Even though Ubuntu is beginner-friendly at first sight, in very short time you'll see that all the benefit you're supposed to get from a community are actually hacks to solve things like: GUI issues with Unity, some services not starting, services crashing randomly, and so on.
Fedora is often taken as somewhat unstable because of its fast release cycle and lack of a long-term support release, but, in my experience, it has proven itself to be very reliable and stable for my workflow.
Critics of this plan argued that this move would just result in more
total censorship of Wikipedia and that access to some information
was better than no information at all
I'm no critic of this plan but I still don't understand why this wouldn't result in more total censorship. Someone explain please?
Because Wikipedia is too useful. Note that it required a certain self-confidence that this was the case for Wikipedia to implement this strategy. And it's self-fulfilling - if Wikipedia allowed itself to be censored, then it would have fewer contributors and its usefulness would suffer.
There's a rather interesting analogy to be made with the GPL here. Critics argue that companies shy away from it because they cannot control it. Yet its entire goal is to not be controlled, and it draws its strength from the conviction that the body of GPL software is too useful to ignore. And again, that's self-fulfilling.
It takes courage, but it's important to know when you have the power to say "all of me, or none of me".
> Critics argue that companies shy away from it because they cannot control it.
No, they don't. Critics point out that companies avoid it, and non-critics ascribe this avoidance to "can't control it", which is false, because nothing under a third-party copyright under any non-exclusive license can be controlled by the licensee, but businesses avoiding the GPL don't generally avoid all non-exclusive licenses.
I think "can't control" refers to sublicensing in this context. People's dislike over copyleft stems from wanting to make software proprietary (or proprietary-friendly through lax licensing). Copyleft removes that control, and the GPL's main strength is that it is so ubiquitous that you cannot practically avoid it (in most cases).
Insofar as companies avoid it, they do so because it constrains their behaviour in some way. Call it what you will; my wording was perhaps sloppy.
For the increasing number of companies that do participate in the GPL ecosystem, they do so because the opportunity cost of not participating outweighs the concomitant behavioural constraints. This produces a strong network effect as GPL software gains contributors, making GPL software more useful.
Wikipedia's anti-censorship strategy is analogous in that the switch to HTTPS raised the opportunity cost of censorship to the loss of the entire Wikipedia "ecosystem", which for many regimes is more severe than the "cost" of not censoring. This too produces a network effect as Wikipedia gains more contributors, thus further increasing its value.
Yes, I understand that. I mean, why don't these censors block the whole wikipedia.org access then?
If they don't want their population to access a Wikipedia topic/article and can't block/determine if someone is accessing it, the easiest thing to do would be just block it right away. So why they won't do it?
(PS: I'm in no way in favor of censorship, I'm just trying to understand such mindset)
If you censor too much people may be pissed. It's much easier to decide "we censor specific articles about specific subjects" than "we censor all of wikipedia". Censoring a popular mainstream webpage may cause too much opposition. Maybe even the politicians who make the decision and their families like to look up things on wikipedia.
Then https will force them to either extreme which I think is a good thing. No option to slowly raise the temperature so the frogs won't jump out of the pot.
As well as forge an SSL certificate for *.wikipedia.org.
Last time I checked, Wikipedia had HSTS enabled. So trying to forge their DNS without also forging their SSL certificate would be equivalent to total censorship for anybody who has previously visited Wikipedia.
Although it doesn't have PGP/GnuPG, I found "The Architecture of Open Source Applications" to be very interesting and something that should be spread out more.
My work demanded me to read the ITK and VTK parts. Git and GDB are also very nice.
I'm in my late 20's, working for the same company for the past 5 years (worked on 3-5 projects in total, though), C, C++, Qt, VTK, ITK... it's very interesting and also my preferred stack to work with, I also learn(ed) a lot here, so no complains. But currently I'm bored and also the financial situation on the company isn't helping. So yeah... 5.
10, starting my own business
After my 9-5 work and at weekends, I work on my own company (mobile security consulting). I'm full steam on this because everything non-technical is new to me, and I'm very excited to see where this is going.
I'm periodically installing FreeBSD on my ThinkPad T400 to see how it's performing with Chromium. It's the only application I use extensively, and the only one that performs really bad with FreeBSD (and OpenBSD also), which prevents me from switching from Fedora.
Is there any magic I'm missing, aside from the shared memory support?
FWIW- Chromium was realllly unstable until the recent 52 -> 54 update that took place on the 22nd. Since then, it seems to be a lot more stable and performs better (on my crap hardware). I would definitely give it another shot.
I'm not sure what's the protocol for this kind of stuff (I'm not blind), but, your website being directed at blind people, wouldn't it be better to be set english as the main language?
Using Firefox 49.02 auto detect of language does not work. I'm using Jaws and assumed it was a bad language tag before I turned auto detect of language off.
I have my OS and browser set to English and am browsing from a Dutch IP address. I get the Italian page. Not sure which part of "Accept-Language: en-US,en" (which Firefox sends) is unclear.
Edit: oh there is an English button in the right top. Only saw it just now (a flag might be more colorful to spot).
Even though Ubuntu is beginner-friendly at first sight, in very short time you'll see that all the benefit you're supposed to get from a community are actually hacks to solve things like: GUI issues with Unity, some services not starting, services crashing randomly, and so on.
Fedora is often taken as somewhat unstable because of its fast release cycle and lack of a long-term support release, but, in my experience, it has proven itself to be very reliable and stable for my workflow.