thomaszander

This is a bit of a simplification, one that indeed not many will disagree with.

The wider problem is that when governments and (non-profit) organizations did create alternatives for Microsoft products, the governments themselves ended up showing they are corrupted and the internal rules quickly changed to stop allowing the competing (open source) offerings.

A good example here is the Munich Linux desktop efforts a couple of decades ago. The actual workers were much happier, the sysadmins were ecstatic (much less work) and there wasn't really anyone that had problems with Openoffice and kmail at the time.

Yet, the funding to companies supporting the features they wanted dried up. Requirements got written that disallowed upgrades to "dangerous" new open source releases and after some time they went back to Microsoft because problems were not getting solved. (duh!).

So, sure, we'd need a set of alternatives. But what we really need is not the end-products. What we really need is more honest bureaucrats that actually work for the benefit of the people. And those I have not yet found.

Hi,

co-author of the ODF spec (2006 ISO) here, I also got involved via NLNet to work with my local standards office to improve OOXML.

The OOXML spec was offered to the ISO standard along an unusual path, a fast standardization lane. Where there was no option for any of the people reviewing it to actually change anything. It was rubber-stamped in other words.

That fact alone doesn't mean it is a bad, but it is a bit of a red flag. The fact is, it is a really bad specification. It is a full 7000 pages long with lots of conflicting details. On top of that it is full of references like "this works like wordperfect version-n". While references are useful in specifications, they need to be to existing open standards to be meaningful. Wordperfect has never standardized its format, so referring to it is meaningless.

To implement a competing application that can use this format you'd not be able to do that from this specification alone. Next to that it is so massive that it is essentially an undertaking that makes no sense. Compare it to ODF which is 1/10th of the size. Has a lot of reuse of concepts and was written under OASIS, a standards organization, unlike the OOXML spec which was written by Microsoft and the full 7000 pages dropped on the world.

I stopped looking at the OOXML stuff for some years, so the next part may be outdated. I noticed that after MS got this ratified by OSI, and thus they dodged the threat of law requiring governments to switch to ODF, they never did an update to the spec even though the applications have seen plenty of new features.

You can wait for the Librem 5 for a very long time, they haven't shipped any significant software update for a long time for mine and its in the state that if you turn on auto-suspend (i.e. don't always go at full 100% CPU) it freezes and needs a hard reboot.

Linux on phone is still very much in the enthusiasts-only phase. Not for me, not for most. And I'm saying that as someone that is a KDE/Linux geek!

Maybe that will change, but for now the e.foundation OS has most definitely a large potential audience that those phones are not going to be able to fill just yet.

Surprised this one hasn't been pointed out yet; "Passman" which is part of nextcloud and has plugins for all major browsers.

open source, encrypted-while-at-rest and a cloud service allowing you to use it from all your machines and even while traveling on public machines.

Reuters has been biased in their news telling for some time now.

Not entirely unlike the rest of the mainstream media, I would suppose.

the cryptographic (in)security of Yggdrasil addresses.

Fair enough, I didn't catch that one.

The addresses generated has changed already from 0.3 to 0.4 (which is the series we see today), I expect that something will change again in future to make brute forcing harder.

Notice that in all cases the same IPv6 range was used, reusing the same space as upgrades change the individuals' IP address.

If you are interested, I suggest you stop by on the matrix room and chat about the different topics. Its rather large and I'm not a developer on the project, just someone learning from those better than me. Mostly in that room.

#yggdrasil:matrix.org

their approach still spends 7 bits on the prefix.

The Yggdrasil people are very clear that this is a research project. Not to be used in production, to be used at your own risk etc etc etc.

In that light I find it unfair to claim it spends addressspace. Which, I might add, is pretty darn huge and we are not going to run out of addresses any time soon. If ever.

Maybe pedantic, but needed to point out that the 7 in `0200/7` of the usage is the opposite of being spent. The 7 first bits are the mask you need to apply to indicate that it is INSIDE the yggdrasil address-space. Which means that they only 'spend' 1 bit from from the first byte. Not 7.

The design behind yggdrasil is to keep as much the same as possible. I have some projects running on ygg using simple, existing, TCP-socket tech. Works great. So, to get the big issue out of the way. There is a lot of compatibility already there.

The gateway possibility is there, someone needs to do it, is all. There are instructions on the website on how to setup such a gateway on your local router, so you do not need to install the binary on each device to access ygg services.

The main reason why there isn't really anyone really doing this is that this is a research project and most people that use it, use it for their own usecases. Not to offer some websites which aren't already on mainnet.

Using. Can't squat something that is officially discontinued.

What is yours?

The protocol does not add peers, you will have to look for nearby ones yourself and add then in the config.

If you add more than one, you might start routing between those nodes. Probably Ok on desktop, not so much on mobile.

