So this very large company who shall remain nameless distributes a proprietary software development environment that includes a patched version of a certain, well-known open-source debugging tool.

The patch is to make said open-source tool support their products. It's not even hidden or anything: the binary is sitting right there in the installation directory, it's called the exact same thing the vanilla debugger is called and when I run it on the command line, it clearly says "patched for xyz".

The tool in question is distributed under the GPLv2 and I need to modify it for my own project. So I sent an email to the company to request the source code for their modification, but they refuse by playing dumb and pretending they don't understand the question. They keep telling me the source code to their IDE is not public. I keep telling them I don't want their IDE but the source for the modified GPL backend tool they bundle with it. But no: they claim it's part of their product and they won't release it.

Anybody knows the best course of action to deal with this? It's the first company I've dealt with that explicitly refuses to honor the GPL. I don't even think it's malice: I'm fairly sure the L2 support guy handling my ticket was told to deny my request by his clueless supervisor who didn't bother escalating it. But it's also a huge company that's known to be aggressive and litigious, whereas I'm just one guy and I'm not lawyering up over this. I have other hills to die on.

Who should I pass the potato to? The FSF?

I know they're supposed to be good for the environment but... God I hate those caps.

None of what follows is new. I know this stuff happens all the time. And yet somehow this insignificant thing shocked me and it's been gnawing at me for the past few days. And today was the icing on the shit cake.

So my wife ordered a a foot massage machine. $50, typical el-cheapo thing made in China. The thing was shipped to our home out in the boonies in less than 48 hours. Wow!

My wife opened the box, got the device out onto the floor and... she couldn't fit her feet inside. She's not big, but apparently the device was designed for customers in the Shire. Unusable.

So she emailed the distributor who told her to cut the cord, send them a photo proving the destruction and throw it away herself. Not return the device. Not pretend to return the device and the device is thrown away behind her back. No no: this time, the distributor told her in no uncertain terms that it's cheaper for them to let her destroy the thing herself.

And then it hit me: here is a device that was born in China, put together by some underpaid workers in a nondescript factory, designed by someone who didn't give a shit, made out of materials that probably came out of the ground somewhere in Africa and in Saudi Arabia - probably involving child labor at some point or other - put on a boat, shipped halfway around the world, then put into a truck, only to be landfilled here.

It didn't even see a single second of use. This is utterly absurd and completely depressing.

I'm not compatible with that. When I buy something, the thing has value and I want it to have a decently useful life. It's not about ecology or money: it's just basic respect for the resources and the human labor that went into this thing. The value of the object is what it cost the Earth and the people who toiled to make it and ship it to me. When I use my things, I show respect for those who made them and it justifies the use ot the materials they're made of.

But here I was looking at that poor thing across the room, unloved and unlovable, whose sole purpose as an object was to be landfilled without ever seeing any use. It consumed resources and someone worked to make it, yet somehow it never had any value for anybody.

And the most depressing thing about it is, its very existence from Chinese factory to my local landfill is totally absurd and makes no sense at all, yet all the invididual steps that contributed to it being fabricated and ultimately landing on our doorstep were a series of perfectly rational economical decisions: someone found added value in designing and building a shit foot massage machine, my wife found it worth buying sight unseen, someone figured there was money to be made shipping it here, and the distributor decided to outsource its destruction to the customers because it's cheaper than destroying it themselves - let alone shipping it back to Shenzen or wherever. And yet when you string everything together, the net result is senseless waste and production of things that have no inherent worth. How crazy is that eh?

I couldn't throw it away. So I replaced the cord and I gave it to the local Red Cross store yesterday to give to someone in need or sell it for pennies. Today, I passed by the shop on my way to work and saw the damn thing in their garbage container behind the store. In the box. Unopened. I guess it will be going to the landfill after all...

That really put the final damper on my day today...

Sorry if this is the wrong venue, but I really needed to vent.

I've never been super-impressed by Rob Braxman. I mean he's never truly wrong in what he was saying in his Youtube videos, but his explanations are over-simplistic, a bit of a shortcut (but fair enough to reach a wide audience I guess), and mostly designed to sell his meh deGoogled cellphones and equally meh privacy services. But all in all, he's somewhat watchable and sometimes informative after I'm done watching all the new videos from the other, more interesting channels I follow.

But lately, his videos seem to have shifted markedly toward unhinged rants and sensationalist conspiracy theory. His latest video for instance is utter nonsense:

Skynet 2024: The Infrastructure is Complete!

I mean yeah, okay, technically he's talking about a real thing. But Skynet? And doomsday Terminator imagery from 1984? Really?

