One notable software business professional interviewed by RBC thought that the West’s decision would “adversely affect the life of the developer community, mutual trust within it, and therefore the quality of the product.”

It was Russia and other autocracies etc. that diminished the trust by actually financing developers for multiple years to first earn trust and finally introduce backdoors into open source software, as demonstrated by the XZ utils backdoor.

In open source projects, maintainers need to have some initial trust into each contributor, and let this trust naturally grow with time and contributions. They cannot perform intensive background checks on everyone before accepting a patch.

While it is easier to uncover backdoors in open source software, there is no good way to defend and prevent against this kind of attack in this type of development process. All open source projects can do is trying to take away some trust from people within higher risk groups. This of course might lead to discrimination.

Nothing gets burned or otherwise destroyed when receiving EM radiation via a dish and converted it into electricity via a receiver.

Sure, the amplification stage of the process likely works only one way, and should be replaced in order to send something.

The one way process of burning oil to generate heat seems much more primitive than the energy conversion offered by a diode, TBH.

You can push or tow an electric car and charge their batteries. Because electric motors are also generators.

Even with your simplistic fossil fuel car in your example the alternator within can also be used as a motor.

I have nothing against any meta search engine, they are very useful, and I use them primarily as well.

However, they are not a true alternative, because they depend on third-party services. The same as Invidious is a very useful, but also not an alternative to YouTube itself, just a different user interface.

Tesla’s CEO; The Inspiration For Tony Spark

Elon “Baby-Brain” Musk as the inspiration of “Tony Spark” the cheap knock-off Tony Stark.

There is no such big differences between a light emitting (LED) and a light receiving diode (photodiode), they are just the reverse of each other. In fact photodiodes can even emit light, but very inefficiently. Same in reverse, LEDs can also detect light, just badly.

It seems like most efficient energy conversion methods can be used in both directions.

These radio telescopes don’t transmit anything at all, they listen to radio waves coming from the cosmos. Much like a normal telescope doesn’t transmit light.

If you invert the flow of the electrons, a receiver becomes a transmitter.

Speakers can become bad microphones and vice versa. Pretty sure that a radio telescope is a very bad transmitter for human music, but it could be possible with some changes…

Well, you and I just have a different understanding of “search engine” then. For me a search engine is something that doesn’t forward queries to third parties.

Which other trustworthy search engines are there? And I don’t mean some different frontend or a meta search engine like ddg, sp, kagi, searx(ng), etc… that mostly just use googles, bings or even yandex and beidu results?

Ages ago I configured and hosted yacy for myself, but that was a different time… Are there any real alternatives? With mayor internet companies like cloudflare, social media sites and many others restricting the access to the net and information, searching becomes more and more impossible if you aren’t a huge corporation…

In what region is Elden Ring available on GOG?

Gog is also much easier to deal with via a VPN. I bought some region locked games easily doing that and could play them anywhere, because they are DRM-free. Steam is much more difficult, because each account belongs to a specific region. Moving accounts means you have to have an bank account and address in different countries, so easy for rich people, more difficult for ordinary folks.

Together with secure boot and your own signing keys, it could be a good way to en/decrypt the a dm-verity secured read-only rootfs. But for the home partition I would probably still want to enter my own decryption key, maybe via systemd-homed. From there you can update the kernel/initramfs and read-only rootfs image and sign them for the next boot.

This is complicated to set up. Otherwise maybe use TPM as a 2FA, so you still have to enter a pin?

Sure, Steam seems fairly okay, especially their Linux support, but I still mostly prefer GOG, wherever possible, because it offers more control to their customer over the product they bought.

It helps that Valve is not publicly traded, but I fear that if the current owner (Gabe Newell) dies, there might be a shift in business practices.

Enshittification can still happen in privately traded/owned companies, it generally happens slower and in case there are other reason for the owner(s) to maximize short term profits (e.g. business built on VC money), it can happen faster.

Well, if the text file uses git(hub/lab) flavored markdown, you can check/uncheck the boxes from the webui of git(hub/lab). No need to write an app for the apple device.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/markdown.html#task-lists

In gitlab you might need to edit the markdown file via an webeditor and create a commit this way.

Instead of relying on a specific cloud service, why not generate a text file from for the todo list data and checkbox state and push/pull it to a git repo?

There is gitpython, a pure python implementation of git.

So that means they are just supporting it as long as it is easy to do, and that they are not brave enough to fork chromium.

The only way I ever used passkeys is with bitwarden, and there you are sharing them between all bitwarden clients.

From my very limited experience, pass key allows to login faster and more reliable compared to letting bitwarden enter passwords and 2fa keys into the forms, but I still have the password and 2fa key stored in bitwarden as a backup in case passkey breaks.

To me, hardware tokens or passkeys are not there to replace passwords, but to offer a faster and more convenient login alternative. I do not want to rely on specific hardware (hardware token, mobile phone, etc.), because those can get stolen or lost.

I guess being a mother is considered an important life achievement, while being a father is not.

You where talking about “system wide AdGuard”, which is not the browser addon, but an app that uses DNS blocking, be it by either letting people set DNS servers manually, or automatically through VPN. Their VPN does not break TLS connection by inserting custom certificates and MITM proxies, so they cannot read/modifiy content.

It might be possible to use TLS breaking proxies for systemwide ad blocking, but even that wouldn’t help, because nowadays a lot of content and ads are loaded dynamically via javascript. So a browser is required to filter ads.

DNS ad blockers are not sufficient to block all ads and often overly broad. So they have much higher rate of false positives and negatives compared to in-browser ad blockers. Differentiating between ads and useful content based on domain names will become more and more difficult. Both might use some url from the same cloud provider, and blocking those breaks a lot of stuff.

That might make it even more dangerous, because you get used to flash to usb sticks on “/dev/sda”. And when you then use a device with a built-in sata drive, you might forget checking in a hurry.

Happened to me a once or twice. I am now only using bmap tools for this.

An interesting concept would be if all hand on the 12 clocks would work, but the hands of the clock in the middle are stuck at 12 position, this way the hands in the middle would point to the clock showing the correct time.