Maybe i’m the only one who doesn’t much like what he sees going on industry-wide, and thinks things might be better.
Ubuntu-MATE is imo the best of the distros i’ve used to date, and that counts as what i call “lots” of distros. But i don’t think anybody has been silly enough yet to claim that Ubuntu-MATE is perfect.
I’m asking here if folks are interested in topics like…
Canonical ditches something, so Ubuntu-MATE needs to scramble for another way. Might it not be better to control the Ubuntu-MATE distro from the bone out so upstream changes have a tougher time screwing up a working system because you let the updates install?
Touchscreen gestures as implemented on Apple products are an unholy mess imo, it’s far too easy to do something unintended simply because you brushed a knuckle against some icon you’ve never used while you were poking at some other icon that you have to tap in order to learn what it does… it’s like Windows 3.1 implemented with all the latest hardware. No bluetooth file-send/receive under iOS and no bluetooth mouse either, because nanny knows better. Let’s not go down that path, the gnome touchscreen stuff seems good as far as it goes (basic selection and left-click equivalent, best i can tell, or maybe they’re using new gestures i don’t know about) but how many folks are running touchscreen boxes this week? Those of us who are, might find it advantageous in the long run if we help provide feedback about touch gestures and so forth.
The number of passwords people have to keep is ridiculous and there needs to be some kind of universal individual-identifier so that when we get old (as i’m busily doing) we won’t forget what case we typed the 4th letter in. Various websites have different password-creation policies and the whole thing seems to be way out of hand.
Network voting is coming soon to a nation near you, when are they going to install the lowjack chips under our skin so we can be who they think we are, or is somebody going to move past fingerprint readers to DNA readers?
Apple has something called “live photos”, where the camera acts like a flight recorder with a 3-second memory, so you can capture a little movement to send in a message. In 5 years we’ll all be having some kind of virtual observation chips implanted along with the lowjack chips and the memory will get expanded to something like 24 hours so we’ll be tracked 24x7. This might be good if your name is Rodney King, not so much if your name is John Wilkes Boothe. How to you feel about the government being able to use the tech that we are creating to track our every action? If it protects you from getting mugged, is that really so bad?
Totally ignorant consumers are buying the shiniest and most-touted products, and most of it’s junk, which is their problem, except there are so many of them that they are the ones deciding what we can buy, because manufacturers don’t ever make more niche-products than mass-market products, and the consumer is always right, especially if he votes with Nobby Nobbs for whatever the posh crowd crows over. The bottom line on that one, is that corporate marketing and advertising is determining what we as professionals can find in order to pay more money for it and not get as good a product as we should.
Et cetera, so forth, and so on, that should give the flavor of what i’m asking about. Is anybody else interested in that kind of thing?
[At the moment i consider my part in this bit of cosmic theatre to have been completed, so i’ll just wait and see what happens. So respond already, or not. ]
A MATE of dreams would be Debian-MATE and not Ubuntu-MATE. We can be thankful that Ubuntu is such a marvellous Debian implementation. But I don’t identify with the company goals anymore. Maybe it is a pipe dream to imagine a departure of this MATE project into more independent grounds. MATELinux sounds good. A fork of Ubuntu, but with its own repos and development line. Heck! I would so much be a part of it!
Or just not implement them at all. I’d rather see MATE a desktop-centric project with none of the nonsense support for things that only a small niche of users are buying into, then a mess of use cases and the increase in code maintenance and bugs that entails. Every distro benefits from a little more cohesion and focus. That’s why we have so many distros. “Distros that do one thing and do it well” sounds about right and is in line with the Linux software development philosophy that reads almost the same.
The funny thing is that they tell you you should pick unique passwords for every website, only to then tell you that you can use your Google, Facebook or, sometime in the future, personal ID-based access. The incoherence would be laughable if it wasn’t enough reason to cry.
The matter of fact is that password managers are the only sensible thing to do. Generating the passwords and don’t even caring what are they (i.e. I don’t know or care to know what password I created to login to these forums). Of course, there’s an whole industry around that concept. And that’s a good reason not to adhere to it and use instead offline password managers that store their data in your computer.