I'm pretty sure the man doesn't have all his fries in the cone anymore. This can't possibly be a conscious strategy to win more Youtube subscribers: this sort of video is going to lose him the part of his audience that has a genuine and technically-informed interest in privacy, and I doubt he's ever going to become a favorite of the sort of crowd who likes conspiracy theories.

Either that or Youtube is a lot stupider than I thought and he noticed an uptick in subscribers when he makes videos like that. At any rate, I really hesitate to click on any of his new videos now.

I haven't been able to update my cellphone anonymously with Aurora since January. Every time I try, Aurora errors out with "Oops, you are rate limited".

This isn't the first time Google plays at making non-normies' lives difficult. So I tried the usual tricks, updated Aurora, tried the nightly build, waited, tried again... for months - to no avail: Google just won't play ball this time.

Last week, Signal stopped working and demanded to be updated. Fortunately, Signal offers the APK as a normal download without having to get it from the hateful Google Play store.

Today, my home banking identificator app did the same thing and stopped working. I needed to make a payment right now, and I had no way to update the app: "Oops, you are rate limited". And my bank sure doesn't offer the APK outside of anything but the goddamn Google Play store.

So I relented and created a Google account. Which of course entailed giving Google a phone number. I sure didn't give them mine, so I phoned a friend abroad who doesn't care to ask him to receive the verification SMS on his phone and read out the code to me. Which worked long enough to set up 2FA and do away with phone numbers altogether. And finally, after an hour of fucking around, annoying other people and compromising their phone number, I could update my banking app and make my payment at last.

All that because Google has decided they want to control my phone.

Fuck Google.

Seriously, how they are allowed to hold the Android world hostage like this without getting their monopolistic ass Sherman'ed AT&T-style, I'll never know. It's long overdue.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/13880246

I have a terrible el-cheapo 14" HP laptop that I bought from a big-box store a few years ago as an emergency replacement for a laptop that died on me on the road while visiting a customer. I literally went to the store 5 minutes before it closed, bought any laptop they had, loaded Linux on it at the hotel and transferred my files from the dead laptop overnight, then did my presentation the next morning.

The trouble is, that laptop is VERY Linux unfriendly. I've put up with it for years because I don't like to throw things away, but I just can't stand the regular AMDGPU driver crashes and the broke-ass wifi-cum-bluetooth Realtek chipset anymore.

So I'm on the market for a good Linux laptop. I'm not a demanding user - I use that HP laptop to edit videos and do CAD and I'm okay with it - I'm very comfortable with anything Linux and I can code my way around problems.

I'm really tempted to get a MNT Reform laptop: I like the LiFePo4 battery cells a lot, it's solid, it's open hardware, it has a trackball and I love trackballs, it's highly hackable, and I'd like to support the MNT Research guys. And I'm old enough and the kids have been out of the house long enough that money is no object.

But a couple of things are holding me back. Maybe there are MNT Reform owners here who could shed some light on the following questions:

• I don't know much of the ARM ecosystem, and what to expect from what processor / SoC. So I'm thinking of going with the highest end RK3588 32GB / 256GB CPU module offered by MNT. Would this at least match the performances of my stupid HP laptop's Ryzen 5 CPU in terms of real-world performances?

  Or put another way: should I expect to take a hit when encoding my videos or doing big CAD models compared to this already slow laptop, or can I reasonably expect the MNT Reform to at least not be a regression.

  Side question (yes, I know it should be obvious, but asking is better than guessing): I assume the "32GB / 256GB" in the CPU module's denomination is for 32GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard flash. Meaning I'd have that much disk space without needing to add a NVMe SSD card. Correct?

• The keyboard layout looks all shades of terrible. I'm flexible with anything but not keyboard layouts - and especially those keyboard that don't put the left SHIFT and CTRL at the bottom where they belong, or have a split space bar.

  The Reform's keyboard ticks all the wrong boxes for me in that respect: I can tell rightaway that it's going to fight my typing muscle memory all the time and forever, because I sure ain't gonna get used to it.

  Can I remap the keys so I can at least I can swap CTRL and whatever that key is at the bottom left, and make the 3 buttons that replace the space bar act as a space bar? Then it's just a matter of putting a sticker on the keys and gluing the space bar keycaps together somehow.

• I seem to recall some years ago that if the laptop was left off and unplugged for long enough - like 2 weeks IIRC - it would drain the cells and kill them because there was no under-voltage protection. Less dramatically but equally annoyingly, you couldn't leave it unplugged for a few days and expect to find it fully charged when you needed it most.

  Does it still do that? Or has the hardware been fixed - or maybe there's a "Turn really off" option in the little side computer that runs the mini OLED display?

