This isn't something that can be defeated like this. You are right, there will be ways around this. But we also have to be honest: being able to buy "off the shelf", two click VPN solution for 5$ already puts you into "geek" category. Relatively speaking.
If they ban the commercial providers, payment processors will be the first to enforce it. And Google and Apple will throw the 1-Click solutions out of their app store for users from those countries immediately. And with that the topic is effectively dead even for most "geeks". At this point the goal is already pretty much achieved, most people are cutoff and under heavier surveillance. Next comes the group that know what a server is, how to rent one, what OpenVPN or Wireguard are. But many of the most used websites already make your life difficult if your IP is from such a range.
It goes on. At each step you can argue "there is still a way, as long as you got networking with other countries". Absolutely correct, but at each step the group who knows how and is willing to invest the energy shrinks. And the intended goal will likely already be achieved at the mentioned phase 1 above. The fact that some people still find ways isn't really a gotcha in this matter.
And at some point they will criminalize it. Does it matter that they are unlikely to catch you? Is it worth the risk? And if so, what if you catch strays for it from an unrelated matter. Ultimately they will simply target the devs that help build easy solution for the less tech-savy.
One big reason why you want to keep a bunch of nerds tunneling out around anyway is that you keep useful, defusing attitudes like that floating around. Aka "It's not that bad, there are still ways around it, haha, those idiots".
Giving APL a quick glance I find the topic at least intriguing.
So if I understand this right K is one of the more popular/recommended APL-derivatives nowadays. K is proprietary but there are a bunch of compatible implementations which are themselves open source. Is that correct?
Which APL derivatives (with an active/healthy userbase) besides k would you recommend to take a closer look at?
Problem at scale. Doesn't matter if someone is consciously able to identify individual bot accounts or comments. There can still be a strong general feeling that something is very wrong. Leading to more and more frustration and unhappiness.
"Popular" reddit posts and subreddits are a good example of this.
And even staying within the comfort of AI enthusiasm: Google wasn't exactly leading in this race. If you have this much confidence in what those presenters and engineers at Google told you, you now have some opportunities to make a lot of money.
When the attack is being used to craft a very particular narrative unrelated to the attack, a lot of other things continue to matter, and yes they do matter right now. That is on the premise that this isn't some depraved PR stunt. And that is also ignoring how purposefully misleading most headlines as well as your comment are.
Yeah bad choice of words on my part, I apologize. I can imagine that things are pretty chaotic right now and that there are quite a few problems like the one you describe. When I said I don't see a crisis here I meant that more in a more overarching sense and that I see this as solvable.
> Works for high school, not so much for university degrees.
I don't know about that. I can't speak for the US, but at the university where I got my degrees (Math & CS) and later worked prerequisite in-person tests to be allowed to take a given exam were not rare. Most modules had lectures (professor), tutorials (voluntary in-person bonus exercises and tutors to ask questions) and exercise groups where solutions to mandatory exercises were discussed. In the latter sometimes an additional part of the exam requirements was to present and explain a solution at least once or twice over the course of the semester. And some had small, mandatory bi-weekly tests as part of the requirement too.
Obviously I can understand that this would not work equally well in each kind of academic programme.
I don't see the whole AI topic as a large crisis, as others have mentioned: put more emphasis on in-person tests and exams. Make it clear that homework assignments are for practice, learning, and feedback. If a person thinks that copy/pasting helps them, give them the freedom to so, but if as a result they fail the exams and similar in-person evaluations, then so be it. Let them fail.
I would like to hire students who actually have skills and know their material.
Or even better, if AI is actually the amazing learning tool many claim then it should enhance their learning and as a result help them succeed in tests without any AI assistance. If they can't, then clearly AI was a detriment to them and their learning and they lack the ability to think critically about their own abilities.
If everyone is supposed to use AI anyway, why should I ever prefer a candidate who is not able to do anything without AI assistance over someone who can? And if you hold the actual opinion that proper ai-independent knowledge is not required, then why should I hire a student at all instead of buying software solutions from AI companies (and maybe put a random person without a relevant degree in front of it)?
Well I was wondering when the war on general computing and computer ownership would be carried into the heart of the open source ecosystems.
Sure, there are sensible things that could be done with this. But given the background of the people involved, the fact that this is yet another clear profit-first gathering makes me incredibly pessimistic.
This pessimism is made worse by reading the answers of the founders here in this thread: typical corporate talk. And most importantly: preventing the very real dangers involved is clearly not a main goal, but is instead brushed off with empty platitudes like "I've been a FOSS guy my entire adult life...." instead of describing or considering actual preventive measures. And even if the claim was true, the founders had a real love for the hacker spirit, there is obviously nothing stopping them from selling to the usual suspects and golden parachute out.