And let’s not even get into the insanity of IoT consumerism and even greater insanity of the irresponsible IoT industry.
One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure. And among those things I find shiny, useless and expensive gadgets I include smartphones, of which, if we did a good exercise in introspection, we would come to realize we don’t really need them in our lives and they bring us more problems than solutions. I’m a still proud owner of a perfectly functional Motorolla E1000 with a full 72h battery life. And my only regret is that the smartphone industry regressed and killed the cellphone industry. When this phone dies on me there are no replacements and the only cellphones being sold are equivalent to what you would find in the late 90s, early 00s.
The number of passwords people have to keep is ridiculous and there needs to be some kind of universal individual-identifier so that when we get old (as i’m busily doing) we won’t forget what case we typed the 4th letter in. Various websites have different password-creation policies and the whole thing seems to be way out of hand.[/quote]And then run the risk of everything becoming compromised when that universal identifier gets hacked or some such? No, TYVM. I think I’ll stick with coding and maintaining my own password manager and enjoying gibberish that no bruteforce attack could ever hope to crack (512 characters on my Mojang account, for one… yeah, good luck on that one).[quote=“crankypuss, post:1, topic:13633”]
when are they going to install the lowjack chips under our skin so we can be who they think we are
[/quote]Hopefully never but probably within the next 10 to 15 years, tops.
Eventually somebody is going to invent a DNA scanner that’s fast as today’s fingerprint scanners. Right now pretty much every US cit has a social security number. The idea here is that the government can already tell who you are by tracking ip’s and suchlike. I always post anonymously. Not to keep the government out of my face, you just can’t do that, but to keep the nutjob trolls from showing up on my front porch with a shotgun and a can of gasoline. Identifiability with anonymity is the key imo. Then you can be free to say what you think, as long as you stay within the law, and nobody will know it was you. Your sister-in-law need not find out that you’re a Trump supporter because you’re anonymous, at the same time you can’t be a real badguy because your posting-id is anonymously hooked to your real id. Are you getting my drift on this?
[quote=“crankypuss, post:7, topic:13633”]Are you getting my drift on this?[/quote]No, because… it was not a direct response to what I said. You probably misunderstood me or I simply did not explain my point accurately enough. I was purely speaking from a security point of view. Not a privacy one. As in, a single service, a single, universal identifier is going to be subject to all the attacks in the world. All malevolent individuals will target it to try to crack it and run away with a database of everyone’s information. Because, well, it’s global after all. No, TYVM, I think I’ll stick to being forced to create numerous accounts all over the damned place.
The suggestion of a global identifier might have its uses, like you’re trying to suggest but ultimately, it has more drawbacks than benefits in my humble opinion. The world is racing towards globalization and AI at a pace that is already quite hard to keep up with for a lot of people (politicians, to name but one group – ever noticed how the law is always a billion steps behind technology?). Let’s not add to that.
The problem is only about security because the invasive business model that we consumers eventually allowed into our lives. Digital ownership is a pipe dream today thanks to us. If I was allowed to buy a darn piece of software without having to create a darn account and adhere to their darn digital distribution platform, I wouldn’t have to care about no darn password. Cancel your account for security reasons and be damned if you are not also throwing away all the money you spent along with any rights to what products or services you purchased in the past. In fact there are no products on the web anymore. Only services.
It’s not just retail that the digital distribution business model destroyed. It also destroyed the simple idea of goods on a store shelf.
Many of the security problems would go away the moment we turned this model upside down. In 1996 I bought my very first product online. It was WinZip. I didn’t have to sign up for anything. It’s not going to happen now.
And if this is just one side of the problem, it is not much different from anything else. It’s not just commerce that adopts the evasive and anti-privacy online account ideology. Everything does these days. You can’t relieve yourself of a fart on the web without having to create a username and a password. And this here is the problem that, much to the joy of our governments, will eventually lead us to a not-so-distant future on which we will be digitally signed to the internet the same way an ID uniquely signs us to our daily lives. No more passwords needed. But so long free internet.