  Mind you, I can always drill a hole and add a physical switch to disconnect the cells, but I'd rather not do that.

• Is there an option to limit the charge? Keeping Li-ion cells constantly at 100% (or worse, charging all the time) when the laptop is plugged in isn't ideal. I'd rather it kept the cells charged around 80% . And I mostly use my laptops plugged in.

• Can I remove the cells and use the laptop plugged in? I might eschew the cells altogether, because I really never need them: I'm plugged in at home, I'm plugged in on the train, I'm plugged in at the hotel, I'm plugged in at the customer's. I can't remember a time when I needed to run this particular laptop on battery. If I can use the laptop as a luggable computer, I wouldn't need to carry the weight of the cells around.

• Has anybody tried to install Cinnamon? Does it work well on Debian ARM? I see no reason why it shouldn't, but maybe there are issues.

Well that's pretty much it. Sorry for the long post 🙂 There's precious little information about the MNT Reform out there - probably a good indication that there are precious few such machines in the wild, sadly - so I would welcome any real-world user feedback!

I have a terrible el-cheapo 14" HP laptop that I bought from a big-box store a few years ago as an emergency replacement for a laptop that died on me on the road while visiting a customer. I literally went to the store 5 minutes before it closed, bought any laptop they had, loaded Linux on it at the hotel and transferred my files from the dead laptop overnight, then did my presentation the next morning.

The trouble is, that laptop is VERY Linux unfriendly. I've put up with it for years because I don't like to throw things away, but I just can't stand the regular AMDGPU driver crashes and the broke-ass wifi-cum-bluetooth Realtek chipset anymore.

So I'm on the market for a good Linux laptop. I'm not a demanding user - I use that HP laptop to edit videos and do CAD and I'm okay with it - I'm very comfortable with anything Linux and I can code my way around problems.

I'm really tempted to get a MNT Reform laptop: I like the LiFePo4 battery cells a lot, it's solid, it's open hardware, it has a trackball and I love trackballs, it's highly hackable, and I'd like to support the MNT Research guys. And I'm old enough and the kids have been out of the house long enough that money is no object.

But a couple of things are holding me back. Maybe there are MNT Reform owners here who could shed some light on the following questions:

• I don't know much of the ARM ecosystem, and what to expect from what processor / SoC. So I'm thinking of going with the highest end RK3588 32GB / 256GB CPU module offered by MNT. Would this at least match the performances of my stupid HP laptop's Ryzen 5 CPU in terms of real-world performances?

  Or put another way: should I expect to take a hit when encoding my videos or doing big CAD models compared to this already slow laptop, or can I reasonably expect the MNT Reform to at least not be a regression.

  Side question (yes, I know it should be obvious, but asking is better than guessing): I assume the "32GB / 256GB" in the CPU module's denomination is for 32GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard flash. Meaning I'd have that much disk space without needing to add a NVMe SSD card. Correct?

• The keyboard layout looks all shades of terrible. I'm flexible with anything but not keyboard layouts - and especially those keyboard that don't put the left SHIFT and CTRL at the bottom where they belong, or have a split space bar.

  The Reform's keyboard ticks all the wrong boxes for me in that respect: I can tell rightaway that it's going to fight my typing muscle memory all the time and forever, because I sure ain't gonna get used to it.

  Can I remap the keys so I can at least I can swap CTRL and whatever that key is at the bottom left, and make the 3 buttons that replace the space bar act as a space bar? Then it's just a matter of putting a sticker on the keys and gluing the space bar keycaps together somehow.

• I seem to recall some years ago that if the laptop was left off and unplugged for long enough - like 2 weeks IIRC - it would drain the cells and kill them because there was no under-voltage protection. Less dramatically but equally annoyingly, you couldn't leave it unplugged for a few days and expect to find it fully charged when you needed it most.

  Does it still do that? Or has the hardware been fixed - or maybe there's a "Turn really off" option in the little side computer that runs the mini OLED display?

  Mind you, I can always drill a hole and add a physical switch to disconnect the cells, but I'd rather not do that.

• Is there an option to limit the charge? Keeping Li-ion cells constantly at 100% (or worse, charging all the time) when the laptop is plugged in isn't ideal. I'd rather it kept the cells charged around 80% . And I mostly use my laptops plugged in.

• Can I remove the cells and use the laptop plugged in? I might eschew the cells altogether, because I really never need them: I'm plugged in at home, I'm plugged in on the train, I'm plugged in at the hotel, I'm plugged in at the customer's. I can't remember a time when I needed to run this particular laptop on battery. If I can use the laptop as a luggable computer, I wouldn't need to carry the weight of the cells around.

