, 10 days of vacation per year, you will have, on average, five friends on vacation every day. Add to this statistic that some people like to re-post pictures of old vacations and it means that you will be bombarded daily by pictures of sunny beaches and beautiful landscapes while you are waiting under neon light for your next boring meeting in a gray office. By design, Facebook makes you feel miserable. That’s not to say that Facebook cannot be useful and have benefits. As Cal Newport highlight, you need to adapt your use to maximise the benefits while trying to avoid costs as much as possible. You have to think consciously about what you really want to achieve. This idea of digital minimalism prompted a revival of the so-called "dumb phones", phones which are not smart and which are able to make phone call and send/receive SMS. Some brands are even starting to innovate in that particular market like Mudita and Lightphone. Ironically, they are advertising mindfulness and being focused. They are trying to catch your attention to sell you back… your own attention. Focus Against Consumerism ========================= One of the consumerist credo is that the market will fix everything. If there’s a problem, someone will quickly sell a solution. As pointed by Evgeny Morozov in "To Save Everything, Click Here", this is not only wrong thinking. This is actually harmful. With public money, we are actually actively funding companies and startups thinking they will both create jobs and sell solutions to every problem. It is implied that every solution should be a technological one, should be sellable and should be intuitive. That’s it: you should not think too much about a problem but instead build blindly whatever solution comes to mind using the currently trending technological stack. French Author Antoine Gouritin wrote a funny and interesting book about that whole philosophy he called "Le Startupisme". The root cause is there: we don’t have any mental framework left other than spying on people and steal their attention. Business schools are teaching how to do catchy PowerPoints while stealing attention from people. Every business is at war with the other to catch your attention and your brain cycles. Even academy is now fighting to get grants based on catchy PowerPoints and raw number of publications. This was the raw observation of David Graeber: even academics have stopped thinking to play the "catch your attention game". There’s no silver bullet. There will not be any technological solution. If we want to claim back our focus and our brain cycles, we will need to walkaway and normalise disconnected times. To recognise and share the work of those who are not seeking attention at all cost, who don’t have catchy slogans nor spectacular conclusions. We need to start to appreciate harder works which don’t offer us immediate short-term profit. Our mind, not the technology, is the bottleneck. We need to care about our minds. To dedicate time to think slowly and deeply. We need to bring back Sapiens in Home Sapiens Sapiens. Picture by Trougnouf https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_through_a_broken_window_from_a…

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Announcing Offpunk 2.0
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 25 Nov '23

25 Nov '23

ANNOUNCING OFFPUNK 2.0 by Ploum on 2023-11-25 https://ploum.net/2023-11-25-offpunk2.html I’m happy to announce the release, last week, of Offpunk 2.0. Offpunk is an offline-first command-line browser/RSS reader. You control it by typing command and it maintains a cache of all the networked resources to allow you to access them offline indefinitely. If a non-cached resource is tentatively accessed, the URL is marked as to be fetched later. Running periodically "offpunk --sync" will fetch those resources and add them to your "tour" to remind you that you wanted to access it. Offpunk official website https://sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/ Offpunk 2.0 changelog https://git.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/refs/v2.0 List of available offpunk packages https://repology.org/project/offpunk/versions Screenshot ========== Mandatory screenshot showing Offpunk browsing Offpunk’s website. There’s a screenshot of Offpunk in the screenshot. https://ploum.net/files/offpunk2.png Switching the license to AGPLv3 =============================== Offpunk originally started as a branch then a friendly fork of AV-98. It was called AV-98-offline and, as such, shared the same BSD license. AV-98, the first Gemini browser https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/AV-98 During multiple discussions, Solderpunk and I came to the conclusion that AV-98-offline was becoming too different from the initial goal of AV-98. It was thus renamed Offpunk. At the same time, I grew increasingly convinced that we needed more copyleft software and that the AGPL license was better suited to protect the commons. "We need more of Richard Stallman, not less", my take on why copyleft is important https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html As a symbolic move, I’ve thus decided to switch Offpunk license from BSD to AGPLv3 but needed an opportunity to do so. The 2.0 release is such an opportunity. Multiple independent tools ========================== Like AV-98, Offpunk was one single big python file. I liked the simplicity of it. But it really became a mess and I wanted to offer Offpunk’s features as separate command-line tool. With Offpunk 2.0, you will thus have three new command-line tools: - netcache : when given a URL, will download and cache this URL or only access the cache if the "--offline" option is provided. - ansicat : will render an HTML, an RSS, a Gemtext or even a picture in your terminal, with various options. - opnk : universal opener. Will try to render any file or any URL in your terminal. If it fails, it will fallback to xdg-open. Those three commands should come with a man page and a "--help" but they are still quite new. To my own surprise, I found myself using "opnk" all the time. I don’t think anymore about how to handle a file, I simply give it to opnk. Packaging those tools was a lot harder than expected and I want to thank all the contributors to this work, including Austreelis, David Zaslavsky and Jean Abou Samra. Themes ====== The goal of Offpunk, through Ansicat, is to render web, RSS, gemini and gopher pages as coloured ANSI text in your terminal. Until now, those colours were hardcoded. With 2.0, they can be customised. See "help theme". Screenshot of Offpunk customised with the worst possible colours I could find. https://ploum.net/files/offpunk2_theme.png In offpunk, customisation can be made permanent by adding all the commands you want to run at startup in your .config/offpunk/offpunkrc file. Mine contains one single line: "offline", ensuring I use Offpunk only in offline mode. Getting started =============== Using Offpunk daily as your main browsing/rss driver takes some learning. You need to get used to the Offpunk philosophy: adding elements to tour instead of clicking them, creating lists to read later, doing a daily synchronisation. It is not trivial. The "help" command will probably be your best allies. The community also provide support on a user dedicated mailing-list. Offpunk-users mailing list https://lists.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk-users If Offpunk becomes useful to you, the community is open. Contributions, documentation, blog post about how you use Offpunk, help to new users and packaging are warmly welcome. Sometimes, simple feedback is all it takes to make a developer happy. So don’t hesitate to contribute in one of our lists. Offpunk-devel mailing list https://lists.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk-devel Offpunk-packagers mailing list https://lists.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk-packagers I’ve also started an experimental Matrix room on #offpunk:matrix.org. I have the belief that mailing-list is better suited for discussions but I’m giving this the benefit of doubt and willing to explore whether or not direct real-time discussion could help new users. Join the #offpunk:matrix.org room https://matrix.to/#/#offpunk:matrix.org