[quote=“crankypuss, post:10, topic:13633”]What i was suggesting would add to security rather than decrease it.[/quote]No, it would not.
You were suggesting, and I quote, “some kind of universal individual-identifier”. Universal implying one identifier.
1 identifier vs thousands upon thousands of identifiers (the status quo). Which is more secure, do you think? Nothing is immune to intrusion, nothing is beyond being hacked, cracked, suffering from catastrophic failure or otherwise. In your suggestion there would be 1 single point of failure. Guess what happens if that point of failure actually does fail?
Anarchy. And wheras I’m actually all for anarchy now and again it does come at a very dire cost more often than not – human lives. Do not forget another development that seems to have become unstoppable, the Internet of Things. Easily within the span of the next decade, every single medical device will be connected online. Now, imagine your suggestion, of a single, universal identifer. There would literally be nothing preventing a truly evil individual from hacking it, finding random people hooked up to life support (again, IOT devices, that obviously know whose life they’re supporting. See your universal identifier) and hacking that life support.
I’m afraid that you’re painting an overly ideal picture of what a universal identifier would do. But you’re forgetting the bigger picture, of how it all connects. The convergence of technologies.
Yes, i understand. Maybe i’m not thinking straight here, i’ve been running on the ragged edge of physical exhaustion for weeks. I’ll lay out what i can recall of my thinking on this, and maybe you’ll propose a better answer.
Givens:
Your world has issued you one identity at birth. Your DNA identifies you uniquely as far as modern science knows, your fingerprint also identifies you but maybe not quite as uniquely as your DNA. You have a name you were issued at birth, perhaps legally updated since. You already have an identity. Your government already owns your credentials. They know who you are. That’s a given, and we can’t readily change it. If for example you are a US-citizen, your social-security-number identifies you uniquely as far as your government is concerned. This whole “identity” business is a tattoo stamped on our foreheads that we can’t remove. Each of us already has a legally-fixed identity.
We all wish to protect ourselves from identity-theft, it’s sufficient that we are responsible for our own actions, without other people taking actions that are incorrectly attributed to us.
Your government holds websites responsible for what they publish. It has various laws about what may be published, things like “no slander or libel” and “no pedophilia” and so on and so forth, we all know the basic list. Since websites are held accountable by government for what their users publish, they have a legitimate need to associate any userid issued to you with some real person.
You (we) want to be anonymous so some nutjob doesn’t show up on our doorstep to beat us to death for saying something they didn’t like. That is, we don’t want our “handle” to be associated with our physical address and so forth. We want to keep our “true identity” safe.
I think that’s about the list of givens i come up with atm.
What websites need is a way to prevent trolls and suchlike from posting. They need to know that you are a “real person, not a robot”. We’ve all tried to read the mashed-around letters and identified the pictures containing this or that, in order to identify ourself as being “a real human”. Furthermore, they really ought to be identifying you as you, instead of someone else; otherwise when they are sued for posting a snuff video or something equally hideous, they can pass the buck to where it rightly belongs.
The government can verify that you are a “real person” by looking you up by some identifier, which in the US these days is your social-security number. It isn’t very many digits, but that doesn’t matter much, because every time you apply for a job they require it, every time you apply for a credit card or a home-loan they require it, and so on and so forth. It isn’t very secret.
Now let’s set that aside for a moment and consider how you might be identified as regards your participation here. For example, i could be identified as “ubuntu-mate.community/crankypuss” with regards to my activities here.
The connection between “crankypuss” and my real identity “grandpa Smurf” is something i wish to keep private.
Today, when you visit the Ubuntu-MATE community login page, you can login with google, with facebook, with twitter, with yahoo, with github, or you can “create new account”.
If you “create new account” it wants your email, which for ubuntu-mate’s purposes is considered your identifying information, because they can send you an email and provide a respond-link that proves you are a real person who is identifiable by email. I guess they figure that the cops can find you from that information. I dunno, none of my gmail accounts knows my street address or my real name or anything else that i might have chosen to lie about. But there’s been enough noting-of-ip-addresses that google could provide information the NSA could use to identify me.
