May I suggest you spend more effort understanding the situation, and less coming up with wild speculations?

I’m sorry but that is absolutely not “the whole point of open source”.

The point of open source is the ability to read, modify, keep and share the source code of the software you use.

It’s a good thing that no one is beholden to anyone then. Which is the entire point of free software.

2024 is the year of Red Star Linux on the desktop

You might be surprised to learn that Sweden also has sanctions against Russia, together with the rest of the EU, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, South Korea and a bunch of other countries. Because this is not about the US being an ass, it’s about Russia being an ass.

The massive negative outcry over this fairly uninteresting change certainly seems oddly overblown, almost as if there are parties trying to turn it into a big political issue to paint Russia as a victim. But idk, nerds freak out over stuff all the time completely on their own.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I think the Linux Foundation has a hard time being clear on the matter because it just isn’t clear. These are new laws and a global open source cooperation run by a non-profit is likely a corner case that the lawmakers did not think about at all when making them.

Yes, the sanctions against Russia, as mentioned by Linus. The change also said the maintainers “can come back in the future if sufficient documentation is provided”.

My guess is that the Linux Foundation must ensure that none of the people they work with are in any way associated with any organisation, person or activity on the sanctions list. And that they preemptively removed all maintainers that might risk violating the sanctions while they work with them to establish whether they might be covered by the sanctions or not.

Regardless of what you or they think of the sanctions, they are the law, and I don’t think anyone wants the Linux Foundation to have to spend their money on lawyers and fines because they had a maintainer who also worked on a research project funded by a sanctioned entity. (If that is how it works, IANAL)

Imagine if China, Taiwan or Korea would start doing this shit. Or maybe they already have! Maybe the device you are reading this on would explode in the event of war!

The US doesn’t even recognize the authority of the internation war crime tribunal, you really think they (or any other superpower) would accept binding arbitration in matters of international relations?

ls -r actually lists entries in reverse order! It needs -R as well.

cp and rm accept either.

Looking at some man pages the only commands I found where -R didn’t work were scp and gzip where it doesn’t do anything, and rsync where it’s “use relative path names”.

(Caveat: BSD utils might be different, who knows what those devils get up to!)

Not chmod related, but I’ve made some other interesting mistakes lately.

Was trying to speed up the boot process on my ancient laptop by changing the startup services. Somehow ended up with nologin never being unset, which means that regular users aren’t allowed to log in; and since I hadn’t set a root password, no one could log in!

Installed a different version of Python for a project, accidentally removed the wrong version of Python at the end of the day. When I started the computer the next day, all sorts of interesting things were broken!

Aha! I didn’t get that you meant the issue was accidentally using -r instead of -R since both you and OP wrote the upper case one.

I’m a lot more used to -R so I instead get caught off by commands where that means something other than recursive :)

I mostly use symbolic mode and honestly don’t get why everyone else seems to use octal all the time.

That’s what -R does in chmod as well? I feel like something here is going completely over my head. Or are you-all using another version of chmod?

I'm honestly really pleasantly surprised that Nexus Mods are willing to take this fight head on. That they are willing to tell these potential customers to sod off, and that they have the tact and understanding to tell the difference between a superficially benign mod with a malicious purpose like this, and the many vulgar mods that they do allow on the site. (Shout out to Schlongs of Skyrim, you magnificent beast)

Gamers, in the general, being the worst people I don't have high expectations from gaming companies but it all seems to be moving slowly in the right direction, even as gamers gnash their teeth and waddle their fingers.

But that post is Mozilla clearly speaking out against SREN because they do not want to be compelled to block certain sites.

Are you then talking about Google Safe Browsing? Which is enabled by default in Firefox, but which does not "monitor your activities". It compares the site you are about to visit to a downloaded list of known bad ones and warns you if it's on the list. Hardly an Orwellian nightmare. Just turn it off or ignore the warning if you do not want it. I keep it on because I've never seen a false positive on that list and I understand that even I'm vulnerable to attack.

We should be free to customize programs, free to block what we don’t need

And you are. If you don't want to use safe browsing, turn it off, is right there in the menu. They have given you a default that's best for most people and the option to customize.

Further, since it's free software there's really no limit to your power to customize or get rid of what you don't need. (I understand that this is not possible for most people, but that's why you have the menu options, this is just a final line of defense.)

That's interesting. The first site on the list is the self-service login page for Banco do Brasil. Doing a little bit of digging suggests that attacking the users local environment to steal money via self-service is a widespread problem in Brazil. That would explain the need to block all add-ons that are not known safe for a page like this so they can't swap that login QR-code. Here's an (old) article detailing some of these types of attacks https://securelist.com/attacks-against-boletos/66591/

I wish Mozilla would be more transparent about this, but I speculate that they might be provided these domains under NDA from the Brazilian CERT or police.

TBH I think malicious add-ons are the new frontier of cybercrime. Most classic attacks methods are well mitigated these days, but browser add-ons are unaffected by pretty much all protections and all the sensitive business happens in the browser anyway.

remotely monitored their browsing real-time

it’s kind of inevitable that sometimes they have to support that giant

What more specifically are you talking about here? The functionality we are talking about can not be used for remote monitoring. Are you saying Mozilla added this feature under duress from Google?

While I don't completely understand the use cases for Mozilla's add-on domain blocklist, I also don't see any reason to assume malicious intent. Malicious add-ons are a very real and serious threat and it's obvious that Mozilla need a way to quickly and remotely protect users. Doing so on a domain level is much less impactful than completely shutting down an add-on.

Since it is obvious to the user if this is triggered, and the user has the option of disabling it per add-on or completely, what's the real problem?

(That said I think it's great that people are being skeptical even of Mozilla)

Edit: Sorry I misunderstood how this is displayed, it is not as obvious as I thought. Hopefully this will be improved. Though doing so might come with the drawback of making unwitting users more likely to disable the protection.

People think it’s about Stallman being bitter. But it’s because GNU is a political project with the goal of total user freedom and control over their computer. The software is a step on the way there. But if people use free software without understanding, valuing or taking advantage of the freedom it gives them, the GNU project has failed.

I think this is what people mean with it being “unstable”. If you keep the system up to date, things will break at some point, and it’s up to you to sort that out. This is because Arch makes very different promises and tradeoffs than something like Debian. It’s a distro for those who want or need to customize or just like to tinker.

The reason I left Arch was because I carelessly installed a new major version of my WM which took me hours to get working. This made me realize that while learning how things work is fun, I want my OS to be a tool rather than a project.

(If you needed to reinstall Ubuntu every six months I guess you were already using it as if it was Arch ;D)