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The gift of time
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 10 Nov '23

10 Nov '23

THE GIFT OF TIME by Ploum on 2023-11-10 https://ploum.net/2023-11-10-the-gift-of-time.html Maintaining a free software project is spending years of your life to solve a problem that would have taken several hours or even days without the software. Which is, joke aside, an incredible contribution to the common good. The time saved is multiplied by the number of users and quickly compound. They are saving time without the need to exchange their own time. Free software offers free time, free life extension to many human living now and maybe in the future. Instead of contributing to the economy, free software developers contribute to humanity. To the global progress. Free software is about making our short lifetimes a common good instead of an economical product.

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The future of Offpunk: UNIX command-line heaven and packaging hell
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 30 Sep '23

30 Sep '23

THE FUTURE OF OFFPUNK: UNIX COMMAND-LINE HEAVEN AND PACKAGING HELL by Ploum on 2023-10-01 https://ploum.net/2023-10-01-future-of-offpunk-packaging-hell.html > A story about how the UNIX philosophy made me develop tools I’m actually proud of and why packaging is holding me back. Two years ago, I decided that I wanted to be able to browse Gemini while offline. I started to add a permanent cache to Solderpunk’s AV-98, the simplest and first Gemini browser ever. It went surprisingly well. Then, as the excellent forlater.email service went down for a week, I thought that I would add a quick and hackish HTTP support to it. Just a temporary experiment. The same week, I serendipitously stumbled upon chafa, an image rendering tool which was on my computer because of neofetch. I thought it would be funny to have pictures rendered in webpages in my terminal. Just an experiment to take some funny screenshots, nothing more. But something really surprising happened: it was working. It was really useful. I was really using it and, after adding support for RSS, I realised that this experiment was actually working better for me than forlater.email and newsboat. Offpunk was born without really thinking about it and became a real project with its own philosophy. Offpunk, a command line to browse Web, Gemini and Gopher while offline https://sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/ Born on Gemini, I wanted Offpunk to keep its minimalistic roots: keeping dependencies under control (making them optional and implementing the underlying feature myself as soon as it makes sense), keeping it simple (one single runnable python script), caring as much as possible about older versions of python, listening to people using it on very minimal systems. I also consciously choose to use only solutions that have been time-trial-tested. I’ve spent too many years of my life falling for the "new-trendy-technology" and learned from those mistakes. The one-file aspect assured that it was really easy to use and to hack on it: open the file, modify something, run it. I’m not a good developer. Anything more complex than that is too much for my taste. Unless forced, I’ve never used an IDE, never understood complex toolchains nor packaging. I modify files with (neo)vim (without any plugin), compile from the command line and run the resulting binary (not even needing the second step with python). Life is too short for making it more complex than that. I like to play with the code, not to learn tools that would do it for me. But offpunk.py was becoming a bit fat. 4500 lines of organic python which have grown over an AV-98 structured to be a test bed for an experimental protocol. The number of people able to understand its code entanglement was varying between 0 and 1, depending on the quality of my morning Earl Grey. I wanted to make life easier for contributors. I also realised that some features I developed might be useful without offpunk. So I stepped into a huge refactorisation and managed to split offpunk into several components. My goal was to separate the code into multiple individual components doing one thing and doing it well. And, to my own surprise, I succeeded. Netcache.py =========== I called the first component "netcache". Think of netcache as a cached version of wget. If possible, netcache will give you a cached version of the URL you are asking. If no cache or too old and if allowed to go online, netcache will download it. It means that if you like Offpunk’s core concept but don’t like the interface and want, for example, a GUI, you could write your own browser that would, using netcache, share the cache with Offpunk. Netcache is currently working just well enough for my needs but could be a lot better. I should, for example, investigate replacing the network code by libcurl and implementing support for multithreaded concurrent downloads. Ansicat.py ========== Coloured output in your terminal is done through a standard called ANSI. As I wrote the first HTML to ANSI renderer for offpunk, I started to understand how awful the HTML standard was. Armed with that experience, I started a second renderer and, to be honest, it is actually not that bad. I’m even proud of it. Ansicat is really useful when in a terminal because it will render HTML and gemtext in a good, readable way. If the optional library python- readability is present, ansicat will try to extract the main content from