there are some good guys out there

I know that. But it’s just a general rule at this point: I just don’t give money. It’s rarely satisfying to give money (and yes, the person doing the donation needs to feel good doing it too) and I just don’t want to find out who deserves to get mine and who doesn’t. I understand your sentiment too, but that’s my personal rule. One has to draw the line somewhere: I’m not Mother Theresa and I reckon I contribute more than the average person to my local community. But I’m also free to donate what I want to donate, and money isn’t part of what I want to donate.

I’m a programmer. I have created, maintained and contributed to many open source projects over 40 years. That’s my donation.

I never give money: I give my time - like for example I’m a volunteer at our local association for the blind - and I give non-commercial things like my blood, used clothing, used toys or food. And to repay the other developers whose work I enjoy everyday, I donate code that I strive to make as good as possible.

The reason I never give money is because the money - part or all - invariably ends up in someone’s pocket other than the intended recipient. When it’s legal, it’s called “overhead”. Still, legal or not, and justified or not, I’m not interested in paying for that.

Doing anything online that requires you to break strict anonymity… breaks your anonymity, hence your privacy. The two should be separate subject matters, but the corporate surveillance model ensures that if anything can be traced back to you, your privacy is as good as gone.

You say you do Facebook… There’s your answer.

Funny, I wanna ping 8.8.8.8 every microsecond forever, and make as many machines as possible all around the world do the same…

I’m a bit confused by your question: it sounds like you want to advertise yourself and your work. Why don’t you let AI scrape your information? If I were you, I’d want a chatbot to spit out my details when someone asks it to name the name of someone who does what I do.

I’m violently anti-AI, but this is the one use case I would happily feed it information: to use it as an amplifier to spread public information I want to broadcast as far and as wide as possible.

It’s not kindness 🙂 I only made a GPL claim. All I want is the stuff that the GPL entitles me to have. The rest is off-topic and - as you say - toxic. Nobody needs the off-topic stuff in the Github repo I’ll post the GPL code to: it’s about the code, not the people or whatever drama happened at their workplace.

Nah… It’s not a matter of embarrassing the company, it’s out of decency for the people who work(ed) there. There’s stuff like “This shit is why Stu was fired - Phil” or “Best leave this out of the repo for now as I don’t want to be included in the next round of downsizing - Tom” this would make Stu, Phil and Tom look bad and possibly hurt their careers. And it would advertise that whoever prepared this ZIP file for me didn’t bother sanitizing company confidential information out of it, possibly putting their job on the line too.

The code is GPL, and I consider the git history part of the code. The rest is inappropriate and potentially hurtful to people who didn’t do anything to deserve grief.

So basically it’s UserLAnd with accelerated graphics instead of VNC.

Conclusion of this thread:

It took a mightly long time, but the company eventually coughed up the source code. They sent me a big ZIP with an large git repo full of uncommitted changes and a bunch of comments and temp files that really shouldn’t leave the company 🙂 Clearly some engineer just zipped up the local repo on his hard disk without doing any cleanup.

So they complied with the GPL in the end. Just the bare minimum - i.e. providing the source code on request and nothing mode. I wish they put it up in their Github but they don’t want to do that apparently. I’ll clean up the embarrassing files and comments and put it up in mine.

I don’t know what it is with Mozilla, they’re both the only saving grace of the open-source browser world and the most stupid internet company at the same time. And they’ve been both for decades, with a budget that could have allowed them to be and to do so much more…

You can fork it and basically freeze it at manifest-v2.

The problem is, all the big tech sumbitches, their buddies and all the companies who want a corporate website that Just Works [tm] will support Google’s new shit, and your privacy-respecting fork will slowly deprecate and stop working right, because you don’t have the resources to mirror new features in Google’s official browser. And of course, ordinary internet users with stick to Google’s version because they need a browser that works.

Chicken and egg… In fact, that’s exactly what’s happening to Firefox and why it’s sliding into irrelevance: Google is simply too massive and too monopolistic to resist for very long. Mozilla has had hundreds of millions to throw at trying and even they are on the verge of losing the battle completely.

Privacy used to be priceless. It still is for my generation. I work my ass off to maintain my privacy, which is harder and harder in this increasingly dystopian world, and I lose out on more and more services and conveniences everybody else enjoys as a result. But privacy is non-negociable for many people my age.

For younger folks, sadly they were born in the dystopia - or an early version of it - and they never lost the privacy they never had. For a lot of younger folks, not enjoying true privacy is their normal. Many of them are waking up to the obscenety of what Big Data does to all of us, but of course it’s harder to wake up than to resist someone trying to put you to sleep.

And finally, the assault on privacy is so relentless and comes from actors with so much more clout and resources that many simply give up, because it’s just too much. I’m one of those who refuse to drive and take the bus because cars nowadays put their owners under surveillance. But most people are not willing to accept that level of loss of quality of life and it’s fully understandable.

With Rosehip. But good news: it would appear my ticket finally made its way to the development team and to legal. They sure are taking their own sweet time like a good giant corporation dealing with a pointless single guy, but things seem to be moving in the right direction.

If they refuse again this time, considering they now acknowledged that my ticket is processed where it should be processed, I will contact the FSF, and name and shame. But for now they’re showing good will.

I rock a Fairphone4 running CalyxOS. Apart from the hardware switches on the Purism phone, I don’t quite see what I’m missing out on privacy-wise.

The camera does not take influencer quality photos

That’s actually a selling feature.

I gave $20 to the friendly wino who lives in the dumpster down my street. He’s reported a income growth of 1000% for today.

Because I’m not interested in being sued for defamation. Even if I’m totally right and they’re totally wrong, they’ll bury me in legal fees. I’m not rich enough to afford the law.

Thanks! I’ll do that if my last-ditch effort to knock some sense into them doesn’t work.

In other news, CNN says the best news source is CNN.

There’s a lot to love about the Reform - not least of which is the chunky form factor, which I like better than thin stuff too, and the replaceable cells. But… I need a trouble-free machine as my daily driver first and foremost, and I know the Reform will fight me right out of the box. I mean as a secondary machine explore and play with, it totally makes sense. But I don’t need that. I have enough projects to play with that take all my free time.