For next steps, it picks one 'main' peer for your outgoing traffic, based on speed. (once an hour).

On a higher level, the system builds a tree out of the peers that are connected and you send data from one node to the other by directions. Think "left at church, right at heardresser". Or in yggdrasil it is "Go to node 10, then from there to node 1, then to node 5, then to node 6".

In short; a tree is built based on the elected root sending out a package and which peer sends it to you first. Indicating that that is the fastest.

You send data the shortest route though the mesh using local directions only.

Actual traffic is encrypted for the destination peer, so other than some headers needed to route, everyone in the middle will just forward an unreadable blob.

From your text;

after configuring you need to restart the service.

you can run 'yggdrasilctl getpeers' to see if it actually connected to any peers. Use https://publicpeers.neilalexander.dev/ to find some local ones.

Ygg does not include a DNS, so use IP addresses directly. Notice that in most webbrowsers you need to add square brackets to indicate an IPv6 address.

Also notice that since yggdrasil automatically does end-to-end encryption, a lot of websites don't bother with ssl. So explicitly type http and turn off any plugins that turn your http into https.

Example: http://[21e:e795:8e82:a9e2:ff48:952d:55f2:f0bb]/

First of all, its is a research project. The owners are very clear about that and love to repeat its lack of any guarantees ;-)

Personally I've been using it for a while and its indeed living up to its promises, but ymmd.

It is indeed an overlay network by the simple rule of that being something that people can use. Technically the guys require the underlying protocol to keep order (one after another) in the packages for the stuff to work. Which is why building it on top of tcp/ip makes sense. Note that the ordering requirement is likely to be removed in a future iteration, again this is a research project.

Ideas like doing a mesh using antenna's in your city are thus, for now, out of reach. But the core concepts and approaches will likely map very nicely to such a usecase and the lessons learned as an overlay will help such a future design.

The public network is currently around 4000 nodes, which is why "scalable" is indeed meant to be vague. Tests of a million nodes are going to be required, probably in a future protocol iteration, to make clear statements about how scalable it really is. Signs are good, DHT usage is still very low while we saw a doubling of network size in the last 6 months.

In short, I use it daily. It works for me.

So it's effectively Host Identity Protocol?

The software is essentially a 'node', doing the routing. Whenever it starts it reads the config file to see if there is a private key in there. If no, it will generate a new one for you and that is your identity on the network.

Just perhaps with something other than IPsec underneath?

That is correct, it uses standard, but not ipsec, encryption based on public key cryptography. A host that saves its private key will thus forever have the same IP address and if it runs services you connect to them using the encryption to its public key.

A node that is configured to connect to the wider yggdrasil public network will thus be reachable on a single IP with an identity that is based on public key cryptography, even if the machine is moving from network to network or even another continent.

Background piece; https://read.cash/@TomZ/mesh-networking-with-yggdrasil-e300d...

To understand what the value of Yggdrasil is, let's take a look at what we use today for networking.

Notice I talked about Natural gas, not national gas.

Gas is imported. Has been for decades.

Since heat pumps are over 100% efficient

You might want to check your numbers on that. Nothing is over 100% efficient.

Natural gas is the most eco friendly source of energy of the fossil fuels. The push for renewables is great, and those should become a bigger percentage of our usage.

But until the day that they are, natural gas is the best one we have. Pushing people to move away from it just because its Bad, doesn't make sense. That would simply move from you burning gas to some electricity company burning gas. With huge economic impact in the mean time for all those that have to buy really expensive heat pumps.

As reported by a lobbying company. Not all numbers you read on the Internet are true.

Here is another lobbying company that has nice numbers too;

https://www.nvde.nl/nvdeblogs/hernieuwbare-energie-voor-het-...

Het verbruik van hernieuwbare energie is in 2020 met bijna 20% gestegen. Daarmee is hernieuwbare energie nu goed voor ruim 11% van ons totale energieverbruik. De groei zit vooral in de sterke stijging van wind en zon, en in meer inzet van vaste biomassa.

Which states that the TOTAL renewable energy is 11%, with biomass being the majority.

Now, both sources can't be right, can they?

The above comment may be very weird to people not living in The Netherlands as we all know that there is nothing wrong with natural gas, its one of the most eco friendly ways to heat stuff.

But in The Netherlands some government officials have taken the point of view that natural gas is Bad, and we should all pay lots of money to move to heat pumps and similar in order to get rid of it.

The sad thing is that most people in The Netherlands are also lied to by those same politicians about how "green energy" actually is created. For instance after years of planting thousands of windmills (both on land and on sea) the wind-energy electricity generated is still around 1% (I'm actually being generous).

Similarly many farming fields have been converted to now have solar panels, and many many houses have them by default. Same here, total energy created: about 1%.

