Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy

On Thu, 20 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

D <nospam@example.net> writes:
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On Wed, 20 Feb 2025, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
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Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:

In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.

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Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)

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What I don't tell, they can't post, and the same with what they
don't photograph. Although I guess that does leave a bit of an
information vacuum there which some nutcase could exploit to make
up missing personal info/photos on me if they so desired.
>

Quite mysteriously, all sorts of otherwise respectable open-source
software developers are happy to use GitHub even though it's owned
by M$. So even having ditched their software long ago, M$ are now
very hard to avoid online if, ironically, you want to use, and
especially work on, open-source software. I find that truely
unfathomable, but others barely seem to see my problem with it.

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Many, I suspect, started using Github before Microsoft bought them in
2018.

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For software projects I use, many more seem to have moved to there
since 2018 than before. You'd think they like the M$ acquisition.
Occasionally I object and am ignored.

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You have been heard! I will not be hosting my stuff on github. On the
other hand, I have nothing interesting to host, so perhaps a moot
point. ;) My home made scripts and little utilities live on my laptop
and sometimes on my server, and are shared upon request.

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I think most little scripts should be documented (with a manual) and put
online.  It will make it easier for others to use and it will certainly
encourage others to improve it and share the improvement.  So you could
see your little script turn into a nice polished program simply because
someone saw the idea and knew what to do to make it a lot better.  Could
be a good source of joy.

You have a point! Sigh... so much one wants to do, so little time. =( Let met tell you about my little scripts. I have my old backup script utilizing rsync and replicating over tor, so it can go through firewalls, and uses a hidden service for a permanent global address, so it is not dependent on DNS or domain names. I once had delusions of grandeur and thought about rewriting a small part of tor to remove all hops since I do not need anonymity for that use case.
I have my calendar sync scripts. They pull in ics from corporate calendar and converts it to remind format.
Then I have a slightly rewritten leafnode that pulls down usenet articles and stores them in Maildir format so I can read and write offline news in my favourite email client alpine.
I also have some custom rss2email scripts, and a script that allows me to take any url in an email, and fetch the page and email it to me.
Now... do you seriously think anyone would ever be interested in that? ;)

One time I wrote a function---just a function---and added to some
archive online.  This was a pretty niche programming language.  Years
later, I looked it up---I was still called the author of the function,
but the code was completely rewritten, with much more expertise
knowledge.  I thought it was ironic that my name was still there.  We
value the pioneer perhaps too much.

This is very inspirational! Thank you!

Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.

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I don't know about Codeberg, but there have been lots of
alternatives all along. Tons of projects switched from SourceForge
to GitHub. Many projects have their own websites too, so why not
self-host? GitHub do offer a lot of extra features for free, but
that's dealing with the devil IMHO. Especially as the more tied in
to GitHub-specific systems a project gets, the less practical it is
to move away if M$ get more greedy later on.

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I have heard about gitea. It seems as if it allows you to setup
graphical git hosting yourself. I personally use a fossil repository
accessible only over ssh. I don't use any of the wiki/ticket/chat
functionality included in it.

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There's Forgejo, too.  It looks very good.  Like in Github, you can
disable all such modules---wiki, ticket system et cetera.
>

Thank you. Will check out, haven't heard about it!