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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • The third option is to use the native secret vault. MacOS has its Keychain, Windows has DPAPI, Linux has has non-standardized options available depending on your distro and setup.

    Full disk encryption does not help you against data exfil, it only helps if an attacker gains physical access to your drive without your decryption key (e.g. stolen device or attempt to access it without your presence).

    Even assuming that your device is compromised by an attacker, using safer storage mechanisms at least gives you time to react to the attack.




  • Kinda expected the SSH key argument. The difference is the average user group.

    The average dude with a SSH key that’s used for more than their RPi knows a bit about security, encryption and opsec. They would have a passphrase and/or hardening mechanisms for their system and network in place. They know their risks and potential attack vectors.

    The average dude who downloads a desktop app for a messenger that advertises to be secure and E2EE encrypted probably won’t assume that any process might just wire tap their whole “encrypted” communications.

    Let’s not forget that the threat model has changed by a lot in the last years, and a lot of effort went into providing additional security measures and best practices. Using a secure credential store, additional encryption and not storing plaintext secrets are a few simple ones of those. And sure, on Linux the SSH key is still a plaintext file. But it’s a deliberate decision of you to keep it as plaintext. You can at least encrypt with a passphrase. You can use the actual working file permission model of Linux and SSH will refuse to use your key with loose permissions. You would do the same on Windows and Mac and use a credential store and an agent to securely store and use your keys.

    Just because your SSH key is a plaintext file and the presumption of a secure home dir, you still wouldn’t do a ~/passwords.txt.


  • How in the fuck are people actually defending signal for this, and with stupid arguments such as windows is compromised out of the box?

    You. Don’t. Store. Secrets. In. Plaintext.

    There is no circumstance where an app should store its secrets in plaintext, and there is no secret which should be stored in plaintext. Especially since this is not some random dudes random project, but a messenger claiming to be secure.

    Edit: “If you got malware then this is a problem anyway and not only for signal” - no, because if secure means to store secrets are used, than they are encrypted or not easily accessible to the malware, and require way more resources to obtain. In this case, someone would only need to start a process on your machine. No further exploits, no malicious signatures, no privilege escalations.

    “you need device access to exploit this” - There is no exploiting, just reading a file.




  • Again, you may quote the FSF, but there are too many users of open source, as well as developers, who got into it for the reasons I stated. I can assure you that they are not doing it so that corporations can profit off their software without giving back.

    If you are developing open source, you are not necessarily developing FOSS. If you are developing FOSS, you are also developing open source.

    FOSS is well defined by the FSF, and it has been for ages, and to be frank, therefore no one cares for anyone’s personal definition of it.

    What I am against is having the cake and eating it, as it’s being proposed with this licensing. Either you do FOSS, or you don’t. Either you do open source, or you don’t. Either you do proprietary software, or you don’t. It’s really that simple, because depending on your project, you take the terms that you see fitting and live with the consequences. The whole goal of this proposal was to be taken more serious as open source developers and projects, and to ensure funding for further development. Cherry picking the best parts of every model, and making irrational demands does not achieve that.

    As I said, I’m absolutely on board that open source licensing and open source development being taken for profit by corpos absolutely sucks, and the usual licensing models have not aged well with the much wider adoption and usage of open source, and there is a need for change - as it’s being done e.g. by elastic, redis and others with their dual licensing.


  • It doesn’t matter how hard you want to call it FOSS, but with this licensing terms you describe it is not FOSS, period. And to be honest, you calling out various people for not getting what FOSS is, while you fully ignore the agreed on definition by people who are actually doing FOSS is you discrediting yourself.

    You haven’t found a license like this, because your model is flawed: A licensing like this will disqualify you from any kind of usage in an actual FOSS licensed environment. Personal users, which will not be providing revenue, will not be really affected by this, and are irrelevant for your point. Corporate users, which you will mostly target by this new license probably won’t be able to use your funky new license because they will need to check with legal, and your software will need to have a lot of USPs for someone to bother with that. A 1% corpo-richness-tax will not be approved by any kind of bigger company, because it’s a ridiculous amount from the perspective of your potential customers.

    You’re taking yourself way to important. Open source software is not replaceable as a whole, but individual projects are. If you want to earn money with your project, that’s good on you, license it accordingly, but do not try to upsell it as FOSS.

    And I fully get your point, and I’m currently working on the same problem in my in-development project, and I’m not sure yet whether to dual-license it, for similar reasons you stated, and live with the consequences of providing OSS, but non-FOSS software, or do FOSS and provide it for actually free.

    Edit: Also, the xz backdoor has nothing to do with funding. Any long time maintainer (as in not just a random person contributing pull requests) going rogue can happen in funded scenarios as well.





  • Before you talked about the Fediverse as a whole, now from a single user perspective.

    IMO it affects the Fediverse as a whole by abusing it. The whole idea is an open network, where instances can federate with each other to bilaterally share information and create a seemingly single platform. This is not the case with the planned Threads integration, because they explicitly plan to feed on the content, but hiding sharing their own content behind an (for most of their userbase) obscure opt-in.

    From a single user perspective it doesn’t affect you directly. But it affects the platform you are part of with malicious intent.

    I am not against Threads joining the Fediverse, and I do actually think it would be great for the growth of the Fediverse if actual big players join, and if it brings content that I personally do not like to see, I can use the tools available (e.g. blocking user/communities/instances) to hide it. But only if they plan on joining as a “regular instance” like any other - but Meta does not intent doing so, since they have chosen the opt-in with obvious intent of simply gaining additional content on their walled platform for their own gain.


  • The problem is not them reading data, but that Threads will take Fediverse content, and display it on Threads. In the opposite direction, Fediverse will only see the select few user content that do actually opt-in, and let’s be honest here, most users won’t know what the Fediverse is, except for again the few people that are on both platforms. This is absolutely not “playing nice” as you’ve put it before, and purely parasitic and, again, purely a greed decision by Meta. I don’t really know why you are shilling so hard trying to excuse absolutely unexcusable behavior.



  • Meta has React, RocksDB and pytorch, and a few other “niche” frameworks and tools. “Half of the internet […] run[ning] on open source code and infrastructure that Meta built and maintains” is a big, big exaggeration. Also maintainance is done by the OSS community for big parts, and I’m really curious what open source infrastructure Meta is running.

    I’m not saying Meta has no relevance in OSS, but I can hardly think of an open source org that does open source purely for its own benefit. React helps them shape the web in the way Meta wants it, their ML stuff is important for their own internal needs (ads, BI, and the whole social networking, etc.), their AR/VR/XR contributions are for the Quest, and KI/LLM since they need it themselves instead of relying/partnering with OpenAI. Meta (the company) absolutely does not stand by the principles of open source, no matter how much you want to sugarcoat it.


  • It’s not a hate train, it’s being cautious. And do you really think that Meta is open sourcing because of their passion for FOSS and standing by those values? They’ve taken an internal framework they’ve build, open source it so that they can advertise how open and great they are on the page you linked, and after it gains traction (which it will, since it’s used by Meta it must be good /s) they can reduce their own internal efforts to a minimum, since the community will contribute. Open source may be a passion for the developers of Meta, but the company Meta does not give a single flying fuck about FOSS or the Fediverse.