The TorrentFreak article might have more information; I skimmed it. I don’t live in India, so I don’t know. Apparently, only the raw.githubusercontent.com domain was blocked, so Indian users should have still been able to access the main github.com domain. It’s the direct link to the files that was apparently blocked. But cloning repositories probably wasn’t affected?

You’re not going to convince anyone to suffer inconvenience for something that has no tangible benefit in their eyes. The best you can do is give people the option to contact you on Signal and explain (briefly) why you prefer it. After enough experience, you realize there is no argument you can make that will convince people to care about privacy. The people who join you on Signal either already care about privacy (but maybe didn’t realize it) or value your comfort over theirs.

Personally, I would rather send unencrypted SMS instead of using a Meta-owned service. I don’t want to be part of the network effect keeping people on Facebook. Everyone with a SIM card in their phone already has access to SMS, but few use it if they can help it, so I don’t think I’m contributing to a network effect by doing this. The only MMS client I use is Signal, so anyone can contact me over there if they want more functionality. That’s the only tactic I use, and so far, it has been unsuccessful.

The main Github.com domain was still accessible but raw.githubusercontent.com, where code is typically stored, was blocked.

Some days, like today, I regret commenting TorrentFreak out of my RSS feed reader.

It’s kind of funny, but it’s also kind of scary that not having access to Github would probably significantly impact a lot of companies and services. It would definitely impact me.

Oh well. We can always move to Sourcehut, right?

Maybe a different perspective could help?

YouTube advertising works a little differently to, say, Facebook. For advertisements longer than 30 seconds, the advertiser doesn’t pay if the user hits “Skip”. Ad-blocking users are far less likely to watch ads to completion, so I can imagine this having almost no impact on conversion.

I believe this change, if it is successful in blocking ad-blockers, will generally be detrimental to advertisers. It means advertisements shorter than 30 seconds (so, unskippable ads) are now shown to a larger proportion of people unlikely to be interested or paying attention to the advertisement. It’s beneficial to YouTube because they can claw back some of the money they spend serving ad-blocking users videos—that ain’t free. That being said, YouTube is still probably one of the most friendly big platforms to advertisers because of how flexible they are. While it uses the Google Ads system, it’s more friendly than Google search ads…

I missed an opportunity to ask someone who did a lot of YouTube advertising whether they noticed any impact at all from the recent ad-blocker blocking change recently, so this is all speculation.

Red Hat, the world’s largest provider of open source software, would begin to reserve the source code of its flagship product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to paying customers only.

I think they should have done that in the first place. You can sell open source software just fine; you shouldn’t be expected to make the sources public—only to those with a binary copy of your software who ask for it. Organizations that write and maintain open source software should be paid for their work.

In 1984, a researcher named Richard Stallman released a software project called GNU. Stallman licensed GNU for free, with his only stipulation that users sign an agreement called the GNU General Public License. […] To Stallman, freedom meant no restrictions — not necessarily no costs. “Think free as in free speech, not free beer,” he is quoted as saying.

Yes. Stallman sold copies of GNU Emacs on physical media back in the day.

This article doesn’t touch on the contentious issue, which is that RHEL’s terms say, if you share the Red hat sources as a customer to a non-customer, Red Hat may stop serving you as a customer. The controversy isn’t about cost. It’s about being punished for exercising the freedoms Red Hat gives you.

Of course, SUSE and Ubuntu Enterprise have had the same terms for years. Red Hat was the outlier until now.

I don’t try explaining this stuff anymore. I’m extremely bad at it and I know most people will either not care or not care enough. And that’s fine. It’s easier to let people think I’m a luddite. I prefer to wait for them to ask me why I use technology differently than to preach to them, and most of the time, they don’t ask. It’s always easier to let people convince themselves than to try to convince them.

I tell them to install Signal and message me there, and if they don’t want to do that, they can SMS me. Signal is a better idea if they want faster responses as I rarely check my phone but do check Signal Desktop fairly regularly. I have tried to get KDE Connect working so I can respond to SMS more timely but it was annoying and I gave up.

I haven’t missed a thing. I don’t even get most of my news from Lemmy or Reddit communities; I get it from RSS feeds or books. I lurked /r/linux for a long time after I stopped actively contributing. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I started contributing to Lemmy, the first collection of online communities I’ve been a part of in years. I’m of two minds about it.

I’m actually grateful for it because I started complaining about things that have bothered me for a long time, and The Great Lemmy Migration made me realize, well, there’s no reason I can’t do something about that. It helped me change my attitude. So, in a very real way, I’ve contributed to several upstream projects because Lemmy made me rethink things and I am now less annoyed. It’s weird how Lemmy feels like an actual community in the way no other social site (including Reddit) has.

On the flip side, I think I spend too much time on Lemmy…but this week has been uniquely rough.

Honestly I laugh at the people whining about password sharing getting shut down. It was never really intended to be used that way

To quote Netflix, “Love is sharing a password”: https://twitter.com/netflix/status/840276073040371712?ref_src=twsrc^tfw

I haven’t been subscribed to a streaming service for about five years. Well, sometimes I pay for a month of Hidive. I usually just buy the show/film on disc and rip it. A decent amount of the shows I want to watch are old and not even on a streaming service.