a web page (and, yes, python-readability is one dependency I would like to reimplement someday). With netcache and ansicat, you can thus already do something like: netcache https://ploum.net | ansicat --format=html Yes, it works. And yes, as a UNIX junkie, I was completely excited the first time it worked. Look mum, I’m Ken Thompson! Making ansicat a separate tool made me think about adding support for other formats. Like PDF or office documents. How cool would it be to have a singe cat command for so many different formats? Opnk.py ======= While netcache and ansicat were clear components I wanted to split from Offpunk’s core since the start of the refactoring, another tool appeared spontaneously: opnk. Opnk (Open-like-a-punk) is basically a wrapper that will run ansicat on any file given. If given a URL, it will ask netcache for the file. Result will be displayed in less (after passing through ansicat, of course). If ansicat cannot open the file, opnk fallbacks on xdg-open. That looks like nothing but it proved to be massively useful in my workflow. I already use opnk every day. Each time I want to open a file, I don’t think about the command, I type "opnk". It even replaced cat for many use cases. I’m even considering renaming it "opn" to save one character. Using opnk also explains why I want to work on supporting PDF/office documents with ansicat. That would be one less opportunity to leave the terminal. Offpunk.py ========== Through this architecture, Offpunk became basically an interface above opnk. And this proved to work well. Many longstanding bugs were fixed, performance and usability were vastly improved. Everything went so well that I dreamed releasing offpunk 2.0, netcache, ansicat and opnk while running naked with talking animals in a flower field under a rainbow. Was it really Earl Grey in the cup that day? Packaging Offpunk.py ==================== Now for the bad news. As expected, the refactoring forced me to break my "one-single-python- file" rule. I felt guilty for those people who told me about using offpunk on very minimal systems, sometimes from a USB key. But I thought that this was not a real problem. Instead of one python script, I had four of them (and a fifth file containing some shared code). That should not be that much of a problem, isn’t it? Well, python packaging systems would like to disagree. Flowers fade, the rainbow disappears behind black and heavy clouds while animals start to look at me with a devilish look and surprisingly sharp teeth. I’ve spent many hours, asked several people on the best way to package multiple python files without making the whole thing a module. Without success. Hopefully, the community is really helpful. David Zaslavsky stepped on the mailing list to give lots of advice and, as I was discouraged, Austreelis started to work really hard to make offpunk both usable directly and packagable. I’m really grateful for their help and their work. But, so far, without clear success. I feel sad about the amount of energy required to address something as simple as "I’ve 5 python files which depend on each other and I want to be able to launch them separately". Austreelis’s branch where she works on making offpunk "packageable". https://gitlab.com/austreelis/offpunk.git The software is working really well. The refactoring allowed me to fix longstanding bugs and to improve a lot of areas while adding new features (colour themes anyone?) On my computer, I added four aliases in my zsh config: offpunk, opnk, ansicat and netcache. Each alias runs the corresponding python file. Nothing fancy and I want to keep it that way. I know for a fact that several users are doing something similar: git clone then run it from an arbitrary location. Keeping things as simple as that is the main philosophical goal behind offpunk. It’s an essential part of the project. If people want to use pip or any other tool to mess up their computer configuration, that’s their choice. But it should never be required. Which means that I’m now in a very frustrating position: Offpunk 2.0 is more than ready from a code point of view. But it cannot be shipped because there’s currently no easy way to package it. The pyproject.toml file had become an obstacle to the whole development process. I’m contemplating putting everything back in one big file. Or removing the pyprojects.toml file from the repository and releasing offpunk "as it is". Some will call me an old conservative fart for refusing to use one of those gazillion shiny packaging system. Others will judge me as a pretty poor programmer if I managed to do 20 years of Python without ever understanding pip nor using an IDE. They are probably right. What would you seriously expect from someone doing a command-line tool to browse Gemini and Gopher? But there’s maybe an easier solution than to change my mind and offpunk’s core philosophy. A simple solution that I missed. If that’s the case, don’t hesitate to drop a word on the devel mailing-list, Austreelis and I will be happy to hear about your opinion and your experience. offpunk-devel mailing list https://lists.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk-devel While you are at it, bug reports and feedback are also welcome. I’ve this odd custom of finding embarrassing bugs only hours after a release. I really hope to do better with offpunk 2.0. And after we’ve solved that little packaging anecdote together, I will happily return to my bare neovim to code all the ideas I want to implement for 2.1, 2.2 and many more releases to come.