The point here is, i never trust those things. I’d create a new account before trusting twitter or facebook. I’d give it my email address and it would verify that.
I’ve run out of words for the moment, can you see some inkling of what i’m looking at and how i’m seeing this? Suppose that in addition to twitter there was a “login through US Govt” link. You’d still have your anonymity without trusting to whatever link some arbitrary website decided to put behind “login through google”.
Let’s say my SSN is 123-456-7890, or let’s call it “7890” for short like the big-boys do when they’re asking you to identify information already stored in their databases. Let’s make a list of what people already know, or need to know:
a) US Government can link from “123-456-7890” to my actual identity with my actual fingerprints (every state i’ve lived in since 1959 has required fingerprints for a driver license at one point or another). They already know that, it’s no big deal, but we don’t want others to know.
b) The receptionist at your doctor’s office may be able to correlate “123-456-7890” with your real name and address, especially if you use medicare insurance, because they embed that number in their little insurance identifier thinger. So we don’t want her to be able to relate “crankypuss”, who made those awful comments in the ubuntu-mate forum, with “grandpa Smurf” because her old man might have a baseball bat and a short temper, right?
Now, consider what those responsible for ubuntu-mate.community need.
All they need is a finger to point at you should you turn out to be the chainsaw massacre guy of software.
So, supposing there was a site somewhere, pretend it’s a .gov site for a moment, that was available instead of “login through facebook” or whatever.
The Discourse software sends an encrypted message to that site when you want to create an account. It sends (encrypted) “ubuntu-mate.community/crankypuss 123-456-7890”, and the server respons with a simple yes or no. Yes means 123-456-7890 is known to them and no means that 123-456-7890 is unknown. The Discourse server would then freely associate crankypuss with 123-456-7890 but it wouldn’t know that i’m “grandpa Smurf”.
The only link remaining is the link between 123-456-7890 and “grandpa Smurf”, iow if people got real unhappy with something i said, they could “out” my secret number 123-456-7890 and put it on the website for anyone to see.
To prevent that i’m not sure what could be done, or whether it’s a problem, so i’m going to sleep for a while.
That is, we don’t want our “handle” to be associated with our physical address and so forth. We want to keep our “true identity” safe.[/quote]I’m telling you from personal experience that unless you yourself take full control over your virtual identity/identities, people already know who you are. In 2014 I had to take that full control, my wife found herself a stalker or, if you will, a predator and no universal identifier would’ve shielded us. All that could shield us was taking full control in our own hands and drive the anonimization to insane limits. Random names even (my current account name is a random generated one), to name but one thing.[quote=“crankypuss, post:12, topic:13633”]
otherwise when they are sued for posting a snuff video or something equally hideous, they can pass the buck to where it rightly belongs
[/quote]I’ve seen too many civil liberties being trampled upon as a result of that very argument. Nothing personal but it sickens me. Yes, snuff films sicken me equally much but this whole global agenda of reducing our rights and invading our privacy more and more just for the sake of combatting “terrorism” and “pedophilia” is just a cover. 1984, Brave New World, V for Vendetta, Brazil. Get with it, it’s happening. Not 100 years from now, not 5 years from now. Not tomorrow… it’s happening, today.[quote=“crankypuss, post:12, topic:13633”]
Suppose that in addition to twitter there was a “login through US Govt” link.
[/quote]* Not everyone here is a citizen of that country, thankfully so. I actually emptahize deeply with you for being a citizen of that country.
And now consider that US Govt service actually being hacked. Now EVERYTHING about you, all services you use your US Govt link for are now known to whomever picks up the database that is now leaked. Seeing it yet? Don’t think it wouldn’t happen, it would. It already has. Remember WannaCrypt? And how did that one actually manage to come about? As a result of a hack of the NSA. Or maybe not a hack but at the very least a leak. And there’s the crux of it really – the single biggest point of failure – the human factor. You’re assuming that the people involved with this US Govt link-identity thing could be trusted. I’m telling you that that assumption is wrong. They will either make software coding mistakes (leading to points of entry via hacks) or simply end up leaking things they should not be leaking. Has happened before, time and time again and will continue to happen.
