ianso

I think there could be a GH feature request that could do something like this in my opinion (opt-in though, not opt-out).

In my personal GH account there is a "sponsor" button that shows me what dependencies I have that I could sponsor. Unfortunately the list is empty.

My _organisations_ have hundreds of repo's, but there's no "sponsor" option at the org level in GH that says what dependencies the orgs use and then set up batch transactions at that level.

The dependency data already exists in dependabot for a lot of stuff, so it wouldn't be starting from scratch.

Very good question!

SDR + something like Reticulum or Yggdrasil would definitely provide the infra or network fabric for the kind of thing I'm thinking of.

However, a normal Android, e.g. a Pixel 7, can't to my knowledge be turned into a web server or a podman host for containers. (I know of people hosting websites on old Androids that are flashed or hacked).

Given phones already have a WiFi/WLAN radio chip, it's a shame to need extra kit for connectivity.

It's something that's been on my mind a lot recently and so you provoked me into writing down a series of scenarios in story format that illustrates what SHOULD be possible using current hardware, were it not, as dlcarrier says, locked down like a games console.

Here you go:

https://ianso.blogspot.com/2025/11/what-we-dont-have.html

I think this stuff is super important, simply because there is a ton of stuff we can't do using our phones today.

Think mesh networking, resilient ad-hoc application clustering, non-Internet P2P, like Freifunk but everywhere. We shouldn't have to depend on Google or any of the big tech companies for anything except the hardware.

That would offer much more freedom. There are also contexts where this kind of thing could also enable life-saving applications. And unlike todays Internet where a database query in Cloudflare or a DNS bug in es-east-1 can disrupt half the services we use, this kind of technology really could withstand major attacks on infrastructure hubs, like the Internet was originally designed to do.

The dumbest part of this is that all Wikimedia projects already export a dump for bulk downloading: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/

So it's not like you need to crawl the sites to get content for training your models...

No offence to Mr. Andserson but it reads a bit like someone has done an 'Inception' on him - subtly planted the seed of a train of thought that would lead him to disband his efforts, all the while believing it was his own idea.

Does anyone else think this should be made into a movie?

Massive respect to this ED.

Popping up here to mention OpenMRS, a healthy open-source EMR used by hundreds if not thousands of facilities across the world, mostly in Africa and Asia. An old version is packaged/integrated with some other apps into Bahmni, which is a full-blown hospital management system.

Honestly, people complain about software all the time and all software sucks to some extent, some more than others of course. Complaining about all EMR just because the USA bodged a national rollout in their uniquely messed up healthcare situation is a bit myopic.

Funny that the article focuses on huge corps for on-prem. I work for a non-profit and we deploy stuff to hardware in Afghanistan, Haiti, Sudan... You can't assume the Internet works and if it does, it could be a 1Mbps VSAT connection.

Needless to say we don't have a Fortune 500 budget. When I see a nice, affordable app that says "and here's a Docker image!" next to the SaaS options, I am like ( ˘ ³ ˘ ) ♥

Love this! See also ssllabs.com and sshcheck.com.

This reminds me of "two stories of the pistol", some anecdotes where a sentry actually does almost kill some idiot senior officers:

http://everything2.com/title/Two+stories+of+the+pistol

Sorry but what is the actual point of this blog post?

GPG is just one guy. Who's practically beggared himself writing and maintaining the tool.

GPG is actually used by human rights activists, journalists etc. That, right there, is reason enough to celebrate it and NOT "kill it off".

I think the massive pile-on this is creating is really dumb, to be honest. So Moxie thinks it could be done better; that's great. He's good enough that he can "show, not tell".

Why waste time denigrating a project that's basically a labour of love for one guy that is actually tremendously important, even if it's "90's technology"? Old doesn't necessarily mean bad.

Apposite: "Don't Pile On" - http://rc3.org/2015/02/14/dont-pile-on/

This is such a stupid framing to the article. The sixth paragraph states clearly why it was built and it has nothing to do with NASA drifting - it was being pulled:

"But, at first, cautious NASA bureaucrats didn’t want to stop the construction on their own authority. And then Congress — at the urging of a senator from Mississippi — swooped in and ordered the agency to finish the tower, no matter what."

Why condemn NASA for cronyism and Congressional stupidity?

This is getting interesting - see the comments - apparently it may be part of an Aegis missile? Not something you'd want to end up in a grey market in Shenzhen!

I think the BtC protocol was used to ensure that peoples usernames were guaranteed unique, and linkable to a private key, i.e. verifiable. I think the whitepaper has more info, reading it now:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7152

Hum, I think between you, nl, and nwg, point 1 is looking very shabby... I think I'll revise it shortly.

Yup, because I misread the paper :-/ I thought it also stated that entity A had done large amounts of churning, which it hasn't. I'll fix that, thankyou...

>Bitcoin is, by design, highly vulnerable to network analysis.