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Splitting the Web
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 01 Aug '23

01 Aug '23

SPLITTING THE WEB by Ploum on 2023-08-01 https://ploum.net/2023-08-01-splitting-the-web.html There’s an increasing chasm dividing the modern web. On one side, the commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web. A web which has only one objective: making us click. It measures clicks optimise clicks, generates clicks. It gathers as much information as it could about us and spams every second of our life with ads, beep, notifications, vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and fluorescent titles. A web which boils down to Idiocracy in a Blade Runner landscape, a complete cyberpunk dystopia. Then there’s the tech-savvy web. People who install adblockers or alternative browsers. People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages. Between those two extremes, the gap is widening. You have to choose your camp. When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content. Most of the time, I don’t bother anymore. The link I clicked doesn’t open or is wrangled? Yep, I’m probably blocking some important third- party JavaScript. No, I don’t care. I’ve too much to read on a day anyway. More time for something else. I’m currently using kagi.com as my main search engine on the web. And kagi.com comes with a nice feature, a "non-commercial lens" (which is somewhat ironic given the fact that Kagi is, itself, a commercial search engine). It means it will try to deprioritize highly commercial contents. I can also deprioritize manually some domains. Like facebook.com or linkedin.com. If your post there, I’m less likely to read you. I’ve not even talked about the few times I use marginalia.nu. Something strange is happening: it’s not only a part of the web which is disappearing for me. As I’m blocking completely google analytics, every Facebook domain and any analytics I can, I’m also disappearing for them. I don’t see them and they don’t see me! Think about it! That whole "MBA, designers and marketers web" is now optimised thanks to analytics describing people who don’t block analytics (and bots pretending to be those people). Each day, I feel more disconnected from that part of the web. When really needed, dealing with those websites is so nerve breaking that I often resort to… a phone call or a simple email. I signed my mobile phone contract by exchanging emails with a real person because the signup was not working. I phone to book hotels when it is not straightforward to do it in the web interface or if creating an account is required. I hate talking on the phone but it saves me a lot of time and stress. I also walk or cycle to stores instead of ordering online. Which allows me to get advice and to exchange defective items without dealing with the post office. Despite breaking up with what seems to be "The Web", I’ve never received so many emails commenting my blog posts. I rarely had as many interesting online conversations as I have on Mastodon. I’ve tenth of really insightful contents to read every day in my RSS feeds, on Gemini, on Hacker News, on Mastodon. And, incredibly, a lot of them are on very minimalists and usable blogs. The funny thing is that when non-tech users see my blog or those I’m reading, they spontaneously tell me how beautiful and usable they are. It’s a bit like all those layers of JavaScript and flashy css have been used against usability, against them. Against us. It’s a bit like real users never cared about "cool designs" and only wanted something simple. It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can’t stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML. Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in two. You know that famous "dark web" that journalists craves to write about? (at my request, one journalist once told me what "dark web" meant to him and it was "websites not easily accessible through a Google search".) Well, sometimes I feel like I’m part of that "dark web". Not to buy drugs or hire hitmen. No! It’s only to have a place where I can have discussions without being spied and interrupted by ads. But, increasingly, I feel less and less like an outsider. It’s not me. It’s people living for and by advertising who are the outsiders. They are the one destroying everything they touch, including the planet. They are the sick psychos and I don’t want them in my life anymore. Are we splitting from those click-conversion-funnel-obsessed weirdos? Good riddance! Have fun with them. But if you want to jump ship, now is the time to get back to the simple web. Welcome back aboard!

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Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 06 Jul '23

06 Jul '23

STOP TRYING TO MAKE SOCIAL NETWORKS SUCCEED by Ploum on 2023-07-06 https://ploum.net/2023-07-06-stop-trying-to-make-social-networks-succeed.ht… Lot is happening in the social network landscape with the demises of Twitter and Reddit, the apparition of Bluesky and Threads, the growing popularity of Mastodon. Many pundits are trying to guess which one will be successful and trying to explain why others will fail. Which completely misses the point. Particular social networks will never "succeed". Nobody even agree on the definition of "success". The problem is that we all see our little bubble and generalise what we observe as universal. We have a hard time understanding Mastodon ? Mastodon will never succeed, it will be for a niche. A few of our favourite web stars goes to Bluesky ? Bluesky is the future, everybody will be there. That’s not how it works. That’s not how it ever worked. Like every human endeavour, every social network is there for a limited duration and will be useful to a limited niche of people. That niche may grow to the point of being huge, like Facebook and WhatsApp. But, to this day, there are more people in the world without an account on Facebook than people with one. Every single social network is only representative of a minority. And the opposite would be terrifying when you think about it (which is exactly what Meta is trying to build). Social networks are fluid. They come, they go. For commercial social networks, the success is defined by: "do they earn enough money to make investors happy ?" There’s no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to communicate. Which is why criticisms like "Mastodon could never raise enough money" or "the Fediverse will never succeed" totally miss the point. If you live in the same occidental bubble as me, you might have never heard of WeChat, QQ or VK. Those are immensely popular social networks. In China and Russia. WeChat alone is more or less the size of Instagram in terms of active users. The war in Ukraine also demonstrated that the most popular social network in that part of the world is Telegram. Which is twice as big as Twitter but, for whatever reason, is barely mentioned in my own circles. The lesson here is simple: you are living in a small niche. We all do. Your experience is not representative of anything but your own. And it’s fine. There will never be one social network to rule them all. There should never be one social network to rule them all. In fact, tech-savvy people should fight to ensure that no social network ever "succeed". Human lives in communities. We join them, we sometimes leave them. Social networks should only be an underlying infrastructure to support our communities. Social networks are not our communities. Social network dies. Communities migrate and flock to different destinations. Nothing ever replaced Google+, which was really popular in my own tech circle. Nothing will replace Twitter or Reddit. Some communities will find a new home on Mastodon or on Lemmy. Some will go elsewhere. That’s not a problem as long as you can have multiple accounts in different places. Something I’m sure you do. Communities can be split. Communities can be merged. People can be part of several communities and several platforms. Silicon Valley venture capitalists are trying to convince us that, one day, a social network will succeed, will become universal. That it should grow. That social networks are our communities. That your community should grow to succeed. This is a lie, a delusion. Our communities are worth a lot more than the underlying tool used at some point in time. By accepting the confusion, we are destroying our communities. We are selling them, we are transforming them into a simple commercial asset for the makers of the tool we are using, the tool which exploits us. Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help them make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one. It will make you happier. It will make all of us happier.

