Yeah, it doesn't look like they ever donated directly to Omarchy. Not to say their association with DHH (the racist bigot at the helm of Omarchy) has never involved money though, as they listed a sizable sponsorship with Rails World, which platforms DHH. That said, it doesn't look like they've done any other sponsorships with Rails World since.

I went to check on whether they were still sponsoring Hyprland, a project which fosters a notoriously hateful community, and it looks like they've stopped their €600/month commitment and now instead report a lump sum of €7200, which could indicate that they stopped sponsoring them after 12 months. Too long IMO, but maybe there was some sort of contract involved that made it difficult for them to pull out. In any case, it's good to see they appear to have cancelled those gross affiliations.

I still hold reservations, as I'm not familiar with who is behind many of the other projects they're sponsoring. Given their failure to identify how problematic associations with DHH and Hyprland were, it leaves questions about whether they'll ensure their due diligence on sponsorships going forwards, (or worse, that they knew and didn't care until the community's uproar). I'm hopeful, but wary.

Maybe by the time I'm looking for a new laptop, I can consider framework.

No. It would be vastly preferable if this were nipped in the bud. Need I remind you how many people died in WWII, not to mention the human cost of fascism elsewhere?

While I do agree with the general trend that many of these populist fascists are incomponent at leading, it's better to not roll those dice in the first place. We should never accept it as inevitable.

Spandana is in for a rough one once she realizes that EC2 instances, even if powered on for only a few seconds, will be charged for an hour's worth of each of her alarm instances since AWS always charges for the first full hour regardless of usage.

Drew has posted a response in defense of these allegations.

Having read it as well the "report" on him you linked, I personally find the report lacks credibility. I take much more stock in Drew's accounting of things, including his mature ownership of the bad decisions he's made in the past.

As for the Stallman Report: it's not a smear piece in my view. It's a whistleblow that outlines an argument why RMS is unfit to lead the FSF with accompanying evidence. You may disagree with some of it, but it's hardly malicious; I can sympathize with anyone who wishes to see better from the leaders of the major social movements of our day.

And as for why Drew initially denied his involvement, I found his response reasonable:

Myself and the other authors asserted our moral rights to publish anonymously, motivated by our wish to reduce our exposure to the exact sort of harassment I’ve been subjected to over the years.

There are lots of reasons to like passkeys from a technical/enterprise standpoint, but I do think you're missing the critical issue the article is speaking to: digital sovereignty.

Passkeys, while more secure in the average usecase, shift the balance of control over your access to services. Yes, you can no longer write your password down on a post-it and leak it in a photo—thats's a good property. But trading that at the expense of your freedom to run software as you see fit on hardware you bought and paid for? For many people, myself included, that's not an acceptable tradeoff. There are plenty of tools and systems around passwords that folks can use to make passwords+2FA match or even exceed the security properties of passkeys.

The thing that should chill everyone is the fact that built into the standard is a switch (given to service providers, not users) that locks out the people that do want to have control of their digital infrastructure. Not everyone can or should be expected to run like that, but they should not be blocked from doing so. Similar with the Right to Repair; not everyone can exercise that right on their own, but no one should be prevented from repairing what they bought.

Similary, I do believe it's my neighbor's right to practice a religion of their choosing. So if the government tries to prevent them from doing that, I'm going to go grab my pitchfork, not because I share their religion, but because they should be able to make that choice. Likewise, while I might not want to exert control over how my credentials are backed up, I still reserve the right to do it, and support anyone else's ability to do it.

And to address the slippery slope objection, I have to point out that this is not particularly theoretical. When Big Tech has provided service providers with the opportunity to enforce restrictions on your device, service providers have used it. Widevine DRM, Google Play Protect, etc.. It's why my LineageOS phone can't use banking apps, which is a shame since some features like Zelle payments are specifically a mobile-only feature, and so I cannot use it anymore. I either run my phone to the exact specs and settings that my bank and Google prefer, or I'm denied access to basic banking anywhere but my desktop (and who knows how long until the block my access there, I run Linux afterall).

I do not trust Big Tech with my devices, and passkeys increase their capability to deny anyone who doesn't buy into their ecosystem, and further entrenches those who already are. I for one find that despicable, and an unacceptable tradeoff. There's no reason it has to be this way though, passkeys could have been the best of both worlds. However, they've been compromised with features that serve platforms at the expense of user freedom. It's the kind of disempowerment that happens when you give the reins to power-hungry, profit-seeking corporations.