I was really struggling to not make this comment just another snarky, sarcastic comment, but it is exhausting. It is exhausting to see the hatred some have for people just owning their hardware. So sorry, "don't worry, we're your friends" just doesn't cut it to come at this with a positive attitude.
The benefits are few, the potential to do a lot of harm is large. And the people involved clearly have the network and connections to make this an instrument of user-hostility.
The product isn't some result of a series of "oopsies". The worst aspects of bad and/or user-hostile software products are that way because the people working at these companies want them to be that way.
Unless you want to call them just that incompetent. I assume they'd complain about that label too.
In short: No it's not "the product", the people building it are the problem. Somehow everyone working in big tech wants all the praise all the time, individually, but never take even the slightest bit of responsibility fro the constant enshittification they drive forward..
Chat control very likely violates at least german law, if not EU law too already. As experts as well as the ministry of justice of the previous government in germany have pointed out time and time again.
Yet still that was never enough for a clear and definitive "no".
It is very likely that the people in favor of this would still try to push it through, or let that happen. They know that the legal battle afterwards to determine its unlawfulness would take years.
And during that time it could already be put it place. And once the legal battle is over (and likely won) severe damage is done and they could still adapt the law or just offer companies to continue doing this "voluntarily". And personally I wouldn't count on Apple, Google, or Facebook to roll this back quickly in that case once they've put it into place.
Congratulations! Genuinely impressive achievement. I don't plan to use Hyprland but the amount of work Vaxry and the Hyprland contributors put into the project is pretty inspiring.
> if you go searching for ladybird on Mastodon you will find that there’s quite a bit of ill will
I followed your suggestion and took a look at this.
Let's call the situation what it is: Someone with a few followers on Mastodon saw a reason to harass an individual, with the reason itself being secondary in nature.
What happened there is called brigading, which is rightfully a bannable offense in many moderated online communities, even those many would (rightfully) consider very toxic in nature.
Pretending that this 3 year old pull request with a one (!) word change was actually of deep interest to the people involved seems pretty dishonest.
The fact that this absolutely trivial PR is enough to gain so much traction in certain circles that they gather to sling hurtful tirades at someone and call them names in order to hurt them....why would anyone want such a community interacting with a project?
Why would anyone want such a toxic crowd near a project?
I don't know, mobile phones and messengers in particular are a very small target compared to general personal computing.
There are very few relevant messengers and adoption rate is king, because at the end of the day we want to use these messenger to communicate with people.
Getting people to try out new/different messengers is already a pain. And here every blow against an uncompromised messenger to make them harder to get will lower its usercount and push more people towards the compromised software they can easily get on the store.
Sure I'd say some way of circumventing this will probably remain available for a while, but I'd say it is extremely easy to make this very inconvenient.
After all this isn't about having some way to communicate safely, this is about being able to communicate safely in our daily lives is what I'd say.
Since for now this is supposed to force the messenger developers a way to circumvent would be to directly download and install APKs of messengers that refuse to implement this and/or left the EU market.
This is obviously merely a short term solution since it should be clear that targeting hosts and developers of non complying solutions would likely be the next step.
> [...] we arranged to have five servers shipped to Amsterdam. However, all five servers were lost in the mail.
> These parcels were insured with the shipping provider, but we have been unable to reach the provider for any information regarding the status of the parcels or any resources for filing an insurance claim.
> After several months of attempts, we have ultimately had to write these servers off.
I obviously do not know the details here and it might be perfectly understandable given the full picture, but this chain of events sounds weird and could have used some further explanation.
Because this makes it sound like several thousand dollars worth of important equipment (and possibly important data) went missing and the issue was completely dropped because emails remained unanswered?
If they ban the commercial providers, payment processors will be the first to enforce it. And Google and Apple will throw the 1-Click solutions out of their app store for users from those countries immediately. And with that the topic is effectively dead even for most "geeks". At this point the goal is already pretty much achieved, most people are cutoff and under heavier surveillance. Next comes the group that know what a server is, how to rent one, what OpenVPN or Wireguard are. But many of the most used websites already make your life difficult if your IP is from such a range.
It goes on. At each step you can argue "there is still a way, as long as you got networking with other countries". Absolutely correct, but at each step the group who knows how and is willing to invest the energy shrinks. And the intended goal will likely already be achieved at the mentioned phase 1 above. The fact that some people still find ways isn't really a gotcha in this matter.
And at some point they will criminalize it. Does it matter that they are unlikely to catch you? Is it worth the risk? And if so, what if you catch strays for it from an unrelated matter. Ultimately they will simply target the devs that help build easy solution for the less tech-savy.
One big reason why you want to keep a bunch of nerds tunneling out around anyway is that you keep useful, defusing attitudes like that floating around. Aka "It's not that bad, there are still ways around it, haha, those idiots".