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How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 23 Jun '23

23 Jun '23

HOW TO KILL A DECENTRALISED NETWORK (SUCH AS THE FEDIVERSE) by Ploum on 2023-06-23 https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html Year is 2023. The whole Internet is under the control of the GAFAM empire. All? No. Because a few small villages are resisting the oppression. And some of those villages started to agregate, forming the "Fediverse". With debates around Twitter and Reddit, the Fediverse started to gain fame and attention. People started to use it for real. The empire started to notice. Capitalists Against Competition =============================== As Peter Thiel, one of Facebook’s prominent investor, put it: "Competition is for losers." Yep, those pseudo "market is always right" people don’t want a market when they are in it. They want a monopoly. Since its inception, Facebook have been very careful to kill every competition. The easiest way of doing it being by buying companies that could, one day, become competitors. Instagram, WhatsApp to name a few, were bought only because their product attracted users and could cast a shadow on Facebook. But the Fediverse cannot be bought. The Fediverse is an informal group of servers discussing through a protocol (ActivityPub). Those servers may even run different software (Mastodon is the most famous but you could also have Pleroma, Pixelfed, Peertube, WriteFreely, Lemmy and many others). You cannot buy a decentralised network! But there’s another way: make it irrelevant. That’s exactly what Google did with XMPP. How Google joined the XMPP federation ===================================== At the end of the 20th century, instant messengers (IM) were all the rage. One of the first very successful ones was ICQ, quickly followed by MSN messenger. MSN Messenger was the Tiktok of the time: a world where teenagers could spend hours and days without adults. As MSN was part of Microsoft, Google wanted to compete and offered Google Talk in 2005, including it in the Gmail interface. Remember that, at the time, there was no smartphone and very little web app. Applications had to be installed on the computer and Gmail web interface was groundbreaking. MSN was even at some point bundled with Microsoft Windows and it was really hard to remove it. Building Google chat with the Gmail web interface was a way to be even closer to the customers than a built-in software in the operating system. While Google and Microsoft were fighting for hegemony, free software geeks were trying to build decentralised instant messaging. Like email, XMPP was a federated protocol: multiple servers could talk together through a protocol and each user would connect to one particular server through a client. That user could then communicate with any user on any server using any client. Which is still how ActivityPub and thus the Fediverse work. In 2006, Google talk became XMPP compatible. Google was seriously considering XMPP. In 2008, while I was at work, my phone rang. On the line, someone told me: "Hi, it’s Google and we want to hire you." I made several calls and it turned out that they found me through the XMPP-dev list and were looking for XMPP servers sysadmins. So Google was really embracing the federation. How cool was that? It meant that, suddenly, every single Gmail user became an XMPP user. This could only be good for XMPP, right? I was ecstatic. How Google killed XMPP ====================== Of course, reality was a bit less shiny. First of all, despites collaborating to develop the XMPP standard, Google was doing its own closed implementation that nobody could review. It turns out they were not always respecting the protocol they were developing. They were not implementing everything. This forced XMPP development to be slowed down, to adapt. Nice new features were not implemented or not used in XMPP clients because they were not compatible with Google Talk (avatars took an awful long time to come to XMPP). Federation was sometimes broken: for hours or days, there would not be communications possible between Google and regular XMPP servers. The XMPP community became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers, posting irregularities and downtime (I did it several times, which is probably what prompted the job offer). And because there were far more Google talk users than "true XMPP" users, there was little room for "not caring about Google talk users". Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. They thought they could communicate easily with them but it was basically a degraded version of what they had while using Google talk itself. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks. In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. And started a long quest to create a messenger, starting with Hangout (which was followed by Allo, Duo. I lost count after that). As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault. While XMPP still exist and is a very active community, it never recovered from this blow. Too high expectation with Google adoption led to a huge disappointment and a silent fall into oblivion. XMPP became niche. So niche that when group chats became all the rage (Slack, Discord), the free software community reinvented it (Matrix) to compete while group chats were already possible with XMPP. (Disclaimer: I’ve never studied the Matrix protocol so I have no idea how it technically compares with XMPP. I simply believe that it solves the same problem and compete in the same space as XMPP). Would XMPP be different today if Google never joined it or was never considered as part of it? Nobody could say. But I’m convinced that it would have grown slower and, maybe, healthier. That it would be bigger and more important than it is today. That it would be the default decentralised communication platform. One thing is sure: if Google had not joined, XMPP would not be worse than it is today. It was not the first: the Microsoft Playbook ============================================ What Google did to XMPP was not new. In fact, in 1998, Microsoft engineer Vinod Vallopllil explicitly wrote a text titled "Blunting OSS attacks" where he suggested to "de-commoditize protocols & applications […]. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS project’s entry into the market." Microsoft put that theory in practice with the release of Windows 2000 which offered support for the Kerberos security protocol. But that protocol was extended. The specifications of those extensions could be freely downloaded but required to accept a license which forbid you to implement those extensions. As soon as you clicked "OK", you could not work on any open source version of Kerberos. The goal was explicitly to kill any competing networking project such as Samba. This anecdote was told Glyn Moody in his book "Rebel Code" and demonstrates that killing open source and decentralised projects are really conscious objectives. It never happens randomly and is never caused by bad luck. Microsoft used a similar tactic to ensure dominance in the office market with Microsoft Office using proprietary formats (a file format could be seen as a protocol to exchange data). When alternatives (OpenOffice then LibreOffice) became good enough at opening doc/xls/ppt formats, Microsoft released a new format that they called "open and standardised". The format was, on purpose, very complicated (20.000 pages of specifications!) and, most importantly, wrong. Yes, some bugs were introduced in the specification meaning that a software implementing the full OOXML format would behave differently than Microsoft Office. Those bugs, together with political lobbying, were one of the reasons that pushed the city of Munich to revert its Linux migration. So yes, the strategy works well. Today, docx, xlsx and pptx are still the norms because of that. Source: I was there, indirectly paid by the city of Munich to make LibreOffice OOXML’s rendering closer to Microsoft’s instead of following the specifications. Meta and the Fediverse ====================== People who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. Which is exactly what is happening with Meta and the Fediverse. There are rumours that Meta would become "Fediverse compatible". You could follow people on Instagram from your Mastodon account. I don’t know if those rumours have a grain of truth, if it is even possible for Meta to consider it. But there’s one thing my own experience with XMPP and OOXML taught me: if Meta joins the Fediverse, Meta will be the only one winning. In fact, reactions show that they are already winning: the Fediverse is split between blocking Meta or not. If that happens, this would mean a fragmented, frustrating two-tier fediverse with little appeal for newcomers. I know we all dream of having all our friends and family on the Fediverse so we can avoid proprietary networks completely. But the Fediverse is not looking for market dominance or profit. The Fediverse is not looking for growth. It is offering a place for freedom. People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it. By competing against Meta in the brainless growth-at-all-cost ideology, we are certain to lose. They are the master of that game. They are trying to bring everyone in their field, to make people compete against them using the weapons they are selling. Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer. Picture by David Revoy https://framapiaf.org/@davidrevoy/110583258129951932

