cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 146 Posts
  • 510 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: January 17th, 2022
  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoLemmy@lemmy.ml•[Discussion] Should Lemmy allow mods/admins to edit user post dataEnglish
    8·
    21 days ago

    as a mod/admin, i would appreciate being able to edit post titles. there have been a fair number of times where i asked a poster to do so, and then waited a while for them to before deleting the post if they don’t.

    and/or, it would be nice to have a way for us to temporarily semi-delete a post while waiting for OP to make requested changes to it; that is, to hide it from the community view but leave it visible to people with the URL, or people who find it via the user profiles of the poster or commenters in it.

    editing titles would be awkward without an edit history or, at the least, a way to see that some 2nd party had edited it, and editing post bodies would be even more so. but it would make sense and be useful with an edit history, i think.

    i would also appreciate having content addressability, portable identity, composable moderation, and… perhaps a pony 😂

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoLinux@lemmy.ml•A good e-mail client for linux?English
    5·
    21 days ago

    still of Obi-wan Kenobi in Star Wars with subtitle "Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time."

    At first i thought, wow, cool they’re still developing that? Doing a release or two a year, i see.

    I used to use it long ago, and was pretty happy with it.

    But looking closer now, what is going on with security there?! Sorry to be the bearer of probably bad news, but... 😬

    The only three CVEs in their changelog are from 2007, 2010, and 2014, and none are specific to claws.

    Does that mean they haven’t had any exploitable bugs? That seems extremely unlikely for a program written in C with the complexity that being an email client requires.

    All of the recent changelog entries which sound like possibly-security-relevant bugs have seven-digit numbers prefixed with “CID”, whereas the other bugs have four-digit bug numbers corresponding to entries in their bugzilla.

    After a few minutes of searching, I have failed to figure out what “CID” means, or indeed to find any reference to these numbers outside of claws commit messages and release announcements. In any case, from the types of bugs which have these numbers instead of bugzilla entries, it seems to be the designation they are using for security bugs.

    The effect of failing to register CVEs and issue security advisories is that downstream distributors of claws (such as the Linux distributions which the project’s website recommends installing it from) do not patch these issues.

    For instance, claws is included in Debian stable and three currently-supported LTS releases of Ubuntu - which are places where users could be receiving security updates if the project registered CVEs, but are not since they don’t.

    Even if you get claws from a rolling release distro, or build the latest release yourself, it looks like you’d still be lagging substantially on likely-security-relevant updates: there have actually been numerous commits containing CID numbers in the month since the last release.

    If the claws developers happen to read this: thanks for writing free software, but: please update your FAQ to explain these CID numbers, and start issuing security advisories and/or registering CVEs when appropriate so that your distributors will ship security updates to your users!

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•is there something about rust which precludes copyleft licensing?English
    2·
    21 days ago

    Nope.

    Nope, it is.

    It allows someone to use code without sharing the changes of that code. It enables non-free software creators like Microsoft to take the code, use it however they like, and not have to share back.

    This is correct; it is a permissive license.

    This is what Free Software prevents.

    No, that is what copyleft (aims to) prevent.

    Tired of people calling things like MIT and *BSD true libre/Free Software.

    The no True Scotsman fallacy requires a lack of authority about what what constitutes “true” - but in the case of Free/Libre software, we have one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition

    If you look at this license list (maintained by the Free Software Foundation’s Licensing and Compliance Lab) you’ll see that they classify many non-copyleft licenses as “permissive free software licenses”.

    They’re basically one step away from no license at all.

    Under the Berne Convention of 1886, everything is copyrighted by default, so “no license at all” means that nobody has permission to redistribute it :)

    The differences between permissive free software licenses and CC0 or a simple declaration that something is “dedicated to the public domain” are subtle and it’s easy to see them as irrelevant, but the choice of license does have consequences.

    The FSF recommends that people who want to use a permissive license choose Apache 2.0 “for substantial programs” because of its clause which “prevents patent treachery”, while noting that that clause makes it incompatible with GPLv2. For “simple programs” when the author wants a permissive license, FSF recommends the Expat license (aka the MIT license).

    It is noteworthy that the latter is compatible with GPLv2; MIT-licensed programs can be included in a GPLv2-only work (like the Linux kernel) while Apache 2.0-licensed programs cannot. (GPLv3 is more accommodating and allows patent-related additional restrictions to be applied, so it is compatible with Apache 2.0.)

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltoOpen Source@lemmy.ml•is there something about rust which precludes copyleft licensing?English
    14·
    23 days ago

    I often see Rust mentioned at the same time as MIT-type licenses. Is it just a cultural thing that people who write Rust dislike Libre licenses?

    The word “libre” in the context of licensing exists to clarify the ambiguity of the word “free”, to emphasize that it means “free as in freedom” rather than “free as in beer” (aka no cost, or gratis) as the FSF explains here.

    The MIT license is a “libre” license, because it does meet the Free Software Definition.

    I think the word you are looking for here is copyleft: the MIT license is a permissive license, meaning it is not a copyleft license.

    I don’t know enough about the Rust community to say why, but from a distance my impression is that yes they do appear to have a cultural preference for permissive licenses.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoLinux@lemmy.ml•*Permanently Deleted*English
    7·
    27 days ago

    for example, on a linux distro, we could modify the desktop environment and make it waaaaay lighter by getting rid of jpg or png icons and just using pure svg on it.

    this has largely happened; if you’re on a dpkg-based distro try running this command:

    dpkg -S svg | grep svg$ | sort

    …and you’ll see that your distro includes thousands of SVG files :)

    explanation of that pipeline:
    • dpkg -S svg - this searches for files installed by the package manager which contain “svg” in their path
    • grep svg$ - this filters the output to only show paths which end with svg; that is, the actual svg files. the argument to grep is a regular expression, where $ means “end of line”. you can invert the match (to see the paths dpkg -S svg found which only contain “svg” in the middle of the path) by writing grep -v svg$ instead.
    • the sort command does what it says on the tin, and makes the output easier to read

    you can run man dpkg, man grep, and man sort to read more about each of these commands.

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoLinux@lemmy.ml•*Permanently Deleted*English
    191·
    25 days ago

    No, SVG files are not HTML.

    Please change this post title (currently “today i learned: svg files are literally just html code”), to avoid spreading this incorrect factoid!

    I suggest you change it to “today i learned: svg files are just text in an html-like language” or something like that. edit: thanks OP

    SVG is a dialect of XML.

    XML and HTML have many similarities, because they both are descendants of SGML. But, as others have noted in this thread, HTML is also not XML. (Except for when it’s XHTML…)

    Like HTML, SVG also can use CSS, and, in some environments (eg, in browsers, but not in Inkscape) also JavaScript. But, the styles you can specify with CSS in SVG are quite different than those you can specify with CSS in HTML.

    Lastly, you can embed SVG in HTML and it will work in (modern) browsers. You cannot embed HTML in SVG, however.

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