By design as in, that's the only way the network could conceivably work.

This network, yes. But you can construct truly anonymous cryptocurrencies with e.g. zero-knowledge proofs, yet the author(s) chose not to. This would have enabled AP, maybe answering PGs question in point #2 of his post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423).

I didn't know the original code was that buggy, I confess I was lulled a bit by the line "This was the only major security flaw found and exploited in Bitcoin's history" in the wiki article. Maybe it needs changing in the light of https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu... :-)

That's true, but then it's equally true that DJBs software, while absolutely excellent, is definitely idiosyncratic. If DJB anonymously published code using the same style, e.g. the configuration language, refusal to use standard UNIX daemons, etc., anyone who read the code would know immediately that it was him.

Yar, I realise the Hezbollah thingy is only tangentally applicable, but I couldn't find a better example of a single mistake compromising an identity and thereby a network. I think that someone (maybe Cory Doctorow?) wrote a better, at-length post about how hard it is to stay anonymous but I couldn't find it, so I used this example instead.

Point 6 is my main stepping-stone from 'organised and capable' to 'government'. FWIW governments have deliberately set up 'dodgy banks' as a way of attracting money launderers and then busting them, so I think it's valid.

I didn't know that PG suggested something similar, thanks for the pointer :-)

Nice. I have to say this is the best approach to "wikileaks"-style journalism since wikileaks itself imploded. Now here's hoping they have what it takes to publish what lands in their inbox, even when the US Govt objects...

Hi there,

This is super-interesting - may I ask where you learned about this part of the history of the postal service?

That is awesome! I wonder if the process could be read out via procfs and continued elsewhere?

There was a whole raft of discussions in 2006 on Lambda the Ultimate and elsewhere about using continuations for page flow in webapps, and ultimately the most persuasive argument (against) was that continuations implied linear flow whereas web-page flow could be non-linear, what with the back button, hyperlinks, and all that.

However, I think that continuations are still very cool, and are especially cool when they can be serialized or written to disk/transmitted/etc., because this essentially lets you "time/space-shift" your thread/process, since it's just bits.

Right now, "suspending" a process is something that happens when you close your laptop or pause a VM, but I think that being able to do this at a much more fine-grained level of detail is what will allow general cloud-based computation to really take off, because individual threads would be portable across computing environments.

As a lot of people have pointed out, this is a rather confused article. I think what the author Dominic Basulto is trying to get at is that the Internet and new applications/platforms are being used to exert political influence in new ways.

For me this is the logical consequence of the increasing "digitization" of the structure of our society, i.e. social networks etc. Basulto has jumped from this to Rushkoff's "program or be programmed" idea. But in the large scale the "programs" that define new social spaces is actually written by a very, very small number of people mostly in California, and have nothing to do with campaigning for anything.

moocow01 is correct to say that people going to Codecademy to learn how to launch online campaigns will be disappointed. This is partly because we don't have an API layer for programs that organise social interactions, and this is one reason why I'm working on a project that does just that.

I agree completely that innovation should not be restricted to certain areas :-) And although I think that Dart isn't good for the web, I would encourage anyone who wants to e.g. try plugging a different VM into a browser engine to see what happens.

Secondly I would agree that WebKit has its own OS X-related baggage, but that just goes to show that nobody's perfect. It's not an argument for adding more. I would also agree that in the hypothetical case of Dart support being added to WebKit that Google would be expected to maintain their code, just as Apple would be expected to maintain OS X stuff.

But again, I think the original conversation was had at cross-purposes. What started as a conversation about hosting a branch of WebKit to do some innovating turned into a conversation about standards and the broader web. In the former case it's a purely technical question of where the work is done, but in the latter, I think the "participate in the web standards community" bit comes in to play. Why did Google come directly to WebKit to ask about integrating Dart instead of talking to e.g. the W3C or WHATWG?

Hum, I think the problem is that Dart may be technically open source, but it's not a standard. In addition to that you can publish the source but being truly open involves more than that: see the open governance index for an example:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/08/android-is-the-le...

It involves things like multi-vendor support, open project management & roadmapping, standards bodies where applicable, etc. These are all things Dart doesn't have.

From the perspective of the WebKit team, I think it would be about spending a lot of time and effort to support something that isn't part of their core mission, the standardised web.

It would also saddle them with an extra maintenance & support burden for the foreseeable future, to the strategic benefit of nobody but Google.

I think the original conversation was hampered by a miscommunication - it was never made clear whether it was just about hacking on a custom version of WebKit, or about adding Dart support to WebKit based browsers.

From reading that email exchange I think the answer to your question is a definite "no" :-)

Aside from that, Google seems to be arguing that 1) there exist languages that compile to EcmaScript, so 2) single-vendor VMs in browsers is now OK. I'm being harsh here but that is the essence of it and it makes no sense at all.