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We need more of Richard Stallman, not less
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 19 Jun '23

19 Jun '23

WE NEED MORE OF RICHARD STALLMAN, NOT LESS by Ploum on 2023-06-19 https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html The Free Software movement has been mostly killed by the corporate Open Source. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and its founder, Richard Stallman (RMS), have been decried for the last twenty years, including by my 25-year-old self, as being outdated and inadequate. Drew DeValut’s FSF is dying https://drewdevault.com/2023/04/11/2023-04-11-The-FSF-is-dying.html Free Software is not enough by j3s https://j3s.sh/thought/drones-run-linux-free-software-isnt-enough.html Viznut asking if permacomputing should be the successor of Free Software https://venera.social/display/85a863ed-1064-8cb8-f689-e51559784396 Myself arguing for RMS replacement in 2006 https://ploum.net/97-it-s-a-long-way-to-the-top/index.html I’ve spent the last 6 years teaching Free Software and Open Source at École Polytechnique de Louvain, being forced to investigate the subject and the history more than I anticipated in order to answer students’ questions. I’ve read many historical books on the subject, including RMS’s biography and many older writings. And something struck me. RMS was right since the very beginning. Every warning, every prophecy realised. And, worst of all, he had the solution since the start. The problem is not RMS or FSF. The problem is us. The problem is that we didn’t listen. The solution has always been there: copyleft ============================================ In the early eighties, RMS realised that software was transformed from "a way to use a machine" to a product or a commodity. He foresaw that this would put an end to collective intelligence and to knowledge sharing. He also foresaw that if we were not the master of our software, we would quickly become the slave of the machines controlled by soulless corporations. He told us that story again and again. Forty years later, we must admit he was prescient. Every word he said still rings true. Very few celebrated forward thinkers were as right as RMS. Yet, we don’t like his message. We don’t like how he tells it. We don’t like him. As politicians understood quickly, we care more about appearance and feel-good communication than about the truth or addressing the root cause. RMS theorised the need for the "four freedoms of software". - The right to use the software at your discretion - The right to study the software - The right to modify the software - The right to share the software, including the modified version How to guarantee those freedoms ? RMS invented copyleft. A solution he implemented in the GPL license. The idea of copyleft is that you cannot restrain the rights of the users. Copyleft is the equivalent of the famous « Il est interdit d’interdire » (it is forbidden to forbid). In insight, the solution was and still is right. Copyleft is a very deep concept. It is about creating and maintaining commons. Commons resources that everybody could access freely, resources that would be maintained by the community at large. Commons are frightening to capitalist businesses as, by essence, capitalist businesses try to privatise everything, to transform everything into a commodity. Commons are a non-commodity, a non-product. Capitalist businesses were, obviously, against copyleft. And still are. Steve Ballmer famously called the GPL a "cancer". RMS was and still is pictured as a dangerous maniac, a fanatic propagating the cancer. Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond tried to find a middle ground and launched the "Open Source" movement. Retrospectively, Open Source was a hack. It was originally seen as a simple rebranding of "Free Software", arguing that "free" could be understood as "without price or value" in English. RMS quickly pointed, rightly, that the lack of "freedom" means that people will forget about the concept. Again, he was right. But everybody considered that "Free Software" and "Open Source" were the same because they both focused on the four freedoms. That RMS was nitpicking. RMS biggest mistake =================== There was one weakness in RMS theory: copyleft was not part of the four freedoms he theorised. Business-compatible licenses like BSD/MIT or even public domain are "Free Software" because they respect the four freedoms. But they can be privatised. And that’s the whole point. For the last 30 years, businesses and proponents of Open Source, including Linus Torvalds, have been decrying the GPL because of the essential right of "doing business" aka "privatising the common". They succeeded so much that the essential mission of the FSF to guarantee the common was seen as "useless" or, worse, "reactionary". What was the work of the FSF? The most important thing is that they proof-bombed the GPL against weaknesses found later. They literally patched vulnerabilities. First the GPLv3, to fight "Tivoisation" and then AGPL, to counteract proprietary online services running on free software but taking away freedom of users. But all this work was ridiculed. Microsoft, through Github, Google and Apple pushed for MIT/BSD licensed software as the open source standard. This allowed them to use open source components within their proprietary closed products. They managed to make thousands of free software developers work freely for them. And they even received praise because, sometimes, they would hire one of those developers (like it was a "favour" to the community while it is simply business-wise to hire smart people working on critical components of your infrastructure instead of letting them work for free). The whole Google Summer of Code, for which I was a mentor multiple years, is just a cheap way to get unpaid volunteers mentor their future free or cheap workforce. Our freedoms were taken away by proprietary software which is mostly coded by ourselves. For free. We spent our free time developing, debugging, testing software before handing them to corporations that we rever, hoping to maybe get a job offer or a small sponsorship from them. Without Non-copyleft Open Source, there would be no proprietary MacOS, OSX nor Android. There would be no Facebook, no Amazon. We created all the components of Frankenstein’s creature and handed them to the evil professor. More commons ============ The sad state of computing today makes computer people angry. We see that young student are taught "computer" with Word and PowerPoint, that young hackers are mostly happy with rooting Android phones or blindly using the API of a trendy JS framework. That Linux distributions are only used by computer science students in virtualised containers. We live in the dystopia future RMS warned us about. Which, paradoxically, means that RMS failed. He was a Cassandra. Intuitively, we think we should change him, we should replace the FSF, we should have new paradigms which are taking into account ecology and other ethical stances. We don’t realise that the solution is there, in front of us for 40 years: copyleft. Copyleft as in "Forbidding privatising the commons". We need to rebuild the commons. When industries are polluting the atmosphere or the oceans, they are, in fact, privatising the commons ("considering a common good as their private trash"). When an industry receives millions in public subsidies then make a patent, that industry is privatising the common. When Google is putting the Linux kernel in a phone that cannot be modified easily, Google is privatising the common. Why do we need expensive electric cars? Because the automotive industry has been on a century-long mission to kill public transport or the sole idea of going on foot, to destroy the commons. We need to defend our commons. Like RMS did 40 years ago. We don’t want to get rid of RMS, we need more of his core philosophy. We were brainwashed into thinking that he was an extremist just like we are brainwashed to think that taking care of the poor is socialist extremism. In lots of occidental countries, political positions seen as "centre" twenty years ago are now seen as "extreme left" because the left of twenty years ago was called extremist. RMS suffered the same fate and we should not fall for it. Fighting back ============= What could I do? Well, the first little step I can do myself is to release every future software I develop under the AGPL license. To put my blog under a CC By-SA license. I encourage you to copyleft all the things! We need a fifth rule. An obligation to maintain the common to prevent the software of being privatised. This is the fifth line that RMS grasped intuitively but, unfortunately for us, he forgot to put in his four freedoms theory. The world would probably be a very different place if he had written the five rules of software forty years ago. But if the best time to do it was forty years ago, the second-best moment is right now. So here are The four freedoms and one obligation of free software ===================================================== - The right to use the software at your own discretion - The right to study the software - The right to modify the software - The right to redistribute the software, including with modifications - The obligation to keep those four rights, effectively keeping the software in the commons. We need to realise that any software without that last obligation will, sooner or later, become an oppression tool against ourselves. And that maintaining the commons is not only about software. It’s about everything we are as a society and everything we are losing against individual greed. Ultimately, our planet is our only common resource. We should defend it from becoming a commodity. Copyleft was considered a cancer. But a cancer to what? To the capitalist consumerism killing the planet? Then I will proudly side with on the cancer side. Disclaimer: I’m aware that Richard Stallman had some questionable or inadequate behaviours. I’m not defending those nor the man himself. I’m not defending blindly following that particular human (nor any particular human). I’m defending a philosophy, not the philosopher. I pretend that his historical vision and his original ideas are still adequate today. Maybe more than ever. Picture of RMS by Frank Karlitschek https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Stallman_(124442297).jpeg