Probably so that it's one of the first files listed when looking at the contents of a repo alphabetically

My thought as well. Not an Israel apologist, but it's difficult to trust this video on its face because of the seasonal differences.

I see no evidence, technical or otherwise, that passkeys are subverting or acting counter to any of these principles. Frankly, it's a baseless claim that passkeys lock people out of their own control/infrastructure.

The evidence is in the fact that the passkey standard provides the means to deny service to anyone whose passkeys do not match the service provider's preferences. This is a non-issue with passwords, since there's no way for a provider to tell whether or not, for example, a password is simply remembered, stored in your password manager, backed up, shared, etc.. The threat model of the user can inform what choices they make there. The platform may require certain things of the password, like length requirments or another factor, but it ends there.

You're correct in that the standard supports passkeys with similar data sovereignty properties; however, the standard includes controls that allow service providers to dictate that those properties be configured to the provider's preferences, not the user's.

Just don't use [locked down passkeys] if you don't want to.

It would all be well and good if that were actually entirely my choice, but it's not. The standard specifically includes a trump card for the service provider in the form of remote attestation. You seem to think that's tangential, but I reject that. It's kinda the whole point.

Authenticating based on a shared secret is an interface with a special property: there's no way for a service provider to know how you remember a secret. That guarantee is extremely important. Service providers accepting password based authentication are guaranteed to not be able to enforce requirements on how you remember your password.

The Passkey standard removes that critical protection by explicitly supporting remote attestation in the standard. It does not matter that the standard is public if it does not preserve that guarantee.

Passkeys are fine, vendor-locking and walled gardens are not.

If you're not a fan of walled gardens, I would recommend against giving corporations the mortar, bricks, gates, and locks with which they use to build them. Maybe they won't use them in ways you don't like, but you'll never have a guarantee that they won't.

I'm not gonna do the maths

Let me help you out there, since I need something to help me procrastinate anyways lol

being 1.43:1 ratio would leave about half the screen blanked out on the sides.

I was curious to find out what this came out to as well. Turns out though, on a 16:9 screen, scaling a full 1.43:1 frame to fit only results in side bars that each take up less than 10% of the image, (less than what I was suspecting to be honest).

While a ~20% size reduction isn't ideal, so is watching a movie that was composed for a different aspect ratio. IMHO, people should have the choice to watch in whatever way best appeals to their needs. We used to do this on DVDs where you could opt for either the widescreen or fullscreen version of the movie, so there's definitely precedent for it.

Unfortunately, the option for the 1.43 version of many of these movies can't be found outside of their IMAX run in theaters. (At least not officially...)

Smart choice. Lethal injection has a terrible history in reliably killing someone without issues. A firing squad is significantly more humane, and people on death row will generally opt for it if given the choice.

However, it's far less common today because society doesn't like firing squads; everything about them feels too barbaric.

Hmmm I wonder why that is... Surely it couldn't be because capital punishment itself has no place in civilized society, right?

Maybe cause its a separate issue? Look, yes it is costly to extract the resources for a battery, but once we have it, we have it for good. Batteries are incredibly recyclable at this point (90%+ recoverable, conservatively), and a new battery can be almost entirely created using previous batteries.

This is in comparison to fossil fuels, which you get to burn exactly once, after which point you have to go extract more. The environmental costs of extracting oil (not even burning it) are well documented.

Where a ICE car requires ongoing environmental devastation, an electric one does not inherently require it. As more of the materials for batteries enters circulation, there's less need to go extract more, and as grids transition from fossil fuels to renewables the climate impact of charging can be lessened as well.

Of course this isn't to say that an electric car is the climate endgame. More walkable places, better public transit, better regulation of corporate polluters, etc. are the real meat and potatoes. But saying that EVs are just as bad as ICE cars is just not true.

This is simply not true on its face.

Unlike the thought expirement you're running in your head, the real world does not have the luxury of avoiding the possibilities of sudden mechanical failure, a soccer ball being kicked into the road, or unsecured debris falling out of the bed of a truck. These are privately owned and maintained vehicles after all, under many more engineering constraints and usage pressures than just achieving maximum reliablilty in all conditions.

These things require some degree of margin for error. In general, any car should be able to fully stop before entering the space currently occupied by the car in front of it in order to account for unexpected disturbances. However, as car speeds increase, so do the tolerances required to maintain that safe margin, exponentially in fact.

Removing the human from the driver seat doesn't mean we get to start running bumper to bumper at 70mph; at best it means that cars can get away with slightly smaller follow distances than humans need to account for their comparably slow reaction times.

