FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

I felt this in my teeth.

The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the possibility that a wrong sequence of commands may point the antenna dish away from earth (like someone did a couple of days ago).

And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.

50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, with only 69 KB of RAM, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use, while nowadays 4 GB of RAM aren't even enough to start VsCode or IntelliJ.

The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels or Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.

If your computer can’t lie to other computers, then it’s not yours.

This is a fundamental principle of free and open source software. The World Wide Web abides by this principle, although we don’t often think of it that way. The Web is just an agreed-on set of programmatic interfaces: if you send me this, I’ll send you that. Your computer can construct the “this” by whatever means it wants; it’s none of the other side’s business, because your computer is not their computer.

Google’s so-called “Web Environment Integrity” plan would destroy this independence. “Integrity” is exactly the wrong word for it — a better name would be the “Browser Environment Control” plan.

In the normal world, you show up at the store with a five dollar bill, pick up a newspaper, and the store sells you the newspaper (and maybe some change) in exchange for the bill. In Google’s proposed world, five dollar bills aren’t fungible anymore: the store can ask you about the provenance of that bill, and if they don’t like the answer, they don’t sell you the newspaper. No, they’re not worried about the bill being fake or counterfeit or anything like that. It’s a real five dollar bill, they agree, but you can’t prove that you got it from the right bank. Please feel free to come back with the right sort of five dollar bill.

This is not the Open Web that made what’s best about the Internet accessible to the whole world. On that Web, if you send a valid request with the right data, you get a valid response. How you produced the request is your business and your business alone. That’s what software freedom is all about: you decide how your machinery works, just as other people decide how their machinery works. If your machine and their machine want to talk to each other, they just need an agreed-on language (in the case of the Web, that’s HTTP) in which to do so.

Google’s plan, though, steps behind this standard language to demand something no free and open source software can ever deliver: a magical guarantee that the user has not privately configured their own computer in any way that Google disapproves of.

The effrontery is shocking, to those with enough technical background to understand what is being proposed. It’s as though Google were demanding that when you’re talking to them you must somehow guarantee, in a provable way, that you’re not also thinking impure thoughts.

How could anyone ever agree to this nonsense? Must all our computers become North Korea?

The details of your own system’s configuration are irrelevant to — and unnecessary to accurately represent in — your communications with a server, just as your private thoughts are not required to be included, in some side-band channel, along with everything you say in regular language.

If a web site wants to require that you have a username and password, that’s fine. Those are just a standard part of the HTTP request your browser sends. But if a web site wants your browser to promise that it stores that username and password locally in a file named “google-seekritz.txt”, that’s not only weird and creepy, it’s also something that a free software (as in libre) browser can never reliably attest to. Any browser maintenance team worth its salt will just ship the browser with a default configuration in which the software reports that to Google when asked while, behind the scenes, storing usernames and passwords however it damn well pleases.

Indeed, the fundamental issue here is the freedom to have a “behind the scenes” at all. Environments in which people aren’t allowed to have a “behind the scenes” are totalitarian environments. That’s not an exaggeration; it’s simply the definition of the term. Whatever bad connotations the concept of totalitarianism may have for you, they come not from the fancy-sounding multi-syllabic word but from the actual, human-level badness of the scenario itself. That scenario is what Google is asking for.

My web browser (currently Mozilla Firefox running on Debian GNU/Linux, thank you very much) will never cooperate with this bizarre and misguided proposal. And along with the rest of the free software community, I will continue working to ensure we all live in a world where your web browser doesn’t have to either.

(Cross-posted at https://rants.org/2023/07/the-right-to-lie-and-google-wei/ .)

I've Been Petting Cats for 300 Years And Maxed Out My Arm Strength

we have met our goal tonight, thank you so much who donated! we beat Wendy's Castle #6, but unfortunately couldn't finish the game in one sitting. stay tuned for a follow-up livestream with a new fundraising goal and the conclusion of the game! https://tiltify.com/@mavica/mavica-plays-super-mario-world-for-mermaids

LB: Come join us watching mavica play super mario world to raise money for mermaids uk: https://www.twitch.tv/mavica

https://computerfairi.es/@mavica_again/110745048571229971

hey gang i'm going to marathon super mario world on the snes to raise money for mermaids uk next weekend the 29th https://tiltify.com/@mavica/mavica-plays-super-mario-world-for-mermaids ​

This is Mastodon and this is why it rocks!

not to sound like a huge communist but I don’t think millions of us should have to die hungry and in debt so a couple dudes with really really really big boats can have really really really really big boats

Happy people can't be monetized, this is why billionaires and tech companies need to keep you unhappy, angry, or scared. Resist. Be happy.

//hat tip to @Archie8

Great social media campaign by WWF Germany over on the dark site:

https://www.wwf.de/themen-projekte/artensterben

Important lesson for social movements:
You don't need to use the brick, but you must have one

I'm happy to announce dosfetch, a neofetch clone for DOS!

https://github.com/leahneukirchen/dosfetch

NEW VIDEO - Top Surgery: 5 Month Diary

logged the entire thing didn’t I

with help from @hazel

hopefully this might be a useful resource for anyone who needs it! ✨

https://youtu.be/gjk2pi72er8

If you're still using Chrome for performance reasons:
- Firefox is now faster than Chrome out-of-the-box
- Firefox uses less memory than Chrome
- Contrary to Chrome, Firefox does not restrict Ad blockers, which will make your browsing experience much faster (and safer).