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Losing Signal
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 09 Mar '23

09 Mar '23

LOSING SIGNAL by Ploum on 2023-03-09 https://ploum.net/2023-03-09-losing-signal.html Warning to my friends : Until further notice, consider I’m not receiving your Signal messages. Signal, the messaging system, published a blog post on how we were all different and they were trying to adapt to those differences. Signal was for everyone, told the title. Ironically, that very same day, I’ve lost access to my signal account. We are all different, they said. Except myself. Signal is for everyone (except me) https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-for-everyone/ What is this difference? I’m not sure but it seems that not having a standard Android phone with Google Play services play a huge part. How I lost access ================= I’m using an Hisense A5 Android phone. This is one of the very rare phones on the market with an eink screen. While this is not recommended for most users, I like my eink phone: I only need to charge it weekly, it’s not distracting, I don’t want to use it most of the time. I feel that coloured screens are very aggressive and stressful. The Hisense A5 comes with proprietary crapware in Chinese and without Google Play Services. That’s fine for me. I don’t want Google services anyway and I’m happy with installing what I need from Aurora store and F-Droid. For the last three years, it worked for me (with some quirks, of course). Signal worked fine except for notifications that were sometimes delayed. I considered that as a feature: my phone is in do not disturb all the time, I don’t want to be interrupted. On March 7th, I made a backup of my Signal messages and removed the application temporarily as I wanted to quickly try some open source alternatives (signal-foss and molly). Those didn’t work, so I reinstalled Signal and asked to restore the backup. Signal asked for my phone number, warned me that I had no Google Play Services then re-asked for my number then re-warned me. Then asked me to prove that I was a human by solving a captcha. I hate captcha. I consider the premises of captcha completely broken, stupid and an insult to all the people with disabilities. But those were the worst I had ever seen. I was asked to look on microscopic blurry pictures, obviously generated by AI, and to select only "fast cars" or "cows in their natural habitat" or "t-shirt for dogs" or "people playing soccer". Now, I’ve a question for you. Is a car looking like an old Saab fast enough? While a cow on the beach is probably not in its natural habitat, what about a cow between two trees? What if the t-shirts are not "for" dogs but with dogs on them. And what if the drawing on the t-shirt is a mix between a dog and a cat? What if there’s a player holding a golf club but hitting a soccer ball? Even with a colour screen, I’m not sure I could answer those. So imagine on an eink one… Signal is for everyone but you need to answer those idiocy first. It should be noted that I have a very good eyesight. I cannot imagine those with even minor disabilities. Of course I did try to solve the captcha. But, after each try, I was sent back to the "enter your phone number" step, followed by "no Google services warning" then… "too many attempts for this number, please wait for four hours before retrying". I have no idea if my answers were bad or if there’s a bug where the captcha assumes Google Play Services. I’ve tried with the APK official version and the Google Play Store version (through Aurora), they all fail similarly. In three days, I’ve managed twice to pass the captcha and receive an SMS with a confirmation code. But, both times, the code was rejected, which is incomprehensible. Also, I learned that I could only read the code from the notification because opening the SMS app reinitialised Signal to the "enter your number" step, before the captcha. Centralisation is about rejection of differences ================================================ What is interesting with corporatish marketing blog posts is how they usually say the exact opposite of what they mean. Signal blog post about differences is exactly that. They acknowledge the fact that there’s no way a single centralised authority could account for all the differences in the world. Then proceed to say they will do. There’s only one way for a centralised service to become universal: impose your vision as a new universal standard. Create a new norm and threat every divergence as a dangerous dissidence. That’s what Facebook and Google did, on purpose. Pretending to embrace differences is only a way to reject the differences you don’t explicitly agree. Interestingly, Signal is only realising now that they have no choice but do the same. At first, Signal was only a niche. A centralised niche is not a real problem because, by definition, your users share a common background. You adapt to them. But as soon as you outgrew your initial niche, you are forced to become the villain you fought earlier. Moxie Marlinspike, Signal’s founder, is a brilliant cryptographer. Because he was a cryptographer, he did what he found interesting. He completely rejected any idea of federation/decentralisation because it was not interesting for him. Because he thought he could solve the problems of