For someone so concerned about his anonimity (which you claim to be), you’re overly eager to simply hand that over to a single, universal identifier. I’m not quite sure why my point is not getting across but, well, I think I’ve said all I can on this except a…
TL;DR – A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If you reduce that chain to a single link, then the weakest one is very easily identified.
Oddly enough, one of my primary design goals in writing code is to make every function a weakest link in order to drive out the fallacies asap. One of the side-effects is that it requires one to write very tight fast code. Mileage varies.
Let’s avoid politics, it’s simply what daddy called “nasty ■■■■”.
Believe me, i agree with you on loss of civil liberties, not trusting the administrative swamp, and so forth.
I’m a realist, and as a result of observation and study and practice and all that, i’m also what some people would call an anarchist… i believe in individual responsibility, and that surrendering any tiniest bit of that to a State is to abdicate one’s own sovereinty. I live as i damn please within the law. If governments disappear, all the better imo.
But they haven’t. They already have us by the short-and-curlies. What i’m looking at is how to most conveniently and safely coexist within that structure until it either breaks down totally (as it has been breaking down for decades, as it would do overnight if the internet mysteriously went away) or until something better evolves from it.
The government (no matter which one these days) can already identify us. The problem is not to hide things from the government, because if they want you, you’re meat. The problem is to be able to freely and openly express our thoughts and grow with one another, without being at risk from various predators. The fact that one might include “The Government” in the list-of-predators seems irrelevant to me, since we already live by nothing more than the forbearance of events.
I believe that together we can figure out a solution to that problem, but what i’m doing for the rest of the day is resting; i’m used up, no more me until the body is rested enough to get bored.
My thoughts and views are a bit “Out there” regarding software in the free and open-source space, but it’s more common than Stallman wants to believe; If it works, people will use it.
Allow for a brief explanation; Stallman and company wants to make a system that is 100% open-source. No proprietary components, limited corporate involvement, everything universal and standard. Except… that’s not how the PC industry works, greybeard.
He had fought for so hard, and for so long, for a impossible vision. So does Debian, which is why Debian for a lot of first-time users is near-about impossible, because the moment you have to use proprietary software, Debian makes itself as hard as possible to use. This is where Ubuntu excels at;
Ubuntu embraces proprietary software and hardware like a lost brother. Because in fact, it is! People use a combination of free standard and non-free non-standard components all the time, and Shuttleworth believed that people shouldn’t be punished for using a GPU or printer that doesn’t have open-source drivers for it, which would most likely be inferior compared to an in-house offering by the same company who made the hardware. But if no software exists for it by them, it should be as easy as possible to install the open-source versions.
It should had sent a clear message for all the free software advocates that it took somebody with money to make Debian worth something, and to stop calling it Linux because after 20 years of people dragging its name through the mud. There wasn’t any redemption until a Trojan horse comes along to clean it off. Funny enough, that Trojan horse was not Canonical and Ubuntu, but Google and Android. You wouldn’t believe the satisfaction I get when I tell people about Linux, they say “But I don’t use Linux” when they have an Android smartphone in their breast pocket, and I tell them “Hey buddy, mind if I see your phone’s settings for a moment?” to prove them wrong.
But I digress. Ubuntu’s message should have rang loudly to the free and open-source software landscape; Closed-source solutions are here to stay, and we shouldn’t fight something that works when we won’t get off our asses to make our own solution which may or may not be better. That’s Ubuntu in a nutshell; A sane person, with a sane outlook trying to being sanity to an insane world, and having near-about succeeded. Now if everyone else could just get along and make their damn minds up so we can concentrate on world domination, and Linus Torvald’s baby might have a chance at being a mainstream household staple.