It’s a good movie, but I find myself completely confused by the driving part at the end. The people who were in the van manage to catch up to him almost immediately, suggesting that the other guy could have just run across the distance to get to the van in the first place, saving everyone all the drama and hilarity.

I thought Wargames was a pretty good one too (mostly). It’s by the same writers.

The NET is…fun…

That’s a nice piece of hardware you’ve got there.

You’ve got Firefox and Brave. Edge + Chrome are based on the free software Blink engine, while Webkit is one of the only free software projects Apple develops and maintains. Who doesn’t use VLC? Bitwarden is a popular password manager. About 50% of the world uses Android, which is nominally free software with some proprietary components. Blender is the world’s most successful free software project. A surprising amount of mainstream artists use Krita. People who download torrents are probably using a free software BitTorrent client like qbittorrent, Deluge, or Transmission, rather than uTorrent. A lot of people use the uBlock Origin extension, which is a free software content blocker.

And hey, everyone who has played DOOM was playing a game released under the GPLv2 in 1999, minus the game data.

File hosting isn’t really an issue of free software, because very few people will host their own cloud storage server. It’s more about relying on servers to provide a service rather than software, which is a good and bad thing.

This is kind of a neutral point, but a lot of software has become services accessed through a web client (browser). This means anyone on any operating system can access the service so long as they have a browser, which evens the playing field for us SerenityOS and Haiku users :^).

Google et al. run crawlers primarily to populate their search engines. This is a net positive for those whose sites get scraped, because when they appear in a search engine they get more traffic, more page views, more ad revenue.

This is not necessarily true. Google’s instant answers are designed to use the content from websites to answer searcher’s questions without actually leading them to the website. Whether you’re trying to find the definition for the word, the year a movie came out, or a recipe, Google will take the information they’ve scraped from a website and present it on their page with a link to the website. Their hope is that the information will be useful enough that the searcher never needs to leave the search engine.

This might be useful for searchers, but it doesn’t help the sites much. This is one of the reasons news companies attempted to take action against Google a few years ago. I think a search engine should provide some useful utilities, but not try to replace the sites they’re ostensibly attempting to connect users to. Not all search engines are like this, but Google is.

If you’re using a desktop browser, I recommend adding search engines directly to the browser. In Firefox, this is easy because all you need to do is click the URL bar and hit “Add [Search Engine]”. And then you can add keywords to them which allows you to search them directly.

So, when I search for something on Wikipedia, rather than using a bang to go through Brave or Kagi, I just do @w query, because @w is my shortcut for Wikipedia in Firefox.

It’s especially useful for someone like me who uses a lot of different search engines, but it’s also faster and takes out the middle-man. If you’re using a non-iPhone non-Firefox mobile browser though, this isn’t really something you can do (yet).

I briefly compare Mojeek to Brave here: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/add-mojeek/12101/2

Pros for Brave Search:

• (Kind of) uses its own index for general results! Their indexing strategy is somewhat odd, but this is miles better than most of the other “search engines” listed here: https://www.searchenginemap.com
• Optionally premium. Users can pay to remove ads, improving the user experience. A monetization strategy that aligns with searcher’s interests.

Cons for Brave Search:

• Image search is heavily based on Bing, as far as I know. You’ll have to correct me on this one.
• Javascript required for certain primary parts of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page), like Image and Video results.
• Adding onto that, their SERPs are a lot heavier than Kagi and Mojeek, but nowhere near as bad as Duckduckgo.

Mojeek aligns far more with what I want out of a search engine. They are completely independent; they don’t even use the servers of big companies like AWS or Google Cloud! They use a local datacenter instead. I think it’s cool that their image search is specially designed for finding freely usable images (Creative Commons/Public Domain licensed), rather than relying on Bing Images. They also have a focus on the “smaller web” and independent creators—see their most recent blog post, for example: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/06/search-content-from-substacks-independent-writers.html

Their staff are clearly very passionate about what they do and very knowledgeable. I trust them a lot, through personal conversations I’ve had with them. I just don’t have that same trust for Brave Search, as well as my usability problems with it.

Lastly, I’ve learned a lot of interesting stuff from Mojeek about search. Their blog is very interesting, even if you don’t use their search engine. I really liked this one, for example: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/05/generative-ai-threatens-diversity-and-hyperlinks.html

My main search engine is Mojeek, and my secondary search engine is Kagi. I’ve paid for Kagi for over a year, and it gets good results. I think it’s great that every part of both search engines work without Javascript, and that Kagi’s results pages are very light. It’s also cool that it returns results for pages in the Internet Archive, which can be useful for certain esoteric topics. I’m de-ranking certain sites so they’re pushed to the bottom of results, like quora, twitter, w3schools, and reddit.

There are also no ads! At all! I used Duckduckgo in a VM today and it was dreadful how far you have to scroll just to get past the ads and see the actual results.

Kagi gets great results. My only problem is that, just like Duckduckgo, they use the Bing API. Now, Kagi actually uses their own non-commercial index Teclis, combined with their news index Tinygem, as well as calling Google’s API and many other search engine APIs (including Mojeek). My main search engine is Mojeek because they use their own index.

I’ve found Kagi great for technical/日本語 queries, which is something Mojeek doesn’t handle well. If I want to learn about a certain topic, I search Wikipedia directly. I think Kagi is the nicest and fanciest Bing/Google proxy around, with easily the best user experience of any search engine.