If you instead believe that we should exert enough control over self driving cars such that we could actually realistically prevent catastrophe while running high speed bumper to bumper traffic, then I have great news for you! We already have that, and it's called a train.

This. So much this. Monopolies are often evidence of an unhealthy/stagnating market, but they're more symptom than cause. Trusts/cartels, price-fixing, and anticompetitive behavior are the actual abuses of market power, and are much more problematic.

I'm not going to claim that Valve is perfect (they're not, e.g. see issues regarding DRM) and I'd love to have more choices about where I buy my games, but I can't think of any instance of them abusing their position in the market to prevent new entrants or claim an unfair advantage. From what I've seen, they appear to be a very fair and honorable competitor in the space. However, if anyone is aware any examples to the contrary, I'd love to hear about it and update my opinions.

Have you recently done any hardware modifications? I had very similar issues which persisted until I realized I had not fully seated the 24pin connector after changing out my CPU cooler. After seating it properly, random boots and reboots went away.

If you have a gun that shoots out multiple shots, it's possible to get them both low and then line up a shot with both of them and have them both die on the same turn to different bullets. Kinda involved, but it's the next best option of you dont have good grenades, normality, or really high quickness.

Or you can do my favorite: proselytize one and then kill the other. Congrats, now you have two allies!

But in your mind, those all pale in comparison to what will happen if we all start using passkeys? I'm not buying what you're selling.

Because you appear to be misunderstand what I'm saying. Be careful to not put words in my mouth. I said nothing regarding bans.

I am, however, arguing that a service provider can reject your passkey if they dont like how you manage it, (e.g make it copiable). To access that service using a passkey, you'll have to accept storing your credential on their terms.

And to be clear, I'm in no way blind to the issues with passwords. We've had to tack on a bunch of extras to have password based security keep up, like TOTP, password hashing, recovery methods, phishing resistant tokens, security questions, and so on. I'm not arguing that passwords are perfect; I'm arguing that they preserve the users ultimate control over the credential. I'm totally open and hopeful for improvements to authentication as long as they similarly preserve the user's freedom to manage their credentials as they see fit.

And this may be where the difference in our values shows, since it appears that you view the user's freedom as more of a problem than a boon:

The same special property that allows rampant attacks on the public. I deal with so many people with compromised email inboxes, malware installs, stolen credentials, etc. Passwords are not the end solution to end user security, and I welcome improvements that also simplify UX.

I'm sorry you've had to deal with that, but I simply don't think some users making mistakes justifies allowing a service provider to remove a critical freedom from the user. I dont believe that improved UX and security has to come at the cost of user freedom, but that's what passkeys explicitly allow for by design. I fundamentally disagree with that.

I didn't say [attestation] was tangential. Attestation is for very specific purpose.

Fair enough, I tend to thow it in the same category as "DRM and other gate-keeping technologies" which you did call "tangential." At the end of the day, for the purposes of my argument, they are the same: a service wishes to exert control over how a client runs, and I object to such limitions broadly speaking. The computers I own work for me, not the service. (Of course this changes in enterprises that own their own clients, like the workstations used by their workforce. But even in those situations, however, I would argue that there are generally more effective measures than remote attestation. But I digress...)

I highly doubt any public service would require attested passkeys.

Ah, but how can you be sure? You're missing the guarentee that they can't flip the script on you. The standard allows them to start forcing users to rotate their passwords and passkeys for ones that require attestation of their preferred settings. Maybe it's unlikely, but "unlikely" is still a massive downgrade from "impossible." IMO, it's unacceptable.

Here's another counter-point: Google, Apple, et. al already implement proprietary authentication mechanisms. ...

Just because a standard is open does not mean it isn't rigged in the favor of closed platforms. This is especially the case with passkeys, where platforms use them to further entrench you into their ecosystem, often under the guise of "look how good the UX is!" For example, MacOS really, really wants you to tie your passkeys to their keychain, so that they can control how it's backed up, transferred, and stored. Remote attestation only makes this worse, opening the possibility that a service provider can enforce that you have to use MacOS's keychain. Sounds like a walled garden to me.

Take a look at metaname. They offer a very minimal (read: unencumbered) service, and are based in New Zealand. Not the EU, but at least it's not the US.

It's not that easy to see here, but the picture on the left is super AI generated.

Source: I unfortunately live just down the street from this sign.

Good point. I suck at coordinates. I meant Bf6, which is also a bad move

Not entirely sure on the genre name, but try checking out Stick Fight: The Game. It's a similarly great time with fast rounds and lots of variety.