world with cryptography only ("when you have a hammer…"). He now must face that his decision has led to a situation where the world-freeing tool he built is publishing facebookish blog post about "differences" while locking out users who do not comply with his norm. Like Larry Page and Serguei Brin before him, Moxie Marlinspike built the oppression tool he was initially trying to fight (we have to credit Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg for being creepy psycho craving for power and money since the beginning. At least, they didn’t betray anything and kept following their own ideals). That’s the reason why email is still the only universal Internet communication tool. Why, despites its hurdles, federation is a thing. Because there is no way to understand let alone accept all variations. There’s a world of difference between Gmail interface and Neomutt. Yet, one allows you to communicate with someone using the other. Centralisation is, by its very definition, finding the minority and telling them "you don’t count". "Follow the norms we impose or disappear!" It is really about Google’s services after all… =============================================== One problem I have with my Hisense A5 is that my banking application doesn’t work on it, expecting Google Play Services. To solve that issue, I keep in a drawer an old Android phone without sim card, with a cracked screen, a faulty charging port and a bad battery. When the bills-to-pay stack grows too much, I plug that phone in the charger, fiddle with it until the phone start, launch the banking app, pay the bills, put that phone back in the drawer. After fiddling for two days with Signal on my eink phone, I decided to try on that old phone. I installed Signal, asked to connect to my account. There was no captcha, no hassle. I immediately received the SMS with the code (on the Hisense eink phone) and could connect to my Signal account (losing all my history as I didn’t transfer the backup). At least, that will allow me to answer my contact that they should not contact me on Signal anymore. Signal automatically trusted a phone without sim card because it was somewhat connected to Google. But cannot trust a phone where it has been installed for the last three years and which is connected to the related phone number. Signal vision of the world can thus be summarised as: "We fight for your privacy as long as you agree to be spied on by Google." Centralisation is about losing hope =================================== One thing I’ve learned about centralised Internet services is that you can abandon all hopes of being helped. There’s no way Signal support could help me or answer me. The problem is deep into their belief, into the model of the world they maintain. They want to promote differences as long as those differences are split between Apple and Google. They probably have no power to make an exception for an account. They could only tell me that "my phone is not supported". To solve my problem, they should probably reconsider how the whole application is built. Technically, this specific problem is new. Three years ago, I had no problem installing Signal on my phone and no captcha to solve. But once you sign up for a centralised service, you are tied for all the future problems. That’s the deal. I was similarly locked out from my Whatsapp account because I didn’t accept a new contract then forgot to open the app for several months (I was disconnected at the time ). Le suicide de mon compte Whatsapp https://ploum.net/le-suicide-de-mon-compte-whatsapp/index.html That’s what I like so much about federated protocols (email, fediverse). I can choose a provider where I know I will have someone in front of me in case I have a problem. Either because I’m a customer paying the expensive tiers for quick support (Protonmail) or because I trust the philosophy and donate appropriately (my Mastodon server is hosted by La Quadrature du Net, I trust that team). I also know that I can easily migrate to another provider as soon as I want (considering mailbox.org instead of protonmail). As a chat tool, Signal is better than many other. But it’s centralised. And, sooner or later, a centralised service faces you with a choice: either you comply with a rule you don’t agree, either you lose everything. With every centralised service, the question is not if it will ever happen. The question is "when". Either you conform to the norm, either you are too different to have your existence acknowledges. That’s also why I’ve always fought for the right to differences, why I’ve always been utterly frightened by "normalisation". Because I know nobody is immune. Think about it: I’m a white male, cis-gendered, married with children, with a good education, a good situation and no trauma, no disability. I’m mostly playing life with the "easy" setting. I’m sure lots of reaction to this post will be about how I made mistakes by "trying signal-foss" or by "using a completely weird and non-standard phone". That’s exactly the point I’m trying to prove. I’ve suddenly been excluded from all the conversations with my friends because I very slightly but unacceptably deviated from the norm. Because, three years ago, I thought having a black and white screen on my own phone was more comfortable for my eyes.

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