Brief items

Physically removing features and components works, but the results are increasingly unacceptable. The NSA could take [US President Joe] Biden’s Peloton and rip out the camera, microphone, and Internet connection, and that would make it secure — but then it would just be a normal (albeit expensive) stationary bike. Maybe Biden wouldn’t accept that, and he’d demand that the NSA do even more work to customize and secure the Peloton part of the bicycle. Maybe Biden’s security agents could isolate his Peloton in a specially shielded room where it couldn’t infect other computers, and warn him not to discuss national security in its presence.

Remember when America spent a year and a half hyperventilating about a Chinese teen dancing app instead of securing American infrastructure from Russian hackers or other threats? Remember when a bunch of GOP officials with a long track record of not caring whatsoever about consumer privacy or internet security exploited xenophobic fears about the app to land political allies Oracle and Walmart a major windfall? Remember when 90% of the press couldn't be bothered to inform readers this was all performative cronyism by an unqualified nitwit? Good times.

This morning the Wall Street Journal announced that the much hyped deal to sell ByteDance-owned TikTok to Oracle and Walmart is looking unsurprisingly dead in the wake of previous legal challenges and Trump's election loss. Instead, the government appears poised to do what made sense from the start: focus on the broader problem of lax privacy and dodgy security standards across the board in telecom/adtech/tech, instead of singling out a teen dancing app [...]

I still think of it as more of a vision -- a goal for what an internet could be, rather than a declaration of what it was. It was a shining star for what the internet might be possible to achieve, with an underlying recognition that policymakers and regulators who never truly understood the internet and its usefulness, would seek to undermine or destroy. People can see in it whatever they wish to see -- good or bad -- and that too is part of the promise and wonder of today's modern internet.

The ‘community’ of Linux users has a bit of a problem. It’s not really a community at all. The Linux ‘community’ is a bunch of individuals who have an affinity for running the OS. But there’s a whole set of people who don’t self-identify as part of that community, because they’re just using the thing as a tool, like you’d use a Dremel. I’m not aware of “Dremel User Groups” but then it wouldn’t surprise me if they exist, and there are splinter groups who eschew the electric devices for more manual ones, probably.

Similarly there’s no real wider unified ‘Free Software’ community either. There’s the Popular People’s Front of FSF and the People’s Popular front of Open Source who believe fundamentally different things and target different users. It’s a giant sliding scale, like any community of meatbags.

I find that planning, in detail, beyond a week or two is likely to be useless. After that, too much changes that affects what I need to do, and how. Note the caveat of “in detail”: it’s fine to plan something like “over the next decade I will implement a backup program”, but planning to develop backups in September, restores in October, and adding encryption the first week in November is folly. What happens if in October you realize you need to learn and implement TCP/IP, HTTP, and TLS in your chosen language, because the existing implementations turn out not to work in the northern hemisphere? And what if I need to move to another country due to inheriting a castle in Spain?

Of course, we'd have all rather gone in person to FOSDEM like every other year. But, necessity is the mother of invention, and what the FOSDEM team has done proved that there is absolutely no reason that any online conference should require proprietary software. There is no reason going forward that we should accept excuses; those who claim to be helping Open Source by running proprietary-software-based FOSS-related conferences are now on notice: you are actively thwarting the adoption of proven and working FOSS solutions by any insistence of continuing with proprietary platforms for conferences, developer meetings, and interactive online collaboration.

Rust is kind of cool, but it’s not a panacea. There are legitimate reasons to prefer C, both technical and moral, and Rust still needs a lot of work before it’s ready for the prime time in systems which prioritize stability, reliability, simplicity, and accessibility. Those of us who work with such systems, we feel like the Rust community has put its thumbs into its collective ears, sung “la la la” to our problems, and proceeded to stomp all over the software ecosystem like a toddler playing “Godzilla” with their Lego, all the while yelling at us old fogies for being old and fogey.