What government still calls "renewables" is biomass. Which is actually the burning of trees. This is massively bad for nature because those trees are the one thing that actually converts that bad co2 to breathable air again.

Real renewable energy we get from imports from countries like Norway: water power. Around 8%.

But, here is the fun part: the vast majority of our electricity comes from, you guessed it, burning natural gas.

People that invest €10K to have a heat pump and solar power still use a very large amount of grid-electricity, which comes from burning natural gas.

it would be some variant of theft.

The assumption you are making here is that the government has the right to steal that 60 million in the first place.

Basically the reason they can is because they have more people with guns. Turns out, when it comes to Bitcoin, those guns end up being less powerful.

This means that the basic assumption where a government can steal from its people is being turned up side down.

notice that the disingenuous statements came not from me, but from the parent comment who asserted (without basis):

With no incoming revenue []

I didn't want to be an ass to point this out, seems I confused you instead.

... they get the money you could have received.

when it comes down to technical details, it is required for privacy to be default, otherwise it simply doesn't work.

Absolutely, we are in agreement.

The point I was making is that the coin itself, the base protocols, adding these privacy options makes it the difference between a generic payment protocol and one specifically made to evade the governments controls.

There being a way to do great privacy while leaving the coin itself to be a generic payment coin gives you the best of both worlds.

The point you make is still true, it is required for privacy to be default on. And this can be included in one wallet that people use for this purpose. Now its the choice of wallet that makes the privacy, not the choice of coin.

It does in fact enable privacy by default.

Ok, my statement was maybe too black/white and you jumped on top of that. The point is that Monero has Privacy level / mixin settings, the default is not completely open, but certainly doesn't qualify as super private either.

Now your comment reads like an attempt to shill

I shared a link to a product that I feel is very successful in reaching privacy. I have no ties to this product (though I have used it).

And the worst they can do is choose to not do business with them...

Whereas you doing full KYC with most companies, who are by law also forced to determine who is a bad actor, doesn't scare you?

The various companies use such coins as a way to do the same thing as shares in a company. In fact, shares are just a pyramid scheme too, if you assume there is no obligation from the company to pay dividends or such.

The difference between coins and shares is such that shares can only legally be owned by a very very small number of people that are licensed to. You can ask them to buy and give you a certificate, but you yourself probably are not one of the few that can own stock. (series 7 in https://www.investopedia.com/articles/financialcareers/07/se...)

On the contrary, coins like these can be bought and sold by anyone. And this makes the balance very different. Should you see the company do stupid things, you can sell your coins in a very short time for nearly no cost and without asking for permission or waiting for banking-hours. Noteworthy is that you can sell them to anyone on the Internet.

Naturally, such companies (and there are quite a lot doing this today) pay out dividends as well. Typically to coin-holders addresses they arrange an air-drop. So simply you own 1000 and they pay 10 extra to that address.

Other strategies are buy-backs when the company is profitable which are meant to make the price go up because there is more demand than supply.

As you can see, there are quite a lot of similarities to stocks, and certainly also differences.

This is an often seen opinion and there is some nuance to this idea.

Monero doesn't enable privacy by default, but its known as a privacy coin. The first means that people could be unaware of the extra steps they need to take to get privacy, but the second is the risky one.

Monero is known as a privacy coin and this makes it the target of governments that indeed made ShapeShift start to to KYC a year or more ago.

Monero is unduly targeted for standard features because governments don't like perfect privacy...

The good news is that privacy does not have to be built in to a coin for it to be capable of giving privacy. If we reverse the Monero situation we might get something that is actually useful for the majority of us. A coin like Bitcoin that doesn't have more than semi-privacy can have mixing added to become private.

Now, mixing as historically done on BTC is both expensive and centralized, which has caused several servers to be confiscated and people arrested. Again, governments really don't like what you do with your money being private.

I'm personally a big fan of https://cashfusion.org ticks all these boxes. It is built on a semi-private (bitcoin-like) coin and it solves the other problems as well with a mix (sorry, fusion) costing you nearly nothing.

It becomes trvial []

I'm looking forward to you helping solve this problem then as I have the Android app, but can't use due to lack of downloadable maps.

I have a couple of places in the offline storage, which still works, but if I go to a new place I can't use the app, downloads never start.

Why does btrfs have those issues compared to other filesystems?

As someone that has built infrastructure on BtrFS for years, the scary stories are mostly just hot air and the stability of other filesystems is really not significantly better.

Bugs like this happen, this is why Linus releases many release-candiates every kernel, this one got through as 10 was a rather massive kernel and there were several regressions. Including one that caused a new release just hours after the supposedly final one. Distros wait a bit longer before shipping an updated kernel and none of these hit actual users.

As far as I know there is no reason to abstain from using Btrfs. When Fedora talked about not using it, they had as reason that they had no in-house expertise.