• Has anybody tried to install Cinnamon? Does it work well on Debian ARM? I see no reason why it shouldn't, but maybe there are issues.

Well that's pretty much it. Sorry for the long post 🙂 There's precious little information about the MNT Reform out there - probably a good indication that there are precious few such machines in the wild, sadly - so I would welcome any real-world user feedback!

I know they're supposed to be good for the environment. But... Holy smokes they drive me up the wall. They really do!

I had no trouble adapting when aluminum can pull-tabs got replaced by push-tabs, because it was pretty much the same movement, and I could see the immediate advantage of not getting cut by a pull-tab.

But the tethered cap is fighting decades of muscle memory in me: I'm used to taking the cap off with one hand and keeping it there while taking a swig with the other. Now I unscrew the cap with one hand, but I still have to hold the cap so it's out of the way. It feels like drinking in handcuffs each and every time...

So unlike the pull-tab, the tethered plastic bottle cap is one of those compulsory eco solutions that constantly make you feel ever-so-slightly more miserable all the time, and I hate that because ecology only works when it brings something of value both to people and to the environment.

I use Firefox and Firefox Mobile on the desktop and Android respectively, Chromium with Bromite patches on Android, and infrequently Brave on the desktop to get to sites that only work properly with Chromium (more and more often - another whole separate can of worms too, this...) And I always pay attention to disable google.com and gstatic.com in NoScript and uBlock Origin whenever possible.

I noticed something quite striking: when I hit sites that use those hateful captchas from Google - aka "reCAPTCHA" that I know are from Google because they force me to temporarily reenable google.com and gstatic.com - statistically, Google quite consistently marks the captcha as passed with the green checkmark without even asking me to identify fire hydrants or bicycles once, or perhaps once but the test passes even if I purposedly don't select certain images, and almost never serves me those especially heinous "rolling captchas" that keep coming up with more and more images to identify or not as you click on them until it apparently has annoyed you enough and lets you through.

When I use Firefox however, the captchas never pass without at least one test, sometimes several in a row, and very often rolling captchas. And if I purposedly don't select certain images for the sake of experimentation, the captchas keep on coming and coming and coming forever - and if I keep doing it long enough, they plain never stop and the site become impossible to access.

Only with Firefox. Never with Chromium-based browsers.

I've been experimenting with this informally for months now and it's quite clear to me that Google has a dark pattern in place with its reCAPTCHA system to make Chrome and Chromium-based browsers the path of least resistance.

It's really disgusting...

Hey everybody,

I installed LineageOS 20 (Android 13) on an old cellphone I had lying around. It works fine, apart from an odd problem: when I connect the phone to my computer by USB, the "Charging this device via USB" notification appears but all the USB preference options are greyed out.

Data transfer works however: if I go into System > Developer options > Default USB configuration, set it to Data Transfer, unplug the USB cable and plug it back in, the options are still greyed out, but File Transfer is selected and the drive appears on the PC. So it's not the cable, and my ports or plugs don't need cleaning.

It's very inconvenient to have to enable and disable this in the Developer options each time I want to transfer a file, and I most certainly don't want to leave Data tranfer enabled all the time.

I've been looking for a solution everywhere, and it seems plenty of people have the same problem with a lot of different phones, but nobody has a solution.

Anybody knows what might be going on here? Any adb shell command I could issue to reenable what might be disabled?

So I'm in the bus, happily browsing Lemmy in Jerboa. I clicked on a Reddit link in a Lemmy post that silently opened the Reddit app without my noticing (cuz I was paying attention to my bus stop). The subreddit had this grey theme going on, so overall the Reddit client kinda looked like Jerboa.

I kept on browsing, but then I thought "That's odd, my Reddit comments show up in Jerboa... Does it aggregate? That's slick. But how does it know my Reddit creds?"

Kept on browsing some more... Wow! They even thought of making the karma points look red. Jerboa is really slick!

And then I went to my home, the UI turned bright red again and I had a "Oh..." moment... Tap twice on the square button, back to Jerboa.

That was an oddly mind-bending 20 seconds.

So I went down the list of PeerTube clients in F-Droid, and the only two that let me pick my instance / login are TubeLab and P2Play. They look nice but there's a problem: they don't understand login with 2FA, and I don't really want to drop 2FA as I always use the extra security whenever it's available.

Any other Android client you're aware of that would work for me?

In the meantime, I'll open a feature request for those two apps.

EDIT:

Uuh nevermind, I answered my own question: when I went to open an issue with TubeLab, the repo says it's now part of FediLab - which, inconveniently, doesn't come up when you search for PeerTube in F-Droid.

I installed FediLab, and lo and behold... 2FA!

And with that, voila: I'm logged in:

Brilliant!