Frankly I always thought Shuttleworth was more responsible for putting Debian back on the map than anything else. Debian wasn’t a particularly loved distribution before 2004. Enjoyed a some popularity during the 90s, but was always outshined by RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake or Caldera. And In the 00s distributions like Gentoo, Fedora, and Knoppix increased the competition and further cemented the idea that Debian was a particularly difficult distribution to setup for no obvious gain, where distros like Arch, Gentoo and Slackware had a more obvious purpose to their torturous installation and setup processes.
And before Shuttleworth all the above mentioned distributions were already giving the user a choice to use whatever the heck they wanted. RedHat, Mandrake and SuSE being the real pioneers of non-free software as a clickable choice on installers. Shuttleworth no doubt introduced that idea, but only to the conservative world of Debian. Not to the Linux community in general who were already enjoying non-free software since the 90s.
It’s also of some interest that it was only after 2004 that Debian started to see a steady increase in the number of Debian developer applicants and contributors. Before that time, the number of developers working on the distro had been on a steady decline.
[quote=“tiox, post:15, topic:13633”]Closed-source solutions are here to stay[/quote]Whether closed source will ever completely disappear – probably not. But I wouldn’t go so far as to praise its glory either. I’m not saying it should be shunned either but if anything, I would say it actually is on a steady decline.
See, for instance, the opening up of the .NET core by Microsoft.
On a more personal level – of all the software I use only one type is typically closed source with open source alternatives being worse – games. But even for that I use an open source solution to actually play them – WINE. In all other things I use on this PC (the OS itself, the kernel of the OS, chess engines, browser, media player, code development, password management, .NET) I find that the open source solutions are not only readily available but typically beat their closed source counterparts to a bloody pulp. Heck, even the graphics stack I’m on is the open source option and it’s running a hell of a lot better for me than the closed source alternative.
So, again, not to shun closed source. I’m just not embracing it like it’s the best thing since sliced bread either.
Neither am I, honestly; I am writing this message on the same system this forum advocates. However being in the world of Debian for so long negatively skewed my perceptions of open-source system advocates because Debian, the root system all the Ubuntu systems use are ultra-conservative, when there is testimony above which juxtaposes against my views stated prior.
However, you cannot deny there are also closed-source solutions which absolutely beat the pants off of our open-source babies. We all love GIMP, at least, those who never used anything else but @antechdesignsdoesn’t even touch it because he sees Adobe Photoshop as the superior choice.
And speaking of games, gaming on Linux would never be a problem, if developer stopped buying into DirectX, but so long as Microsoft has that sweet, sweet money to give and so long there are developers who need it they’ll forgo Vulkan for it, at least until a certain amount of time had passed depending on the agreement signed. id Software bucked the trend a bit with creating DOOM in 2016 and making it able to run on any system imaginable but that doesn’t prove inspiring enough for most to avoid Microsoft’s conspiring when the money crunch has smaller groups perspiring.
but that doesn’t prove inspiring enough for most to avoid Microsoft’s conspiring when the money crunch has smaller groups perspiring
[/quote]Perception is not always the same as reality.
I particularly like the note at Star Citizen… “Vulkan support to replace DirectX 12”
Honestly, the days of DirectX assured dominance are in fact quite over. DX10 never caught on, neither did DX11. DX12 might catch on a bit more but ultimately, Vulkan is the better API and developers are actually adopting it. A big one in that list I just showed you – Dota 2. Now, if there is one company that’ll have an impact, it’s Valve. And if there’s one genre that is sure to inspire others, it’s MOBA. Dota 2 is huge. Big money in big title. And no, I’m not a fanboy. I prefer HOTS and Smite, MOBA-wise.
I think that real difference here the technological requirements of the MOBA genre. The popularity of the genre has little impact.
Think of it this way, the technology is what allows for good final products and the popularity is the end result of that. Developers are thus ultimately interested on their tools first. So, if Vulkan can deliver the exceedingly high technological demands of a triple-A MOBA tile, you can bet developers will take note of that. The MOBA genre can act as a tremendous showcase for Vulkan for the simple fact that a triple-A title exists on such a technological demanding genre.
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